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.

What to do next

For as long as I have been in the IT profession, my best work has been produced from the ideas of other people. Tell me what needs doing, and I’ll do it. Typically I’ll do it well, and with a great attention to detail.

Leave me to my own devices, and I’ll struggle to determine what needs doing, and then what the priorities are.

This morning I found myself thinking that I could do with someone to tell me how to live my life. Discovering and embracing an autism spectrum disorder may well be wonderfully liberating and it has certainly answered a lot of questions, but it is leaving me feeling as though I don’t know where my life is going all too often.

Today is one of those days. Wouldn’t it be great if someone would come along and just tell me that now I have to do this. And when I’m finished with that, I should then do this – and so on.

Instead I feel stressed, anxious and bewildered. My to-do list tells me the things I have to try and get done today, but what do I need to do to get my life on track next week, next month, next year?

I don’t know.

Opening up: A stressful couple of weeks

I’m sure you know how it goes. You don’t find a release for your frustrations, and they very quickly build up, giving you an uncomfortable dose of anxiety.

Well, that’s certainly what has been been happening with me these last couple of weeks.

There are a number of things at play. Firstly, I’ve decided that the time is right to let my parents know about my Asperger’s. Secondly, work has, for one reason or another proven to be quite stressful over the last couple of weeks. Thirdly, I’ve not been writing here.

Why have I not been writing? Well initially it was just the way that the dice rolled – it was a long bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and I rarely write outside of work, through habit rather than anything else. I’ve also been quite busy at work, and also busy with point number one this week, and so didn’t write on Tuesday either. I then decided that maybe it would be nice to take a little break from writing for the rest of the week, to recharge my batteries as it were. This, it would seem has turned out to be a mistake, but perhaps only because of points one and two above also being on the go.

So – I told my parents I has AS. In many ways, the direction of this blog has been working towards this since I set it up. I needed to get my own head straight about AS before I could tell others, and in particular my parents. That’s because I’ve always known I would have a hard job selling my self-diagnosis to them, and in particular to my mother.

And I was right. I send a long but well considered and tweaked email to my parents at the start of last week. It barely scratched the surface of AS and me – how could it? AS is a big and all encompassing condition, and I’d need to write a book (or a blog!) to capture it all. A couple of days later I got an emailed response, that spent some time trying to point out how various aspects of my life meant that I couldn’t possibly have AS, as someone with AS wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I’d achieved, or wouldn’t have acted as I did. To cap it all, my mother flat outright rejected in writing that I had AS, after two whole days of consideration.

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised. This was the sort of thing I expected. Instead of a considered response that this was all a bit of a surprise, and that they didn’t really know enough to form an opinion, I got a flat rejection. I couldn’t possibly have AS, and I shouldn’t be so silly as to suggest it.

I wrote an angry email back, that argued that a snap judgment based on a couple of days of research and a small amount of background knowledge formed over the years that my mother served as a teacher (she retired seven years ago) was simply not valid, and further more was extremely insensitive. I’ve since followed this up with a series of emails that point out how the examples she gave of why I couldn’t possibly have AS actually missed a huge amount of subtlety in the situations that did show underlieing AS; or in some cases how the judgments were just plain wrong. I’ve not had responses to these as yet, as my parents disappeared abroad on holiday at the end of last week, and won’t be reading the correspondence until today at the earliest.

Despite the fact that I was expecting this sort of response, and was well prepared, I still felt as though the whole experience was a kick in the teeth. My stress levels are correspondingly up, as is my anxiety, and it took a few days from the first response for me to recover my composure and confidence enough to put up a well thought out and thorough rebuttal to my mother’s dismissals.

So when you add work stress to all of the above, it hasn’t been a great week. There are various mind games going on at work, with individuals such as myself, who are contract rather than permanent staff being subject to veiled threats regarding the stability of our jobs. It’s not much fun.

In hindsight, I picked a bad week to decide to open up to my parents, but I wasn’t to know that the work stress would start. It’s also been a bad week to decide not to write much here, as bottling up my thoughts has just lead to further stress and the associated anxiety.

So today has been different. I have worked hard to clear my to-do list of the most important work related tasks, and have cleared a half hour of schedule to write this, so I can get some of it off my shoulders. It feels good.

The next week or two are clearly going to be difficult, but I hope that a bit of time and patience on my part will allow my parents, and my mother in particular to accept that I do have AS.

Time will tell. Wish me luck.

And another thing…

Rachel has written a lovely series of articles on her Asperger Journeys blog about working towards a sense of belonging. Lots of aspects of the articles have struck chords with me, but perhaps the one that stood out most for me was how she intends to stop falling into old traps when dealing with organisations that get things wrong.

