It always does.

My wife wanted to talk. Not a friendly talk, but one of those talks where she wants to vent her huge frustration with me. She’s very good at this, and whether she realises it or not, has a canny knack of vicious character assassination, in these often one sided arguments that run from when the kids go to bed to when we go to bed.

Argument is not one of my strong points. I’m not often quick thinking, and so argument directed at me is typically just absorbed, and I remain quiet much of the time, unable to think of a decent counter to use. This, of course makes things worse. It makes it look like I don’t care. Of course I care. I just can’t produce the necessary come back that my wife expects and wants.

Our argument last night left me not only feeling down and unloved, but also completely misunderstood, and a little suicidal.

I didn’t see it coming. I rarely do. This perplexes my wife, who thinks she is being very obviously ‘off’ with me for days before hand. But I don’t usually see it, and I didn’t see over the last few days.

My life since my diagnosis has thus far seemed pretty good. I’ve felt like I’ve been achieving things – like I’ve moved on a bit. Except, as I discovered in a flash of inspiration that I had independently of last night’s argument, I haven’t actually been moving forward and achieving things.

What’s been happening is this: My focus has moved in a series of very fixed directions. For focus here, you can read special interest if you prefer. As usual with special interests, I feel to have no control over the direction the special interest takes. I’ll go further than this, and make another point, that I think is especially important here – for the most part, I’ve not even been aware that what I have been doing is indulging a special interest. Seriously.

For the last three or four weeks, I’ve felt like I’m making great progress at work. A series of disjoint jobs that have needed tackling for months have started to pull together into a larger project that is finally sorting out a whole chunk of loose ends. I’ve said as much to colleagues, telling my boss and my wife just a few days ago how satisfying I was finding it that everything seems to be pulling together and things seem to be getting sorted out.

As I mentioned above, my general thoughts on this have simply been that I’ve moved forward, and managed to get on with things and be productive. But that is an illusion.

In reality, it is special interest all the way. And after eight solid hours of complete focus at work each day for several weeks, the cracks have started to show this week. I’ve grown progressively more tired over time, and in recent days I’ve become snappy at home, especially with the kids, and I’ve not been sleeping well. My intense focus at work each day has left me drained outside of work hours, quite lacking in thought and speech, and I’ve clearly been uncommunicative at home – not that I’ve actually noticed this.

Yesterday, I broke. After struggling to get started at work, I found that I was obsessively hunting out cool applications and rearranging the home screen on my phone. I spent three hours on it, when I should have been working. The difference with this was I could see it was obsessive special interest. I couldn’t stop, much to my own horror. Even when I was hungry, it took me a whole hour to drag myself away and go and get some lunch.

So I was feeling quite depressed even before I left for home yesterday. For the first time I could see that I wasn’t a new more productive me, work had simply become my special interest, to the exclusion of everything else.

And then came the argument, which of course I didn’t see coming either.

It was extremely upsetting for me, because of course I was painted in a very bad light by my wife. I understand that this is what people do in arguments – you air your frustrations, and the other person in the argument airs theirs, and so the air ultimately clears, as both people get their grievances off their chest.

But of course, that dynamic doesn’t really work when I’m one of the people in an argument. I soak up the criticism, and don’t offer very much back. I feel more and more awful and useless and poorly understood, and reply less and less. This just makes the other person in the argument even more angry and the cycle goes round and round until bedtime, at which point the other person is often apoplectic with rage, and I’m a gibbering wreck.

So it was last night. I felt wretched, and useless, and that no-one understood me at all, despite my genuine best efforts to explain things from my point of view. The last part of this is perhaps the worst. We all feel useless from time to time and remorse too. But the feeling that the person closest to me really didn’t understand me or how I am, was almost indescribably painful. I felt completely alone, and that I would never truly find any understanding from anyone else.  I could see my life going forward being a series of unintended disasters where I unintentionally piss other people off. With those thoughts, and jibes from my wife suggesting our relationship was in trouble, and questioning whether I was capable of being a father in a family, it’s perhaps not surprising that I started to wonder where life was actually worth living.

I’m feeling a little better this morning – perhaps surprisingly, I slept well.

