Opening up: A stressful couple of weeks

I’m sure you know how it goes. You don’t find a release for your frustrations, and they very quickly build up, giving you an uncomfortable dose of anxiety.

Well, that’s certainly what has been been happening with me these last couple of weeks.

There are a number of things at play. Firstly, I’ve decided that the time is right to let my parents know about my Asperger’s. Secondly, work has, for one reason or another proven to be quite stressful over the last couple of weeks. Thirdly, I’ve not been writing here.

Why have I not been writing? Well initially it was just the way that the dice rolled – it was a long bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and I rarely write outside of work, through habit rather than anything else. I’ve also been quite busy at work, and also busy with point number one this week, and so didn’t write on Tuesday either. I then decided that maybe it would be nice to take a little break from writing for the rest of the week, to recharge my batteries as it were. This, it would seem has turned out to be a mistake, but perhaps only because of points one and two above also being on the go.

So – I told my parents I has AS. In many ways, the direction of this blog has been working towards this since I set it up. I needed to get my own head straight about AS before I could tell others, and in particular my parents. That’s because I’ve always known I would have a hard job selling my self-diagnosis to them, and in particular to my mother.

And I was right. I send a long but well considered and tweaked email to my parents at the start of last week. It barely scratched the surface of AS and me – how could it? AS is a big and all encompassing condition, and I’d need to write a book (or a blog!) to capture it all. A couple of days later I got an emailed response, that spent some time trying to point out how various aspects of my life meant that I couldn’t possibly have AS, as someone with AS wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I’d achieved, or wouldn’t have acted as I did. To cap it all, my mother flat outright rejected in writing that I had AS, after two whole days of consideration.

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised. This was the sort of thing I expected. Instead of a considered response that this was all a bit of a surprise, and that they didn’t really know enough to form an opinion, I got a flat rejection. I couldn’t possibly have AS, and I shouldn’t be so silly as to suggest it.

I wrote an angry email back, that argued that a snap judgment based on a couple of days of research and a small amount of background knowledge formed over the years that my mother served as a teacher (she retired seven years ago) was simply not valid, and further more was extremely insensitive. I’ve since followed this up with a series of emails that point out how the examples she gave of why I couldn’t possibly have AS actually missed a huge amount of subtlety in the situations that did show underlieing AS; or in some cases how the judgments were just plain wrong. I’ve not had responses to these as yet, as my parents disappeared abroad on holiday at the end of last week, and won’t be reading the correspondence until today at the earliest.

Despite the fact that I was expecting this sort of response, and was well prepared, I still felt as though the whole experience was a kick in the teeth. My stress levels are correspondingly up, as is my anxiety, and it took a few days from the first response for me to recover my composure and confidence enough to put up a well thought out and thorough rebuttal to my mother’s dismissals.

So when you add work stress to all of the above, it hasn’t been a great week. There are various mind games going on at work, with individuals such as myself, who are contract rather than permanent staff being subject to veiled threats regarding the stability of our jobs. It’s not much fun.

In hindsight, I picked a bad week to decide to open up to my parents, but I wasn’t to know that the work stress would start. It’s also been a bad week to decide not to write much here, as bottling up my thoughts has just lead to further stress and the associated anxiety.

So today has been different. I have worked hard to clear my to-do list of the most important work related tasks, and have cleared a half hour of schedule to write this, so I can get some of it off my shoulders. It feels good.

The next week or two are clearly going to be difficult, but I hope that a bit of time and patience on my part will allow my parents, and my mother in particular to accept that I do have AS.

Time will tell. Wish me luck.

Dancing the night away

Since my son started School in January, my wife has become quite involved in the parents’ association, and it’s various fund raising events.

This was why I found myself in the local village hall with my wife last Saturday night, to attend a ceilidh (pronounced something like ‘kaylee’). If you are British, then you’ll know what one of these is (I hope), but for those of you not familiar with this Scottish tradition, I suppose I’d better fill you in. A ceilidh is, I suppose a little like American line dancing. It’s a traditional Scottish folk dance performed by a collection of couples, accompanied by a traditional band with instruments like fiddles, whistles, accordions and a bodhran drum. A caller explains steps that the dancers then perform, making complex patterns, usually of intermingled people across the dance floor.