Rachel talks about how she feels she has to correct people in organisations that she gets involved with who are making what she sees to be clear logical mistakes, and how this never seems to result in a satisfactory outcome. She writes:

In every organization, there are all sorts of social, nonverbal, pecking-order assumptions about treating certain individuals with deference, about defending the organization, and about a number of other concerns that I just can’t see and don’t understand. So, a person I contact at any organization will very likely defend someone higher up, come out in defense of the organization, ignore me, or do something else that drives me nuts.

I too fail to see or understand many of these rules. I know the rules are there, but I don’t really ‘get’ them.

Rachel continues:

Unfortunately, what I consider bullshit is just basic social reality for most people. Needless to say, sooner or later, a relentless force (me) meets an immoveable object (them), and it’s not a happy experience.

How true this is. Failing to handle situations like this in a neuro-typical way is one of my most common causes of faux pas, and it gets me into a lot of trouble. You see, the organisations that I like to give a piece of my mind most frequently are those that I work for.

I guess that little annoyances at work get shrugged off by typical people. When they don’t, they tend to have a quiet word with those around them, or their boss to try and get things resolved. Unfortunately, my anxiety and problems with verbal interaction mean that I rule myself out of taking these approaches. Instead, I tend to let things build up to the point where I can no longer keep the issue inside of me.

Eventually, like Rachel, I feel that I have to point out what’s wrong. Whatever the issue is seems so logically wrong to me, that I can’t understand why others wouldn’t see it, or would choose to ignore it. So at that point, where my frustration is so great that I can’t keep it inside me any more, I write an email. The email is, in my typical style, brutally honest, long, detailed, and doesn’t hold back in saying what I think about situations and people. If someone is doing something I perceive to be wrong or dishonest, I say so. If that person happens to be the boss I’m writing to, I’ll still say so.

Writing the email is a great experience, in much the same way as writing for this blog is. It’s cathartic, and I pour huge amounts of emotion into it.

And of course, that’s where it should stop. I should write the email outside of my email client, and never send it. Unfortunately, my executive disfunction means that I don’t see this common-sense conclusion at the time. I bang away at the keyboard for an hour, honing everything I want to say into an email that usually reads much like an article here, and then without a second thought, I send it.

I’ve never been fired, but I’ve ended up in trouble with management at most companies I’ve worked for in one form or another, and typically it’s my use of email in this way that gets me on the trouble radar – I’m not playing by the rules.

It’s not just work, of course. Another of my bug-bears is recruitment agents that call and email me about work, and put zero effort into their sales pitch. At least spouting off at Job Agents doesn’t cause me any trouble. Every month or two I explode in annoyance and write a snotty email back explaining just how useless their communication to me was, and how I’m sticking them on my black list of agents that I won’t deal with when I’m next looking for a job. Indeed I did something very similar this afternoon, which along with Rachel’s article prompted me to write.

Here’s the email that the agent sent today:

Subject: URGENT! Please Get In Touch!

I have tried without success to reach you by telephone, so hope that you
receive this email.

I have a potentially interesting opportunity for you and would be
grateful if you could call me on the number below to discuss the matter.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

[Agents name]

Wow. How can I fail to be impressed by this. Remind me how this works again? Oh yes, that’s it – the agency put me in contact with a company looking to employ someone with my skills. I then attend the interview and put in the hard work that secures me the job. The agent acts as a conduit to get me the interview, for the contract paperwork, and well, not much else. For their brief involvement, the agency make about 20% of my starting salary, which amounts to many thousands of Pounds.

And this sort of email is frequently their opener. At least this one didn’t have the very wonderful ‘Dear Candidate’ at the start of it – I’ve often responded snottily to these by starting ‘Dear Agent’. But come on – there is nothing about where the job is located, what skills they are looking for, whether the job is permanent or contract, what level of seniority they are looking for or what sort of pay range they are looking at. Nothing at all that I can use to make any sort of judgement. It’s just pathetic.

Grrr.

Clearly, I need to find some way to deal with annoyances like this and those at work when they first crop up. I’m not sure how to do this right now, but I can see that it needs to be done. If I don’t tackle this, then I’m going to keep on sending inappropriate and pointless emails, and keep on getting myself into trouble.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to tackle this?

Feeling the fear

If you are on the spectrum, then you probably know this feeling. It’s the one where you look like a rabbit caught in car headlights just before it gets hit.

Fear is never far away for me. I’m sure it is connected to my background stress and anxiety in some way, but frankly the feeling of fear is distinct from that of feeling anxious.

The odd thing for me is that frequently there is no good reason for the fear to be there at all, but it still is. Is life that terrifying that it causes me to walk around feeling frightened? Well, maybe there is something in that. After all, I’ve said in countless articles on this site that I find the world a confusing and unpredictable place. In the past I’ve used this to justify the anxiety I feel, but could it also cause a frequent background fear, that on occasion flares up into terror?

