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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

Post from: That Explains Everything

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Subtlety

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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.

Post from: That Explains Everything

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The Timewarp

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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.

Post from: That Explains Everything

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A different focus

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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.

First, I assume the other person is right by default, and I acknowledge this in lots of ways whilst I’m interacting with others. To do otherwise will often lead to me having to defend myself, and this feels both threatening, and difficult from the point of view of finding the right words.

Secondly, I’ll resort to communicating in a written way, if I can get away with it. In the office, email is king for me. By doing this, I can take more time to find the right words for what I’m trying to express. If you knew me, and really thought about it (I doubt people do), you’d realise that I can express myself far better in email than I can face to face.

I also use mimicry quite heavily, especially when in larger groups. If people laugh, then I laugh. I’m often not fully aware at what I’m laughing at, but I know that to blend in, I should laugh, so I do. Understanding the joke can come later, unless of course I’ve already reached the point of over-stimulation.

Perhaps the most intriguing technique I use is that of metaphor, analogy and allegory. This is a technique I’ve learned to apply frequently when I need to describe something to someone. It has been a technique many years in the making – probably a lifetime, and certainly from way before the prospect of having Asperger’s was ever on the horizon.

So, why do I use it?

I’ve always found it difficult to verbalise ideas and thoughts that are in my head. This, you may be surprised to hear is something of a new revelation to me, despite suffering from it my whole life. Mundane stuff can be easy to say, as can information about subjects which have become something of a special interest, but feelings, emotions, concepts, techniques and other things like that I frequently find difficult.

In the days before I understood that this might be part of a neurological condition, I realised that others found it difficult to understand what I was trying to convey to them when discussing something that I found difficult to put into words. I would get flustered, and would find that the more I tried to put it into words, the less sense it made to me, and unsurprisingly to the other person too. Suddenly, I would find that I didn’t have the words that adequately described how I perceived the concept in my head. What I didn’t know at the time, was whether the other person found my words to be difficult to interpret, or if it was the subject itself. I also didn’t understand why it was difficult for me – it just was, and that was that. In other words, I had no real concept as to whether others had the same difficulty in expressing things verbally in the same way that I did. I may even have assumed that they did, unless they were very obviously an extremely eloquent speaker.

My response to this was to try and find some other way to express what I was trying to say. Metaphor. Analogy. Allegory.

These techniques seemed to work very well for me, because they generally turned a concept in my head into some visual picture. A concept that was difficult for me to interpret could be shoe-horned into an allegorical story (well, just about), and it would then make far more sense to me. Then, when it came to trying to explain the concept to someone else, I’d resort to the allegory after my first attempt had caused confusion.

Does my use of these techniques help the other person to understand? I used to think that it always helped. That isn’t true, though. The real picture is that sometimes, yes, it helps. Other times, no.

What I can say with some certainty is that it helps me tremendously, much of the time. By turning a difficult concept or thought into a silly situation with characters that I can picture, it instantly makes more sense to me.

These days, I wonder if the language in my head is different from that of the typical person. I know, for instance, that I’m a very visual thinker. Could it be that the way that I process thoughts and feelings uses different techniques than a typical person? Might this explain why I don’t seem to have a very appropriate language to turn my thoughts into verbalised words? Might it also explain why I find feelings so difficult to explain, and why I find concepts difficult too? Maybe these things do have a language of sorts inside my head, but the language is not the same one I verbally use.  Indeed it’s happening right now, even in writing. I have a picture in my head of how this might work, but I can’t find the right words to describe it.

One thing is for sure though – in my tool kit that helps me make sense of the world,  allegory is one of the first tools that I reach for.

Was that a metaphor?

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An allegorical story

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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.

And at this point, expectations and desires started to go in different directions. For their part, the young women found a bright young man that they could get on with. Someone that they found strangely easy to talk to. Someone they could confide in and be themselves with.

Whilst I may have found this too, I invariably found something else. I started to see beauty. Not beauty in the sense that people typically use the term. Some of these women were, of course, conventionally visually beautiful, but the beauty I was seeing was in how they functioned and thought – all of what they were was beautiful. The more I spoke to them, the more beautiful they appeared to be to me, and the more I fell in love with them.

Ah. A hopeless story on many levels. They found an unusual thing – a male friend who they could treat like a female friend. Some of them revelled in this for a while. I found unrequited love, and that ultimately lead to the end of most of these friendships.

