Fallout

I’m continuing to experience fallout from my stressful evening at the theatre last weekend.

The flashbacks and replays of the events have stopped, thank goodness, but the evening has served to heighten my background levels of stress and anxiety considerably, and these have yet to abate.

Whilst not causing a downward spiral by any means, the increase in anxiety has had a very noticeable affect on my ability to function in every day life. Since Saturday night there have been many examples of this – here are a few:

On Sunday, I was a bag of nerves, and had a very short temper. In the early evening my daughter pestered to play a game. I felt over stimulated, and disinterested. We all played as a family, but luck wasn’t on my side. I helped my three year old daughter with the game, and she ended up doing twice as well as I did. Finishing last was just the way things turned out and had little to do with skill, but it made me feel lousy and even more grumpy.

On Monday, I got very little done at work. I wrote my previous article here to try and clear my brain out, but my stress and anxiety were terrible regardless. I found it very difficult to concentrate on what I needed to do, and spent much of the time just browsing the Internet. I simply didn’t feel capable of working.

My daughter has a cold. She was coughing in the night last night and up several times. My wife got up to deal with her first, but I got the nudge in the ribs the second time. Instead of being gentle and sympathetic, I was enraged. I stomped about, and in no uncertain words told my three year old daughter that it was the middle of the night, and that we should all be asleep. “I’ve got a runny nose”, she answered unhelpfully. I stomped around until I found a box of tissues, and then grumpily wiped her nose and almost menacingly told her to go back to sleep. Not a great example of good parenting.

It got worse this morning, when my wife pronounced that our daughter wouldn’t be in nursery today, because of her cold. Our daughter is only in nursery part time, and this gives my wife two days during the week where she can make appointments and get things done. “You’ll have to work from home”, my wife told me ten minutes before I was due to leave for work, “because I have an appointment I can’t cancel this morning”. Nooooooo! This sort of derailment to my schedule sits very badly with me. Not only do I want to ignore the change in plan and push on with what I was supposed to be doing, but in situations like this, I always feel guilt – like I’m letting work down by not being able to make it into the office. Add in the fact that since Christmas I’ve spent a lot of time working from home due to poor weather conditions, and my increased background anxiety too, and it meant that the prospect of working from home felt truly awful. What would I say to my boss? I worked from home two days last week due to ice on the roads (everyone else made it in), and I left an hour early last Friday because my wife was ill. I really did not want to face the prospect of explaining this one.

The crazy thing is that I know my boss will be fine with it, and I know that my many recent days absent from the office have been due to the weather which is out of my hands. I even said this to my wife, as I sat with a sulky face trying to persuade myself that working form home would be fine. She didn’t look impressed.

What happened next just made everything worse. My wife’s decision not to send our daughter to nursery was made whilst my daughter was still asleep. She woke up just before it was time for my son to go to school. She was fine! Change of plan again. I stayed at home with my daughter whilst my wife took our son to school, and then I left for work. And herein lies the next source of stress. I leave early for work – arriving around 8am usually, so that I can get a parking space. I know from experience that if I arrive after 9am, I am unlikely to get a space. This then means struggling to find a space somewhere else that doesn’t cost me £7.50 for the day. This in another of those situations that makes me anxious at the best of times. I took a deep breath and resigned myself to pay the huge fee for the car park that always has spaces. At least I had coins in the car with which to pay.

As it turns out, even at 9.30am, I managed to find a space in my usual car park today. Well, it’s not really a proper space, but spaces aren’t marked in this car park, and as long as you don’t block anyone in, it’s fair game.

So here I am at work once more, and still struggling to get going. I know that eventually my stress and anxiety levels will go down, but I have no idea really how to help that along or even how long it might take to feel better. You see, this sort of background stress is pretty common with me, but I’ve never really paid attention to it in the past – I’ve just assumed it is normal, and there is nothing I can do about it.

Do you have any suggestions for things I can try to help reduce my background anxiety levels?

The Timewarp

I’ve been left with a familiar feeling. So much so, that I nearly entitled this piece Groundhog Day. But to call it that that would just be showing another of my traits – the one where I present my own interpretation of things as fact, without having all the information needed. Passing off BS as fact in a confident way. To be clear, Saturday wasn’t a day I’d had before. The feelings I felt were very familiar, however.

Firstly a warning. It’s not usual for there to be coarse language in my posts, but this post is an exception. Consider yourselves warned.

On Saturday night, my wife and I went to the theatre. But it was no ordinary play we were going to see, it was The Rocky Horror Show. You may or may not have come across this masterpiece of 70s kitsch rock opera, but if you haven’t, I’d best give a little background, as you’ll need it to help put my experience of the evening into context.