I’ve been to a ceilidh before, a couple of years ago. I didn’t join in. This time though, I was determined to take part. To this end, I dragged my wife up for the first two dances. I felt this was psychologically important, because if I had taken part at the start, when everyone was still finding their feet, I’d feel less out of place. This little trick worked, and both me and my wife took part in all but two of the dances across the whole evening.

It was fun!

It really was good fun, and I didn’t feel out of place. Most of those taking part (and there were fifty or so of us) had clearly never done much dancing, never mind much ceilidh dancing. We were a bunch of novices that made countless mistakes, and laughed about them as we made them! Fabulous!

This all meant that no-one noticed the extra little mistakes that I was making. The funniest of these was where we had to stand in a circles and then wheel either to the left or the right. I have trouble with left and right at the best of times – I have to consciously think which is which when someone asks me to do something that invovles a left or right action. So it was that for the first few dances we’d be commanded to ‘circle left’, and I’d be standing still thinking for a half second whilst the circle was already moving in the correct direction. In the end I gave up trying to think about it, and just went with the direction the circle decided to go. That worked nicely!

I found, to my own surprise that I didn’t have a problem keeping the rhythm of the dances, indeed many others were far worse at this than I was. I’ve commented in the past that I have no rhythm. This clearly isn’t true. I don’t dance well or imaginatively – that’s a better description, because clearly in a prescribed dance such as a ceilidh I can have a good go at the steps, and can keep the rhythm quite well.

Some dances had sequences of eight or ten different moves. I found these difficult from the point of view that I’d mix up the sequencing. I punctuated these dances with little verbalised reminders to myself – “right wheel, pass partner, dosey doe, oh – no – promenade then dosey doe – sorry, polka” – that sort of thing. Despite the sequence of moves repeating every minute or so for a good five minutes, I’d still make the same sequence errors each time. Oh – and because of the intense concentration on the moves and the sequencing, I didn’t hear much of the music – it just washed over me providing the rhythm and nothing more. That’s a shame, because the band were rather good, I thought.

What I really wasn’t good at were the knots. These are complex moves performed in small groups where everyone holds hands and then people weave through each others arms and spin around to unwind the knots they’ve created. We’d try these slowly and a little repetitively without the music first, and then perform them in the dance. Whilst I’d feel I’d understood how it worked when we first tried it out, I’d inevitably have forgotten the intricate details by the time we danced, just a minute or two later. How did the other dancers manage? Well some managed the knots, and others didn’t, and everyone found them difficult.  Perhaps the difference here is that I was paying very good attention as to how the move worked and then still failed, whereas some others having trouble were clearly taking things far less seriously, and weren’t paying as much heed to the instructions as they might have.

So the dancing was fun, and because it was complicated and we were all amateurs, I didn’t feel self concious about getting bits wrong, or about forgetting the sequence of moves. Others were making the same mistakes.

What wasn’t so much fun were the social bits in between the dances. The dancing is hard work, so the format was typically two five minute dances and then a 15 minute break for people to recover. In these breaks, many of the attendees wandered around and chatted socially. My little group of me, my wife, my wife’s friend and her friend who we’d not met before didn’t really mingle. This suited me fine – the dancing was hard work mentally as well as physically, which didn’t leave much room in my head for making small talk. Even in our little group I kept mostly to myself, and listened more than I talked. My head was full of dance moves and how they worked.

I wondered before the start if I’d feel over-stimulated by the music and the noise. In reality I didn’t feel it as much as I thought I might. I was a bit blank during the breaks, and undeniably tired at the end, but elated. And the elation over-rode any feelings of over-stimulation.

Would I go again?

Yes. The combination of someone else telling me how to move, plus everyone being an amateur who made mistakes really did work well for me.

And another thing…

Rachel has written a lovely series of articles on her Asperger Journeys blog about working towards a sense of belonging. Lots of aspects of the articles have struck chords with me, but perhaps the one that stood out most for me was how she intends to stop falling into old traps when dealing with organisations that get things wrong.

