The anatomy of a special interest

Whilst browsing the web a few evenings ago, I found myself – as I often do – following my thought process to see where it would lead me.

My starting point was a news item I’d seen earlier in the day that had piqued my curiosity. The story was this – a ghost village near to where my parents live in Scotland is to finally be demolished after thirty five years of sitting empty.

I love stories like this – local history and it’s odd quirks in particular have long been a fascination of mine, making this a special interest that makes regular and usually unanticipated repeat visits.

Over the course of an hour and a half, I let my thought processes dictate where this starting point would lead me. It lead to somewhere quite unexpected, but still in the same special interest thread (just) – Drax power station.

What follows is a little dissection of my thought processes that show how I got from A to B, via C on the way.

As I’ve said, we started here – a BBC news story about how the ghost village of Polphail in Argyll is to be demolished thirty five unhappy years after being built and never having been occupied.

The village, it turns out, was a legacy of the Scottish oil boom of the 1970s. A series of dry docks were built at that time around the Scottish coast for building giant concrete oil rigs, and Polphail was built next to one of these to house the expected workers. But the workers never came – the technology changed, and when it comes down to it, this dock and village were built on the west coast of Scotland, and all the oil is off the Eastern seaboard. The government has long since sold off the dock, which has recently been redeveloped into a marina, having served time as a fish farm. The unused village has changed hands several times, and has had a long and unhappy history of promised demolitions which have never been carried out.

A link from the BBC page (the link is no longer there) took me to a collection of photographs by a local photographer, that document the decay in the village, along with surprising details such as a rack of keys for the houses, and washing machines in a launderette – all still in place after thirty five years. The photos are eerily beautiful, and the website is well worth a visit.

Google maps showed me where Polphail was. After seeing it, I wondered if Google could tell me any more about it’s history. I found this – a wiki about secret and obscure sites in Scotland. This had some useful additional information, but I’ll come back to this in a few moments.

At this juncture, I wondered if there were any other ghost villages in the UK, so I searched. I found a couple.

The British military, it would seem has been the main cause of ghost villages in the recent past. During the Second World War, it commandeered three villages for exercises – Tyneham in Doset on the south coast, Imber on Salisbury Plain – not far from Stonehenge, and Mynydd Epynt in Wales. In each case, the government told the occupants that the land was temporarily required for military use, and gave them a month to leave. None has ever had their home returned to them, even to this day.

Figuring all this out took a while, and involved a lot of quick searches and looks via Google Maps to see what was there on the ground today. Some of the websites I found along the way were wonderful examples of amateur passion and campaigning turned towards the direction of a new technology like the web, including this great example here. You’ll find a great tour of Tyneham here.

Some further searching for other possible ghost villages turned up this gem of a website. I’ve barely scraped the surface of it yet, but have it tucked away to devour in full when I get the time. This site just about left me agog, as it talks about a now vanished village that I have driven past the site of many times – Glenbuck in Ayrshire, Scotland. Glenbuck is on the road I drive down when I visit my parents, which is the same road that we used to drive down to visit my grandmother when I was a child. Due to this I know the road well, and can create a wonderful 3D video of it in my head. The old mining town, with houses and a main street, has gone – vanished under a scar of open-cast mining. The industry that made it also in the end tore it up too.

With other ghost villages examined, it’s time to go back to Polphail, where we started.

I noticed on the Secret Scotland website that there were links to various planning documents (isn’t it amazing what you can get easy access to these days online?), so I had a bit of a read of these. Not only did these tell me a lot more of the history of village including the various efforts to try and get the owners to demolish it, but the site also had some interesting reading about how much public money had been wasted on building it in the first place. It wasn’t the cost that grabbed me however, it was mention that the costs for it were listed with the costs to build the Hunterston Deep Water Terminal, which is literally just down the road from where my parents live. I’ve always known that Hunterston was a port for bulk materials, but I’d never really know what. A quick trip to Wikipedia told me that these days coal is offloaded here, and then taken over the road via a large conveyor (easily visible in Google Maps) to the railway, where it is sent elsewhere.

