Waiting for, well, something that never comes

The last few days have been somewhat plagued by this feeling. I’m anxiously waiting for something that never arrives.

What is it that I’m waiting for? Well over the last few days, it’s been a number of things.

Calls to third-parties at work result in “I’ll call you back”. I then sit there waiting for the call back. Someone emails me asking a question. It looks urgent. I respond immediately, but ask a question of my own for clarification on some point. I then sit and wait for a response, which never comes. I check the stats on my blog. Then I check them again. Then again. Then again. Have they gone up from the last time I checked?

These are all manifestations of the same sort of issue. I’m expecting some sort of immediate response, based on criteria that I’ve set myself. I then sit there anxiously waiting for the response to arrive, unable to do anything else in the mean time, in case I then miss the response.

Part of this is a logic problem, I think. When someone says, “I’ll get someone on that right away – they’ll give you a call”, I take it to mean that some one will be calling me imminently. I don’t want to miss the call, so I sit there waiting for the call. Doing nothing.

Part of it is also that I can’t really hold much info from a variety of jobs in my head at the same time. If I persuade myself that I’m not going to be getting the phone call any time soon and then go and work on some other task, chances are that when the person does call me back, I’ll find it difficult to switch back to that original task. I find that awkward and embarrassing, so I try and avoid it.

The website stats issue I mentioned may look like something different, but I don’t think it is. When I find myself repetitively looking at the stats, it’s like I’m waiting for something. I don’t know what. But those familiar feelings of anxiety and of having to concentrate on nothing else are there in spades. Perhaps knowing that people are reading that I’ve written makes me feel like they are communicating with me in some way – a little like the guy eventually calling me back at work.

What I really need, of course is to shift the anxiety. None of the above are anything like this much of a problem with my anxiety levels are lower.

Do any of you have any anxiety busting tips?

Update: It’s a few hours now since I published, and non of you have been visiting to push my stats up! Have you any idea how badly that affects my anxiety?!?

…and for the avoidance of doubt, that was a joke.

Sparking

I’m highly charged today. Perhaps literally.

For the third day in a row I’m the only person in the office. There are usually three of us, with one of the other chaps spending almost his complete time ensuring that the system we run is performing properly. In his and my other colleague’s absence, it’s down to me to run the ship single handed. I’m busy, and rather agitated too, perhaps because of my routine having been thrown out.

My highly charged emotions might just be making themselves felt – every time I touch something metal today I release a bit of static charge. A little spark that reminds me that I’m feeling on edge by making me jump. This isn’t normal for me, I assure you, but perhaps it is just coincidence.

I feel full of things that needs saying – sparks of expression waiting to be released. They are probably always there, but today they are close to the surface and want to escape – and to be honest some of the sparks trying to get out frighten me a little. I can’t judge whether they are appropriate or not, and for that reason, they are going to stay exactly where they are now – in my head.

Every once in a while I have days like this, and I guess if I look back at the last couple of weeks, it was inevitable that a day like today was coming.

There is so much in me that never gets said, but I really do believe it’s better – well safer at least – that way.

Not such a great social engagement

You might have spotted that I’ve not been too up-beat of late. In the middle of last week, right in the middle of feeling not-so-great, I had to attend a social function that I’d accepted before I started to feel that way.

I nearly chickened out – a social engagement was the last thing I wanted to do, but I stuck to my guns and went. It was an after work do, arranged by a former colleague to show off some new facilities that his current company has just opened. So this was a very real social event – the whole purpose was for my former colleague’s company to drum up some business for themselves, and for those there to network with each other.

I dislike this sort of forced social event at the best of times – it feels really rather false, as half of those there typically out to hard sell whatever their product is. But I’d said I would go, and so I did.

You know how sometimes on TV programs and films they use a clever camera trick to show something and then quickly zoom out, from a first person perspective? Well, that’s how it felt for me when I arrived, feeling very apprehensive at the venue, having spent well over an hour in the car, fighting traffic. I saw everyone else intermingling and chatting, and there was I standing there on my own, feeling very small.