But I still feel wretched and useless. What’s more I hate myself too. Today is one of those mornings where I wish I didn’t have Asperger’s. I want to be normal. I want to feel like I’m understood for who I am. I want to have arguments with people and I want to be able to organise my life in a way that I get on with other people rather than piss them off. I’ve had enough of faux pas, and of hating social activities. I don’t want to be ultra-focussed on one activity at a time, and I’d like to be able to express emotions without difficulty.

And the daft thing is that my wife suggested last night that I can do all of this, because of a single sentence from the Diagnostic Assessment Report. She said I wasn’t trying. But I do. I try hard every day to fit in and do my best. Perhaps my best just isn’t good enough.

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Out of the blue

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I spot things.

I have an unusual attention to detail that means that means I see things most people miss. Whilst this often means humdrum things like trying to decipher personalised number plates on cars, or even what trim level the car is based on the pattern of the wheels, I occasionally see rather more unusual things. Sometimes strangely synchronous things have happened too. Things that are so unusual that they stick in my mind for years, in the way that normal events typically fail to do.

But are these unusual things of any consequence whatsoever, and are they the product of an over fertile imagination?  I’ll leave that to you to decide.

I grew up Yorkshire, about 20 miles away from Manchester airport, which for those of you outside the UK is one of the major regional hubs here. More than this, we were on one of the common approach ways, so as a child who was interested in paying attention to the detail around me, I knew the sights and sounds associated with aircraft overhead. I saw them every day, and I knew the directions they flew and the heights that they would be overhead depending on the wind direction. I had muy head in the clouds. When I was fifteen, and unusual ariel sight lead to The Mother Of All Special Interests in my mid teens, which I’ve written about before. I won’t cover that again here – I don’t need to, as there have been other unusual things I’ve seen in the sky too.

Firstly, there was the very odd bolt of lightening I saw one morning. I must have been around thirteen or fourteen at the time, and I was off school ill – perhaps with a bad cold. I was home alone, and bored. As I often did, I was sat on the back of the sofa looking out of the lounge window at the rolling Yorkshire hills around the house. I’d seen foxes out in the fields in the recent past, and wondered if I might see one again. Bam! My eyes darted in an instant towards a bright light that was towards the left of my vision. Somewhere behind the hill in the middle distance on the left, a bright white light shot upwards. It was bright like lightening, and lived for perhaps roughly the same amount of time, or maybe ever so slightly longer. In all other ways it was quite unlike lightening however. Firstly, as I said it clearly went upwards, disappearing into the cloud cover, which incidentally was not thunder cloud like in the least. Secondly, its appearance was that of an entirely straight line, and it didn’t touch the ground and clouds at the same time; it was like a bright white glowing rod appeared from behind the hill and shot up into the clouds. What was it? I have no idea.

In my final year of high school, having had the unusual sighting that lead to the mother of all special interests, I’d bravely told my closest school friend one morning on the bus on our way to school. ‘Friend’ just about fits here, incidentally, but this was more out luck than good judgement on my part, but that is another story. The bus dropped us at the bottom of a long steep hill which we had to climb to get to the school gates. We were still chatting about my sighting as we climbed the hill. I looked up at the sky, as I often do, and spotted something moving that didn’t look right. “Oh!” I said and pointed to the sky so my friend could see what I was looking at. He gasped in amazement – “What’s that?” he asked. I thought sceptically about how I’d read recently about many UFO sightings being attributed to planes being seen at odd angles. “It’s probably a plane at an odd angle”, I said. We both kept on looking. “That really is quite odd” I chipped in, and my friend agreed. It didn’t look like a plane, and he agreed about that too. It was’t flying on one of the usual flight paths either. We both tried to twist what we could see into a plane flying at an odd angle, or with the sun gleaming off it in a strange way. We couldn’t. To be honest, whatever it was was pretty high up – the sort of height that planes cruise at, and the looked like an odd mash of roughly three and four sided polygons, none of which looked remotely like wings . What was it? I have no idea.

My friend remembered this several years later, when the subject came up by chance. He was still genuinely enthralled that he’d seen something that neither of us could readily identify in the sky. What freaks me out more is the odd synchronicity that it happened on the very morning that we discussed my previous sighting. Coincidence? Probably. Plane at an odd angle and glinting strangly in the sun? Probably? But not definitely.