Rocky Horror is, well, a British institution. Gothic horror, sexual liberation and blurring of gender roles are the big themes, and it has a huge and very loyal following of mainly thirty-something Brits, who – man and woman alike – dress up lavishly, often in basques and fish-net stockings with suspenders to sing along and shout things at the players that over the last thirty years or so have become completely woven into the story.

So this isn’t your usual sort of theatre production. It owes more to a rock concert mixed with another British staple of theatre, the pantomime. The stage show is outrageous, the audience’s costumes are outrageous, and the audience participation is outrageous too, but all deliberately so, with a large amount of tongue in cheek thrown in.

If you are on the autism spectrum, you are probably now wondering why on earth I went to a show like this. Well, you have a good point, really.

My wife is a veteran of the stage show, so it is difficult to keep her away when the tour is in our neighbourhood, and I went with her for the first time a couple for years ago. We have the film too, and I enjoy the rock opera and find the themes fun. Despite this clearly being something of a minefield for an Aspie, there is also the potential there to have a good time.

On my first visit I didn’t dress up. This is perfectly acceptable – whilst dressing outrageously is the norm, the atmosphere is very relaxed, and frankly no one bats an eyelid if you haven’t dressed up. I felt out of place though, primarily, I felt at the time, due to the lack of costume, so for this visit, I was determined to go dressed up. Not in fishnets and a basque, mind you – that would make me feel more uncomfortable than not dressing up at all. Instead, I settled on a glitzy black evening suite with a red bow tie, red conical cardboard party hat and large sunglasses – a theme based on some of the background characters in the film version. My wife dressed in her usual Rocky outfit of fishnets, black mini dress, red feather boa, maids apron, crimped hair and white face paint. We both looked the part.

But that was where things started going wrong, really. If I was going to pull this off, I was going to need to arrive relaxed and happy, and with time to get a drink from the bar to relax me a little. Our plan built in time for this, but it wasn’t to be. We should have left at 19:00 for the thirty-five drive to the theatre, leaving plenty time for that drink and to soak up the happy atmosphere before the show started at 20:30. I was ready at 18:45, but my wife was running late, and we didn’t leave until 19:20. Un oh. Not to worry, I thought to myself, we’ll still have half an hour once we arrive before the show starts. Rewinding a little, during the afternoon, I checked our route to the theatre, and where we were going to park. I’d even updated the sat-nav software on my phone – Nokia have recently made the navigation free to use, so I wanted to make sure that if I needed it, it’d be there without me having to panic.

Half way there, and signs start showing on the motorway matrix signs – ‘Slow traffic ahead’, and ‘J28-J26 Delays’. Oh. No. We need to get off at J26. And then we met the tail of the queue midway between J29 and J28. We stopped. And then we didn’t move for the next five minutes. Oh dear. It’s about a quarter to eight.

Never mind, I tell my wife – we can come off at J28 and take the A road to the venue rather than the motorway. I know the road goes in the right direction, but I don’t know it well enough to drive unaided. I pull my phone out of my pocket, and start the sat nav software. I pull the theatre tickets out my pocket and get the street address of the theatre. It calculates the route for me, leaving the motorway at J26. So – and here is my first mistake – I go into the menus, and choose the alternative route option. This, I think calculates a different route for you – the non-obvious route. It now says I need to leave at J28, which is a mile and a half away. Great! Well, as you’ll see in a minute, it wasn’t, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

First, I had to contend with a surprise. No sooner had we started crawling along the motorway once more, than the sat nav software pops up a message, tellling me that my navigation subscription ran out three months ago. I f I wish to use the navigation feature, I’ll have to resubscribe. What? But is’s free now! I really need the navigation, so I choose the path of least resistance, and dig out my credit card, and pay, whilst crawling along at 5MPH. There. Done. Phew.

We reach J28 at about 20:00. To compound matters, we are still crawling down the slip road too, but that turns out to be because the traffic lights at the end of them are not phased to cope with large numbers of folks leaving the motorway at eight on a Saturday evening. Once we get past the end of the slip road everything is free flowing, except there is a new problem. The sat nav now wants to take me back onto the motorway. No! This is wrong! Panicing a little I tell me wife I’m going to ignore it, because I know the road I need to take, and once we’re on that road, it’ll recalculate and then go the best way. I make it onto the road we need to be on, and true to word, the sat nav recalculates. It says we are 21 minutes away from our destination. No! It’s now five past eight… This really isn’t good. What’s more, I know that I’ve given the theatre address to the sat nav, and we don’t want to go to that road, we want to go to one that is nearby, where there is a large car park. The two roads are not immediately connected to each other. If I follow the sat nav, I will most likely miss the car park and end up at the wrong place, with no time to spare. I am by now hugely anxious. I know the road I need if I am approaching from the motorway, but not the road I need if I am approaching from the road I am on. I don’t even know the name of the road with the car park on.