And this is where Drax comes in. Wikipedia told me that one of the places that coal from Hunterston is shipped to is Drax – a huge coal-fired power station located in my neck of the woods, and just a couple of miles down the road from where I worked for a little over two years. Drax is huge and imposing – on a clear day you can see it from near my house, which is some twenty miles away as the crow flies. It’s huge in terms of output too – on it’s own it can provide 7% of the UK’s electricity, and if you classed Drax as a country in it’s own right, it would rank as the 76th biggest produces of CO2 in the world. Wow!

So – Polphail to Drax, via Tyneham and Glenbuck. All in all a very interesting ninety minutes.

Was it really ninety minutes? It seemed like much less time than that. I’ve been writing this piece for about that amount of time too, and once more the time has flown. This is what special interests are about – I get so thoroughly absorbed in them that time just disappears.

I think the above dissection of my thought processes gives a good example of how special interests drag me in, and of how my brain becomes a huge sponge for new information, devouring anything and everything vaguely related that I can find.

It also shows the other side of special interests too – the desire to share the knowledge I’ve learnt, often in detail to people that aren’t interested. This article is exactly that, but in written form.

I’d be willing to bet that some of those who start reading don’t make it here, and I can’t blame them.

As for you – well thank you for listening!

The work problem

I could have called this article Life derailed: part 2 or maybe even Derailed job. It’s really a continuation of my thoughts from the article I wrote yesterday, but applied to my work life.

My work life hasn’t been derailed as yet, well not completely at any rate. In my article yesterday I talked about how my life at work hasn’t lived up to my youthful neurotypical aspirations. There is no question that my neurology has held me back versus my non-AS peers, but I’ve still managed to perform adequately, especially when well managed.

But how long will that last? I don’t mean here that I’m likely to go off the rails simply because I now know about my AS. This is a slightly more subtle and long-term problem. I’m thirty six now, which means that in a few short years I’ll be forty. Age in itself isn’t the problem, but age and work mixed together is.

In general, I’m comfortable with the type of work I do these days. It’s technical work, and often repetitive. The problem is that older people don’t do jobs like this in the UK. I’ve been involved in the interview process with enough companies to know that technical ability (and I’m no genius on that side of things) doesn’t count for everything. Running alongside it is that wonderful characteristic of team fit. Here in the UK, you can’t use age as a reason for refusing someone a job. You can, however legitimately refuse to employ someone because you believe they wouldn’t be a good fit into the existing team, and I’ve been on interview panels where older applicants were rejected for that very reason.

IT is a young man’s game. The industry is full of bright young things fresh out of University, and I get a year older than the average age every year. As people progress in years, they also progress in skills, and usually up the corporate ladder too. Most of my peers are now either technical architects (which is about as far as you can go technically, and is a job reserved for the truly technically gifted), or are managers of IT teams. They’re either at the pinnacle of the technical ladder, or have already started to leave it behind.

At the moment I can still find work, but in the last three companies I’ve worked for I’ve been one of the oldest members of the team. In my last job, for a major online retailer, I was in my early to mid thirties, and the average age of what was a very skilled team was mid to late twenties. That’s quite a gulf. How much longer will it be before I find it difficult to land roles, no matter how well I come across in interviews? How long will it be before I’m hitting that “He could do the job, but he wouldn’t fit into the team” problem?

My IT train will get derailed in time, I have no doubt.

What can I do about it? Well, the standard route that my peers take to avoid the problem – moving into team management and ultimately further up the managerial ladder isn’t a realistic option for me. So what could I do instead?

I could take contract roles in IT. My view is that if you contract in IT in the UK, then you can go on in technical roles for a good few extra years than if you were in a permanent role. Whilst contracting is an option, I’m not well suited to it. Contracting is a risky game, with no job security. It often involves lots of short term roles with different people in different locations. As I’ve written before, it takes me a long time to settle in and find my feet in a new job, which makes short term contracts stressful for me, and stops me performing at my best.

I could start my own company. I’m reasonable at money management, and have a useful skill in setting up and managing email and websites that I could build a business around. I’m hopeless at marketing however, so finding clients and selling my talents to them would be difficult, and without a decent number of clients the business wouldn’t be viable. This, I guess is a dream that there is an outside chance might come true, but it would take a tremendous amount of effort and courage for it to be in with a fighting chance.