Another strange episode of synchronicity happened to my some years later, when I was living in London. It was summer, and I was on my fifteen minute walk to the tube, on my way to work. Suddenly, I wondered what had become of my first major girlfriend. This was the fantastically kind and gentle (but ultimately unfaithful) woman who I’d spent a solid two years of my life with from the age of around fifteen. I was in my mid twenties now, and I hadn’t been in touch with her since we slit up nearly ten years previously. I hadn’t thought about her for years. But there I was wondering where she was and what she was doing as I wandered down the road to the tube.

I trotted down the stairs to the platform, and walked along to the place I invariably stood to get on the train. Bam! There she was. about three or four people away, standing on the platform. I physically reeled and felt faint. This was just freakishly odd. Could it really be her, or was it just someone that looked a little like her? I spent the couple of minutes waiting for the train stealing surreptitious looks, whilst she was oblivious. The train came, and we all got on. She got on at the next door, and the train was packed, so that was it. It was her, I’m convinced of it. Once again, it is the synchronicity of things here that freaks me out.

You don’t need to have a keen attention to detail to have seen the next thing. But was it a cruel trick from within the family, perpetrated for some still unknown reason? Probably. But definitely?

These incidents happen back when I was in my mid teens again, perhaps a year or two after the unusual sightings. Both had one thing in common – they happened on Saturday mornings, whilst I was out of the family home working behind the counter in our local newsagents. I got up early on Saturdays to open up the shop and get the newspapers sorted into the various rounds for the boys and girls to take and deliver. The job was my first real job, and was offered after I’d been a conscientious paper boy for several years.

The other thing going on in my life at this time was fairly severe depression. I’d recently split from the long term girlfriend mentioned above, and I was a mess, who wasn’t coping with life very well at all. The bpttom had fallen out of my world.

I’d work at the newsagents until lunchtime when the local daily paper arrived, and then, having seen these out on their deliveries, I’d lock up the shop and head home. On this day, I got home, headed up to my room, and Bam! (hope you are not getting too tired of my use of Bam! yet, but it does seem to sum up my feelings each time).

My room was, umm, well different. Nothing big, you understand, but different none the less. The first time this happened, the mattress on my bed had been pushed askew from the bottom of the bed, so that it was hanging off the bed. The mattress was big and heavy, so it wasn’t the sort of thing you could do by accident, say whilst hoovering. Under the mattress was also where I kept my stash of porn (these of course being the pre-internet days when porn was actually printed on paper, and working in a newsagents made it easy to get hold of). I immediately suspected my younger brother, who would have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, so I went and asked him. “Have you been in my room this morning? I’m not going to be angry if you have, I’d just like to know.”, I asked in an annoyed voice. “No”, he said, looking genuinely taken aback and confused. I asked my parents the same question, and drew the same response. How odd. A few months later I returned from my morning selling sweets and crisps  and the odd magazine to find my wardrobe doors open. Once more, all very subtle, but not only had I not left them open that morning, but I never left them open. Again, plausible denials from everyone who had been in the house over the course of the morning. Odd, odd, odd.

The final thing I’d like to write about is something subtle that I’ve noticed for a great many years. Even I suspect there is some mundane explanation – most likely coincidence – at play, but it does seem to happen an awful lot.

Street lights. They are, of course just about everywhere. And being a bright source of light, my eyes tend to get drawn to them, even if only out of the corner of my eye. And what happens to street lights when the bulb starts to reach the end of it’s life? Well the bulb goes out, and then comes back on. Sometimes this is a flicker, but very often, it is an extended random period of the light being off and then it being on for a while, before it goes off again. How do I know? well I’ve observed it, of course. A lot. None of this is odd, however.

What is odd, is how frequently I approach a street light, either on foot or in my car, and the light changes state as I approach. I’m not talking randomness here. My eyes pick out changes in lights from a great distance – I suspect that the more I’ve noticed this effect, the more I’ve become atuned to look for it. But in all seriousness, I will frequently drive down a road where you can maybe see the lights for a good several hundred yards. No flickering or state changing. Suddenly, as I approach a light, it will change state. If it was on, it’ll go off. If it was off, it’ll come on. But for as long as I’ve been able to see it – sometimes several minutes if I’m walking, it won’t have changed state. Sometimes this will happen to me on my commute, and I’ll pay special attention as to where the light was. I’m interested to see if it does the same thing again in following days. What’s surprising is perhaps how frequently it does repeat. Over the course of a week, say, some lights have repeated their apparent behaviour two or three times.