I shouldn’t have worried. Some other former colleagues shouted me almost the second I was through the door, and I was then able to ease myself into the evening by chatting with them first.

The IT business in this part of the world is surprisingly small, and there were a handful of other people that I’d worked with at the event too. Over the course of the next two hours I chatted to most of them, and we reminisced about the old days when we worked together.

Whilst clearly not as bad as I thought it was going to be – I’ll even admit to enjoying the reminiscing – the evening didn’t pass without incident.

First there was the wife of a former colleague, who works in public relations for a prominent charity, and spent twenty minutes telling me how as a small business, what I really needed to be doing was arranging PR, and not spending money on marketing. Useful stuff, for sure, but it was almost Aspie like in it’s hard sell, and I was left wondering constantly whether my responses were suitable.

Another problem was the name badges. I’d decided to put the name of my fledgling company on mine. This was a mistake. In a world of reasonably big business, I ended up having to repeatedly talk down the company name on my badge. “Oh – it’s just a little thing I’m setting up on my own. Fixing PCs, email and web hosting – that sort of thing”. I felt a fool. Most of those there had their main employers on their name badge. Big important companies, doing important things. Not a little one man band that’s not really doing anything much right now.

Then there was the helter skelter. I kid you not, the lovely new offices in which my colleague’s company are based has a three floor high helter skelter in the lobby, as a piece of installation art that is intended to foster creativity. I tried it. Everyone did at some point in  he evening. It was fun. That in itself wasn’t a problem, but it will feature in a problem that I’ll come to in a minute.

Come the end of the evening, I needed to say goodbye to my host. I was over stimulated – all fuzzy headed and exhausted feeling. My host was popular, in in my state I found it difficult to attract his attention, spending a good 30 seconds looking like an idiot standing on my own near him. When I did make contact and said thanks a lot, he did something I wasn’t expecting. Instead of an acknowledgement and maybe a “thank you for coming”, he did all of this, and then asked “I hope you’ve enjoyed it?”.

Gah! A fatal and unanticipated question. My brain scrambled for something to say, and ended up with, “Oh yes, and the, um, <pause>,  um, <hand gestures to try and signify the helter skelter>, thingy, <pause> um, too!”.

“Oh!”, he said, with a slightly surprised look, and a little odd looking grin, “yes!”.

I left. I felt bad – like I’d just made a complete idiot of myself. On the half hour drive home, my head was full of action replays of not just that incident, but also how I’d handled the PR woman, and whether my conversations with others had gone ok.

It was close to bed time when I got home, but once I made it to bed, I couldn’t get to sleep. The events of the evening were still going around my head.

With the benefit of hindsight, I didn’t do that bad, despite how awful the non enjoyable bits of the evening were. I’m never going to be great in situations like this, because by the end of the evening (and often long before this), I’m going to have reached my saturation level for sensory input. When this happens, I start to go vacant, quiet and unresponsive. That’s just inescapable fact.

And you know what? My stumbling over the unanticipated question from my host wasn’t that bad either. Embarrassing, yes. But he knows me well, and this is just me being me. If it was the first time we’d met, then maybe he’d have taken away a different picture of me, but he knows I’m like this.

I’m glad I went.

And yes, I’m going to consider some PR ideas for my company instead of just placing adverts, once I have proper services to sell.

Long days and food

A little under two weeks ago, I was on holiday with my family in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was the end of the afternoon, on what had been a long day. We’d spent some time at the Museum of Childhood, seeing children’s toys down the ages. We’d also seen some street performers taking part in the famous Festival Fringe – including a couple of chaps who juggled firey clubs between themselves whilst one of them was balancing on a ladder and the other balancing on a six foot unicycle. As an armchair juggler, I can tell you it was impressive stuff.

After lunch we’d caught a bus that took as to the Ocean Terminal to see the Royal Yacht Britannia – the former sailing vessel of the British Royal Family.