What about low risk options? Well, I could take a technical role whilst I still can with a large company that offers job security. I would need to join with the mindset that no matter how annoyingly badly run the company turned out to be, I’d have to grin and bear it. With a technical position in a large corporate, I could potentially tread water and stay in technical roles for years, but at the cost of not being able to move companies. My neurotypically-programmed responses tell me that this is a very lazy way to work, and I suspect that is how it would come cross to my managers in the company – “James has no ambition…”.

I could look at doing something completely different, outside of the technical IT world. Perhaps I should hone my writing skills and get into technical writing. I understand many technologies and my AS abilities to see things in detail may help me to document things. Could I motivate myself to write every day for a living however? I don’t know.

Maybe I should go and work in a shop. That would be less stress, but would have the difficulties involved in having to interact with people all day. It also wouldn’t bring in the sort of money that my family are used to living on.

There are no easy answers to this one, but ultimately I need to give this some serious thought, before it’s too late and I find that my train is completely derailed. That’s the one thing that isn’t an option.

Suggestions welcome!

Life derailed

I’ve written before about how my daily routine is on railway tracks, and that when something comes along that alters the course of my day, I’ll find that I want to continue down those tracks rather than modify my routine to the new schedule.

Well, I’ve recently figured out that the whole bigger picture of my life is like that too.

You see, I grew up in a neurotypical world, with neurotypical expectations, hopes and dreams. I knew I was a little different from the norm, but I really didn’t see how big this chasm was in certain areas until very recently. Thus, neurotypical expectations felt normal and right for me. I had places to get to and things to do. After leaving school there was University to look forward to, and then a life of work, making my way up the career ladder. Somewhere along the way I expected to gain a wife, kids and progressively bigger and more comfortable houses to live in. I was expecting to lead a typical middle-class British life.

In some ways I did. I went to university, and got a good degree. I migrated into the world of work without too much pain either, and made an impression on people for providing the results they asked for. Indeed, it took several years before it became apparent that not everything was as plain sailing as I thought it would be.

I guess the wheels started to come off the wagon when, three years into my work life, I broke up with my girlfriend of six years. Sadly, the relationship had deteriorated in a way that left us as friends and little more. I decided it was over, and we parted company – the one and only time in my life where I’ve ended a relationship. In a neurotypical way I  imagined that once I was out of this relationship, I’d meet someone else in due course. But I didn’t – not for several years. Instead I failed miserably to get my act together.

And then there was work. I’d been getting into trouble either for being too outspoken (something that I’ve written about before), and occasionally for not knuckling down and working hard when it was needed. I had developed an eye for seeing the ridiculous and unjust in the work environment, but had poor control over voicing my opinions. I was no longer the model employee that people turned to to get things done. I was the loose cannon that took a bit more managing than my peers, though with management I still produced good results most of the time, and was still valued.

Instead of trying to understand why life wasn’t going as planned, and trying to sort out my working problems, I pulled a trick that you can get away with when you work in IT in the UK – I moved jobs – sometimes within the company, and at other times to other companies. I was in a repeating cycle of joining a team full of enthusiasm, taking on responsibility and delivering on it initially, then starting to see the problems in the company, getting stressed, moaning about it inappropriately, failing to deliver what I said I’d do and then moving on once more.

After six years and six jobs in three companies I was a senior technician, well paid, but out of control. In the last months of my third job I was given a junior management role that involved looking after a track of work, and four technical staff. It went badly wrong, and I left the company, and ultimately my whole working life in London behind.

A big problem for me was that I could see my peers doing well. Many of them grew up with the same middle class values and aspirations as me, and I watched them climb the corporate ladder. That step into junior management that I found impossible was typically tackled by my peers with ease. Why couldn’t I do it? Why was the whole process of people management so intolerably stressful to me?

In the months leading up to work exploding, I’d been introduced by an old friend to a lovely woman who lived and worked in the town where I had grown up in Yorkshire. Our relationship was going well, so I left London behind, and followed my girlfriend (later to be my wife) back to Yorkshire. After six months of doing very little, I took up work again, in a much less senior technical role. That worked better, and for a while I consoled myself that I ‘just wasn’t ready’ for a management position, but that in time I would be.

A little over a year ago the chance arose for me to become departmental manager for the company I was at the time working for – to fill the boots of someone who was leaving. I walked away and left the company. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to hack it.