One autumn, when I worked in London, and had to walk over London Bridge each evening towards the tube, I had a light that scored perhaps even a little better than this. It’s state changed more often than not as I approached it, for several weeks.

There’s a strangely similar effect that sometimes happen to me on spring mornings as I drive to work. Time it just right, and the street lamps are starting to switch off in the dawn light. It’s amazing though, how for a few weeks I find myself driving along with lights switching off as I approach them. Not just one set in quick succession, but often several sets over some distance.

Coincidence and an over active imagination? Probably. Yet these oddities really do happen a lot. It feels more than coincidence.

All of the odd things I’ve described above mess with my head, because I prefer to deal in logic and in certainties. Yet here are things that I have experienced that seem to defy the logic that I hold so dear.

The world feels like an odd place. But that oddness is ever so slightly magical too.

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Street lights, synchronicity and lights in the sky

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These thoughts have been on my mind recently, so I thought I’d write about them a little.

I have considerable trouble expressing myself clearly to other people, particularly when feelings are involved. There are a few problems at play here, that conspire together to make something that should be straight forward just too difficult a lot of the time.

The first big problem is who to express myself to. My observation of the world over the years suggests that my answer to this question is rather different to that of most people. My best guess is that the usual answer is that you should speak to the person that is most appropriate. That may be your spouse, close friends, family, more casual friends, business colleagues, your doctor, your counsellor, the girl behind the bar. The answer really depends on what you need to express and why.

The answer that works for me, however, is to talk to my wife. I rarely confide in anyone else. Why? Well, as you’ve quite likely read before on this blog, friends are something of a problem and an enigma to me. I’ve never really managed to have good friends from my early teens, when life started to get beyond friends being there to play simple games with. I dont have an inner circle of trusted people in my life, or even an outer circle for that matter. I have my wife.

Secondly, there is a language problem. I’ve tried to explain this before on the blog, I think. I often find it difficult to translate my thoughts and feelings into words. Its like I speak a different language inside my head, one based far more on visuals than on words themselves. Sometimes, I can’t find the right verbal words to express what I’m thinking or feeling. I know how I think or feel, but I can’t express that to you in any sort of meaningful way.

Another issue at play is really a consequence of the other two, and of a lifetime of faux-pas. My self confidence is shot. A lack of self confidence compounds the above two problems, and means that I often don’t trust that my thoughts and feelings are worthwhile or even correct.

When added together, these problems make a potent block on self expression.

What happens when you don’t express your thoughts and feelings? In my case they get bottled up. I have bottled up my feelings for years, and the more this happens, the more they create a pressure that needs to be relieved.

The sort of self expression that ends up happening via pressure relief is often unpleasant. It frequently shows via anxiety or depression or both. Confusion and desperation can also put in an appearance, turning something that may have started out as a minor annoyance or even as a pleasant thought into a seemingly bleak hopeless spiral, which is often ends up expressed horribly inappropriately.

Clearly, bottling things up is not a good option although I do an enormous amount of it.

What I try and do these days to counter this problem is write.

This blog is more about self expression than anything else. It doesn’t really matter whether anyone reads what I write, although I’m continually amazed and flattered that people do, and from time to time find it useful. What really matters to me, is that this blog gives me an opportunity to express myself in an unhindered way. What you read here is pure me, with all of my faults. Indeed, my openness has grown over the time that I have been writing here. Unfortunately though, I can’t express everything that I would like to. There are some areas that are just too personal to cover. Whilst I write pseudonymously, there are people who read this blog and do know me in real life.

Writing works, though. With writing, I have the time and ability to express what I want to say clearly. I can (and do) go back and revise what I’ve written, sometimes several times, before I publish my thoughts. I like that – it works well for me, and I end up feeling like I’ve expressed my inner thoughts quite well. It is satisfying, and is also often something of a pressure relief valve.

