Pay back time

On Monday I flew to Amsterdam on business, returning yesterday evening.

I work in IT, and this trip was to visit the data centre we use to house our computer servers, with the main task being to fit out and commission a whole new cabinet with 20 servers and all the associated wiring and everything else that is needed to make things work.

I wasn’t on my own for this trip – John, my colleague was flying with me.

We worked hard, putting in ten hour days without a break for lunch, finished yet more bits and bobs of work after dinner in the evening, and tackled unexpected adversity along the way. At the end of it all, I described my overall feeling about the week to John in one word – brutal.

It really was hard work, but whereas John is just suffering from being rather tired today, I’m suffering from a great deal of stress and anxiety, as well as feeling completely overstimulated and exhausted. Am I being overly dramatic about this? Well, I certainly don’t feel like I’m making more of this than is really there.

Over the course of the four days, I was focussed and got things done. There was no other option, and I felt like a lot of weight was on my shoulders to achieve the goals that we’d set ourselves. When things went wrong – and they did in a fairly major and completely unanticipated way – I just had to suck it up and make things work again. Whilst that was clearly stressful, my body and mind stepped up a gear and let me take control. I felt stressed, but at the same time I was ultra focussed to, so it was manageable.

To further complicate my week, I agreed to drive John and me around. This being just about anywhere in the world outside of the UK meant that of course I would be driving a car on the other side of the road than I’m used to. I’ve never driven abroad before. I was extremely anxious on the first drive from the airport to the hotel, but it passed without incident. As the days passed, I grew more confident with the driving, and my brain adapted to the gear stick being on the other side, although it never quite grasped that the handbrake was on the other side too.

By the time of my final drive back to the airport, I was in control enough to not only take in the road ahead and the other traffic, but also the sat nav too, so I could see in advance where I was going, and even to chat a bit with John. On the first couple of days, John had to resort to telling me where the sat nav was suggesting we go at each and every junction – he was Sat Nav Plus.

When our plane landed back in the UK yesterday afternoon, and we’d worked our way through the slow snake-like queue to get through passport control, something in my mind changed.

I got in my car, and started the drive home. I was suddenly feeling very stressed and anxious. The traffic was bad, and so was the weather – a total contrast to what I had experienced just an hour or two earlier in Holland.

My mood plummeted, and I felt very jittery indeed. Anxiety bubbled out of every pore. Not anxiety about anything in particular. Just anxiety.

I think that when I landed back in the UK, my mind stopped holding everything in. I’d slurped up a lot of stress and anxiety over the course of the week, and it was now taking the opportunity to force its way out of me.

I still feel that way today, although the edge has been taken off it a little – it feels less raw and uncontrolled.

My mind is unusually blank today, and I keep finding my eyes unfocussing. Indeed I’m so blank that I’m actually finding it quite difficult to write this. I had so much to say, and yet the visible chunks of sentences in my head are drifting off into the distance before I get a chance to get them written.These are the signs I usually associate with sensory overload. I’m not sensorily overloaded right now, but I guess that this too is something of a delayed reaction to sensory input I’ve had earlier in the week.

Something unconscious in me allowed me function above my abilities for most of this week. Now my mind and body are saying it is pay back time.

A new Special Interest

Here in the UK, a General Election has been called for 6th May.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m not very big on politics. However, whenever a general election happens, I end up getting very drawn into it all, with very set views all of a sudden.

I’m a liberal. Not out of choice or even out of spending great deals of time pouring over policies. I just am. I guess I was born that way – my ideals align with them rather better than any of their rivals.

The voting system in the UK does not favour the Liberal Democrat party which is where my voting intentions lie. We use a ‘first past the post’ system that skews and twists the will of the electorate wildly. In recent elections, the Lib Dems have typically polled approximately 20% of the votes, but taken only 10% of the parliamentary seats. The two larger parties – Labour (currently in power) and the Conservatives take the lion’s share of the remainder of the votes and the seats. It is, however entirely possible for one of the two big parties to win a majority of seats with fewer than a third of the popular vote.

It’s no surprise then, that voting reform has always been one of the big pledges of the Lib Dems, and one of the political causes that I support with a passion when there is an election in full swing. It’s the lack of logic in the current system that I despise.

Something unusual has happend in the last week of the current campaign. For the first time, there has been a televised debate between the the Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem leaders. The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg did something unexpected and refreshing. He talked about his parties policies and how they differed from the ‘old’ policies of his rivals. His rivals squabbled amongst themselves. Nick Clegg ‘won’ the debate – snap polls immediately after the event had around 50% of people thinking he won the arguments.