By late afternoon we were still at the Ocean Terminal, the kids were hungry, and we were on the other side of town from my mother in law’s, where we were staying. We decided to buy the kids their dinner in a restaurant, and that we’d eat later, after the kids were in bed.

My brain was screaming at me – “eat something!”.

I didn’t though – my wife and mother in law were adamant that they weren’t eating at the restaurant, and so my instincts told me that it was best to follow the status quo, rather than potentially appear to be rude.

After we fed the kids, we caught the bus back towards Princes Street, in the vicinity of which we hoped to get a second bus back to the house.

Edinburgh’s roads are all being dug up at the moment in preparation for a new tram system that will be up and running in a couple of years time. We battled the traffic until we were about half way up Leith Walk. Then the bus stopped in road works, and well, didn’t move at all for the next ten minutes. When it then did move, it moved about half a car length each time, often several minutes apart. I felt exhausted and my brain was telling me that I should eat, and that I was a fool for not having eaten with the kids. By now, about half the passengers on the bus had got off and started walking the half mile or so back towards the centre.

I suddenly felt we had to do this too, and in a grumpy and clearly stressed manner told my wife. So we walked. The bus overtook us about half way. Bah.

It took us well over 90 minutes to make the five mile journey back from the Ocean Terminal to my mother in law’s house.

When we got back I collapsed in a chair. I felt dazed and exhausted, and my brain was screaming at me. “You’ve only eaten about 900 calories today! What are you playing at?”. It was at about this time that my wife started talking about dinner again. She wasn’t feeling very hungry. She and my mother in law would have a bit of a salad once the kids were in bed. Would that do me?

NO! It jolly well wouldn’t! I need proper food! I should have eaten at the restaurant!

Now – I don’t know if you are seeing a pattern here yet. My symptoms were all of sensory over-stimulation. It had been a very busy and long day and we had seen and done a lot. My senses had taken in more than they can manage for one day. But my brain was telling me something rather different. It was telling me that the problem was that I needed to eat.

Why might it do this? Well, I think it’s a learnt behaviour that is wide of the mark. I have of course experienced these sensations of feeling dazed and exhausted following busy days my whole life. Long before I learned about Asperger’s, I had to put some sort of a label on why I ended up like that, and what the cause was. I decided that the problem was that I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough over the day, and that my blood sugars were low. From my reading of Wikipedia, I can see that this sort of extrapolation is pretty common in people who think they know what low blood sugars means. At the time I acquired the label, and until very recently, it felt like this scenario fitted very well. After all, the exhaustion would come towards the end of the day, and if I stopped, sat down and ate, then after an hour or so I would feel much better again. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

So, on that day, as on many others, my brain was telling what I thought I knew – that I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough, and now my body was crashing because of it.

Wrong wrong wrong.

The real reason for my feeling dazed and exhausted was simply the AS-related sensory overload that I was experiencing after a full-on day.

It’s interesting to note that despite the way I was feeling, I could have walked miles effortlessly if I had needed to. As it was, we briskly walked a good half a mile up hill to try and outrun the bus, without it feeling a strain.

Of course I feel better after I’ve sat down for a while and eaten some food and drank some water. But it isn’t the food and water that are having the magic effect – it’s the proper rest. I wrote recently how on another family holiday I started to sense how I was over stimulated at the end of each day, and how time was the healer – an hour or ninety minutes restored me. Well, this is the same thing.

The problem is that I’ve been wrongly viewing my feelings of exhaustion as a signal to eat for many years, and in that time I’ve put on quite a lot of weight.

And do you know the real big give away that should have told me long ago that the problem wasn’t hunger? I frequently don’t feel hungry even when my brain is telling me that I need to stop and eat. How can I possibly have missed that?

This week I’ve started trying to pay more attention to what I’m eating. I’m trying to trust my own judgement about when I’m actually hungry, and not just to stuff my face when I feel overloaded. It’s difficult, but on a couple of of days worth of evidence, it’s working so far.

Whether it will continue to work remains to be seen.

