There’s a lot going on in my head right now, and I’m not only struggling to make sense of it, but also to turn it into something that can be expressed in some way. I have no idea which way this post will turn. Lets find out.

My background anxiety levels are through the roof, and small things are causing them to peak. Big things are causing them to peak too, obviously, but when I get to the point that little unimportant things are causing me such a problem, well – I’m not in a good place.

Everyone has problems. I know that. In that respect I’m absolutely no different to a considerable portion of the population of the planet right now. We all have our personal struggles. I want to make this clear, because I also want it to be clear that this is not a post asking for sympathy – not at all – it is a simple dump of where I am and how I’m feeling, and maybe even some of the reasons why.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife booked us a joint appointment at Relate. Those of you in the UK will know this is a relationship counselling service, where someone who is suitably trained will listen to the viewpoints of both people in a relationship and will try and facilitate harmony in whatever direction that happens to go. My wife has used the prospect of Relate as a threat before. Perhaps that is a little unfair. I have perceived her calls to go to Relate – which are usually made during one of our arguments, and once I’m well and truly within meltdown – as a threat. We last talked about it, and this time rather more soberly a couple of months ago. Neither of us actually made the call at that time.

But a couple of weeks ago, she did. She quietly dropped it into conversation once the kids were in bed one night. I was shocked and a little hurt that she’d just gone ahead and not actually spoken about it with me first. Its not as though I actually would have disagreed.

We’ve had an introductory session, and more are scheduled for the weeks ahead. I found the first session quite difficult emotionally, but as I’ve always found, opening up to a stranger is actually quite simple to do. Somehow, I find it easier to turn my thoughts into words. Perhaps I know that I’m not going to get them thrown right back at me, and then struggle to find a suitable response. In other words, the Relate setting facilitates a non-confrontational way of me to express my feelings. That’s a good thing. However, I worry about what I’m going to say on Friday morning, when we go back for the next session.

You see, I’ve been thinking a lot, and very open-mindedly. I wouldn’t normally do that, perhaps because I would be scared of what the outcome would be. Ordinarily if my thoughts took me to a place where I decided that actually everyone would be better off if my wife and I separated, I would not be able to face actually having the conversation with my wife about it. I fear the confrontation so much that I’ll go as far as not thinking about certain possibilities to avoid having to actually go through it.

But Relate has altered that balance. If I need to have that conversation, it can be done with a neutral third party present, and somehow that removes the threat of confrontation for me. This change in balance has been surprisingly liberating. I have found myself thinking through possibilities for the future that really would be off limits normally.

Let me share one with you. It may appear gloomy and depressing, and in a way it is – however it feels quite rational to me right now.

If I look at my extended family, then I don’t see a very happy nor comfortable picture. My dad is the only one of four siblings every to marry or even maintain any form of long term partnership at least during my adult years (and thus the scope of my knowledge). My dad’s brother and one of his sisters died over the last decade on their own. Alone. My dads other sister is a spinster too. My parents have a 40 year marriage, but it is not what you would call conventionally successful, and it is clear from things that my mum says, and letters she has written me in the past that my dad drives her near to insanity much of the time. They stay together, but that seems to be much to do with a fear of living alone in their old age. My brother, aged 36, is to the best of my knowledge single, and does not appear to have had a long term relationship in around ten years. He lives alone, in his own flat.

That really isn’t a rosy picture of happy relationships. I for my part am in the ninth year of the relationship with my wife. I don’t make her happy the majority of the time. She doesn’t trust me to get things done (despite the fact I am quite practical and do get things done), and frequently refers to me as the third child in the family – often in front of the kids. We argue frequently, invariably about how I don’t make her happy. I have been told in all seriousness by her on a number of occasions over the last couple of years that she feels trapped in the relationship due to the kids and her lack of independent means to extract herself.

I feel that I try very hard to make things work. My wife for her part states the same. I feel unloved, unheard and that I’m not understood by anyone. I also feel that it is getting harder and harder for me to maintain my act of normality – the thin veneer that I exude in front of everyone to try and show that I’m not as different from them as I actually am. I’m tired, not sleeping properly, stressed and very anxious. I dare say I’m depressed too.