I tell myself that I just need to push on, and get to the city centre – I can sort it out when we get to the right area. But I am thwarted again…

After a mile or so, I can see that sat nav is going to send me sharp right at a junction half a mile ahead. That isn’t right! The city centre is dead ahead down this road! So I hit the alternative route button again. It tells me to do a u-turn. What! This is crazy! And then the logic in my head kicks in. Alternative route doesn’t mean take the next most direct route, it means take a scenic route – I’m in no hurry. And whats more, the more you select it, the more scenic is seems to get. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to reset it back to the most direct route, so I tell it to stop navigating, and then I start from scratch and put the address in once more, all whilst driving. Did I mention it was foggy? Well, yes, it was. I was driving along in fog, fiddling with the sat nav, whitst very anxious, and running very late. Not good. But hey – starting from scratch sorted the sat nav – it now took me on the direct route. And what’s more, the arrival time dropped by five minutes. Phew.

It was nearly eight twenty, when we made it to the city centre. By now, we were following signs for the theatre as well as using the sat nav. Then, in the fog, I missed a turn. Damn. The sat nav suggested we turn right ahead to compensate. I did. More theatre signs. Phew. We carried on a bit further, and then, all of a sudden, I saw the car park we were aiming to park in. Completely by chance we had ended up approaching it from the other side. We parked, and, with five minutes until curtain up, we dashed towards the theatre, which happened to also be five minutes away. When we got there I relaxed a little – there were still plenty of folks pouring in through the door to the foyer. Phew! We both needed to pee. My wife looked dismayed at the queue for the ladies – isn’t it always the way – and I made my way to the gents. Imagine my shock to find it full of women! Not just men dressed as women either – actual women trying to evade the queues for their own toilets. I threw caution to the wind and used the urinal despite the giggling women just a few feet behind me (I thank my kids for this – once you’ve had a three year old girl stare at what you are doing a few times, you can probably pee anywhere).

The bell rang, and folks started to disappear. My wife was still in the queue to get in the toilet door. Anxiety still building. Bah. I hunted out my tickets so I knew where they would be. I checked our seat numbers, and then went to find out which door we’d need to go through. I went and bought a program. The foyer was just about empty now, and the stewards were shouting that the performance was starting. Damn!

After what seemed like an eternity, my wife appeared. I dragged her up the stairs, and we found our seats. We’d missed the opening number, but we were there. I sat there glazed, tense and panicy. We’d not had a chance for a drink, but we had at least made it to our seats.

After a minute or two it became clear that the theatre was very noisey. You expect noise in a Rocky Horror showing – that’s all part of it, but it was especially noisey with chit-chat, far noisier that I remembered it being on my first visit. That was distracting – I found it hard to concentrate on the dialog on the stage. People were whooping and cheering and clapping in all the right places, but I wasn’t. It was just all too much, and the anxiety and tension were not helping. Before I knew it, we were all stood up – another Rocky main-stay – and dancing along. I attempted to move myself in time with the music, but failed. Never mind – I knew if I could just relax a bit, I’d be fine.

As the next few minutes passed, I did start to relax a bit, but the woman in the seat in front was annoying me. She was clearly very dunk, and determined to enjoy herself. That’s not a problem, of course, but she was doing things like throwing her head back in her seat, which was banging into my legs. In my already over-stimulated world, this was a huge distraction.

I did calm down a little and start to feel the show flow through me rather than around me. By the time the Timewarp came around for the first time, I was able to make a little bit of an attempt to join in. Not much - partly because even at the best and most relaxed of time I can’t dance well and look uncoordinated, but also because I’d forgotten the actions. However, I was feeling relaxed enough to try it now.

And then the real problem started. Whilst standing and dancing is all an accepted part of the show, we Brits are also unfailingly polite, and show etiquette dictates that once the dancing is finished, you sit down once more so that everyone can see. Everyone just does it. In lots of ways, it is a joy to see – it just happens in a coordinated manner, from the front towards the back, a row at a time.

But the drunken woman in front of me, and her friend in the seat to her left didn’t sit down. How awkward. I could just about see the action on stage in the gap between the two of them, as long as I kept moving about. How annoying. I didn’t feel annoyed though – it just made me feel more tense once more. After a couple of minutes, some of the women in the row behind me started shouting “Sit down!“. The standing women paid no attention. My anxiety was almost coming out of my ears now – I felt like a conduit for the brewing tension – but still I just sat and tried to see through the gap. By now I couldn’t hear the show any more, it had been drowned out by my internal dialogue, which was asking what I should do. I didn’t know what to do, but thankfully, I had the decision made for me. One of the women in the row behind me tapped me on the shoulder and shouted “can you get her attention so we can get her to sit down!”. As is often the case, once told what to do, I had no problem with the execution. I immediately tapped the standing woman on the shoulder , and as she turned, I shouted “Sit down!” at her. So did half a dozen women in at least one row and possibly two or more behind me.