Guilt

I like to think that in general my writing here is upbeat and positive. That isn’t always how I feel though, and this article reflects that. If that isn’t your thing, then maybe you’ll want to skip reading this time. This article also has some adult themes in places. You have been warned.

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Guilt.

I’m feeling a lot of it now, and for very specific reasons.

In short, I don’t feel good enough.

I’m not good enough for my wife, she deserves better. I don’t meet all of her emotional needs, and I typically don’t see when she needs some TLC from me.

When I do see that she needs some TLC, I struggle to know how to respond. It doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s not that I don’t care – I do of course, I just don’t seem to be able to use my brain in a way that allows me to make decisions on what is appropriate in situations like this. “Just buy me a little something every now and then”, she’ll say. But that doesn’t work for me. What do I buy? I have no idea. When inspiration occasionally strikes, I worry that my choice is a bad one. It has been some times in the past, so I now feel I can’t trust the ideas I have.

Most normal people (and I include many men in this) do not have a problem in this area. So why do I? It’s not good enough, and it makes me feel incredibly guilty and frankly quite miserable that I can’t keep my wife happy.

My wife actually put it quite succinctly a few nights ago. It’s like I learned the physical side of intimacy, and paid enough attention to that to ensure that I was proficient, but then forgot about all the other aspects that are involved. I don’t do romance. My wife says she feels neglected at times.

She’s right, of course. Physical intimacy makes sense to me, and everything else surrounding it doesn’t. I’ve always tried to use physical intimacy to express my love, and as such have concentrated on making that side of things special for my loved one. But that doesn’t always work, does it? You can’t always make love to show someone you care. Sometimes they want support or to feel loved in other ways. Could I describe those other ways to you? Erm, well, not easily, no. I really do have trouble in understanding them and putting them into words.

My reliance on the physical aspects of showing love has caught me out in other ways in the past too. I can’t always judge all that well what is appropriate and what isn’t, and have been overtly sexual to female friends. The problem here is that expressing love physically is what seems natural to me. I want to show them I care, and, well, it can get messy and cost friends, as I have found out.

Another area that I don’t feel good enough at is being a parent. Perhaps no-one does – fathers especially.

I have always tried to be very hands on with my kids – I was heavily involved in changing nappies when they were small, and in feeding them, and bathing them and generally caring for them.

But now that they are a little older (they are five and three) I feel decidedly out of my depth. My son is learning to aggressively push boundaries, and his little sister is learning to copy him. This, I would imagine, is trying for the most competent and together of parents, but I’m finding it difficult to find the right words and actions to meter out the right degree of discipline. After a hard day at work for me, they are often noisy and aggressive, and I find that side of things to be a bit much from a sensory point of view. It can sometimes be difficult to keep my own aggression at bay.

Of course this makes me feel incredibly guilty as well, and something of a failure.

The final area where I feel guilty about not being good enough is at work.

I’m working on a contract basis in my current job, so I’m being relatively well paid versus the permanent members of staff. At the moment I’m struggling to actually get work done. There are no two ways about it – I’m not currently worth the money that my employers are paying me. I don’t like letting people down, and hence, once more, I feel very guilty that I’m not pulling my weight.

All of which is very negative and makes me feel very gloomy.

My ideas about what I should be able to achieve and my measures of these ideals are still very neuro typical. When I don’t live up to my own high standards – especially when I feel that my own lack of performance is impacting on other people – I feel very guilty.

Do any of you also feel this sort of guilt?

Where is everyone?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed – I certainly have – most of those who contribute to the debate here are female. More than that, almost all of the blogs that I read regarding ASDs are written by women. This isn’t me being selective, indeed I’d dearly love to hear more about AS from a male point of view.

There are a few notable exceptions - Gavin’s blog springs immediately to mind, but I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that most ASD bloggers are female.

There is of course absolutely nothing wrong with this, but I do find it odd. After all, one of those universal ‘facts’ that goes round and round is that four times as many males have ASDs as females. This may of course not be entirely reliable, but even if the real figure is a 50/50 split, you can’t escape the fact that there are precious few male ASD bloggers.