Where had my middle class dreams gone?

Well, these days, of course, I know the answer. My aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder, and everything that goes along with that typical middle class existence are the dreams of a neurotypical person. I’m simply not neurologically cut out for management, and – lets be honest here – I never will be. I don’t understand office politics and I come across as being hopelessly naive and optimistic a lot of the time, and lazy and rude at others. I now know and accept this.

Why then can’t I accept that my dreams of having a typical middle-class lifestyle simply aren’t going to happen? Well, it’s like I said at the top – my aspirations have been derailed, but my train wants to keep on going in that familiar straight line, chasing the dream that I can’t possible achieve. I’m finding this dream surprisingly difficult to shake, and reality difficult to accept.

The gulf between dream and reality shows itself frequently to me in every day life. I work with smart people, who run their own businesses, and know others, younger than me, who are doing very well in management. I live in an affluent village, and see other parents dropping their kids at school from large new expensive cars. I see the large new cars parked outside large houses too. This is the lifestyle that I was brought up to expect, and yet I can’t realistically hope to have it.

Does that matter? Yes – it feels as though it does.

But does it really matter? No. Look at what I have achieved. I have a lovely and very underastanding wife, and two great kids. As a family we live in a modest but large enough house in a lovely village. We eat well and can afford to run two cars (albeit old and small ones), and have enough spare cash for the odd treat. What’s more, because I understand and accept my limitations and their causes these days, I am in a good position to make work choices in the future that fit my skills better.  Whilst I can be a trouble maker at work, I’m also generally good at delivering the sort of results that people want as long as I’m well managed, and with a bit of practice maybe I can keep the trouble maker at bay now that I know what triggers his appearance.

Life is good. Now if only I could get my train to take the branch line off to the left that leads to Satisfaction rather than going straight on towards Middle-class Central…

Dysfunction

In the mid nineties, home computers were far less powerful and considerably more expensive than they are now. As a newly graduated Computer Sciences student, I wanted the best computer I could afford, and yet I had very little by way of disposable income to play with. To work around this problem, I decided to build my own desktop PC, so I could choose the parts that thought represented the best value for money at the time, and I also then decided to overclock the CPU. This was then (and to some degree still is) one of the easy and free ways to grab a little extra performance out of your PC, by making the CPU process more instructions per second than it is supposed to.

Unfortunately, overclocking doesn’t always work. If the CPU you bought was already running near the limit of it’s capabilities, then overclocking it can cause your machine to crash. And so it was for the machine I built. When the machine was idle or working at well under capacity, then it was fine. It would trundle along happily for days. Then when you asked it to do something that was intensive on the CPU it would crash within minutes.

I’m using the above as a metaphor for my life right now. My life is a little like my mid-nineties PC. I can manage the low-level and background tasks reasonable well, but ask me to do something more complex and I’m struggling.

In aspie terms, my executive function is failing me badly right now.

This is nothing unusual. My executive function isn’t wonderful at the best of times. I’m typically disorganised, and unless I’m prompted in some way about events like birthdays or Father’s Day (this Sunday here in the UK), then I’ll forget about them. I use a to-do list each day, but often have trouble thinking ahead regarding what needs to be on the list. I’m used to all of this however, and I’ve never been better set up to stay relatively organised, and thus under the radar of typical people.

The current problems that I have are very familiar, however. I’ve had this sort of problem frequently, for as far back as I can remember. Simply saying that my executive functioning is worse than normal doesn’t really cover it, but it does provide a starting point – a key if you like – for how the problem presents itself.

Right now, planning and execution feel really difficult for me – far more so than normal. Getting items on my to-do list is proving difficult, as I’m forgetting to write them down when they occur to me. Then, of course, I’m forgetting what it was that occurred to me in the first place. I’ll pick up my list book, and sit there thinking that there was something that I needed to do, but completely failing to remember what it was. I have trouble with having a small working memory at the best of times, but right now it feels thimble sized. If I don’t immediately concentrate on the item in my working memory and externalise it in some way, then it is gone, and very difficult for me to retrieve later.

By way of example, over the last couple of weeks I’ve come up with various ideas for articles for this blog, but at times where I’ve not been near a computer to jot them down. I haven’t the faintest idea what those ideas were now, despite feeling that they had legs at the time. What a shame.