Her reaction? “No! Fuck off!”. Oh, nice. This acted as some sort of catalyst for me. Instead of feeling anxious now, I suddenly felt very angry. So were the women behind me. The whole area behind me in the theatre were now shouting for the woman to sit down. She ignored them. Her friend didn’t though – she sat down. I stood up and right behind her shouted, with very obvious rage, words to the effect of, “Look – sit down! No one else is standing up! No one behind you can see! We’ve all paid to see the show! Let us see it! SIT DOWN!”. “No! Why the fuck should I?”, she said. The barrage from behind continued, and by now this had been going on for quite a while. Her friends were now asking her to sit down, and she was saying no to them too. Eventually, though, with repeated suggestions from her friends, she did sit down. She then spent the next five minutes talking loudly with her friends, in such a way that I was meant to hear, how pathetic and dumb I was being for asking her to sit down. This typical bullying behaviour has a devastating affect on me at the best of times, but in my current state is was crippling.

Literally crippling. I realised I was grasping both arm rests on the chair. I was stuck fast and tense in my seat. I could barely hear the performance, and I was hugely anxious once more. I was experiencing my strange anxious guilt that happens in situations like this. I know I’m not to blame for this situation, but my body tells me otherwise. The only thing being taken in by my senses were the actions of that woman. Fuelled by alcohol she was bullish, arrogant and aggressive, oh and completely irrational.

When the next stand-up section of the show happened, I didn’t stand immediately. Neither did many around me. Neither did the woman in front of me. She turned to her friends and said clearly, loudly, and with considerable sarcasm that she couldn’t possibly stand up, as it would block the view of those behind. Enraged, I tapped her on the shoulder and said “Look! You can stand up now – no one will mind, BECAUSE LOTS OF OTHER PEOPLE ARE STANDING UP TOO! Just PLEASE sit down when everyone else does, then everyone can see the show they have paid to see!”. She didn’t – she stayed sat down, as if to make a point.

After a couple of minutes she turned round to me and asked what my problem was. She asked why I needed to shout at her, with the confidence of someone who knows she is in the right. Why was I spoiling her show? You know what? I was doing it all because I was selfish. That’s what she said. From her point of view, I was the only person who had a problem with her actions, and it was me being selfish. Shying away from a further confrontation, I shook my head, sighed, and took the fortunate opportunity to stand up and dance that had just presented itself in the show. I didn’t dance of course, I just stood there glazed and anxious, but it did get her out of my face.

She appeared to calm down a bit after this, but spent most of the rest of the first half of the show chatting with her friends, or sulking in her seat when other stood – the sort of behaviour I would expect from my three year old daughter after a telling off. Remarkably, for someone so keen to stand up, she was spending very little time actually watching the show. She did, however leave me alone. The first half of the show went on for another twenty minutes or so, but when I left for the interval I was still very tense, and not really enjoying myself. I chatted a little about it with my wife, over a drink. The drink helped – it took the edge off things. My wife hadn’t heard what had been said between the woman and me, and she said she was glad she hadn’t – she’d said she’d probably have ended up hitting her if she had, and my wife is not a violent woman.

We took advantage of an empty seat to the right of us for the second half of the performance, which meant that I didn’t have to sit behind the drunken woman. Instead, she had an empty seat behind her. She rolled in five minutes late for the second half, and when her friends arrived back five minutes after that, she refused to stand up, which meant her friends took some time getting past her to their seats, leading to extended blocked views for use and others behind. All of this, I am sure was done deliberately and for effect.

But finally, I was able to relax and get into the show. By the end, at the final reprise of Timewarp, I was able to join in and do all the actions without feeling tense or that I was doing it wrong.

It wasn’t the end of the story for the drunken woman though – she decided that she would stand once more, and at various times during the second half of the performance, she once more decided not to sit down when others did, to more angry choruses of “SIT DOWN!” from behind and drunken “NO! FUCK OFF!” responses from her. I was very glad to be out of the firing line.

All in all, it was a very stenuous night for me. The late arrival, the missing of the start of the show, the altercation with an aggressive drunk, and the general loudness of all of it had all taken a large toll on me.