Rachel talks about how she feels she has to correct people in organisations that she gets involved with who are making what she sees to be clear logical mistakes, and how this never seems to result in a satisfactory outcome. She writes:

In every organization, there are all sorts of social, nonverbal, pecking-order assumptions about treating certain individuals with deference, about defending the organization, and about a number of other concerns that I just can’t see and don’t understand. So, a person I contact at any organization will very likely defend someone higher up, come out in defense of the organization, ignore me, or do something else that drives me nuts.

I too fail to see or understand many of these rules. I know the rules are there, but I don’t really ‘get’ them.

Rachel continues:

Unfortunately, what I consider bullshit is just basic social reality for most people. Needless to say, sooner or later, a relentless force (me) meets an immoveable object (them), and it’s not a happy experience.

How true this is. Failing to handle situations like this in a neuro-typical way is one of my most common causes of faux pas, and it gets me into a lot of trouble. You see, the organisations that I like to give a piece of my mind most frequently are those that I work for.

I guess that little annoyances at work get shrugged off by typical people. When they don’t, they tend to have a quiet word with those around them, or their boss to try and get things resolved. Unfortunately, my anxiety and problems with verbal interaction mean that I rule myself out of taking these approaches. Instead, I tend to let things build up to the point where I can no longer keep the issue inside of me.

Eventually, like Rachel, I feel that I have to point out what’s wrong. Whatever the issue is seems so logically wrong to me, that I can’t understand why others wouldn’t see it, or would choose to ignore it. So at that point, where my frustration is so great that I can’t keep it inside me any more, I write an email. The email is, in my typical style, brutally honest, long, detailed, and doesn’t hold back in saying what I think about situations and people. If someone is doing something I perceive to be wrong or dishonest, I say so. If that person happens to be the boss I’m writing to, I’ll still say so.

Writing the email is a great experience, in much the same way as writing for this blog is. It’s cathartic, and I pour huge amounts of emotion into it.

And of course, that’s where it should stop. I should write the email outside of my email client, and never send it. Unfortunately, my executive disfunction means that I don’t see this common-sense conclusion at the time. I bang away at the keyboard for an hour, honing everything I want to say into an email that usually reads much like an article here, and then without a second thought, I send it.

I’ve never been fired, but I’ve ended up in trouble with management at most companies I’ve worked for in one form or another, and typically it’s my use of email in this way that gets me on the trouble radar – I’m not playing by the rules.

It’s not just work, of course. Another of my bug-bears is recruitment agents that call and email me about work, and put zero effort into their sales pitch. At least spouting off at Job Agents doesn’t cause me any trouble. Every month or two I explode in annoyance and write a snotty email back explaining just how useless their communication to me was, and how I’m sticking them on my black list of agents that I won’t deal with when I’m next looking for a job. Indeed I did something very similar this afternoon, which along with Rachel’s article prompted me to write.

Here’s the email that the agent sent today:

Subject: URGENT! Please Get In Touch!

I have tried without success to reach you by telephone, so hope that you
receive this email.

I have a potentially interesting opportunity for you and would be
grateful if you could call me on the number below to discuss the matter.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

[Agents name]

Wow. How can I fail to be impressed by this. Remind me how this works again? Oh yes, that’s it – the agency put me in contact with a company looking to employ someone with my skills. I then attend the interview and put in the hard work that secures me the job. The agent acts as a conduit to get me the interview, for the contract paperwork, and well, not much else. For their brief involvement, the agency make about 20% of my starting salary, which amounts to many thousands of Pounds.

And this sort of email is frequently their opener. At least this one didn’t have the very wonderful ‘Dear Candidate’ at the start of it – I’ve often responded snottily to these by starting ‘Dear Agent’. But come on – there is nothing about where the job is located, what skills they are looking for, whether the job is permanent or contract, what level of seniority they are looking for or what sort of pay range they are looking at. Nothing at all that I can use to make any sort of judgement. It’s just pathetic.

Grrr.

Clearly, I need to find some way to deal with annoyances like this and those at work when they first crop up. I’m not sure how to do this right now, but I can see that it needs to be done. If I don’t tackle this, then I’m going to keep on sending inappropriate and pointless emails, and keep on getting myself into trouble.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to tackle this?

Feeling the fear

If you are on the spectrum, then you probably know this feeling. It’s the one where you look like a rabbit caught in car headlights just before it gets hit.