I’ll explain what this fear feels like: It’s like when you were a kid, and you wanted your parents to leave the hallway light on at night (which mine did, incidentally). It’s an irrational fear that often appears to have no cause in particular, but it’s chilling all the same.

When I was a child, at least part of this night time fear was one of security. With the light on, I could see my surroundings, and this was comfortable. With the light off, I couldn’t see where I was, and then small creaks in the house would make me jump and my heart pound. Perhaps there is an over-active imagination at play here, or perhaps it’s just to do with the way I’ve always processed sensory inputs – in real time, with pattern matching. When you can’t see what you are doing, your other senses become hightened, and you start to hear every little sound. In the UK, our houses are built with wooden rafters and floors, and these creak when the house heats up and cools down in the daily cycle of life. To a young man, processing the noises in real time, and trying to understand and pattern match them, the creaks can sound like someone walking towards your room. When your parents are asleep in bed, this sort of thing can be very frightening, especially when your eyes can’t confirm or deny what you are hearing.

I wonder if my background fear as an adult is a similar mechanism at play?

If the input I get from my senses matches in some way to a previously scary event, do I then subconsciously start to feel scared? I’ve many times in the past suffered from unexpected outcomes in social situations. Outcomes where I’ve inadvertently provoked an aggressive response from someone. These leave me surprised and quite genuinely instantly frightened at the time. My social faux pas don’t happen often on this scale, but in a life time I’ve unintentionally provoked aggression on many occasions. I think there is a good chance that my brain has these stored away for use as pattern matches – after all, I know I have a great many past events stored in just this way – I make use of them daily to help navigate my lack of social intuition. So – what if my brain pattern matches something about a current innocuous situation to one of these old scenarios, and turns on my fear?

What I’ve just described is what would typically be called post traumatic stress disorder, but would I be at all justified to claim that this is what I am experiencing?

To be honest, I’m not sure it’s all that wide of the mark. The world is continually perplexing and unpredictable to me, and at times my apparent naivety has burnt me badly. I observe that I don’t learn from these sorts of mistakes over time, and continue to make them. Why then, wouldn’t my brain pattern match fear, when it thinks it sees another scenario that might provoke the same response? I may not have suffered from trauma in the way that people usually define it – as in a single horrendous experience – but I have suffered a catalogue of broadly similar moderately scary incidents over the years. Incidents that I’ve not learnt to avoid. Could they add up and reinforce the message over time in my brain? Maybe. It sounds plausible to me.

What do you make of this? Do you suffer from the fear too? If you do, what do you think causes it?

The Mother of all Special Interests

Warning: Many of my articles may appear to be a bit unusual to those of you who don’t have an autism spectrum disorder. I do however usually expect those of you with an ASD to understand and empathise with that I’ve got to say, and I trust that you do. Be warned that this article may appear to be very left-field even to those of you who usually understand my work. The article is also rather long.

The following is all true and from the heart. I hope you can take it at face value.

I grew up in a family of mixed but unspoken religious views.

My father never spoke about his take on religion, and my mother went to the local Methodist church every Sunday. Until the age of eleven or so, my brother and I went too, and attended the Sunday School as well.

By the age of ten or eleven I was developing a strong sense of logic, one that has stayed with me ever since. I reached the conclusion at around that age that the bible was just a set of stories – the people mentioned had never existed, and that the church was playing a cruel trick on those who attended. I also decided that Sunday School was a lightly masked attempt at brain washing those who were too young to make up their own minds to become believers.

I told my mother about my thoughts, and following a brief argument I no longer attended church. I had made my own mind up, and logic told me that church wasn’t for me. Over the next few years I’d tell my school mates that I was an atheist if anything remotely like religion cropped up as a conversation.

Then, when I was fifteen, something happened that would change how I saw the world forever. I changed my views on religion and why we are here, and many other things besides.

You may be suspecting that I had something of a religious awakening, and in some ways it was – but at the same time it was something completely different.

This is the story behind what would turn out to be the biggest and most obsessive special interest of my life to this date, and the profound effects it has had on me.

When I was fifteen, I had an after-school newspaper delivery round. I’d pick up the local evening paper from the little newsagents a half mile from my house, and I’d spend forty five minutes or so wending my way back home delivering papers as I went. I’d done this for the previous couple of years, and could do the job pretty much with my eyes closed. I never did though – then as now I spent my time observing the world, seeing the patterns in every day things.

It was early autumn, and the evenings were drawing in. It was around 16:45 and still light – dusk was probably another hour away. I’d finished delivering the papers and was making my way up the little lane that led to our house. The road is single track and one way with the traffic flowing in the opposite direction to my up-hill walk, so I walked close to the side, near to the slightly ramshackle dry stone wall. As I passed the gate into the field on my left, something flew silently over my head, above the trees. Thirty seconds or so later I was passing the first of the houses on my left something caught my eye, and I looked up, whilst still walking.

The next five or six seconds would change my life forever.