I’m not faring any better once I have items on my list. Instead of checking the list regularly to see what I need to do next, I find that I’m forgetting to look at it. Worse, when I do look at it, I’m oddly finding that I’m not properly taking in what’s there. This means that sometimes I only see half the list, and then miss the equally important items on the other half. It’s not a concious decision, it just happens.

When I forget to look, I often find that I’m procrastinating my time away browsing the Internet, following links about an arbitrary subject. This has been happening a lot over the last couple of weeks, and large tracts of time disappear without me realising it’s happening. This following of links about a subject is a soothing mechanism that I have, and I take in large quantities of typically useless information.

When I do drag myself back to tackling list items, I’m finding that I just can’t get started. In the past I’d simply have put this down to a lack of motivation – after all, that’s the problem that typical people have in this sort of situation. It’s more than that though, because it’s not just dull work tasks that are getting affected by this problem, it’s more interesting personal tasks too. It feels like there is some huge physical hurdle that I need to get over to get down to tasks right now. That’s not a lack of motivation, it’s a lack of executive function.

When I do finally get down to starting tasks, then I manage them reasonably well. Well, that is, if you consider working on a single task until it’s done to be a good thing. Frequently it isn’t, and I should be dividing my time up between tasks, especially at work. That isn’t really happening right now, where as normally I’d manage this much of the time, as long as the tasks were on my list.

Along with all this executive dysfunction and working memory issues go various other familiar characteristics. I’m very blank and unfocussed right now. I appear to be drifting through life. My usually very active brain is dull and just ticking over. It feels a little like that feeling I get after too much sensory input – like I’ve withdrawn to be alone, but instead of that lasting a half hour or so, it’s been going on for days, or maybe even weeks now. I have no spark, no zone. My special interests – this blog for one – appear to have fallen by the way side for the most part. I’m quiet and uncommunicative. My routine doesn’t seem to be fully happening – not because I’m choosing to do something different, but just because I seem to be forgetting it.

I’m not sure if this sort of way of being has a trigger. I can’t think of anything in particular that has set this one off. Perhaps it’s just cyclic. Perhaps it’s a change in brain chemistry for some reason.

Maybe, and I whisper this, as it feels like a slightly scary proposition, it’s just that after a long period of acting as NT as I can, my brain waves a white flag and gives up. Perhaps this is just the more naturally autistic version of me, where my brain and nervous system are refusing to try and live up to NT expectations as they have become worn out doing it.

I do feel like I need a holiday. I am tired, and my life is hectic and not well organised right now. So just maybe my whisper is reality. Maybe my body can’t keep up the pretence right now, and the exaggerated (versus my normal state) executive dysfunction and working memory issues are the end result.

Whatever it is, I’d be willing to bet my mid-90′s PC would understand how I feel right now.

The quiet one

I wrote recently about dinner party that my wife and I hosted last month, and about how well it went. Well, last weekend the six of us present that night had dinner together again, with another of the couples acting as hosts.

The evening didn’t go so well for me this time. It wasn’t that I was too quiet, or that I felt too overloaded – I coped with both of those things reasonably well. The problem this time was that some of the topics of conversation hit home just how much of an outsider I am. The other guests, of course didn’t know or even notice this.

The big thing that the six of us have in common, and ultimately the reason we became friends is that we each have a son who started at the same local school in January this year. We’ve known one of the couples since before our son was born – they went to the same parenting class as us. We’ve not known the other couple as long socially, although our son went to the same nursery as theirs. The mothers in the other two couples are both teachers of kids their own age, but at different schools. Much of our conversation over the evening flowed around school annoyances, and in particular the social etiquette of parents at the school gates.

At the core of these discussions were how some parents were rude and cliquey. Our sons are in a class of nearly thirty, so on a typical morning, once you’ve discounted the kids that arrive with one of a couple of childminders, there are over twenty parents dropping their children off for my son’s class. Some, of course are friendly. Others, it would seem, aren’t. The five other adults at the table that evening had all been variously blanked, ignored, or cut short by some of the other parents in the school yard. There was a lot made of how incredibly rude this was, and much musing as to why various sets of parents would talk to each other but blank parents of other children in the same year.