But I feel quite rational.

And the rationality in all of the above right now says to me that the best outcome for everyone – me, my wife and my kids – is for me to leave. It wouldn’t be an instant cure by any means, but perhaps six months down the road things would be heading in the right direction. You see, a separation would ultimately remove the primary cause of the unhappiness experienced by my wife, and the constant disappointment of me failing to meet what she considers to be easy-to-meet needs. It would make me happier too. My stress and anxiety levels would drop due to me not being constantly on edge at home, scared of confrontation, and I would undoubtedly end up with more me time on my own – something that I need in order to be happy, yet don’t feel exists for me right now. The kids would be happier too once things settle down. The unhappiness of both of their parents is rubbing off on them, at times very obviously. They are unhappy and I would bet quite confused right now as to why both their parents keep flying off the handle with them.

What’s more, the track record of my extended family suggests that I will lose in the end at any rate. Regardless of the outcome of these Relate sessions, there would appear to be a very good chance that I will eventually end up on my own. I don’t want to do what my parents have done, and stay together but unhappy – that wouldn’t be fair on my wife.

I don’t think this will be what my wife is expecting as the outcome of the sessions, however we have only been to one, so I may yet be wrong. I suspect, that she feels that the counsellor will be able to unlock some magic communication method that allows us to understand each other in a way that we’ve never done, and in a way that will ultimately allow us to sort out our unhappinesses and live happily ever after. Maybe that will happen. Maybe something else will. Maybe my point of view will have changed completely by Friday. Only time will tell.

But at least I’m considering all the options now, rather than suppressing anything that could lead to a difficult confrontation.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The rapidly approaching T-junction

Related posts:

1. The season to be jolly ‘Tis the season to be jolly according to the words...
2. Out of the blue It came like a bolt from the blue. It always...
3. That explains nothing Help. I’m sorry to start with such a stark word,...

My Autism and Me is a 15 minute video from the BBC in the UK that was first broadcast last week. It is narrated by Rosie who has Asperger’s, and gives an insight into her life, and the lives of some other young people in the UK with differing degrees of autism. It was produced for the BBC’s older children’s channel – CBBC, but I think it works well for an adult audience too.

Well worth 15 minutes of your time – please take a look.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

My Autism and Me – autism as children see it

Related posts:

1. Awareness versus propaganda I’m glad I live in the UK. Here in the...
2. Autism rates in adults Hooray! This article, from the BBC News website speaks for...

So here’s the deal: I find it difficult to plan and execute things.

My inability to get started causes issues in all areas of my life: What shall we do at the weekend? What shall I buy my relatives for Christmas? How do I start this work task?

I don’t have answers for all of these problems, but at work, where I’m good at drawing up a list of the tasks that need completing, I’ve found a trick that more often than not gets me results. It involves writing.

I write a work diary. Sometimes I write it in insane detail, to the point where others literally scratch their heads and express incomprehension at the depth of information it contains. But I’m well known for being quirky at work, so I tend to get away with oddness like this.

Whilst others may see my frantic note taking as odd, it really does serve a hugely important purpose in my time at work.

It is an enabler for me. The simple action of writing down what I am doing has the effect of translating the task into something that I can understand.

In short, it decodes my life, one sentence at a time.

Here’s how it works:

• I outline.
• Put simply, I use an indented bulleted list, one sentence per bullet point.

• A point that is logically a child or continuation of the previous point, is further indented, like this
• Outlining presents me with a list

• Lists are easily decoded by me
• Lists provide the right sized chunks of info for me to decode in one go
• Lists give a logical structure to what is often unstructured information
• Bulleted lists allow detail to be added out of sequence

• When something occurs to me, I can go back and add it in the right logical location
• I can do that without breaking the flow of the list
• I did just that in the writing of this list

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Decoding life, one bullet point at a time

Related posts:

1. Getting things done I used to be terribly disorganised, and failed to get...
2. Life derailed I’ve written before about how my daily routine is on...
3. I must remember to write I’ve almost certainly said something like this before, but with...