You see, whilst I may be unconventional in the way I interact with people due to my lack of social intuition and sometimes even basic social skills, I’m still often engaging to talk to one to one. But whilst I’m clearly a gentle guy that doesn’t use body language that suggests that I’m trying to hit on you, I still feel those typical male urges. Perhaps my definition of attractiveness in a woman is different to my peers, but it is still very much there.

These friendships caused me a great deal of pain over the years. They are nothing, however, to the despair caused by missed opportunities.

There were only a small handful of these, and for the most part, they happened in my early work years, whilst I was single, and living in London. A woman I worked with would take the usual route of striking up a conversation with me, and would find, to her surprise, someone who she really like to talk to. No surprise here for me, of course, it was what I was used to. And then after a month or two, typically after a social evening at a pub, or at a party at someone’s house, it would happen. She’d make a pass at me. I’d miss it. Seriously. My uncertainty and lack of confidence meant that I acted too aloof when suggestions were made that could have lead to intimacy. Nothing intimate ever happened.

Like the time after a house party full of work colleagues, where many of us had decided to hang around until morning. A female friend of mine was in one of the beds, and had recently stripped off, complaining of being too hot. I was at the other end of the room, laying on the chaise longue. We’d been chatting with the female host, but she’d made some excuse to go and chat with someone else, so we were now alone. We were both quite drunk and stoned. My female friend took off her glasses, yawned, stretched and then smiled at me. She made a few little snuggly wriggles under the duvet, and then suggested that instead of shouting across the room, I should come over to the bed to talk with her. She even patted the bit of bed next to her. I didn’t. I stayed where I was – I could hear her just fine. We chatted some more, and eventually, our host rejoined us, and ultimately sleep overtook all of us. I slept on the chaise longue, and they shared the bed.

It wasn’t until the next day, having caught an early tube home, and after I’d caught up on some sleep, and shaken off the hangover, that I started to think over the events of the night before, and what was actually going on. The removal of clothes, the excuses made by our host to leave us alone. She even shut the bedroom door on her way out. The subtle but clear suggestions from my friend. At the time, I missed it all. Did I find my friend attractive? Of course. Could I have shared intimacy with her? Absolutely. If she’d said, “come over here and kiss me,” would I have reacted differently? I suspect so.

To this day, that night frequently haunts me and fills me with deep regret. Right now talking about it is nearly bringing tears to me eyes. How could I have missed what was so obvious?

And then there was the time that a group of us had a night out and agreed to all go back to someone’s flat and go our separate ways in the morning. A female friend from work who had been chatty with me for a few months was there. She confided early on in the evening that there was someone else there who fancied her, and that she couldn’t stand. Could I help her out? There weren’t enough beds for everyone, and the chap she didn’t like had suggested that they share a bed a the end of the night – purely in a platonic way. She wanted to avoid this, she said, and asked if I might share the bed with her. Platonic once more, course – I was such a good friend that she knew she could trust me.

I agreed. She almost immediately made the sleeping arrangements public, and everyone then agreed amongst themselves how the other beds would be shared out so that everyone got a mattress and no-one got the floor. How wonderfully democratic, I thought.

The night passed, and we all ended up back at the flat, drunk and happy. People started to drift off to bed, and my friend went a good half an hour before I did. When she decided to go, she made a point of saying it multiple times, like we’d not heard her the first time. When I decided that it was time for sleep, I crept into the darkened room, and saw her silhouette as she lay facing away from me in what turned out to be a single bed. Oh – I wasn’t expecting that – I’d never asked what size the bed was. I quietly called her to see if she was a awake. She wasn’t. So, taking off my jacket, but keeping the rest of my clothes on, I squeezed under the duvet next to her. It immediately became apparent that she was naked from the waist down, with just a T-shirt on her top half. I lay on my back, not daring to move. Had she forgotten that she said we’d share the bed? Should I go elsewhere? I was drunk. I lay there for what seemed like an eternity, and then eventually fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke, and nursed my hangover. It was a work day, so I needed to get up, and out to work – in the same work clothes (yup, full suit) that I’d been wearing the day before, and that I’d just slept in. I pulled the duvet back, and then went to sit on the edge of the bed. Once more I was reminded that my friend was naked from the waist down, so I gently covered her back up. She stirred, then turned and smiled an uneasy and slightly perplexed hungover smile at me. For days afterwards, my friend kept mentioning what a nice night it had been.