Fear is never far away for me. I’m sure it is connected to my background stress and anxiety in some way, but frankly the feeling of fear is distinct from that of feeling anxious.

The odd thing for me is that frequently there is no good reason for the fear to be there at all, but it still is. Is life that terrifying that it causes me to walk around feeling frightened? Well, maybe there is something in that. After all, I’ve said in countless articles on this site that I find the world a confusing and unpredictable place. In the past I’ve used this to justify the anxiety I feel, but could it also cause a frequent background fear, that on occasion flares up into terror?

I’ll explain what this fear feels like: It’s like when you were a kid, and you wanted your parents to leave the hallway light on at night (which mine did, incidentally). It’s an irrational fear that often appears to have no cause in particular, but it’s chilling all the same.

When I was a child, at least part of this night time fear was one of security. With the light on, I could see my surroundings, and this was comfortable. With the light off, I couldn’t see where I was, and then small creaks in the house would make me jump and my heart pound. Perhaps there is an over-active imagination at play here, or perhaps it’s just to do with the way I’ve always processed sensory inputs – in real time, with pattern matching. When you can’t see what you are doing, your other senses become hightened, and you start to hear every little sound. In the UK, our houses are built with wooden rafters and floors, and these creak when the house heats up and cools down in the daily cycle of life. To a young man, processing the noises in real time, and trying to understand and pattern match them, the creaks can sound like someone walking towards your room. When your parents are asleep in bed, this sort of thing can be very frightening, especially when your eyes can’t confirm or deny what you are hearing.

I wonder if my background fear as an adult is a similar mechanism at play?

If the input I get from my senses matches in some way to a previously scary event, do I then subconsciously start to feel scared? I’ve many times in the past suffered from unexpected outcomes in social situations. Outcomes where I’ve inadvertently provoked an aggressive response from someone. These leave me surprised and quite genuinely instantly frightened at the time. My social faux pas don’t happen often on this scale, but in a life time I’ve unintentionally provoked aggression on many occasions. I think there is a good chance that my brain has these stored away for use as pattern matches – after all, I know I have a great many past events stored in just this way – I make use of them daily to help navigate my lack of social intuition. So – what if my brain pattern matches something about a current innocuous situation to one of these old scenarios, and turns on my fear?

What I’ve just described is what would typically be called post traumatic stress disorder, but would I be at all justified to claim that this is what I am experiencing?

To be honest, I’m not sure it’s all that wide of the mark. The world is continually perplexing and unpredictable to me, and at times my apparent naivety has burnt me badly. I observe that I don’t learn from these sorts of mistakes over time, and continue to make them. Why then, wouldn’t my brain pattern match fear, when it thinks it sees another scenario that might provoke the same response? I may not have suffered from trauma in the way that people usually define it – as in a single horrendous experience – but I have suffered a catalogue of broadly similar moderately scary incidents over the years. Incidents that I’ve not learnt to avoid. Could they add up and reinforce the message over time in my brain? Maybe. It sounds plausible to me.

What do you make of this? Do you suffer from the fear too? If you do, what do you think causes it?

Slow thinking

When it comes to talking with others, I’m often seen to be something of a slow thinker.

I’ll see the other person smile after saying something and look at me – they are expecting a response, but what sort of a response? Was it a joke they made? Were they looking for agreement on something? My brain will scramble and then often metaphorically shrug it’s shoulders. I don’t follow this up with a physical shrug – I’ve long since learnt that this isn’t an acceptable response. Instead I’ll use a tried-and-tested store-cupboard stock response of, ‘Heh, yeah!’.

This is a highly refined response from me, and has been carefully honed over the years to try and covey many messages at once in an ambiguous way. It has a little humour in it, in case what you were saying was actually a joke. It has a positive response in it too, so that if it wasn’t something funny, I’ve indicated that I acknowledge what you were saying. It works a surprisingly large amount of the time.

And then it comes, eventually – I’ve decoded what you were saying to me, and I suddenly see the joke, or why you were wanting some agreement from me. Occasionally of course I’ll eventually see that my response wasn’t very appropriate. Oh dear, but then again, you can’t win all the time.