Sunday was filled with a mix of emotions. Flash-backs to the aggression, and to the delayed journey. You’ve seen from my writing here that I remember it all in huge detail. Well, perhaps I’ve needed to write about it here to get it out of my system a bit – to stop that huge detail from playing and replaying in my head time after time.

Did I enjoy it? Well in some ways, yes I did. I like the Rocky Horror Show. I like the music, and I like the themes. It’s fun – even if you are an Aspie. But what was always going to be a difficult night for me was ruined by a stressful journey and the effects of alcohol on someone else. I’m still paying the price today, and that’s no fun.

Confirmation

Wow.

Not only have I not written anything here for the last few months, I’ve not be reading any of your blogs either. For the first time in well over a year, AS has not been a conscious part of my daily routine for some time.

Today I’ve not only written here for the first time since November, but I’ve also spent a bit of time reading some of my favourite AS blogs. Wow really does sum it up for me.

I spent most of last year experiencing a strong sense of kinship with many of you who write about your experience of AS. Coming back to your writing after a break has felt quite profound.

I really am one of you.

The way you see the world is the same as the way I see it. The complexities you find in your social relationships are just like mine. Your confusion, surprise, shock, and routine are all mine too. Above all, there is that certain quality in the writing, something that I can never quite put my finger on that really screams at me that we are alike.

That’s not something I get anywhere else. Not from my family, nor from work colleagues or from any of my few friends who don’t have AS. And perhaps because of that, it feels amazing.

Thank you. All of you.

Awareness

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

My new job is going well – very well. That is the biggest reason that I’ve not been writing here.

It’s not that I couldn’t find the time to write, it’s a little more subtle than that. My new job has become my current special interest, and has taken on all the properties that that title bestows on it. Focus – that’s the main thing. By focus, I don’t mean that I’m getting lots done. I don’t mean that I’m obsessing about work when I get home either. Both of those attributes are what I would associate with a regular person who was committed to their job.

When my job becomes my special interest, something a little different than the above happens. Whilst at work, I am supremely focussed. Focussed on whatever it is that I’m doing at the time. I may have a to do list the length of my arm – indeed this is often the case, but I’ll struggle to get half of it done, despite working really hard. This isn’t due to a lack of productivity, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I complete the task I’m working on very thoroughly, and with great attention to detail, at the cost of the other tasks that need doing.

I won’t realise that I’m doing this whilst it is happening. To echo one of the great AS cliches, I lose track of time, and suddenly find myself near the end of the working day, aghast that I’ve not tackled several of the high priority items that I put on my list that morning. I will have had a blast of a day however, getting lost in the intricacies of some problem, and quite often bathing in the satisfaction associated with having nailed whatever the problem was.

It’s not just my other work tasks that get neglected, I’ll often have a few bits of personal logistics on my daily list – paying bills, finding a little something for my wife, that sort of thing – and much of the time I’ll not have tackled these either. I find this very frustrating, and over the years, no matter how I’ve tried to structure my day to allow me to complete more tasks, I’ve invariably slid back to a position where items get missed for the above reasons. I find that with great effort I can carry off some sort of structure that forces the execution of my list for a short time only. Invariably the effort required to make it work is just too great. I am not blessed with much of an ability to structure my life in a way that gets important tasks done in a reliable way. Call it executive dysfunction if you like.

At the end of the working day I drive home, and for the most part leave my work thoughts behind in the office. That’s great, but unfortunately I don’t get to enjoy my evenings in the sort of productive way that I note many of my peers do. There’s the initial feeling of exhaustion that I’ve written about before. That hour or so of feeling dazed and looking glazed that I put to down to too much sensory input at work and the forty five minute drive home. Once that’s worn off and the daily chores are done, I’m fit for nothing. I feel tired despite getting eight hours of sleep most nights, and find it difficult to bring myself to do anything productive.

But do you know what?

The above frustrations now also feel normal and comfortable. Whilst I have lived with the above challenges my whole life, it’s only really in the last year that I’ve become properly aware of them, and have had any kind of idea as to why they exist. My awareness has brought an acceptance of who I am. That’s incredibly powerful and empowering too. I’m never going to be all that good at getting a bunch of tasks done in a given day. By accepting that, I’ve removed the need to compare myself to those who don’t have AS. I no longer have to beat myself up for not managing to work in the way that I see many of my peers do.

One, two, three, four…

You know how it goes:

Ring-Ring. One…

You don’t like calling people on the phone, and have just spent ages trying to pre-play the conversation in your head.

Ring-Ring. Two…

Anxiety is sloshing around.

Ring-Ring. Three…

It’s ok, people rarely pick up on three rings, unless they are sitting by the phone.

Ring-Ring. Four…

Ok, I admit it. I count the rings before people pick up the phone.