If you have trouble expressing your feelings and emotions verbally with others, as a great many of us with ASDs, both male and female find, then writing can be a wonderfully liberating release. The Internet provides a freely available, easy to use medium for people like me to express themselves in writing, and what’s more, if you persist at it, people will give you their own thoughts back. This is great – so where is everyone? And just where are all the male ASD bloggers?

If I looked hard I’d probably find a few hundred ASD blogs out there. If I tried really hard, spent a long time on search engines, and looked at forum sites like wrongplanet.net maybe I’d be able to push the number of people with ASDs who regularly write about it to a few thousand, but I doubt I’d get the figure much higher than this.

That really isn’t many, and is a tiny fraction of those who have been diagnosed.

Why?

This really makes no sense to me. Am I missing something? Anyone got any ideas?

Oh, and if you can find me the missing male ASD bloggers, I’d be very grateful!

Repetition

Sometimes, repetition is soothing. On the right day, actions like inputting my receipts into online tool wesabe can be very soothing. It’s the same keystrokes and mouse movements over again for each receipt that I enter. At the end of the process I feel calmed and soothed. There is an order to the repetition that I like. It disentangles my brain in some way.

On other days – like today for instance, where my stress and anxiety levels are high – I can’t even contemplate using something like wesabe, even though I’m weeks behind on entering my receipts. On days like today, repetition feels too complex. It feels like too much of an effort, and so I don’t do it.

If I could persuade the malfunctioning executive function aspect of my brain to let me start to process my receipts, would I get into the swing of it and ultimately feel soothed? I suspect so – but the persuading is difficult to do, and I tend to follow my natural instincts and do what feels best on days like this. Which is to do very little.

Better to know?

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I discovered my Asperger’s  in the autumn of 2008, when I was thirty five years old.

Until that point in my life, I’d been plagued with feeling different from everyone else, getting into many scrapes of my own making that I didn’t see coming, and generally living in a high stress mode all of the time.

My discovery of Asperger’s, and my subsequent matching of its characteristics to my own personality was my real That Explains Everything moment.

I frequently wonder how my life might have been different if I was growing up today, with the reasonable chance that my differences might have been identified and diagnosed when I was still in childhood. Would my life have been easier or harder?

Let’s look at how it has been for me first:

My life has been lived under the almost constant feeling of high stress. As life has progressed and got correspondingly more complex, so my background stress level has increased. Tasks that a typical person would find to be not stressful at all – such as making a phone call – add intense peaks to my daily stress. Backing up my stress is anxiety. I’ve experienced this since at least my early teens, and it comes and goes in waves. This week I have it quite badly, but last week I was mostly fine. When bad, the anxiety can be crippling. A combination of it and the stress often leave me feeling dumbfounded just by regular life. I sit like a rabbit in the headlights of life, existing, but not really knowing what to do or how to behave.

You need to understand, however, that until a year or so ago, this felt normal for me. Whilst I knew that I was a little different in some way to most other people that I interacted with, I didn’t appreciate just how different I was. So, stress and anxiety felt normal – it’s all part of every day life for everyone. Isn’t it?

Life at work has always been a mixture of success and failure for me. When well guided, I work better than your average person, tend to get on with things without a fuss, and I’ve been well liked by various people that I’ve worked for for these reasons. When I work in a disorganised place, or for bosses who are underhand then I fare far less well. I’ve never been fired, but I’ve come close, and I’ve upset senior people at several companies with what I can now see were inappropriate outbursts. The problem is that I didn’t see them like this at the time. I’ve never seen the potential consequences of my whistle-blower-like activities in companies. I’m speaking the truth – what’s wrong with that? Bad times at companies also increase my stress and anxiety. So it goes.

In my personal life, I’ve been a serial monogamist. Without realising it, I’ve always dated women who could help take control of the areas of my life that I wasn’t very good at.