Why do I miss the intent of what people are saying to me in the first place? Well there are a number of competing Aspie traits at play, and they often collude together.

Firstly, there is my lack of social intuition. I do have some sometimes, but it isn’t enough to get me by most of the time. With little by the way of social intuition to help a conversation flow, I have to real-time process what is being said to me, and then try and figure what to say next. This consumes a lot of brain power, and concentration, leaving me little room for anything else going on in my head. Sometimes the responses are easier to come by than others. But put me in a situation where I know little about the subject matter, and I very very easily get lost, especially if it’s more than a 2-way conversation.

Think of it as having a meeting where the other people speak in a foreign language that you don’t fully understand. You have to listen very hard to catch what is being said, and then spend a little time processing what was said to turn it into English, before what they’ve said makes sense. My lack of social intuition presents itself in much the same way but when everyone is speaking in English.

Then there is my lack of reading non-verbal social cues. Because I concentrate on what’s said, and don’t see the body language or facial expressions very much, I miss much of the subtlety that people often convey whilst they speak. This makes the decision making regarding what people are saying even harder at times.

The third main trait at play is strongly related to the other two, and is that I easily get sensory overload in social situations.  The amount of time this takes varies, but you can be sure that a multi-person face-to-face meeting will cause it remarkably quickly. Once I’m overloaded, my body involuntarily starts to shut itself down, to shield me from the constant input. This feeling is one of blankness. I feel to have withdrawn inside myself, and the voices become distant echos. My eyes blur and I kind of switch off. This, of course means that I miss a fair bit of what’s being said, and that means that the impact of the other traits gets magnified hugely.

With all of these traits at play, it’s not surprising that I often find verbal communication, be it social or work meetings, to be very hard going. It’s also not surprising that I can be perceived to be slow of thought, and disinterested.

At work, at least, I tend to get away with this, because I come back with well though out responses to things after the event, and people respect me for doing this. I seem to have a well-honed ability to reply recent events and from this work through peoples thoughts and intentions before drawing my own conclusions. It’s rumination, but it works very well for me. Whilst I may not have good instant answers for anyone, I do at least have well thought out follow-ups.

You could conclude that this article is about mental agility, and my lack of it. However it’s more subtle than that. I don’t have great mental agility in group verbal communication scenarios, but I do when it comes to rumination or philosophising. This is signalling parallels to me regarding this article I wrote last week, where I said that I don’t appear to others to not have much common sense, but really it’s just a case that I can’t express it when I need to. Maybe that article and this simply describe different facets of the same issue.

As ever, what this article really says is that I’m different from the norm, but perhaps in ways that aren’t what you first think. I have skills that are very typical of any intelligent person – I can reason arguments, suggest ways forward and make rational decisions. I just can’t access these results in the same sorts of timescales that typical people can.

I’m not slow-minded, I just can’t respond in a way that meets your neuro-typical expectations.

Loud noise feedback

Maybe this is normal. I don’t really want to go round asking people though, because they’ll most likely think I’m mad, regardless of which outcome turns out to be normal.

Whatever the case, it’s my Aspie trait of spotting the tiniest of details in things that’s lead me to spotting this, and then wondering what it was.
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A dinner party, Aspie style

Last weekend, my wife and I hosted a dinner party for six. This is an unusual event in our household, but we had been to evenings at the other couples houses recently, so it was our turn to entertain.

With my new-found hyper-awareness of how my Asperger’s affects me, I wondered how the evening would go, and how my AS would colour things. As it happens, it went well.

Before the day itself, my wife and I split up the jobs. She was to sort out the nibbles and the dessert, and I was to cook the main course. We decided that as we don’t have much practice of juggling cooking and entertaining at the same time, that we’d stick to a pre-prepared dessert, and a main course that we cook regularly – a good old fashioned British roast dinner.

On the morning of the event, I did my first Aspie trick – I made a list. It was a timeline from mid-afternoon of when everything needed to be prepared, go in/out of the oven, and when we’d fit in feeding the kids and bathing them etc as well. With my list done, I was confident I knew the schedule. If I hadn’t taken the time to make it, then nothing would have been ready in time. As it turned out, the list worked wonderfully.