Years of rumination have left me concluding me that this situation was far less clear cut than the other I mentioned, but I do still think that on balance my friend had intended for us to get intimate at bed time. I’d failed to spot her signals, and she had fallen asleep by the time I got to bed. Another beautiful woman, another completely missed set of signals. Another lifetime of haunting regret.

–

If you aren’t autistic, then you’ll probably think that I’m crazy sharing the above with you. It’s very personal stuff, and not the sort of thing that people talk about. Even I know that. If you have an ASD, then I wonder if you also feel I’m crazy, or if you actually understand. I’d be grateful to hear from you.

You see, this is an area of my life that has been greatly influenced by my Asperger’s and how it affects my ability to interact with other people. The stories I relate have swirled around in my head for many years now causing repeated hurt, and I’ve never told anyone about them. I don’t want them to haunt me for the rest of my life, and I’m hoping that by explaining them, I’ll help to exorcise their ghosts from my memory.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that  another aspect of my neurological makeup means that I can’t remember the name of the young woman in the first tale. We worked together for at least eighteen months, and were close for several months, albeit without any intimacy. Whatever your name was, beautiful woman, I’m sorry.

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Relationships with women and tales of regret

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A great many people, it would seem, don’t believe in things they can’t see. I can understand that point of view – the world seems to be a much simpler place if you take everything you see at face value. If the world has taught me one thing, though, it is that you can’t take anything at face value.

From time to time, people have seen my Asperger’s in every day life, and have commented on it.

“You walk funny,” said one of my so-called friends at school. I’d maybe have been twelve at the time. I did walk funny – well I had assumed I did for some time, because I wore out the soles on my shoes in an unusual way, certainly in a different way to that of my peers. The jibe still hurt though.

Maybe a year or two later, and still at school, I took part in the annual sports day. I ran – slowly – in a 400m race. After coming in at the tail of the field, I made my way back to where my classmates were gathered, only to find them doing odd looking runs and laughing at each other. “You run funny,” one of them said to me. Their mimicry of my running style left me feeling terrible, yet I knew instantly that they were right.

When I was sixteen, my maths teacher took me to one side after a lesson one day, and asked if everything was ok. Actually he went much further than this, and astutely pointed out that I seemed to be suffering badly from stress. “You should try yoga. Really. Give it a go. If you don’t learn to unwind, you’ll end up making yourself ill.”

At some point in my mid twenties, I noticed that the default relaxed position for my face included a frown. By this time I already had deep wrinkles on my forehead, caused by the facial expressions I pull when stressed or anxious – which is a lot of the time. I’m often not concious that I’m pulling a face.

Over the last fifteen or so years, I’ve heard the same thing at least half a dozen times from concerned work colleagues: “Are you alright? Its just that you look really worried”. I’m typically taken aback by comments like this, and require some top notch acting to talk my way out of the situation. I’ll put on an instant huge smile, and make up some tale about being lost in thought about something, rather than being worried. Whilst I may have just been going about my usual routine, they have mostly been right – I will be have ruminating and worrying about something or other, and oblivious to me, it showed on my face.

The one thing all of these scenarios have in common is that people noticed something about me that was caused in one way or another by my Asperger’s. I’m sure that not one of them wondered if what they saw was connected to Asperger’s, however, and why would they? The human condition has many causes for all of the above traits, and people tend to plump for the explanation that they have come across before, and thus seems the most likely.

I’ve avoided what are perhaps the obvious examples of how Asperger’s shows itself here – examples that involve social interaction. Clearly, when I can’t or don’t shy away from a social event, there are often times, particularly towards the end of the event, where I get tired, overloaded, and my acting will start to slip. Indeed, I wrote about one such event recently. But just as I’ve focussed on this sort of trip-up before, so have many others, and I thought it would be nice to show that just sometimes, people do spot the outward signs of AS in other ways.

Asperger’s is a hidden condition, its true. With so many other potential causes of those outward symptoms that people do sometimes see, its easy to see why some people simply don’t believe in it. But if you know what to look for, and you know someone for long enough, just maybe, sometimes, you will see it, even if you have no clue what it is that you are really observing.

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You walk funny

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I understand many of the reasons why friends are important these days, and yet at this moment, aside from my wife, I really don’t have any good friends. Good is, of course, subjective. What I mean by good, is someone who I can be myself with 100% of the time, who I can be fully open with, and who I’d happily (and regularly) disappear down the pub with, or go out for a hike with, or, well, I’m sure you get the idea.