When I was younger, I held on for dear life to the romantic relationships that I had, and was desolate when they broke up. As I’ve matured (perhaps rather more slowly than a typical person would), I’ve become far more accepting of my responsibilities in relationships, and what I can realistically expect from my partner.

My dating methods have been unusual. When I was younger, it was always the girl that asked me out. I have always been sweet natured and queit and kind (although perhaps in an unusual way). I met my wife via an introduction from a friend and we text messaged first, before graduating to phone calls and then meeting. This took a huge effort on my part – effort that I assumed most other people had to use too to find a suitable partner. Without that introduction, there is a good chance, I think, that I’d still be single now, seven years later. I’ve never gone looking for love in bars, or using other typical methods that people use to meet other people.

I’m thirty six. I went to university, I have a wife, two kids, a house, two cars, and a job. I have a great deal to be thankful for.

How my life would have progressed if I’d been diagnosed with AS as, say, a young teenager:

Well for a starter, I doubt I’d have gone to university. University was expected of me, and hence I went. I didn’t enjoy it, as I failed miserably to make friends, and got though it only with the substantial help of a long term girlfriend.

I’d have decided that university wasn’t for me. So. No degree.

That would have meant that I wouldn’t have joined the graduate recruitment program of a large UK IT company, nor moved to London.

What would I have done for work? I really don’t know. I fell into the computing course at university more out of luck rather than good judgement. I toyed with chemical engineering and architecture first. IT suites me – but would I have seen that if I had been diagnosed with AS at a young age?

I suspect I’d have got a low paid, low status job – maybe a librarian or somesuch. Perhaps my work would have consisted of lots of reasonable short jobs.

I’d be stuck at home with my parents well into adulthood, because I doubt very much that I would have had the confidence to move out. After all – I’d been diagnosed with this big scary condition that made me vulnerable and easily led. My parents wouldn’t have wanted me striking out on my own in that condition, I suspect.

Relationships? I doubt there would have been many, if at all. A man in his twenties, living at home, with no friends, who perhaps doesn’t have a job, and who doesn’t socialise is going to find it difficult to find love. That isn’t rocket science.

And now, at thirty six, where would I be?

My best guess is that I would be living in a rented flat, with no career, and possibly not much regular work. I’d have made a few friends in the autism community, but I wouldn’t be married, and I’d probably have been single for many years. I’d be anxious and depressed, and frankly quite downtrodden and pissed off with the hand that life has dealt me. I would most likely get about by bus, having never learned to drive.

Frightening, isn’t it?

Life has been hard work to get to here, but it felt normal, because I had no expectations that there was really anything fundamentally out of the ordinary with me. I was different yes, but not that different. I got on with life, because that what you do – that’s what everyone does. I had expectations of living an ordinary life, and that’s what I set out to do, and ultimately did.

I genuinely believe that my life expectations, if diagnosed at an early age with AS would be very different. Everyone’s expectations of me would have been far lower, as would my own expectations. Even independent living would be a serious and hard to achieve goal. Life would be a struggle in a very different way to the way in which I’ve found it a struggle in reality.

–

The reason behind my thinking about all of this is perhaps not obvious, but has been knawing at me for a little while.

At times I see some of my AS-like traits in my own children. They are five and three right now. Would I wish them to undergo a diagnosis if it started to become clear that they fitted an ASD profile? It’s a difficult moral question to answer.

Based on how I think my life might have been different, can you guess which way I’m leaning on this right now, should it become an issue?

Frazzled

I’m finding that I’m needed to write each morning when I get into work this week. If I don’t attempt to empty my brain a bit, I can’t settle down to the work that I’m being paid to do.

So it’s Wednesday morning, and here I am writing once more. What’s on my mind today?

Well, I’m feeling agitated and stressed for a number of reasons. As usual with these things, a number of small issues trip me up in a short period of time and leave me feeling far more stressed and anxious than the sum of their parts should do.