What I saw made me stare wide eyed. I followed it, whilst still walking as it tracked across from the left of my view, over the park to my right and over the brow of the hill. I was agog, but not frightened. It was dark in colour, and cigar shaped. It had an intensely bright white light about half way along it that stayed on, and about half way through my sighting an intense red light came on towards the back of the object and then stayed on. Both lights had a strange single colour wavelength feel to them – much more like the colour you get from an LED than from a regular light. The object made no sound, and size-wise was equivalent to holding my thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart at arms-length.

I walked the remaining ninety seconds or so home, and sat down a little dazed. I was the first one home. What had I seen? We lived at that time about 20 miles away from one the UK’s large airports, and our house was over one of the regular approach paths to it. I saw planes every day, and they didn’t look like this, nor sound like it either. What’s more the object was flying at 90 degrees to the usual flight path, and felt to be flying much lower, although it’s impossible to judge the height of an object that is uniform in size and colour. Perhaps it was very small and flying low and fast, or maybe it was much bigger and flying slower. I couldn’t say then, and I can’t say now.

My mother arrived home some fifteen minutes later, and I made a decision about what I’d seen. “I’ve just seen a UFO”, I told her, and I explained what I’d seen. I don’t remember her reaction, or indeed my immediate thoughts and feeling from that point about it in detail.

What I can say is that my life took a new direction from that point onwards. I needed to know more. I took books out of the library about UFOs. I bought some books with my pocket money too. I read everything I could find. I joined the regional UFO group, and started getting and pouring over their amateur magazine.

In ways similar to my later discovery and dawn of understanding of Asperger’s, I started to see that I was far from alone in the sort of experience I had witnessed.

The group I’d joined had aspirations being UK wide, and they were publishing various case studies of famous (well in UFO lore at any rate) events. I spent my spare cash on buying lots of it, re-reading it over and over again.

Clearly, this had become in Asperger’s terms, a special interest. It was so much more than that though. It was obsessional. It was deeper than that even. Getting embroiled in a subject like this is in my book very similar to getting deeply into religion. You ask the same sorts of philosophical questions about where you come from, and just what your role in the universe is. Where did we come from? As a deep logical thinker and from a science background, this was a profound question to be asking.

And then there was the anxiety. This perhaps is the one feeling that you wouldn’t see coming. The more I read, the more I saw a hidden sinister side to things. I had a huge feeling that something big and organised was going on across the world, and that whilst it was understandable that the populace didn’t know about it, it seemed that perhaps the governments didn’t know it either. If they did, I got the impression they were powerless. That feeling not only made me hideously anxious at times, I also found it chilling, and at times terrifying. It felt like I was in on a big secret, and that no-one around me saw it.

Odd things happened. I attended two UFO conferences put on by the regional group that I’d joined. These proved to be strangely tense affairs, with people looking shiftily at each other for the whole day. One of the speakers mentioned that he was aware that there were undercover military people in the room. Another speaker’s presentation was ruined because their slides had been tampered with, rearranged into the wrong order. A previously working slide projector suddenly didn’t work when it was needed for the first time. All in all these conferences were strange.

And then there was the day when I was around 18, where I told my then girlfriend about my sighting. She went white, and started to tremble. She couldn’t immediately tell me why. Eventually, on another day she felt able to tell me. A couple of years previously she’d turned a corner on a road near her house and confronted a huge object hovering above the road. Despite not being good at reading non verbal signals, I could see she was terrified just recounting this to me. She said her memory of what happened next was hazy, and that she couldn’t tell me any more that day. Indeed she never chose to bring the subject up again. I can’t say that I blame her.

My obsession followed me to University when I was 19. As I’ve written elsewhere, I had trouble making friends at University, and I felt very disjointed from the usual university life. I received some counselling towards the end of my first year there, and as the obsession-lead anxiety was at times a big part of the problem, I once spent a whole hour of counselling just pouring out my knowledge and theories of UFOs to the counsellor. How very wonderfully, one-sidedly, Aspie.

Eventually the obsession waned. I think this probably happened once I left university, moved to London, got as job, and started living with my girlfriend. Perhaps I’d grown up a little. Perhaps I found new special interests that took it’s place. By the time this happened, UFOs had been my obsessional special interest for something like seven years. It had taken over my life at times, and had permeated pretty much every aspect of my life.

It’s never quite gone away. The fear and anxiety flares up from time to time. I repeated my hour-long monologue to another counsellor when I was being treated for depression in my final years in London. It cropped up again at bed time last night, which is why I’m writing this today. Last night I could feel the fear once more, and could hear my heart beating in my chest.

The reasons for it recurring, of course, is that I have no concrete answers. I may have spend huge amounts of time and effort trying to understand what my sighting meant, and what lay behind it, but I never did reach any conclusions that I had any way of proving.