This all went very much over my head, with a bit of a feeling of horror. I take my son to school once or twice a week on average, depending on my shift pattern. After nearly six months of this, I recognise only a handful of the parents. Many are still unfamiliar faces to me. I’ve never been blanked nor cut short by anyone – but then again I’ve never made the effort to approach parents that I don’t know and introduce myself. As for who is the parent of which child – well I haven’t got a clue, and nor do I know what the children or parents are called. It became very clear to me over dinner that my normal mode of operation in this sort of scenario was very out of the ordinary. I felt quite ashamed and embarrassed. I’m well aware these days that I’m a little different from the norm, but I’m not used to having it pointed out (albeit inadvertently) just how unusual and unsophisticated my interaction with other people is.

I felt awful during dinner, but I didn’t let it show. It felt like I was one of these parents who my friends (ok, not sure of the best word here – friends are a tricky concept for me) were laying into. I was being overly hard on myself, of course.

Whilst I don’t talk to the other parents in the school yard much, I will say hello back to folks, and even engage in a little small talk, as long as the other person is doing the hard work of thinking up the direction of the conversation. But this is always with people I know already – the adults from the dinner party, and a couple of others who I know because my son went to Nursery with their child too. I’m not being cliquey or rude. I’m just finding the social etiquette of the school parent role difficult to master. The odd thing, from my perspective is that until that evening, I didn’t think I was finding it difficult to master. I was just doing what I always do in this sort of situation. I thought I was doing fine.

I am doing fine. I’m doing as well as I can hope to do at the moment. I’m just different from the norm.

Of course what this thread of conversation also showed is just how well I do hide my AS. Not once was there any suggestion from any of the gang that I might fall into the camp of those who don’t communicate with them. But these people already know me, and will happily start and perpetuate small talk with me at the school gates. This of course means that they don’t see how I go out of my way to avoid talking to the other people, to those I don’t know.

But maybe those who I don’t know think I’m rude because I don’t talk to them.

I’m not. I’m just coping the best I can.

Too much to do, and a touch of writers’ block

I’ve been very very busy, hence the lack of posts here.

Work has been busy,  as has my home life. Add to that the situation with my parents, my hosting provider blowing up, my new Netbook becoming faulty and needing replacing and a little writers block, and it has meant no postings here for more than a week.

I’ve not disappeared, nor abandoned this site. I’ve still got lots to say, so will be back very soon.

Promise!

Camouflage, understanding, and a Big Professor

I’ve recently become aware that there are a number of non-typical things that I do when speaking to people, particularly when it’s a one-to-one conversation. The conversation subject could be anything, but the examples I use below are based on a work scenario, where something technical is being discussed.

Perhaps the most obvious (and annoying) trait in these scenarios is for me to finish other people’s sentences, in a questioning tone of voice. If you know or work with me, then chances are you are used to me doing this. I’m sure it must be a little off-putting when you first meet me.

Also, I want you to know that I am listening to you, and to this end, I interject with lots of reassuring noises – lots of uh-huhs and yups and yeps when you are speaking. Everyone does this, of course, but I’ve noted that I seem to do it rather more frequently than average. Sometimes, when stressed, I’m making an almost constant stream of acknowledging noises.

Another trait that I have is to ask lots of questions. If I’m going to help you (and lets be honest about this, I’m going to try and help you whether you are after my advice or not), then I need to be able to understand the problem you are facing.

I think there is a clear reason for these behaviours: I want to understand, and I want you to see that I understand. Ok, so that’s two reasons, but the underlying causes are very closely linked.

My ASD social interaction problems mean that I’m never sure how I should non-verbally behave in two-way conversations. So instead of whatever it is that ordinary people do to non-verbally signal their empathy and understanding (just what do people do, incidentally?), I use verbal signals that I’m in tune with what the other person is saying.

In light of this, my behaviours make a lot of sense. Finishing sentences, whilst annoying, clearly demonstrates that I have been listening and taking in what the other person was saying. The frequent noises of agreement do the same, too.

My asking of questions may also give this impression, but in reality it serves a different purpose. What I’m trying to do is build up a mental picture of the thing you are telling me about, in a language that makes more sense to me. This mental picture is typically quite visual and often manipulatable like a 3d model, with difficult concepts encapsulated into boxes with labels in my mind’s eye. This is what seems to work best for me, and it helps me see the bigger picture of your problem. This is me trying to understand in my own language, rather than wanting you to see that I do understand.