A big one is to do with the hard work I’ve been putting in to starting up my own business. As I suspect many people in my position find, there is far more work involved in the set up of a new venture than you imagine there to be. I spent five and a half hours yesterday working on getting the last chunk of my managed email offering working in a way that I could sell to people, and felt a great deal of satisfaction when it all started to come together and work. But someone else was rather less satisfied – my wife. My working on it meant that I didn’t spend any quality time with her last night, and she wasn’t impressed. Indeed she questioned why I needed to spend so much time working on this at all.

In a way, she has a point. I manage her email already, and it works. Why then do I need to spend many hours working on something that as far as she can see already works?

Well, the problem is that her email works in a way that I couldn’t possibly sell to other people. It isn’t fault tolerant, and it wouldn’t scale. I don’t want to start selling the current configuration only to have to go back to those I’ve signed up in a month or two’s time and tell them either that I’ve lost all their email because my machine broke and I don’t have backups, or that I now have to inconvenience them to change their configuration because I’ve finished implementing the new system. I have a customer waiting for the email service, so don’t feel that I can hang around.

My wife has in general been very supportive of my decision to set up my own business, but last night wasn’t. My protestations that I was doing this in order that I could ultimately help support my family was met with derision. My wife said that I was just tinkering for tinkering’s sake.

This comment cut deep. In much the same way as I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, I was being told something counter to my understanding by someone that I trust and respect. I immediately felt that she was right. Who was I kidding? Setting up a business? Am I ever really going to be able to do that? Well am I?

More than just having a customer waiting, it’s true that I feel a compulsion to get this new email service up and running – like I have to prove something to myself. I need to know that I can do this – that I have a talent for something. I also need to see that I can finish things that I start. Perhaps it’s true to say that this business venture has become something of a special interest that I feel that I need to spend time on.

Has my wife just been humouring me all this time, or were her comments last night simply because she was angry that I wasn’t spending quality time with her last night? Only she can answer that of course.

There are other little things knawing at me too right now. My son missed his swimming lesson this week because my wife forgot to take him last night, and now he’s missed his place on the next course as it has now filled up in his absence. My wife said I should have reminded her about it yesterday. I now feel like I’ve let my son (and wife) down.

The chain keeps coming off my son’s bike, and he wanted to take it to the Holiday Club he’s at today. My wife told me that the chain was off when I got home last night, but I was too embroiled in my work efforts to remember fix it. I tried to hurriedly fix it this morning, but failed – either the chain ended up too loose, or the wheel ended up going on at an angle meaning the brakes rubbed the whole time. In the end he took his scooter to the club instead of his bike. Frustrating, and once again I feel like I’m letting my son and wife down.

On top of all of this I’m finding it difficult to get down to the work I’m being paid to do.

All of this just goes round and round in my head and doesn’t help. I don’t feel like I’ve been on holiday, I just feel more stressed and anxious than I did before I went on holiday.

Gah!

Still, I’ve got some of it on paper now, and I’m finally not feeling as sensorily wiped out as I have been doing since my long drive home from holiday on Saturday. Hopefully I can now knuckle down and do a bit of what I’m being paid to do.

I hope so – if I don’t knuckle down soon, people will start to notice the lack of output from me, and the potential consequences of that don’t bear thinking about.

What to do next

For as long as I have been in the IT profession, my best work has been produced from the ideas of other people. Tell me what needs doing, and I’ll do it. Typically I’ll do it well, and with a great attention to detail.

Leave me to my own devices, and I’ll struggle to determine what needs doing, and then what the priorities are.

This morning I found myself thinking that I could do with someone to tell me how to live my life. Discovering and embracing an autism spectrum disorder may well be wonderfully liberating and it has certainly answered a lot of questions, but it is leaving me feeling as though I don’t know where my life is going all too often.

Today is one of those days. Wouldn’t it be great if someone would come along and just tell me that now I have to do this. And when I’m finished with that, I should then do this – and so on.

Instead I feel stressed, anxious and bewildered. My to-do list tells me the things I have to try and get done today, but what do I need to do to get my life on track next week, next month, next year?

I don’t know.