Work is proving to be quite challenging at the moment. There is a new technology for the company to wrestle with, one that no-one here has had to deal with before. We all bring different skills to the table, and slowly we are working together to figure out what is needed. This is what work is all about, and it feels good to be part of the team that will solve this particular challenge.

There is however a problem. My colleagues keep dropping in with their take on where we are at, and it is here where I start to struggle. It takes me time to work through new material. I cannot process it in real time.

If that was the limit of the problem it might not be too bad as I can take it offline and process it later, but there is a double whammy that life has dealt me here too. I need to think about the social interaction with my colleagues so I can respond to them in a suitable way at the same time as trying to take on board the difficult technical details that they are describing.

The result? I feel stressed and terribly tired. I don’t feel able to keep up with the train of thought that my colleagues are describing. I feel a fraud – as though I’m just stumbling my way through, pretending to understand things that in actual fact have not even registered in my brain yet in any meaningful way.

This is of course a very practical demonstration of one of my most popular articles on this site - Slow thinking. I think it illustrates rather well just how challenging very ordinary aspects of life can be when you have a condition like Asperger’s. I understand how face to face chats between colleagues at work helps to cement ideas and allows consensus to be quickly reached. I see it happening all the time, and yet if you put me in a situation where I don’t already have a good working knowledge of the subject matter, and all of a sudden I find this sort of interaction to be almost impossible. It is just too much to deal with all at once – something which is not understood by people who are neuro-typical.

Which is perhaps why I try where I can to keep interaction to email in scenarios like this. Email is my secret coping mechanism for issues like this, as it provides a practical route to work around issues I have face to face. I can take my time to think things through when I work this way, and I use that time wisely, allow the ideas which I have so much trouble with verbally have the time to be absorbed properly. I can process and understand what is being suggested, and produce my own well thought out arguments for or against. And the great part is that with my colleagues split over not just different offices but different timezones, email is seen as a perfectly acceptable, and indeed necessary mode of communication.

I win! (In the end)

I’d love to hear how you deal with tricky situations like this. Do you have a secret tool that helps you to respond in a way that works for you?

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

A challenge at work

No related posts.

Just a quick note to acknowledge that this blog is now back online after an extended outage of around 8 months or so.

Early in the year I had a problem with my hosting provider, and at the time it seemed like an easy choice just to leave the blog broken. In a typically autistic way, I was in no mood to communicate at the time, even in a written way. My life was very full of work, and I was finding it difficult to find the time to do anything else. All of which made taking a sabbatical from the blog an easy thing to do.

As for me? Well life goes on, and not much changes. As with a great many people – whether autistic or not – work is still busy and family life is still hard work. Asperger’s hasn’t been in the front of my mind very much over the course of this year, but that hasn’t made my life any easier or better.

Anyway – the blog has been resurrected, and I’ve been somewhat amazed that google has instantly started to throw search results in its direction again, despite the site having been broken for more than half a year. It has made me appreciate that perhaps this site did have something useful to say.

I’m hopeful that this will be the start of Chapter 2 of That Explains Everything. I’m not sure as yet whether I’ll be plotting the same course as before, or whether I’ll sail towards new horizons.

However it all turns out, I do hope however, that you feel your time here is well spent.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Welcome back

No related posts.

Help.

I’m sorry to start with such a stark word, but I truly feel like I need some help right now.

Life with Asperger’s is at times full and happy, but I also find it to be filled with big periods of confusion, stress, anxiety, and unfortunately, hopelessness. These feelings have been so repetitive through my thirty-seven years, that they feel normal when I’m experiencing them. They are literally a normal part of my every day experience of life, and they are filling it right now.

A bit of painful truth: I’m destined to be alone. I seem to be unable to keep relationships strong. Specifically, I have never offered women what they need to remain happy in a relationship with me. The big hole in my relationship with my wife is now and always has been romance. She needs it, and – fairly – expects it from me. I appear to be unable to offer it.