How do I deal with those other thoughts and feelings that I can’t express here? At the moment, I don’t. That’s really not good.

I’ve paid for counselling in the past, and found that with the right counsellor, I can and do open up and express the sorts of thoughts and feelings I can’t express in any other way. I can’t afford to pay for a counsellor for the rest of my life though, which leaves me wondering if there is a solution.

Do you have any suggestions? How do you cope with this sort of problem?

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Self expression

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Two weeks ago I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. That didn’t come as a surprise – I have after all been talking on this website for nearly eighteen months now in a matter-of-fact way as though it was already a done deal. The diagnosis left me feeling both shocked and relieved. Yes, shock. It’s all very well researching and then convincing yourself that the balance of evidence says you have Asperger’s, but its a very different thing to be told it by someone who is qualified to do so. There is now no room for doubt. I was right, and I no longer need to worry that terrible what if: What if I am wrong?

Wednesday 12th May 2010 wasn’t a life changing day for me – the life changing day was the now forgotten date back in autumn 2008 when my wife sowed the seed in my mind that I might have Asperger’s. May the 12th was however perhaps the start of a new chapter in my life. Diagnosis may mean I can move forward with confidence in my life. Diagnosis may mean that I can negotiate a better way of working. Diagnosis may mean that I can get some help in making my marriage and other relationships work a little more smoothly. Diagnosis may bring me some peace of mind. Maybe.

But all that is for the future. Right now, I still feel a little in limbo. Whilst I was told at the end of the assessment that I have Asperger’s, the report has yet to land on my door mat. And without that a little part of me still hasn’t accepted things, and I haven’t felt able to ask myself what next.

But I can’t put off writing any longer. My pressure cooker of internalised thoughts and feelings is likely to explode soon if I dont let some of it out. My anxiety is back too, and is not giving me an easy ride.

So. What happened on D day?

For a start, I took the day off work, despite my assessment not starting until 17:30. My thinking here was that if I went to work, then I’d either arrive at the assessment overly stimulated from work, or I’d just sit at my desk all day getting nothing done other than getting more and more anxious. My parents had been drafted in to collect the kids later in the day, and to put them to bed for us. Both knew about the appointment, but didn’t seem to want to mention it. I think the nearest we got was when discussing food for the evening. Might me and my wife want to go out for a meal when we get back? I doubted it, but suggested a takeaway. My mum commented that I might feel quite down when I got back, so perhaps takeway was the better option. Hmmmm. After a little reflection, this meant only one thing to me. That she though I was going to come back having been told I didn’t have AS. Oh well. I decided that I really needed to put that out of my mind.

So, instead of work, my wife and I went shopping for the day. There is of course a risk in this too – the large shopping centre we went to could easily sensorily overwhelm me just as much as work. We were lucky – with it being a week day, it was reasonably quiet, and we took our time, not rushing or feeling under any pressure to be anywhere.

As the afternoon progressed, I started to get more nervous, and less able to potter around the shops. The final half hour before we had to leave for the assessment went on forever. When we did leave, I drove. This again was a calculated move on my part – by driving, I had to concentrate on the roads and the other cars, leaving little brain capacity for nerves and anxiety. It worked, for the most part, but as we pulled up and parked in the church car park next door to the building where the assessment was taking place, the anxiety once more had room to express itself. I felt terrible.

The twenty minute wait for the assessment to start went on forever, and during this time, I found myself shaking and unable to focus on anything at all.

In complete contract, the next ninety minutes or so passed in a rushed blur. After an initial five minutes or so where I found it difficult to come up with the right words, I managed to relax, and Special Interest Number One of the last eighteen months or so was able to take the floor and ensure that I got my point of view across.

Ninety minutes. It’s not long to impart enough information to base a diagnosis on. Whilst various subjects were covered in enough detail, I ultimately left feeling that others weren’t covered, and in some ways that left me feeling cheated.

After the assessment, my wife was ushered in and asked a few questions, but the Prof had already made it clear that he’d reached a conclusion about my diagnosis.

And that diagnosis: Well, I have Asperger’s Syndrome. I sank into my chair when the Professor finally said it. Those words felt like they had weight. My feeling of relief was huge.

