Frazzled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gah!

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

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

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6 Comments to “Frazzled”

  1. leica 20 August 2009 at 08:50  (Quote) #

    I think all of what you wrote just sounds very normal, like the real-life trials and tribulations all families have. I don’t think you should give it another thought. I know easier said than done.

    I think generally being different sometimes makes us feel like we always are, even when that isn’t the case at all.

    There is always something else that needs to be done. That doesn’t mean configuring resiliency into a server isn’t something that needs to be done as well.

    Maybe just try to chalk it up to real-life, if bog-standard pressures and not worry too much?

    Reply
    • James 21 August 2009 at 10:17  (Quote) #

      leica,

      I do take your point about sometimes seeing the ordinary complications of life that everyone has as mistakenly being something AS related.

      I still feel there is a subtle point in the posting that makes the situation different from how a normal person would handle this, and it’s really to do with my reaction.

      I’ve gotten very stressed and anxious about the situation, and that’s a direct consequence of the AS and how I’ve learnt to react to it over the years.
      My anxiety and my AS in general means that I suddenly can’t see the wood for the trees and don’t know whether my behaviour is reasonable or not. I withdraw and don’t know what to do. I can’t explain verbally to my wife what the problem is – all classic AS problems.

      Most normal people would simply argue their case, and get back an argument as good as they give, until both sides found some common ground and calmed down.

      I’ve tried this approach when feeling brave in the past and have come completely unstuck. I took the shouted arguments against me very personally, and ended up a gibbering heap on the carpet, unable to deal with the reaction.

      Part of my wife’s frustration is that she knows she can’t have arguments like this with me that will clear the air for her. It must be very frustrating for her.

      So yes – the situations above are all part of every day life for families. My reaction to them isn’t though, and hence my wife’s reaction isn’t either, causing her further frustration, and making it difficult to resolve things.

      Reply
      • Liz 23 August 2009 at 03:06  (Quote) #

        James, the thing about not getting an official diagnosis is that you may be missing pieces of information regarding your own particular deficits. Have you ever heard of alexithymia? It’s more common in Aspergers sufferers than the NT population.

        I learned about it in a book called “Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Adults with Aspergers,” by Valerie Gaus. I’m extracting this excerpt from her book to see if it makes any sense to you.

        “The obstacles or factors reducing interpersonal effectiveness can be lack of skill, worry thoughts, emotions, indecision or environmental constraints. People with Aspergers suffer from a combination of lack of skill and indecision. They lack the prerequisite skill of recognizing their own internal mental states, recognizing that their distress can be a signal for a need to initiate change in the environment, differentiating emotions from needs, and translating them into words. Adults with Aspergers have a higher rate of alexithymia (a deficit in the fund or accessibility of words to describe subjective states).

        I wonder if these findings are related to my clinical observations of the difficulty they have with learning assertiveness skills. As a prerequisite to assertiveness training, many adults with Aspergers need to learn to connect their internal states with words. An invaluable tool for teaching this skill can be found in Talk Blocks for Work (Innovative Interactions, 2000). Capitalizing on the strong visual skills that many of these patients have, the Talk Blocks serve as a visual multiple choice cue set to help the Asperger adult recognize and differentiate his or her needs in stressful situations.

        The Talk Blocks are a set of six blocks, each with a picture and phrase on each of the six sides. Three blocks are red, to symbolize feelings, three blocks are blue, to symbolize needs. First, the person is asked to look at each of the red blocks to find a word to best describes their feelings (they can pick more than one). Then the person is given the blue blocks to help them figure out what needs to be done to resolve these feelings.

        The person learns various things from practicing this exercise repeatedly with different real-life scenarios. One is the ability to make connections between subjective states and words. Another is the idea that a feeling can actually prompt one to change something in the environment in order to relieve distress.

        It is my opinion that this multimodal presentation optimizes whatever learning style the person may have. There is the obvious verbal presentation of the words, but it is associated with nonverbal visual cues (picture symbols and color coding), along with tactile involvement because the person must hold and rotate each block in his or her hand while processing the choices.

        Not all the feeling words are “pure” emotions. However, the purpose of the task is not to teach emotional proficiency but rather to begin building a connection between subjective states, whether they be emotions or beliefs, and words, and the fact that those states can prompt a need for change.

        Not all the solutions on the “I need” blocks involve other people. The goal is to get the person to realize that he or she can initiate an adaptation when in distress.”

        James, I don’t know if the talking blocks would work for you, but her book had some really good information. Whenever you feel bad about how your Aspergers affects your wife, remember that she’s learning from you the information she will need to be a good mother to her sons. You’ve heard the expression about opportunity being disguised as hard work. Well your Aspergers may be a blessing disguised as a burden.

        Good luck and God bless you!

        Reply
        • James 24 August 2009 at 09:23  (Quote) #

          Hi Liz,

          This is interesting.

          The text you quote does describe me rather well.

          I’ve not come across the block system mentioned before, but I recently saw a similar, but simpler scheme in action on a TV program.

          In that example, a young autistic woman (she had AS) had a set of ‘Emotion Cards’ that showed a pictorial representation of an emotion with the name of the emotion attached. She used the cards to convey how she was feeling.

          As someone who finds it difficult (ok, more often than not practically impossible) to verbally discuss emotions, I can see how this system could be very useful.

          I would however find it extremely difficult to bypass the stigma attached with using such a system, regardless of how useful it might be. I can suddenly comprehend why people who start to lose their hearing in later life chose not to wear hearing aids – there is a feeling of failure and also one of “I’m not disabled” involved.

          I take your point about my wife learning things from me that will help with the raising of our children. I’d not considered that!

          Thanks for your best wishes,

          James

          p.s. I reformatted your comment to make it easier to read, without altering the content. I hope you don’t mind.

          Reply
          • eaucoin 30 August 2009 at 18:36  (Quote) #

            James, I wasn’t thinking of you using this system with other people, but just to help you when you get stuck, like you know how some people keep a stress ball in a drawer for working tension out through their hands. You could have these six “paperweights” lying around in a drawer that would help you change gears when you’re stuck. There are lots of times when no one will want to hear about your feelings, but you will still need to recognize and acknowledge them yourself to get through them. Even the “I’m not disabled” stuff will have to be worked through. You don’t want your children to be afraid to ask for help. Even if you never speak about how ashamed you feel sometimes about not being normal, your kids will sense it, especially if they share your handicap. Just because our culture sometimes seems to only value perfection doesn’t mean that the striving to reach one’s own potential can’t be promoted within our own families as admirable.

            Reply
            • James 2 September 2009 at 13:40  (Quote) #

              eaucoin (Liz, I think?),

              Thanks for the kind thoughts and suggestions.

              I’ve found that I use my writing here to help recognise and deal with my thoughts and feelings these days. It’s taken a while to fully open up here, but now that I’ve managed to do this, I’ve found the process to be very liberating.

              Maybe something like the blocks would help too – particularly when I’m having a bad moment of executive dysfunction that expresses itself in me not feeling able to make a decision about something.

              Reply

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