Conclusions about UFOs are hard to come by. Many thousands of people see unidentified objects in the sky every year. Many of these are trained observers. There are a remarkably small number of similar shapes of object that come up time and again, and there are characteristics such as the lack of any noise from the object that are very commonly reported too. My logic tells me that I saw something real. Extrapolating that tells me that thousands of people a year also see real objects.

Do governments have a better picture of what is going on than I do? I suspect so, to a degree.

Were famous incidents such as the supposed Roswell crash actually UFO related? I have no way of knowing.  I’d put money on these objects having crashed somewhere at some time. But Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947? I don’t know.

Did I see something man-made and super secret? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Reports from the 1940′s talk of similar objects. I doubt very much we had the appropriate technology at that point in time.

Did the Dogon tribe from Mali get their thousands of years old folk lore that appears to rely on modern astronomy from extra terrestrials? I don’t know. I’ve read a book that suggests they did.

Were the stunning photos taken by Ed Walters in Gulf Breeze, Florida, in the late 1980s actually faked? I don’t know, but on the balance of probabilities, I suspect so.

Is the whole Majestic 12 thing for real? I don’t know. Could be. Might not be. People really do go to unimaginably long lengths to fake UFO-related material, and I’ve never understood the rationale behind that, so who knows. In the midsts of the obsession, the Majestic 12 documents seemed like a smoking gun. But was that just gullibility on my part?

I have, however, reached conclusions of sorts about God and my place in the universe.

I think life exists in many places in the vastness of space, and whilst I don’t believe in a God that took his time to create the Earth and everything on it, I can these days happily conclude there is some form of higher power at play. This may, as I tend to think,  spring from the physics of the universe itself, but I see no problem with someone else describing this as God, or Allah, or anything else for that matter. My place in things is here on earth at a wonderfully exciting point in human existence. I’m a tiny dot in a vast existence that stretches billions of miles in all directions, and that feels a good place to be.

What did I actually see that day half a life time ago? I don’t know.

But I did see something real, and it has shaped my life.

A not-so-mild form of autism

I’ve read many times that Asperger’s Syndrome is a mild form of Autism.

In really simple metrics this is true, but at the same time, that is an entirely unhelpful comment.

My reasoning here is that if you tell someone that you have a mild form of autism, then they will likely think that it has little impact on you, especially as those of us with Asperger’s are often good at hiding most of the visible signs of it. Unfortunately, whilst the condition may present as mild, that’s a long way from the truth of how it affects those of us with it.

I’m happy to state that my Asperger’s doesn’t cause me a lot of the problems that more profound autism does – I seek out social interaction at times, and can communicate well with people a lot of the time, especially in writing – but it does still cause me a lot of problems, in practically every area of my life.

Over the years I have adapted and learned techniques like mimicry to help me deal and fit in with the normal world, yet just because I appear to fit in most of the time doesn’t mean that my life is plain sailing.

I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that my life has frequently been hard going, and I expect it to remain so. I’m not saying this to elicit responses of ‘poor you’ – it’s not about that at all. I’m just trying to point out how those of us with Asperger’s tend to have to fight our way throughout life just to live a reasonably normal existence. It’s hard work a lot of the time.

There are many things that make it hard work. Here are a few examples:

People are unpredictable to me, and they often act in ways I don’t see coming. You could view this as an over-trusting type of nature if you like – to me it’s simply that I don’t have much of a natural ability to read people. Sometimes they can read me all too well, and take advantage of that. This unpredictability has caused me considerable anxiety and depression over the years.

Work is difficult – it is expected that I’ll be flexible and work on various different projects at the same time, and be able to literally drop something and immediately run with another if the need arises. I find this very difficult to do, as I’m much more naturally oriented to work on a single thing in immense detail. Time runs away with me, and my forward planning skills aren’t great either.

Phone conferences and meetings with more than a couple of other people in them stress me enormously, as I can’t follow input from multiple people well, and I suffer from the slow and immediate data processing style that many Aspies seem to have. This means that I may be slow to come up with timely input into meetings, and tend to get left behind when meetings move onto new subjects, as I’m still processing what was being said a minute or two previously. Allow me go away and think about what was said in a meeting however, and I’ll often provide valuable input as an afterthought.

As forward planning is a constant battle for me, providing a fun and relaxing home life for my wife and kids is something of a constant battle. It’s extremely unusual for me to think ahead and book a night out with my wife – even something straight forward like going to the cinema or out for a meal. What are we going to do this coming weekend? I don’t know, and I still won’t on Saturday morning, most weeks. Family holidays don’t occur to me either, so it usually falls to my wife to pick up the pieces and be the constant social secretary of the family. Doing all of this work on her own annoys her, and rightly so. It frustrates me, as I don’t neglect these things on purpose, they simply don’t occur to me.