When our guests arrived, the kids were safely asleep in bed, my wife had finished assembling the nibbles, and I was hard at work cooking. My wife did the pre-dinner entertaining whilst I got all the final bits of the main course ready. This worked well. I was focussed, the food got delivered on schedule, and everyone enjoyed it. Great.

What I perhaps wasn’t expecting was just how little I would have to contribute after the meal was done. In usual dinner party style we adjourned to the lounge for coffee and chocolates and grown up chatter. But I had nothing left to give. Once more, I was the quiet one in the corner that wasn’t joining in with the conversation very much.

You may be surprised to hear that I wasn’t expecting this. I’m usually quite chatty at dinner parties, especially once alcohol has kicked in a bit. As someone who doesn’t discuss things verbally with people all that often or indeed all that articulately, rare occurrences like dinner parties at other people’s houses tend to provide something of an outlet for me. Alcohol helps.

But not that night. The intense focus on the list of things that needed doing, and the effort involved in preparing everything had wiped me out. I wanted so much for everyone to be impressed with the food that I had put every last ounce of effort into it, and left nothing for the social side of the evening.

This is another of my traits that I put down to my AS. Whenever I concentrate intently on something for any length of time I end up feeling tired and withdrawn. It’s a similar feeling to the one I get when I’ve experienced sensory overload. I feel vacant, and almost as though I’m looking at a video of the world around me rather than real life – like I’m detached from reality in some way. I get the feeling even after short periods of concentration – I’ll get it after publishing this article, for instance.

At least, with only six of us there, there wasn’t a great deal of time spent with people talking over each other. This meant that whilst I may not have been saying much, I was at least able to follow and enjoy the conversations. I think six people is about the right number for me for an evening like this. Any more and regardless of whether I’m the host or not, I’ll start to loose track of conversations, and the general background noise will start to annoy me and eventually overload me.

Did anyone notice my lack of input? I’m not sure, but it probably doesn’t matter. Everyone – me included – had a good time, and that is more important.

It’s interesting that we chose a roast dinner for the main course as we thought that would be an easy option. I think that the next time we entertain in this way, I’ll try and come up with a main course that can have at least some elements prepared ahead of time.

That way I might have a little something left to give in the second half of the evening.

Common sense

As someone who sees logic as being at the core of how I act and interact, I seem to have a lot of problems with another concept that would also appear to be governed by logic a lot of the time – common sense.

It’s not that I don’t have any common sense – I most certainly do. It’s just that deciding how to react to a given input makes use of my ‘store cupboard’ responses a good deal of the time and common sense gets pushed to the side.

When I need to make a snap judgement on something – the sort of judgement where an ordinary person would simply dial up common sense and ask it to provide the answer, I find that I’m asking myself all sorts of questions, and often completely failing to provide any sort of rational answer at all. I want my answer to be right, yet because my brain frequently pushes me down the store cupboard path if I didn’t see the scenario coming, I find I’m asking myself whether a given response is appropriate, and then having instant self doubt. I stammer and try to fill the passing moments with words that sound as though they might be building up to a solution, whilst my brain has a little battle with itself over what the right store cupboard response might be. Meanwhile, common sense is over in the corner somewhere with it’s hand up waiting patiently for me to ask it for a response. I rarely see it.

After the fact I can easily see what the obvious solution was, and interestingly, when it’s someone else having to make the decision, I often reach the same common sense answer as the other person before they say it. So common sense does exist in me – it just doesn’t find it’s way to the surface when it could be best used much of the time.

It’s not just snap judgements though, it’s interesting just how much of life relies on common sense:

What task do I do next on my list today? On my way home from work do I call home first, or collect my daughter from nursery on the way? Does this shirt go with these jeans? Should I cook dinner as my wife’s not home yet?

See what I mean? All of these could be answered instantly with a little common sense, and yet I find that I’m asking myself questions that either complicate matters further, or add procrastination into the equation such as:

Should I do this easy task before the one that’s important, and get it out of the way quickly? Can I put this other task off until tomorrow? Perhaps I should get this blog article that’s stuck in my head written first before anything else? Would my wife think the shirt and jeans matched? Does it matter? What would my wife think if they clashed really badly? Do they clash? I dunno. Should I put the dinner on? When will she be home? Will she be coming straight home? Hmmm. Not sure if she hasn’t already eaten. What if I make it and it’s ready way ahead of time?