Wanting to understand is vital to me, perhaps simply because I am aware that I think in a different way to typical people. Experience has shown me that other people tend to grasp concepts far more quickly than I do. They can see the big picture in most scenarios and not just the minute details in the middle, and this view on things is straight forward to them and requires minimal brain power. I conversely tend to see the minute detail in the middle, but not the other surrounding details, with large amounts of brain power required for concepts – hence the questions.

I further suspect that most people don’t actually see the big picture at all – they just understand it is there, and how it works. I, on the other hand work far better if I can see it all in my mind’s eye, including how it all fits together.

From an early age, my observation that I don’t understand the same things as others, and that my level of detail is different to theirs has lead to the development of the camouflage techniques I’ve mentioned above. Let the other person know that I’m listening, and give them an impression that I understand what they are saying. Ask questions so that I can translate their language into one that I can see and comprehend.

Ultimately, it’s vital for me to understand, because experience tells me that typically that is what is expected of me – an ordinary person would understand. When you have grown up not being able to differentiate between what you are expected to trivially understand, and what it would be acceptable to admit that you don’t know, the best camouflage has proven to be to say that you understand everything, and then do your best to demonstrate that you do.

And that is exactly what I do.

These techniques are also ringing bells with me about a well publicised AS trait that is usually mentioned alongside talk of  ‘Little Professors‘. Your average Little AS Professor can speak at length about a subject of interest without actually having a detailed understanding of the mechanics behind the interest. I think this sort of  confident faking-it technique is most likely another string in the bow of the camouflage tools I’ve outlined above. Having signalled to the other person that I’ve listened to and understood what they were saying, and having asked questions so that I can formulate my own picture, I’d then be happy to go and tell someone else about the subject in question, in a tone of voice that suggested that I understood entirely what I was talking about.

I become a Big Professor.

I often don’t understand the subject in detail of course, but if it’s something that I judge I should know about, then I’ll act as though I do.

Partying with kids

It was my son’s fifth birthday a week or two ago, and we arranged a bowling party for him and twenty or so of his friends. It was one of his best friends birthday the following day too, so we had a joint party between the two families, to help spread the load and the costs too.

So – just how does a party with twenty or so five-year-old kids, assorted parents, bowling and food go when you have Asperger’s?

Well, there were some quite obvious things (to me at least) that happened.

Firstly, I interacted with the kids, but not much with the adults. We had four bowling lanes, with five or six kids playing in each lane. An adult clearly had to supervise each lane, and despite most of the parents staying around for the whole party, very few of them joined in with the bowling or supervision. They stayed at the back, chatting to each other, and watching.

My wife and I had already figured out ahead of time that we’d most likely both have to be involved in running the bowling – at least to some degree, and so it turned out. I spent my time in one lane, helping the kids to carry the balls, and then rolling them down the ramps they had for the kids to use. I cheered them when they knocked pins down and chatted away to them.

I ended up supervising most of the 120 or so rolls in the game in my lane, despite the parents of most of the kids in my lane being there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, whilst I spoke to the kids, I didn’t speak much to the parents at all.

This is quite symptomatic for me – I can speak to kids quite easily most of the time, as there doesn’t feel to be that barrier there that there is with adults – there is no social game afoot with them. Adults are much more difficult for me. I knew most of the parents faces, but there were only a couple that I’d spoken to before. I barely said anything even to those I knew to some degree – it just felt too uncomfortable, that there was too much input for me to deasl with and I had nothing pre-prepared to say.

Was this due to sensory overload? Well, I think it played it’s part – the longer the bowling went on (and it lasted nearly an hour), the more I withdrew from the situation and behaved more automatically. It’s almost like you get race horse blinkers, and can’t see anything outside of what you are actually doing. This meant I could focus on the kid I was helping at the time, and chat to them about lining the ramp up and so forth, but beyond that, the world didn’t really exist as anything other than noise and a blur. The repetitive nature of choosing the ball, helping the child to carry it to the ramp, lining the ramp up, holding the ramp whilst they pushed the ball, making encouraging noises whilst the ball rolled, and then an appropriate noise depending on how many pins it knocked over was quite soothing. But then again, repetitive tasks almost always have that effect on me.