My lack of natural social flair and the anxiety that has sprung up around it makes my life difficult too. I go through short patches of trying to force myself to be more sociable, usually by accepting invitations to social events via tools like Facebook. I typically don’t enjoy them though. The social world is very alien to me, I feel dislocated much of the time, and tend to get drunk far too quickly in the hope that it’ll remove some of the feeling of otherness from me. It rarely does. I feel the normal feelings of needing to connect with others – the need to have friends, yet in reality I don’t have any. Barring my wife, not one true friend. That hurts, yet despite many efforts over the years I’ve not succeeded in keeping friendships going over any length of time.

Whilst the above gives a flavour of some of the ways that Asperger’s has impacted on my life, there are many many more examples.

With all the above doom and and gloom, you might expect me to hate Asperger’s, and to jump at the chance to look for a cure.

Not a bit of it.

Firstly, I don’t believe there is a cure for Autism Spectrum Disorders – I think they a genetic cause.

Secondly, and most importantly, Asperger’s makes me who I am. It doesn’t define every aspect of me, but it has had a large input on making me the man I am today. And despite of the problems I face, I like me. I’m a worthwhile person, and my life has purpose. I have a lovely wife and two great kids.

I may have had to battle through life, but so far I’ve won. I may not be financially rich, but I feel rich as a person. I see the wonderful tiny repeating patterns in leaves on trees, and the beautiful colours in spring meadows, and all sorts of other things that most people seem to overlook.

Asperger’s may be mild when compared to some other forms of Autism, but it’s affect on those who have it is far from mild – it’s all encompassing and causes life-long challenges. At the same time it bestows unusual and useful skills which can provide a lot of pleasure both to ourselves and to others.

I wouldn’t change my Asperger’s even if I could.

I wouldn’t call it a mild form of autism either, it’s too pervasive for that.

Meltdown

When I first started to discover Asperger’s and the various traits that those with it often possess, I was a little surprised by the concept of meltdowns.

Pretty much every trait I read about got a tick in my own personal list of traits that I have too, but I struggled to find a box for meltdowns, and indeed decided in the end that I didn’t have them.

The thing is, though, that I do have them – I just didn’t recognise them.

Through my pre-Asperger eyes of someone who suffered from occasional depression, it was very easy to write off my meltdowns as a bad depression day, but the problem with that description is that it takes no account of what lead to the meltdown.

Part of the reason I’m writing this article now, is that perhaps for the first time, I can see that due to various things that have happened, I’m sitting on the precipice of a meltdown right now.

So – how do I feel right now? Agitated is perhaps the best over all description. I’m rather hyperactive today, and my stress levels are very high. My brain is running at a thousand miles an hour through various potential articles for this blog, and through various Asperger’s attributes. The thoughts are bouncing around and none of them can get focus. If I try and concentrate on one at a time, then I almost instantly forget the other thoughts. This in itself is intensely annoying – it’s only now that I’ve been able to sit down and start writing, and I didn’t want to lose any of the different aspects that I was pondering over.

Why am I like this today? Well, I took an unexpected phone call yesterday that put a whole load of guilt on me. Someone in my family offloaded their problems on to me, and I feel guilty that I have had my part in that person feeling the way they do. That’s not the whole story, though. The bigger problem is that I feel that I hold the key in my hand to explain to that person a good deal of why they feel the way they do. However, by doing so, I’d be opening a huge can of worms that would reverberate through my extended family for some time.

I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I don’t know what to do. My guilt is intense, yet I know that what is missing from the situation is understanding on the part of the other person, and that they also need to seek some help from a professional for what has become a clinical depression. Yet dispensing that knowledge would throw my extended family into chaos, and I can’t predict what the outcome would be.

I’m dancing around the specifics here on purpose. I find it difficult to say them even here on this anonymous blog. I’m concious that one day this blog may not be anonymous any more, and I worry about how this article may be perceived by those same family members after the fact. The information I have almost feels like a dirty secret.

It’s not a dirty secret, of course, it’s simply Asperger’s, which I’m sure crops up a lot through my family. No one right now talks about it, and I have to assume that for the most part, those affected and those around them are unaware of it’s existence. It even may be the case that everyone affected barring me has no idea of it. Whilst they don’t know it exists, it sure as hell impacts them, and at times very badly.

The family member that offloaded onto me yesterday was ultimately complaining about the traits of those in the family with Aspergers wearing her down to the point of absolute frustration. Those affecting her are those closest to her, and understandably through lack of understanding she sees idleness and lack of caring from those people as the causes for her current pain.

We’re not idle nor lacking in the caring department. We’re just typically Aspergic, and find it difficult to express ourselves, especially verbally – which is where my guilt lies – I don’t phone or do much to keep in touch. I find using the phone difficult, and I never known what to say past the usual pre-learnt small talk of how people are and what they have been up to. Making small talk is also a problem, because it’s never been important to me in the same way that it is to typical people. I understand that it is important these days – I know that typical people don’t just intuitively do it, they enjoy it, they need to do it, and it helps build and confirm their social structure and standing. That doesn’t hold for me though – that concept simply doesn’t apply.