The above are all questions I was asking myself yesterday, so are real-life examples. It’s mostly daft stuff like above, and it really does cloud my view of the common sense answers.

For the record:

I should do the most important item on my list first. My logical mind will tell me every time which one that is. The blog article can be done later. I should collect my daughter on the way home, as it saves an extra car trip. If I’m questioning if the shirt clashes with the jeans, then it most likely does and I should change. Of course I should put the dinner on. It doesn’t matter if it’s ready early – it’s often ready before I get home, when my wife is doing the cooking. I can even send my wife a text message  to let her know the dinner is on.

Perhaps the complications that I put in my own way show how making snap decisions stresses me, and just how badly I cope with stress at times. I like my day to be planned, and I don’t like it when plans change. Having to make an unexpected snap decision on something is just like having to change my plans.

Oh, and I did put the dinner on, but I didn’t pick my daughter up on the way home – I went home first. One good decision, one bad.

Do any of you find that you have plenty of common sense, but that you can’t use it when it’s actually needed?

Eye contact

I just can’t do it.

I’ll look at your shoes and maybe your trousers. I can often remember what people were wearing on their bottom half, but hardly ever the top.

I just can’t look you in the eyes.

This phenomenon is widely known as a trait with people on the Autism Spectrum, but I’ve never seen a convincing write up of why it happens. Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising – I struggle to understand it myself.

Looking in someone elses eyes feels wrong to me. By that I mean that it feels like something I shouldn’t be doing. There’s sometimes literally a thought of  “damn – you caught me looking” in the brief fraction of a second when eyes meet.

Moreover, it feels intensely uncomfortable too. When I make myself look someone else in the eye, I find myself almost physically flinching. My eyes want to look elsewhere, and it takes real effort to stop them doing just that. More than a few seconds of enforced eye contact and my brain is screaming at me, almost in pain.

And that’s just made a connection. The feeling of something akin to pain is actually just like the feeling I get when I’m tickled, or if I hear a loud noise. It’s not a physical pain as such, but it is excruciating all the same – a sort of mental pain. The feelings it stirs in me are those of getting away from the pain. With loud noises I’ll scrunch my face up and sometimes cover my ears. With tickling I’ll push people away or run. These are all reactions that happen without me consciously thinking about them.

I suppose that eye contact has an equivalent reaction too – I’ll simply look elsewhere.

So maybe the eye contact problem is caught up with the sensory over-stimulation problem in some way.

What ever it is, I simply can’t make eye contact with anyone comfortably, and I doubt that will ever change.

Misguided lobbying

Perhaps I’ve been deliberately avoiding it, albeit subconsciously.

Perhaps it’s just something of a fluke.

Whatever lies behind it, it’s fair to say that I’ve never read the various sites on the web that advocate that Autism is a curable disease, and that vaccines cause autism.

That’s changed today, and has proven to be something of an eye opener. At the tail end of last week, I supplemented my Google Reader list with some custom streams from Google News, gathered from some ASD-related search terms. This threw a number of pages at me this morning, some of which were on websites I’d not seen before.

I’m not going to name them, because I’m a strong believer in free speech, and they are entitled to their opinion. I have to say, though, that what I read horrified me.

My own investigations of my Asperger’s have lead to something of an inevitable conclusion – that Autism Spectrum Disorders are genetic, and that they flow through families. I say inevitable, because I can see signs of other family members having ASDs. In addition, my different ways of thinking are so deeply ingrained and natural to me that I can’t believe that they are purely a learnt behaviour, nor the effects of some vaccine gone wrong.

Living in the UK, it is impossible to have escaped the Vaccines cause Autism debate over the last few years. Indeed, in the years before my own discovery of AS, my wife and I chose to have our son vaccinated privately so that he could have separate Measles, Mumps and Rubella jabs. I’d researched what little there was of the pros and cons online, and personally didn’t believe in the suggested link; but my wife did, and I was happy to do what was needed to put her mind at ease.

In the years since then, it seems that a whole industry of new sites has been born which are far more organised and more professionally run that the information that used to be available. The sites I saw today argued very strongly that both MMR and other vaccines were behind autism, and that we were on the verge of an epidemic of autism that was caused by the vaccines.