Wow! The Lib Dems have now risen from around 20% to around 30% in the opinion polls, very similar ratings to the two big parties. But here is where it all goes wrong again.  Let’s look at one single, but reasonably representitive poll carried out this week:

Liberal Democrat: 33%, Conservative: 32%, Labour 26%

Based on an average distribution of ‘swing’ from one party to another across the country, this would give the following predicted break down of seats in parliament, if the above figures held on election day:

Liberal Democrat: 134, Conservative: 244, Labour: 243

Ugh! Not only do the Lib Dems end up with approximately 45% fewer seats than either of the other two parties, but Labour, who have less of the popular vote than either of the other two actually end up with the most seats, although not enough to rule on their own – it would be a hung parliament.

That TV debate has been something of a catalyst for me, and I’m now heavily absorbed in what is going on. My search for information – typically via the Internet – is now quite time consuming each day, and my quest for further knowledge seems to have no bounds – my brain is like a big sponge trying to take in everything I can find. I smell a new Special Interest in the making.

The Lib Dems cannot win this election. They do however seem to have captured the public mood right now, where people are fed up of the old style politics and politicians. They can’t win, but the Lib Dems can force a change. If there is a hung parliament – and it looks very likely right now – then they would hold a lot of power, by forming an alliance with either Labour or the Conservatives to allow a government to be formed. It’s likely that part of that power would allow them to ask the populace if they’d like to see a change in the way voting works.

Who knows – maybe by the time the next general election comes round, a fairer and rather more proportional voting system might be in place. I for one have my fingers crossed.

Glass half full

I’m sure that everyone finds it difficult to be positive all of the time, no matter how high their self confidence is.

My self confidence level moves around hugely, but on average has never been very high. Trying to keep my glass half full rather than half empty is a problem that I face frequently, and even after all these years, I still don’t have any hard and fast remedies to turn things towards the positive.

Learning about my Asperger’s appears to have just added to the volatility of my mood and in turn my self confidence. Whilst I spend much of my time these days feeling that I now know and understand myself far better than I did a couple of years ago – which is a very positive thing – I also frequently see differences in the way I am versus ‘normal’ humanity that I simply wouldn’t have spotted before. I find seeing these differences an almost invariably negative thing, and their discovery typically pushes down any positivity that I was feeling. My differences hit me like a punch in the face – they are unexpected and often unpleasant.

And then there is the self doubt to contend with too. Having grown up in a world that frequently moves and works in ways that I fail to predict and fully comprehend, I’ve grown accustomed to being ‘wrong’ about things. That nagging self doubt creeps into all areas of my life, especially when I’m not feeling positive. On darker days I still question whether I actually am on the autism spectrum. Despite all my reading up and thinking on the subject, the countless hours of research and self evaluation, I still can’t convince myself sometimes that this label applies to me. Why? Well, I’ve been wrong in the past when I was sure about things. Why not now too?

With my diagnosis rapidly approaching, I’ll soon have the opinion of someone who knows. I hope that will settle the internal arguments I have about it. My natural reaction right now though is to say that I dont know what the outcome will be.

Am I nervous about the diagnosis? Of course. I’m also haunted by the words of my mother, as spoken to my wife. To paraphrase: “If he does come back with an Asperger’s diagnosis, it’ll be because he’s read up on the subject so thoroughly that he knows all the right things to say”. I can see through this, of course, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt, and on less positive days, my lack of self confidence says that maybe she could be right.

Writing seems to help, to a degree, as it means I can externalise some of the thoughts that are running through my head. So as we near ‘D’ day, expect me to write here more frequently again, because seeing my glass as half full rather than half empty  is important.

Subtlety

I have always been astonishingly good at faux pas. Since my self-realisation eighteen months or so ago that I have Asperger’s, there has of course been a reasonable explanation for this.

Whilst I prefer to hide in the background, I do often say or do things are are simply not subtle. I say things that upon reflection it becomes obvious that I shouldn’t have said. I do things that I really shouldn’t do. Things that make others cringe with embarrassment at.

But here’s the thing. The ways in which the autism spectrum makes itself visible in peoples’ lives is for the most part very subtle. Both my wife and I recently reached the same conclusion on this, and we’ve since discussed it at length. Our thoughts on this have of course been formed from our own experiences, and from observation of my family, and as such centre around the effects of Asperger’s Syndrome rather than on the Kanner’s end of the spectrum.

It’s nearly a year ago now that I first emailed my parents to try and explain that I had Asperger’s to them. If you’ve read much of this blog, then you’ll know that the fallout from this event was rather large, and more difficult to deal with than I was expecting. Well, it is still causing a problem in my family, and I’m still finding it difficult to communicate with my parents, and in particular with my mum. The big bone of contention is purely that my mother cannot see my autism. Her line a year ago – and still to this day – is that I don’t have Asperger’s. She has gone as far as saying this to my wife, but not directly to me.