Over the years this has caused a lot of unhappiness and resentment in our relationship which ultimately boils over into arguments. The phrase “Why are we here again?” is now forever etched into my brain, along with the feelings of shame and guilt that it conjures in me.

And so to the title of this post. My initial that explains everything moment started it all. I intuitively understood the relationship between Aspergers and me from the start. It really did explain everything as far as I was concerned, and that provided immense relief. I started the blog, and everything here, from the initial tentative sharing of my previously internalised thoughts, through my formal diagnosis last year, to today, with all the difficult times and good that there have been along the way – everything here has really been for the benefit of my wife. I didn’t know that when I started. It has has only really occurred to me this morning that it truly is the case.

It’s true. You see, I’ve failed to get my point of view across verbally. My wife and I speak different languages although the words are the same. I have tried to get my point of view across many times, and yet somehow the words I say mean something different to my wife than the way they were intended by me. In the last two years I’ve invested a lot of time and poured a huge amount of emotion into my words here. From the blog comments and the private emails it is clear that much of what I’ve written has struck a chord with those of you who’ve paid me the very great honour of reading what I’ve written.

Whilst that is comforting, the one person that I really hoped would find a new understanding from it all hasn’t. My wife reads this blog, but yet I feel like my best attempts to explain myself are still being misinterpreted. To my wife, this blog – and indeed the aspergers itself explain nothing.

So on this bleak morning after yet another “Why are we here again?” evening, I’m genuinely asking for your help. That means you if you are my wife, you if you are a long term reader and you if you just stumbled upon this article by accident. I’m interested in NT thoughts, but perhaps more than anything else I’m interested in the thoughts of those of you who are on the spectrum yourselves.

How do I make romance work?

How do you make romance work?

To me, romance feels like a concept that applies to other people, not me. It is abstract, and as I’ve written before, I have real genuine trouble with abstract concepts. I have no inbuilt definition of how it works and what I need to do to apply it. To me it is devoid of logic – a mystery that I don’t know how to even begin to solve.

Can I learn it? If so, what do I need to know, and what do I need to do?

Where do I start?

Please help if you feel that you can. You can comment privately via the contact form if you prefer.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

That explains nothing

Related posts:

1. Out of the blue It came like a bolt from the blue. It always...
2. Diagnosed: Part 2 Where do I start? Two weeks ago I was diagnosed...
3. Sitting on the advocacy fence I got a shock last week, and it has made...

‘Tis the season to be jolly according to the words of the well known carol.

The festive season has arrived and gone, and I have survived – but it has taken its toll. This year, our family festivities worked in a different way. Earlier in the year, my parents bought a second home in the next village up the valley from us, partly in an effort to be closer at hand without imposing on us all the time. This, on the whole, has been a positive thing – family relations are more cordial than they have been for a while, and things seem less strained.

Christmas has been a sore point in our family for a number of years. My parents main home is a 300 mile drive away, which in the UK is about half the way from the top to the bottom of the country, and a car journey, not one taken by plane. For the first couple of years after our kids were born, we stuck by tradition, and made the long drive to my parents house for Christmas week. However, my wife and I then decided that we’d prefer to stay at home over the Christmas period in subsequent years, at least while Christmas was still a magical experience for the kids. We don’t have the room to put everyone up, so for the last few years we’ve had a much smaller family Christmas celebration, without my extended family present. This has worked well, as we have not had to cook for a large number of people, or even be very organised – all of which suites me fine. Of course, this didn’t go down quite so well with my parents, and my mum in particular. She likes the family to spend Christmas together. As we live in different areas of the country, and don’t meet up very often, I can understand her point of view. But ultimately, you have to do what is right for you, not for everyone else.