Ring-Ring. Five…

It’s partly to do with knowing when to put the phone down when the phone isn’t being answered.

Ring-Ring. Six…

It’s also to do with my love of patterns. I find myself counting involuntarily these days.

Ring-Ring. Seven…

Come on – where are they?

Ring-Ring. Eight…

Hmmm… Maybe they aren’t there. But eight rings isn’t all that long. (It’s actually around 24 seconds…)

Ring-Ring. Nine…

I can visualise them running towards the phone now.

Ring-Ring. Ten…

Pick it up! Oh no. They didn’t. Maybe they weren’t running after all…

Ring-Ring. Eleven…

Maybe this time! Oh – no.

Ring-Ring. Twelve.

Handset  down.

I don’t know why I picked twelve rings to be the cut off point if I’m honest. If I really think about it, most people have picked up by half a dozen rings if they are there. But twelve it is, most of the time. If I’m phoning a utility or some other sort of service I’ll hold on for longer. But with people, I count to twelve and then put the handset down.

Do any of you have a hidden and slightly odd use of patterns like this one? I’d love to hear about it!

Peter Pan’s new coat

Ah yes – Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I was left feeling like Peter yesterday.

It all started when we rushed out the door on Sunday morning. I took the kids to the rugby ground – my son for his weekly training session, and my daughter to stand and watch with me, whilst my wife went to the supermarket just down the road from the rugby club to get the weekly food shop done. I say supermarket, but it’s actually two right next to each other – Aldi, the lovely and decidedly quirky German import, and Asda, the local giant which is now owned by America’s Walmart. Asda’s name, incidentally, comes from a contraction of Associated Dairies.  I mention this because it is one of those odd little bits of information that frequently pops into my head when Asda is mentioned – there is clearly an association there in my brain, and my AS helps to push me into mentioning it. Only after I’ve told this to people will I start to feel embarrassed for having done so.

Anyway – Asda isn’t the star here, it’s Aldi. Aldi is great – it doesn’t stock the huge range of Asda, and it isn’t big on well known brands, but the things it stocks are usually of excellent quality, and many – such as cold continental meats – are better and also much cheaper than at their giant next door neighbour. Aldi also have a clever trick of having some non-food specials in twice a week at unbeatable prices. Everything from power tools to computers, light bulbs to bathroom furniture. At the start of the summer we bought a giant four berth tent and lots of camping equipment from them when they opened one Tuesday morning (just in case they would sell out before we got there), at prices far better than any of our local outdoors shops could manage. We like Aldi. Anyway…

Whilst I supervised the kids at the rugby, my wife went to Aldi first, and then across to Asda for the few items she couldn’t get at Aldi. We met up at the end of the training, and she told me that she’d seen some winter coats at Aldi – both for my son and me. We wandered down the road to take a look. My son liked his jacket, and I thought the one my wife had found for me was great. They were silly money too, so we bought them. For £18.99 I got a waterproof coat with an unzippable fleece lining. It’s nicely finished, is deliciously warm, and has plenty of pockets. My son’s is like a slightly brighter scaled down version of mine. The fleece lining doesn’t unzip on his, but hey – for £7.99 you really can’t complain – and it is still waterproof.

At home, after lunch, I found myself doing something that I remember doing when I was a child.

I took my new coat, and spent a good ten minutes pouring over it in great detail. I unzipped each of the pockets in turn, and explored them with my hands, seeing what size they were, and wondering where to put each of the things that I carry around with me. I marvelled at the stitching, and carefully cut off the couple of stray thread ends. I examined how the fleece was zipped in, amazed at the trickery used to hide the metal zip ends behind folds in the softer material where it might make contact with my neck.  I tried it on and then took it off again, and then put it back on and did up the zip right to the top. I unfolded the hood from it’s hidden compartment, and then carefully folded it back up. I felt the fabric of the fleece lining and of the outside too. I listened to the sound that my hand made on the outer fabric.

This is something I can always remember doing with clothes, but especially with coats. Coats tend to be quite complicated garments with lots of pockets, so there is much to explore. I can still remember a summer coat (this is the UK after all) that I got when I was about ten. It was green and blue and yellow – very garish in today’s terms, but quite fashionable back in the mid eighties. It had a pouch on the front for your hands, much like a hoody sweat top, but you had to peel the pouch off (it fastened on at the top and one side with velcro) to zip and unzip the jacket – really very unusual. I loved it for it’s unusualness, and for the lovely way it had been stitched together. To me, it was a coat to be proud of. I guess I feel much the same way about my new coat. It is a no-name brand, and in all likelihood the material probably isn’t wonderful quality, and maybe it’ll lose it’s waterproofness quickly. But it is well engineered in a very German way, and well finished, and it was an astonishing bargain to boot.