Next month, I am going to attend an appointment to get my formal diagnosis. As part of this, the clinic have sent an in depth questionnaire aimed at the parents of attendees to try and help get a feel of what the attendee was like as a child. On a recent visit by my parents, I took a deep breath, and managed to raise the subject of the questionnaire. Would they mind filling it in when they got home? My mother jumped at the chance, which was something of a relief, yet what happened next has been ringing alarm bells for me ever since.

I handed them the questionnaire over breakfast on the last morning of their visit. I then left for work. What happened next is relayed by my wife. My mother spend some time pouring over the questionnaire without actually filling it in. She told my wife that I “exhibited hardly any” of the symptoms as a child that the questionnaire was trying to draw out. My dad then started looking at the questionnaire with my mum, and murmured his agreement too.

And that is the last we have seen or heard of the questionnaire. I naively assumed that they’d fill it in and send it back to me. They didn’t. After a couple of weeks, it dawned on me that I wasn’t going to see it. I checked the copy that we had from the pack the clinic had sent. There, in the footer of each sheet was the clinic’s address. My parents have sent the questionnaire straight back to the clinic. It is difficult to draw any conclusion from this other than they don’t want me to know what they have answered. This does nothing to help soothe family relations.

The problem, with my parents, I am now sure, is one of subtlety.

When I was growing up, my parents were not looking for signs of the autism spectrum. Indeed the whole concept of an autism spectrum did not exist at that time. Autism was a single condition that caused a small number of people to be completely lost in their own world all the time. Based on that definition, I certainly don’t have autism.

Yet the clues were all there, albeit subtly, whilst I was growing up that I was on the autism spectrum, had the definition existed in its current form. I’ve talked about all of this at length before, but briefly: I was bright at school, and did well in academic subjects, but I was hopeless at sports. The rigid structure of school life suited me very well. I was told what to do, and I did it without question. Indeed the routine ultimately provided me with a great deal of comfort – so much so that I can still conjure up the feeling to this day. At the same time I almost completely failed to make or keep friends. The start of a new school year always provided me with huge stress and anxiety. Classes had new people in them, and took place in different orders in different rooms than before, with different teachers. My peers started becoming wonderfully social creatures, and I really didn’t understand what they were up to. It became more and more difficult for me to blend into the background as I understood less and less about what my peers were up to. I became depressed and full of anxiety.

My parents weren’t looking for any of this. They didn’t see me during the day at school. I’m certain they put my lack of friends down to a combination of shyness and the fact that I was sent to a secondary school outside of the local catchment area. That is, of course a very blinkered reasoning – many of my peers lived in separate villages, and I know for a fact that they still managed to play and socialise together outside of school.

My wife and I have been seeing subtleties in our own little family over the last few months.

My daughter has recently turned four. If you weren’t looking for the subtleties, then you’d most likely see a lovely little girl – indeed we get a lot of comments along these lines. A little shy, maybe, and at times badly behaved, but most of all just a sweet little girl. We see all of this too, but we see far more. We see the daily clumsiness that leads to constantly scraped knees and bumped elbows. We see the anxious little non-verbal periods where she’d just like a hug rather than say anything.The confusion and anxiety in her eyes. We see the subtle problems she is having at nursery school: She often doesn’t want to attend; she doesn’t understand the subtleties of friendships that are at play; she wont join in games unless asked – she just stands on the edge of the game and waits for it to finish. She is also often shattered at the end of a nursery day, and I’ve started to see her produce excuses to work around the very real complications she is experiencing whilst there – “Did you play with Jane today at nursery?”, “Jane isn’t my friend!” (Jane is the nearest my daughter has to a best friend, and it has been this way for the last year). “Who did you play with today?”, “Can’t remember!” (with accompanying shrugs and aloofness). I know how she feels.

My wife and I are both certain that she is showing many signs of being on the autism spectrum, and my wife has reached her conclusions without influence from me. She see’s those patterns that she’s seen in me over the years now playing out in my daughter. I see them too.

Incidentally, my son, who is nearly six, also shows some spectrum traits. His are less pronounced than his younger sister, however.

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It’s subtle. And that’s just the way it will always be.

If you don’t look for autism, you won’t see it

- at least not until the person does something very unsubtle. Something that is a faux pas.

But don’t ever EVER assume that just because you can’t see it it isn’t there.

Life for those on the spectrum is often difficult and complicated in ways that they simply don’t show you.