So, that’s the problem of the day.

If I look back to previous meltdown situations, then one of two things has tended to happen when I’ve been presented with just too much stress to deal with. I’ve either collapsed in a withdrawn gibbering heap – as it often the case with Aspies, or I’ve vented via writing.

The venting via writing is interesting – it has often been the cause of my getting into trouble at work by sending emails that point out all the problems in the team or with the software we are developing. In cases like these, the meltdown has been caused by a combination of bad practice at work and too much work load, often caused in the first place by the bad practice. My stress soars, and eventually, something has to give, and instead of collapsing in a heap and taking time off sick with stress, I’ve vented all my thoughts – inappropriately, with fingers of blame – in email. I’m not saying that collapsing in a heap would be the right solution, incidentally – the right solution would be not to get into that position in the first place, if at all possible.

Extreme emotional stress has caused both types of reaction over the years, but mostly the gibbering  heap. Often an emotionally triggered meltdown happens over a much shorter period of time – something will happen, and bam – I’ll be unable to cope within minutes. I withdraw and become quiet and tearful. I feel like I’ve put up an invisible shield, and that if I stay quiet, then the emotional problem won’t be able to touch me any more. Those around me get frustrated, because I can’t answer their questions – it feels to them like I’m avoiding the difficult situation.

Have I avoided a meltdown today? Well, I’ve certainly vented by writing this, and feel much better for it. I did the same last night too, by writing a much shorter version of this post as a draft. That meant I slept well, which is good news too. By externalising in some way, I avoid the gibbering heap phase, and by doing the venting in a direction where I’m not pointing fingers, just maybe I don’t put myself in a position where I get unhelpful come back.

See – in a way, I was dancing around the specifics above because I saw what I was doing was venting in just the same way as with all those angry emails that pointed the finger at work. My brain spotted the pattern and responded by telling me to hold back, to avoid any possible negative come back. I’m glad I felt able to say what the root of the issue was in the end, without making it too negative, and without apportioning any blame.

No-one is to blame for the position my family is in right now. That doesn’t make the right way forward any easier to see, my guilt any less real, nor make the hurt felt by some any less painful.

Do I upset the apple cart and live with the consequences, or do I continue to pretend that I don’t know why my family is the way it is?

I don’t have an answer.

I do, however feel much further from meltdown now. My stress has abated some, and my mind isn’t racing in the way it was. Maybe now I’ll be able to get some work done.

Settling in

I often hear other Aspies express the thought that they dislike change, and that they find change to be stressful.

I too suffer from this problem, so can empathise with all those that this problem affects.

Indeed, the very first article I wrote on this site talked about how changes to routine are difficult for me, using the metaphor that I’m a train on a track, and when the change comes along, I tend to want to keep on going on the rails.

There’s another facet to this issue that I need to talk about as well – and that’s the problems I have settling in to new places.

This issue most obviously rears it’s head when I change jobs, but equally, other big location changes such as moving house  and even things like getting to grip with my finances (which I did recently) can cause similar feelings of stress and disorientation.

I’m going to focus on what it’s like when I change job, because it’s probably the easiest of the scenarios for me to put into words.

Once I’ve been working somewhere for a while, I could just about walk around it blindfolded. I know the shape, size and layout of all the rooms, and how they fit together. I know who sits at every desk, and how best to approach them – be it in person, on the phone or by email, etc. This is the closest I come to work Nirvana – all the jigsaw pieces fit together well, and I can interact with both the work environment and it’s people efficiently. All of my jobs so far have ended up at this point, eventually.

Usually it takes me at least six months to get there. The time leading up to it is a big curved graph of decreasing stress and disorientation.

I always find my first week in a new job to be incredibly disorienting. As is the common courtesy, I’ll usually have been show round the facilities and introduced to team mates and probably others that I’ll come into contact with on my first day. I don’t know about anyone else, but this plain doesn’t work for me. I suspect that my initial stress levels are so high that I fail to take in any names – sometimes not even the name of the person who has just shown me around. I also think that I’m prioritising trying to take in the spacial arrangement of the office and the other facilities. I have some deep down need to know my surroundings, and this seems to override the perhaps more important (in a typical view) priority of getting to know those i’ll be working with.

After an hour or so, I’ll often have to ask the person on the desk next to me where the toilet is. Despite trying to take it in on the tour, I’ll most likely have forgotten if it is more than a room and a corridor away. What’s more, I’ll feel it essential to be overly polite to the person I’m talking to. I’ll most likely start my questioning with something like, “Excuse me, sorry to interrupt but…”.