And then some more detail: I have particularly difficult issues with social interaction and theory of mind – I don’t read many nonverbal cues, and as I don’t have a good theory of mind about myself, I find it difficult to put myself in other people’s shoes. In addition, I clearly have many day-to-day problems caused by Dysexecutive Syndrome – or executive dysfunction as I’ve referred to it throughout this blog. The Professor likened my problems in this area to ADHD, although stressed that he didn’t think I had ADHD itself.
There are also some areas where I have less of a problem. I used a great deal of expression during the assessment, and was able to convey my point of view well. The professor also noted that I was very well aware of my own limitations, and had clearly made adjustments throughout my life to try and cope and work around them – long before I suspected I had AS.  These were all things, he said, that he didn’t see all that often in people with Asperger’s. The professor used an interesting phrase to describe this. He suggested that my Asperger’s was in some ways mild. He then went on to clarify this by saying that in many ways this made the life of the affected person more complicated and difficult, as they were far more aware that they were different, and they often saw the consequences of their differences and had to deal with that.

I understand where the Professor is coming from on this, but I was, and still am somewhat uncomfortable about his choice of language. I don’t like the use of the word mild, because I feel it conveys the wrong message. Not to me, as such, but to other people who don’t understand the condition well. I can understand and accept that I have difficult problems in some areas, and far less of a problem in other areas that encompass the AS definition. But try telling someone that you have Mild Asperger’s. It clouds the waters, and almost certainly makes the situation more confused – if its only mild then clearly it isn’t much of a problem, is it?

So there you go.

When we got home, my mother was keen to know the outcome. She eventually asked after haf an hour or so, and I told her very simply – I have Asperger’s. Clearly, the right response was difficult to find. She said that it had been obvious from my mood – I was elated, and that actually the important thing was that I made the most of things. Ummmm…. Thanks mum.

–

So, where next?

I’m not sure as yet. I’m hopeful that the arrival of the written report will act as a catalyst for moving things forward. Both my wife and I are likely to visit the Professor again for an hour of talking about what happens next. I think we both need to hear about the pros and cons of being more open to others about my diagnosis. My AS has clearly impacted on my work life in unexpected ways over the years, more often than not getting me into trouble or causing unnecessary friction. We also need to hear about what might help both of us going forward.

Would being open about my AS make things better or worse? Do you have any strategies that might make life more straight forward?

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Diagnosed: Part 2

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Verdict: I have Asperger’s Syndrome

More later, when I’ve had a chance to think about it all.

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Diagnosed

No related posts.

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.

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Pay back time

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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.

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A new Special Interest

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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.

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Glass half full

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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.

–

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.

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Subtlety

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Being a tech savvy geek with Asperger’s it’s no surprise that I’ve owned a smartphone for some time. Indeed, the first one I owned was a Sony P800, which was waaaay back in 2002. In those days you used a smartphone as an organiser, and not a great deal more, because this was in the days before data tariffs for mobile phones.

It’s 2010, and I can get my email on my current smartphone. I can browse the web too, and hook things up so my laptop can access the Internet via the phone if I’m out and about without access to WiFI. 3G data makes all this possible, and as is the defacto in the UK, I have a mobile phone plan with Unlimited Data on it for an additional payment of something like £5 a month.

Wow! Unlimited data eh? Doesn’t that sound wonderful. It certainly does to me.

The problem is that it’s a blatant lie! It’s not just my mobile provider that use the lie, all five of the networks here in the UK do it. The headline may say Unlimited Data, but the small print has some weasly words that say something like fair usage limits apply. My current provider make it quite difficult to find out exactly what these fair limits are, and they seem not be alone on this.

I think my limit per month is 750MB. It might be 1GB. It certainly isn’t a higher figure than this. That isn’t a lot of data, really, it’s approximately the contents of a full CD-ROM. I’ve hit the limit a couple of times over the last year.

When you do hit the limit, you instantly get a threatening SMS from the provider, warning you that you may get cut off if you use any more data at all before a given date at some point next month. Try and check your email the next day, and almost the second you fire up the application you get another equally threatening SMS message.

It’s the lack of logic of it all that infuriates me. How the hell do they get away with advertising their data plan as being unlimited when it clearly isn’t?

I know all the providers do it, but really, that doesn’t make it any better, does it?

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Unlimited

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