Wow. These websites appear to be thinly disguised lobbying tools. The apparently well-meaning adults who write for the sites appear to predominantly be parents of children who have been diagnosed with ASDs. They feel that their viewpoint – that vaccines caused the autism in their children – is right, and they passionately want to change the world view. They are on a crusade.

Well, the purpose of my site has never been one of lobbying nor a crusade to change anyone’s mind. I present the facts as I see them – just as their sites do – but I hope that those who visit mine will make up their own mind. I speak as someone who is affected by Autism, not as a well meaning, but neuro-typical adult. I seek the understanding of others. I don’t want to change the world, and I certainly don’t want the websites I’ve seen today to claim to be speaking for me.

Incidentally, as a parent, I find it very easy to see how you could think that vaccines cause autism – I really can.

After all, vaccines are given to children at around the age where symptoms of ASDs often start to show.

Every child develops in different areas at different speeds. My son, who is now five, has always been great at motor skills, such as riding a bike without stabilisers before his fourth birthday, but got his colours wrong until very recently. My daughter, who has just turned three had already got colours mostly sussed, uses a broader vocabulary than her brother did at the same age, but is less good at the motor skills. This is normal. My daughter has the occasional toileting accident, despite having been potty trained during the day for well over six months. Again, this is normal. I think you have to look at the big picture. Both of my kids are coming on in leaps and bounds.

But could I see this when they were a year old? If you really think about it, it’s only at that sort of age that children really start to communicate with you in any way that isn’t smiles or crying. They’d learned to sit up and crawl, sure. They also made repetitive single syllable sounds. But beyond that? It’s much more difficult to see real progress. So I personally find it difficult to see how someone can really see regression in a one-year old, who has just had the MMR jab.

If you were brought up without the strong grounding in science and logic that I have, it is easy to turn better detection of autism disorders into an epidemic that doesn’t exist. After all, when I was growing up, there was no diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome. School teachers weren’t on the look out for kids that had ASDs – indeed the autism label was really just applied to kids on the very profoundly affected end of the range.

That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist though. I had Aspeger’s when I was a dazed seven year old at school wondering why everything was so confusing. I had it when I was born. But I wasn’t one of the Autism statistics in those days. And guess what? I’m still not. I don’t have a formal diagnosis, yet I still have Asperger’s.

Like me, many tens of thousands of adults are realising they have an ASD every year. Not because they have been vaccinated then developed a condition, but because they’ve always known they have something different about them, and they are now empowered to find out what it is due to the wonders of the Internet and books that have been published. These are not new cases of Autism. These people have always had it.

It is also absolutely true to say that more children are being diagnosed with autism than ever before, but logic says that anything other than this would be absurd. Far more is known about autism now than even fifteen years ago, so more and more of those like me, who would have slipped through the net when I was a child are now being diagnosed at a young age.

An autism epidemic? Give me a break. It’s just more comprehensive diagnosis.

What I’ve read today has shocked me. These people seem determined to persuade the world to adopt a misguided view of Autism disorders. What’s more they seem to be sending a message that vaccines in general are bad, which is likely to lead to more deaths of children in the long term, as measles makes an unwelcome return.

And what about their poor children? Instead of being accepted for who they are, it would seem that they become part of a freak show, with the drug companies as the bad guys. Asperger’s isn’t a terrible thing to have – it just means you are different from the norm. I remember how I felt growing up. I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up like that but to think that your differences were caused by an injection you had when you were a year old. How depressing – you will forever think that you could have been ‘normal’ if it wasn’t for that injection, and you’ll always have hope that the next special diet or treatment you try may remove the autism.

What I’d like to see is better understanding of those who are affected. I’d like money to be spent to provide help to those who need it. I sure as hell don’t want sites like those I saw today claiming to represent people like me.

I think, however that they might just have pushed me into action. I’ve seen a few autism advocacy sites, and I’m going to read more and look to offer them my support in some way.

Incidentally, by the time my daughter was due her MMR, the big holes had appeared in the Wakefield report, and we elected to give her the tripple jab. My son has also since had his MMR booster, as the tripple jab this time.