I’m in this predicament due to my own making. I last tinkered with trying to create a good friend maybe eighteen months ago, and failed. This didn’t come as a surprise, sadly. I find it very difficult to keep relationships going, and in that particular case I ultimately let it lapse after we went out for drinks a few times. In a way, letting people into my inner circle feels very overwhelming. I’m comfortable with my wife being in there most of the time, but with other people, I can see that I’m acting rather than being myself, and I guess I feel afraid to let others  in to see who I really am.

So, what does someone like me do when for one reason or another, communications break down with the one person (i.e. my wife) who is within my inner circle? That’s a very good question, and not one that I have a very good answer for.

There have been a few times recently where, with raw emotions in full flow, I have felt I have no-one to turn to. That’s not a nice feeling at all.

My wife works very hard to understand and accept this monster of a condition which she wasn’t expecting to find hidden inside me. But I fully understand that this isn’t at all easy for her, and there are times when she can’t help me, and would just like the whole Asperger’s thing to go away.

This all makes me see how many people with Asperger’s lack any of the good friends that they need to help keep them make sense of the world. Continually turning the raw emotion and negative feelings inwards must cause a lot of damage and despair, and I feel very lucky that I don’t experience that very often.

Sometimes, I can turn to this blog to express some of the feelings that are causing me problems. But that doesn’t always work either – there are some things that I just won’t talk about here. Whilst you see me as I really am, there are some aspects that I simply don’t write about. That’s usually because for one reason or another it would be inappropriate for me to comment.

If you are one of the handful of regular visitors here who I know in some way other than just through comments, then I hope you don’t feel hurt by this posting. I do consider you as friends, and in lots of ways you do know the real me. None of you are physically located close to me, however, and you all have enough on your plate already without me offloading in your direction. Unfortunately these things rule you out of being a good friend by my own definition. I hope you understand what I mean.

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Having no-one to turn to

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I turned, and there was the new manager from work. She’s based at the other end of the country, and visits us for a couple of days every other week or so. “Oh, hi Lynne,” I said. As I paid for my breakfast and she bought a Latte, we exchanged very basic small talk. I asked if she was here for a leaving do that’s happening after work tomorrow – Lynne is replacing one of those who is leaving.

Perhaps you may have taken from my last sentence that I was asking if that was the primary reason she was here. I wasn’t meaning that, but I think that’s how Lynne took it, judging by the slightly confused look on her face. She was going to attend, yes, but she was here for other things as well. Of course I hadn’t meant the question the way it had sounded, but – oh well.

By now I’d finished paying and was wondering if I should politely wait for Lynne, as she would be heading back to the same office as me. In the blink of an eye, she clearly sensed this too, and said,”Oh, don’t bother waiting – you get off.”

“That’s fine, I’ll catch up with you later,” I said, and then headed back to the office, feeling confident that I’d made a good impression.

A good impression, eh? Hmmmm. The passage of time, and the application of some rumination means I now feel rather differently.

The problem here, is that my facsimile of chatting is just that – it’s guess work rather than having anything solid behind it. I’ll catch up with Lynne later will I? Erm, no. I won’t. My comment appeared to demonstrate that we had things to talk about, but we don’t. It’s just what I imagine people say, and in a moment where I had to find something appropriate to end the conversation, my brain chose that phrase.

There is a bigger problem here too. By interacting with people in a way that mimics what I think they would be expecting to hear rather than a way that is actually acheivable by me, I often send the wrong signals or leave a sense of inconsistency with people. I must be frequently confusing to deal with.

“Can you do this for me James?”

“Sure”

Except that having confidently said yes to a piece of work without even finding out what it involves, I’ll often find that the work is outside of my sphere of knowledge or it simply doesn’t grab me and I struggle to complete it. Confident and happy to undertake work, yet not good at completing it. That’s a bit of a conflict, isn’t it?

Life is a constant battle to obtain the right script for James the actor, and unfortunately the script writer fails to see twists and turns in the plot of life.

A metaphor, yes, but not all that far from the truth either. My tool box of stock phrases, gleaned from years of observing others are something of a script that I act out. And as I am the script writer, and I don’t often see things coming in life, I’m frequently stuck with a script that doesn’t fit the situation very well.

If half the battle is finding suitable words when communicating with others, then the other half of the battle is realising that the things I say need to be doable. Maybe saying no once in a while would help, no matter how big and scary that sounds.

Because if I said no to something I couldn’t deliver, at least I would be being consistent.

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Saying one thing and doing another

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