I keep wanting to put it on – in fact each time I’ve popped out of the office this morning, I’ve put it on. This is unusual – I usually brave the trip to the coffee shop or the post office in just my shirt sleeves, even at this time of the year.

So, I feel like Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I feel ten years old again, pouring pride and affection into my new coat. I can’t help it – it’s just me.

Yet whilst my actions may be very much like they were when I was child, I’m concious of the fact that they are not the actions of many, probably most kids. My son is only five, so I can’t compare directly with myself at ten, but his reaction to his new coat was, I think, fairly typical of boys in particular. He liked the colours, pronounced it as  cool and said he’d wear it. When we got home, it got discarded on the kitchen floor and forgotten about until this morning when it was time to leave for school.

Will he react that way at ten? I can’t say, but I suspect he’s more likely to continue to react that way than to have my fascination with the mechanics and design of it.

In lots of ways I’m like Peter Pan – many of the things I do now are the same as when I was a child. However, the child in me is still really rather different from your typical child, so the comparison feels strained to me. I’ve read many times over the last year about immaturity and naiveness in adults with Asperger’s, and associated behaviour being described as child-like. But it occurs to me that I’ve not seen it pointed out that the behaviour is child-like in a peculiarly ASD way – but it most certainly is. And remember how kids with ASDs get described? That’s right – as little professors.

So maybe I’m not like Peter Pan at all. Maybe I’m actually like a little professor, in an adults body, with a strange fascination for winter coats.

A different focus

I wasn’t intending to have a break in writing these last few weeks – it’s just the way that things have worked out. Interestingly, the reasons behind my lack of writing have ended up being very life-affirming for me.

First, the good news: I was approached by someone I used to work with a couple of months ago, about joining them in a new work venture. At the time, I completely failed to grasp the subtle undertones used by them in their email approach. They asked if I knew of anyone with my job skills who might be available, and incidentally, was I available? I couldn’t think of anyone else, and then told them I wasn’t available right now. They pursued me more, and suggested that the job they had available would be pretty exciting, and that maybe I’d like to pop round and have a chat with them about it in more detail. Having thought things over, I decided against pursuing it further, and politely declined.

End of story.

Well, no. I got another email a couple of weeks ago, asking if I might want to reconsider. It was only really when I read this that I realised just how much they were specifically interested in me, and not in whether I knew of anyone with my sort of skills.  You see, this time they said that they were disappointed that I’d turned them down before, and that they were interested in me because I’d worked with them before, and thought I’d be a great fit in their company. I don’t do subtlety very well – it tends to pass me by. Spell things out though, and well, I can see what is really being said.

So, once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I went and had a chat with them, which essentially involved me interviewing them, and them trying to sell the opportunity to me. They succeeded. I join them in a month or so! My skills suit the new job far better than the one I’m doing now. I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into it.

My investigation of my potential new employer shifted my focus somewhat. I found that I was spending a lot of my time thinking about the opportunity, and I also made a concious decision not to do any writing here whilst I was preparing to meet them – to help me focus. Without realising it, my job prospect suddenly took on all the familiar aspects of a special interest, and everything else got pushed to the back burner. I was getting the same intense feelings about the job opportunity as I have been getting most of this year from thinking about Asperger’s. I went from checking my blog visitor stats every hour or two, and ruminating over what to write about several times a day, to not thinking about the blog at all, and checking the stats every few days. Just like that.

The sudden change in focus has surprised me. Introspection regarding Asperger’s, and writing this blog has felt so deeply ingrained in me these last few months, that the possibility of not thinking about it has been, well, unthinkable. And yet, without expecting it, that was exactly what had happened. Initially, I was intrigued.

With Asperger’s shifted from being the core of my thinking, would life be any different?

Well, at times it has felt like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. By not ruminating deeply about Asperger’s and not looking in microscopic detail at how it affects my life, I’ve not been seeing as many aspects of my life where I feel that I don’t do well. My mood has lifted – but then again, I’ve got a new and exciting job to look forward to, so my mood is going to have been lifted by that too. I’m sure the lack of Asperger’s special interest has played it’s part, but I can’t solely put down my better outlook on life down to lack of it.

Here’s the really interesting thing for me: I wondered if my lack of focus on AS would make my life better – whether I would somehow revert to being more normal if AS wasn’t the middle – and indeed edges – of my world. I think that deep down, that little grain of self doubt in me that isn’t sure that I have AS wondered if my lack of AS focus would have an impact on my behaviour. Is any of my behaviour simply down to conditioning over the course of this year? Have I talked myself into being an Aspie? Have I played out a stereotypical Aspie interaction with the world simply because I’ve learned to do so?