Those first couple of weeks will feel like I’m an intruder in all the public spaces. Whilst I may get to feel at home at my desk in a few days, I’ll find the canteen and yes, probably the toilets too to be an alien landscape into which I’ve strayed and in which I’m not welcome. It’s not that anyone is setting out to make me feel unwelcome – that’s just how the surroundings feel – they are unfamiliar and disorienting to me.

I kept a track when I changed jobs last year of how long it took me to learn the names of those in the office. It’s not a large office in this case – only a dozen people. After a week, I had remembered the names of about half of those in the office, and after two weeks I had all bar a couple of names off by heart. First names, at least. Some surnames took many weeks to learn. Those whose first names took longest to learn were those with whom I had no reason to communicate – which is perhaps obvious.

So, after two to three weeks in a typical job I’ll know the names of those around me, and the way around the facilities. I’ll also have some idea of the roles that those around me have too, and who to approach for what. I won’t feel settled, however, nor part of the team. This takes far longer – as I have already said, typically six months or so. Until that time I feel detached – an outsider. I do what I can to fit in, but as I dislike small talk and find it difficult to do most of the time, this perhaps prolongs the length of time I spend in my detached limbo. I spend this time feeling like I’m faking it, and wondering if anyone has spotted that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Eventually, however, all the jigsaw pieces fit, and I feel comfortable and part of the team.

The same feelings apply for big events like moving house or even organising my finances. Clearly the ground rules involved are somewhat different in these cases, but the feelings of not belonging and being disoriented are the same.

I have one final example. At high school age, I chose to go to a school that was outside of the catchment area for my junior school. This meant that barring one friend who did the same thing, I moved to a school where I knew nobody. I was part of the decision making process for this, but ultimately I used my parent’s logic, and agreed with their choice. The school had a better reputation and better exam results than the local one.

I felt very alone and out of place for a long time at that school. After a term or two, my mother asked me how I was liking it. “I don’t fit in”, I told her, and it was true. I can’t imagine how that must have felt for my mother – it must have been awful to hear. Eventually I fitted in to a degree with the other misfits in my year, and had friends of sorts who would last me the remainder of my time in the school.

So, my feelings of disorientation and of not fitting go back a long way, and still show themselves frequently. Obviously everyone – Aspie or not – is going to take some time to settle into a new experience, but it certainly looks to me like it doesn’t take a typical person months. Do any of you experience similar things?

Why all those unneeded words are needed. Maybe.

I wrote last week about how I saw similarities with my own writing style and those of other Aspies whose blogs I read. The article has caused a lot of comment, with points made both for an against what I was saying.

One of the big style cues I noted was the use of a lot of qualifiers in my text – something that Gavin Bollard quite nicely described as writing in a ‘flowery’ style. I put a lot of these qualifiers in my writing, as, I note, do many other Aspies.

Having spotted the pattern, I have turned my attention as to why I might do this. I have a solution that makes sense to to me, so I thought I’d share it, and see what you all think.

Those of you who grew up with undiagnosed Asperger’s will well know the feeling that nothing ever quite makes sense in the world, and that people and their responses to situations are often wildly unpredictable. My response to a given situation often seems to be atypical from the population at large, and these faux pas often cause either derision or conflict.

I, for one, have built up something of a defence to this sort of thing over the years – I’ve had to to survive and keep my self-respect intact, and I suspect that it’s the path that many people with AS take. I do hope you’ll let me know as to whether it is the case with you too or not.

It’s often the case that I can’t tell ahead of time whether my response to a given situation is appropriate, and the one that an ordinary person would be expected to give. Thus I go into many situations ‘blind’, with my best guess, and braced for a negative response of some sort.

And this is where the flowery language comes in. When I’m not sure of myself, and suspect that I may end up eliciting a negative response for something, I’ll start adding in qualifiers. This happens both for verbal and written communication. By doing this, I’m saying to the other person, “What I’m saying/writing may be the case. It’s certainly the way I see things, but please tell me if you think I’m wrong, and don’t be too harsh on me if it seems ridiculous to you”.

Over the years, my use of this sort of language has ballooned. I think this is because as I’ve got older I’ve seen more and more clearly just how out of the ordinary my responses can often be. I’m not thick-skinned (is this a typical Aspie characteristic too?), and therefore I throw in anything I can say or write that might help diffuse any potential conflict. I’d rather do this and sound a little odd than sound rediculous and have my feelings hurt and confidence dented.

If my background stress or anxiety is up, then I use this sort of qualifier even more often, as I’ll in general feel less sure about myself and what I’m saying.

And so, the qualifiers show up a lot in my writing on this site. Whilst what I’m writing makes sense to me, and is a genuine description of the way I see things, I still don’t trust that I’m right, and half expect everyone who reads the site to laugh at what I’ve written, and publicly humiliate me.

You don’t, of course, but that’s an indication of just how much this tendency to faux pas has affected me over the years.