It’s clearly not all sensory related, however – if I was at a dinner function with all of the same parents I would have been equally uncomfortable and unsure of what to say, despite the situation being far less noisy.

After the bowling came the food. The kids were all sat down at a long table, and buffet food was brought out for them to nibble on. I floated around, occasionally saying little bits to the kids, but mostly helping my three year old daughter with her food. I did this because it meant that I didn’t have to sit down and talk with the parents. Good avoidance of a difficult situation for me, but actually at the time it just came naturally – I wasn’t doing it consciously.

And then suddenly, people were leaving. My wife had taken our daughter to the toilet, so I was left saying goodbye and thanks to everyone along with the parents of my son’s friend who we were sharing the party with. I didn’t know what to say. Perhaps the sensory overload was too much by that time, or maybe it was just lack of social intuition. I suspect it was a mixture of both.

“Thank you”, said one parent to me. My response? “Thank you”, in much the same tone of voice that they had used. Ummm. Where did that come from? Not “You’re welcome” or “See you again soon”, or even “Thanks for the present, good to see you”. Just “Thank you”. My brain didn’t know how to respond, and it repeated the same message it had just heard back – echolalia.

Echolalia isn’t something I suffer from all that often, but I do have my moments. Questions that offer me a choice often get reflected back as a question when I’m stressed – “Would you like ham or tuna in your sandwich?” will result in me saying “Would I like ham or tuna? Hmmm…” if I’m moderately stressed or overloaded.

When highly stressed or overloaded, I get a non-verbalised or sometimes whispered echolalia which often is word perfect – I end up saying “Would you like ham or tuna in your sandwich?” to myself , often several times in a row, before the question sinks in enough for me to come up with an answer. This feels to me like a sort of sensory processing overload at play. When stressed, it can take several repetitions of the question before my brain catches up and gets a chance to process what the questioner is asking. Perhaps this is also executive disfunction at play.

Back to the party. After that faux pas, I generally smiled and waved at people – if I couldn’t think of something sensible to say, and hey, I’d just proved that quite comprehensively, perhaps it was better to say nothing at all.

The scenarios I’ve painted above are nothing out of the ordinary for me – they are very typical of how I react in situations that I find difficult. They show quite clearly how I’ve learnt techniques to avoid or camouflage situations that I find difficult, particularly social ones. I learnt these techniques many years ago – well before I knew anything about AS – and have honed them over time, until they have become practically second nature to me.

Did I enjoy the party? On the whole, yes. It was stressful, and I felt socially very awkward at several points, despite the camouflage, but the bowling was fun.

Ironing my way to happiness

I’m sure you all have your own version of this – a task that has just the right elements in it to soothe you and make you feel good.

For me, ironing is one of these tasks. Give me some clothes to iron, and I’ll come out of the other end of the process feeling relaxed, soothed and happy.

Why? Well ironing has a couple of features to it that are great for aspies. Firstly, there is the attention to detail. There is a skill to ironing – making sure you push the iron the right way whilst often pulling the fabric in a different direction. You get instant feedback by looking at the detail of what you are doing – constantly adjusting the strokes of the iron to achieve the best results. Then there is the repetition. If you iron half a dozen shirts, then you are essentially repeating the same job six times. Each shirt will need different tweaks to the technique, depending on the fabric, but each will require the same routine.

With shirts, I iron the underside of the collar first, and then grab an arm which I iron both sides of. I’ll then tackle the other arm, before working around the trunk, from the button side to the other. This is how I’ve tackled a shirt for as far back as I can remember, and I feel comfort in using this same process each time.

Then there is the time to think. There’s something about the repetitive aspect to the process that allows my mind to unwind, forgetting about the troubles of the day, and allowing it to then concentrate on something else. I get some of my best thinking done whilst ironing.

I feel a great satisfaction in producing nicely ironed shirts, and other clothes too. Somehow, the following of the process, and the attention to the detail smoothes the creases out of my mind as much as it does the clothes. Perhaps it’s the concentration on the task in hand and the repetition. Whatever it is, it produces real beneficial effects.

Do you have a similar task that allows you to soothe yourself? I’d be interested to hear what it is.