No. I’ve already admitted that I simply replaced one special interest with another – AS got replaced with new job. I thought about it and poured over the pros and cons of joining a small business in every bit as much detail as I have recently thought about AS. I spent a day pretty much solely tracking down hardware and then making a recommendation about what I’d like to use on my desktop when I join. This was fully costed out, with alternate options, all spelled out in an email that took me hours to write in a way that I felt was just right. I’ve spent another day pouring over Google maps, trying to work out the best commute for the new job, including costing out the various options. In short, I’ve been every bit as focussed and all consumed by my new special interest as I have been by Asperger’s all these months.

And in the mean time, my daily interaction with the world has gone on, pretty much unchanged. On days where my mood has been especially buoyant, I’ve maybe taken a little more time to try and make small talk with folks – but that too is normal. My interaction with the world has always been governed by mood – I have good days and bad days, just like everyone else. It’s my wife’s 40th in less than a month, and I keep finding myself thinking that I must sort out her present. I have been saying this every day for a couple of weeks now, and have only managed to spend a little time on one day actually doing something about it. As usual, on all the other days where I should have been sorting it out, my focus on something else (the new job in this case) means it simple doesn’t cross my mind at a time where I can do something about it – even if I’ve written it down in my book of things to do.

So there you go – despite not thinking about AS, my life has carried on in the same familiar AS-like way that it has always done. If you can sense a little surprise in my writing you’d be right, because that little grain of self doubt can be very powerful. But that little grain of self doubt is wrong. I don’t act Aspie, it is simply, and always has been a part of who I am.

Empathy from two perspectives

Last night, something dawned on both me and my wife. Whilst I can empathise with others, I can’t empathise in the same way that she can.

It’s not that my ability to empathise is less strong than hers per se, more that I can’t use empathy in the same scenarios that she can.

This all came about because my wife had asked me how I thought she felt at that moment, and I’d realised that I found it very difficult to gauge. My guess was just that – a guess – and as it turned out, it was well wide of the mark. I would never have guessed the emotions that she was actually feeling.

However, as soon as she had explained to me how she was feeling, I experienced a huge wave of empathy, and managed to express some of it too.

The difference in our abilities was suddenly clear to both of us.

My wife can easily put herself in someone else’s shoes and understand and empathise with them just through observation and an understanding of the general situation that the person is in.

I, on the other hand have to be told how the other person is feeling to understand and empathise. Once I’m aware of their feelings, my empathy is every bit as strong as my wife’s.

I’d never really appreciated this difference in experience before. I think that perhaps I had, if anything, assumed that my experience of empathy was normal. But to be fair it isn’t something that I’ve ever thought about all that much. I’m now thinking that it’s my experience that is unusual, and that indeed my wife’s is more typical.

Of course, it doesn’t always work this way. There are situations where someone’s emotions are immediately obvious to me, and I’m sure that there are others where my wife gets it wrong. But most of the time, we both fit our very different pattern well.

Armed with this new perspective on things, I wonder if this explains why people who aren’t autistic frequently comment that those of us who are can’t empathise.

If your average person can empathise and express their empathy without having to be told how the other person is feeling, then I can see how they would perceive someone like me as having no empathy at all. After all, I often don’t get how someone is feeling, and even when I do, I find it difficult to express my empathy, as I’m not sure of the right words.

Does this make sense to any of you?

An allegorical story

Perhaps the most visible aspect of my Asperger’s – if you were actually to look for it – is the way in which I interact with other people.

There is quite a distinct style behind this, and some strongly embedded techniques that I use all the time to try and make my life easier.
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Relationships with women and tales of regret

When I was growing up, my relationships with women were unusual. This article covers a time line that stretches from my early teenage school days, right through to my mid twenties, and as such, covers situations that happened at school, university and in my early work life. This article is deeply personal, and contains mild sexual references – if this isn’t your thing, then you may want to skip this one.

Throughout this time in my life I was ignored by a great many of my female peers – almost as though I was invisible (something, incidentally, which Rachel writes wonderfully about here). In a sense, that didn’t bother me. I felt no great desire to interact with these young women – whilst many of my male class-mates and work colleagues found them to be hugely attractive, I didn’t.

Those that did interact with me – well that was a completely different story, and one that perplexed me until very recently. Maybe once or twice a year on average, someone who I was either at school or work with would discover me. They would always make the first move, and start talking to me. Whilst I find group conversation difficult, I have always enjoyed talking one to one with others. I can manage this sort of conversation quite well, and it allows me to feel a connection with others. Over the years I often found myself doing quite a lot of it with young women.
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