With the new house in the neighbouring village, this year’s Christmas was always likely to be different. My wife and I agreed to allow a larger family Christmas, with us providing lodging to one relative, and my parents putting up my brother. My wife and I would cook the Christmas meal, from food provided by our guests. All in there would be six adults and two children eating together on Christmas day. Entertaining on the surrounding days would be shared between the houses. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

Well, we all survived, and there weren’t any arguments. My wife was ill with a nasty flu-like bug that has been doing the rounds, so I had to do a bit more thinking ahead and rushing around than I was expecting. I cooked most of the meal, which went fine until the point that the turkey was starting to run late. We only have a small kitchen with a single oven, so my planning all revolved around the roasted vegetables going into the oven once the turkey was cooked. It became clear that the turkey was going to take rather longer than estimate, and at this point, faced with a written list of jobs that couldn’t be started, I started to get very stressed. In the end, the dinner was on the table an hour later than planned, the roasted veg weren’t as good as I had hoped they be, and I was feeling very very stressed indeed.

Our guests left in the middle of the week between Christmas and New Year. My wife was still ill, the kids were fighting a lot and I was very much out of my comfortable routine and feeling very stressed out and anxious. There was nothing in particular that was causing it – more like everything was causing it. Nothing in particular was wrong, but yet nothing was right either.

I longed to get back to work after the new year, because I hoped that would provide me with my regular routine once more, and allow my feeling of wellbeing to return.

It didn’t. I have found it very difficult to get back into the swing of things at work. I think the problem is my underlying stress and anxiety that have been so robustly shored up over Christmas. They feel to be acting as something of a barrier preventing me from starting tasks. I’m trying hard, but faced with a long list of tasks that need doing at work, I’m feeling rather overwhelmed at times.

Stress and anxiety can affect anyone, of course. Indeed I’m sure that a huge number of work days are lost every year to them. Christmas time with family can be stressful for anyone too. I understand all of this, and yet at the same time I feel that the problem I’m facing here is inextricably bound up with my Asperger’s too. My lack of social intuition, need for routine and tendency to get overloaded by sensory input all quickly lead to stress and anxiety. My Christmas was characterised by a complete lack of usual routine and long periods of social interaction, along with trying to keep the kids amused and stop them from fighting. I longed for some time where I could just go somewhere quiet to be alone and do nothing for a while. That would jave been bliss, but it didn’t happen. Instead, the stress and anxiety that was the output of my busy and disorganised week was multiplied by the stress and anxiety that most people feel in hosting a Christmas week for their families.

And so here I am, one week back at work, and nearly two weeks since my guests went home still felling highly stressed and highly ineffective at work. I’ve produced lists of tasks. I’ve tried to write them in different ways and in different formats. I’ve done my best to prioritise them, and to tell myself that I can sort this all out.

It will all get sorted, of course – at least those bits that are important. But I know that it’ll be some time yet before I feel relaxed and in control.

–

I wish all of you a happy new year.

Thanks you so much to those of you who have taken the time to write to me recently – either here or via email. I apologise for not replying – perhaps the above explains a little about why that is. As ever, writing is ultimately the media that works best for me, and I’d really like to spend more time doing it this year. Being honest and open with you here – albeit anonymously – has helped me enormously over the last two years. I hope there is much more to come.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The season to be jolly

Related posts:

1. Subtlety I have always been astonishingly good at faux pas. Since...
2. Better to know? If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll...
3. Fallout I’m continuing to experience fallout from my stressful evening at...

It came like a bolt from the blue.

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.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Out of the blue

Related posts:

1. Diagnosed: Part 2 Where do I start? Two weeks ago I was diagnosed...
2. Better to know? If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll...
3. Maybe we are not so different… This, in a sense, is a follow up to the...

Note: This is one of my more unusual articles. There’s nothing bad, and no bad language either. Just, umm, oddness.

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.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Street lights, synchronicity and lights in the sky

Related posts:

1. Peter Pan’s new coat Ah yes – Peter Pan, the boy that never grew...
2. Relationships with women and tales of regret When I was growing up, my relationships with women were...
3. Subtlety I have always been astonishingly good at faux pas. Since...

Thoughts and feelings. Self expression. It’s vital. Yet how do you express yourself when you don’t have friends? And what happens if you don’t express yourself?

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?

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Self expression

Related posts:

1. Diagnosed: Part 2 Where do I start? Two weeks ago I was diagnosed...
2. That explains nothing Help. I’m sorry to start with such a stark word,...
3. Is this what we’re all living for today? Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to...