An allegorical story

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

There is quite a distinct style behind this, and some strongly embedded techniques that I use all the time to try and make my life easier.
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Awareness versus propaganda

I’m glad I live in the UK.

Here in the UK, autism isn’t well understood outside of families that have been touched by it. I believe it’s still very much seen as a condition in kids that causes them not to interact with others, and to rock backwards and forwards. Many people in the UK will have heard of Asperger’s, but will have no idea what it is.
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You walk funny

It’s often said – indeed I’m sure even I’ve said it more than once – that Asperger’s is a hidden condition. What is meant by this, of course is that you can’t tell that someone has it simply by looking at them.

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.

Having no-one to turn to

One of the biggest ways in which Asperger’s shows itself with me is my lack of friends. This has always been a problem for me, and I’ve spent most of my life in a situation where I’ve had either one or two good friends, or at times none. Over the years, I’ve come to terms with much of the loneliness that this brings me, but I would still dearly love to be able to hold onto good uncomplicated friendships – something that I find very difficult to do.

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.

Not reading between the lines

One of my tasks at work right now is to pick up new cases that have been logged on behalf of our clients, and raise cases on our internal ticket system to deal with them.

Once such case was waiting for me when I got back from lunch today. The basics of the case were obvious, and I created a ticket for it. However, one of the specifics wasn’t at all clear to me, although it looked to me like what the client was intending was implied, but not actually stated

Not wanting to misinterpret what the client was asking for, I pushed the case back to the call handlers, and asked for clarification on the item I was unsure of. I got an immediate reply. It was almost rude.

The reply stated in no uncertain terms that the original information in the case clearly stated what was being asked for, and of course the client was wanting the item that I was clarifying. The email essentially said, “What? Are you stupid or something? Did you not read what was written?”.

And in retrospect I could see that perhaps it was obvious what was being asked for. The problem is that unless someone says, “This is what I want,” I find it difficult know just what it is that people are asking for. I’ll have an idea of what they want much of the time, but because I’m not sure, I’ll end up asking for clarification. This produces reactions of surprise and astonishment from people. How could I possibly have not understood what they were asking?

There is a degree of reading between the lines of what people are saying that is just lost on me.

Can you read between the lines?

Is this what we’re all living for today?

Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to feed
Take a look at all the suffering we breed
So many lonely faces scattered all around
Searching for what they need

Is this the world we created?
what did we do it for?
Is this the world we invaded?
Against the law?
So it seems in the end
Is this what we’re all living for today?
The world that we created.

You know that every day a helpless child is born
Who needs some loving care inside a happy home
Somewhere a wealthy man is sitting on his throne
Waiting for life to go by.

Is this the world we created
we made it on our own
Is this the world we devastated
Right to the bone?
If there’s a God in the sky looking down
What can he think of what we’ve done
To the world that he created?

Lovely words – I hope you agree – and absolutely laden with sentiment that I find irresistible these days.

They are the words to a song by Queen with perhaps an obvious title, Is this the world we created…?, which was written by Freddie Mercury some twenty five years or so ago. For perhaps the quintessential performance of the song, click here to see Freddie and Brian perform it at Wembley Stadium in 1986.

Mentioning music in my blog is a first, but it isn’t for the lack of trying. I’ve started a number of articles about the relationship between me and music since I began writing here, and yet somehow none of them have captured the emotion well enough. This isn’t going to be the article I’ve been struggling to write either – that will have to wait – but hopefully this piece will start to give you a sense of just how much music – the right sort of music – works on me.

Is this the world we created…? only popped back into my life a couple of days ago, after a hiatus of perhaps fifteen years. I’d forgotten about it’s very existence, and only rediscovered it again by accident, on one of my follow-the-link sessions whilst using the Internet.

Having clicked on the video link, the opening chords sent a chill down my spine, and made the hairs on my arms prick up. I knew this song. I knew it was good, but I had forgotten just how good it was.

I was in something of a sad and reflective mood – I’d been reading with some disbelief how it was nearly eighteen years since Freddie had died. I found that incredible.

I remember hearing about his death almost like it was yesterday. For me it was one of those moments that stays with you forever. I was at sixth-form college, and I’d heard the news on breakfast television, and then again on the radio on my walkman on the bus to college. I remember feeling sad, and disappointed that someone so wonderfully charismatic and influential had been taken away at such a shockingly young age – Freddie was only 45 when he died.

When I watched the above video clip for the first time a couple of days ago, the sense of loss I felt was immediate. In two and a half minutes I had been reduced to big choking tears. I watched it a couple more times, and really cried hard for a few minutes.

What was I crying about? A very good question. I felt the loss of something. Was it the loss of a teen idol all those years ago making itself finally felt? Perhaps there was an element of that there, but that wasn’t really it.

Was I mourning my loss of youth? Well, youth clearly has a bearing on this. The music brought back very hazy memories of feeling young and energetic, but also of feeling fundamentally lost, alone and unhappy in a world that made little sense to me.

I think the music had brought back how I was really feeling at that time in my life – a feeling that I kept very well hidden, for fear of, well, I’m not sure what. My peers all seemed to be happy and relaxed with life. They were all starting to look for independence, and were achieving it by going to colleges on the other side of town by bus and by applying for university or planning to go travelling around the world. I too was doing this, but primarily because that’s what everyone else was doing, and I was filled with with a feeling of barely controllable terror much of the time.

I’ve been quite teary on a number of occasions over the last few days. Perhaps this is because I’ve had a bit of alone time in the evenings for a change that have allowed me the luxury of thinking about things in detail. This is a natural conclusion to the anxious and down feelings that I’ve experienced over the last week or two, and I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to try and express and deal with it, finally.

Going back to Freddie’s lyrics, I can’t help but notice just how well they sit with my own view of the world these days. I’m sure they didn’t back when I was a teenager.

It seems to me that there is hard-core logic in the words. Their truth is self evident, yet so wonderfully understated, allowing you to fill out the detail yourself using your own thoughts and experiences of the world. This too may go some way to explaining why the song makes me cry.

The world didn’t make much sense to me at seventeen, and it still doesn’t today at thirty-six.

This song, however is as relevant now as it was twenty-five years ago. Brilliantly simple, yet powerfully touching and perfectly executed.

What more could you want from music?

Not such a great social engagement

You might have spotted that I’ve not been too up-beat of late. In the middle of last week, right in the middle of feeling not-so-great, I had to attend a social function that I’d accepted before I started to feel that way.

I nearly chickened out – a social engagement was the last thing I wanted to do, but I stuck to my guns and went. It was an after work do, arranged by a former colleague to show off some new facilities that his current company has just opened. So this was a very real social event – the whole purpose was for my former colleague’s company to drum up some business for themselves, and for those there to network with each other.

I dislike this sort of forced social event at the best of times – it feels really rather false, as half of those there typically out to hard sell whatever their product is. But I’d said I would go, and so I did.

You know how sometimes on TV programs and films they use a clever camera trick to show something and then quickly zoom out, from a first person perspective? Well, that’s how it felt for me when I arrived, feeling very apprehensive at the venue, having spent well over an hour in the car, fighting traffic. I saw everyone else intermingling and chatting, and there was I standing there on my own, feeling very small.

I shouldn’t have worried. Some other former colleagues shouted me almost the second I was through the door, and I was then able to ease myself into the evening by chatting with them first.

The IT business in this part of the world is surprisingly small, and there were a handful of other people that I’d worked with at the event too. Over the course of the next two hours I chatted to most of them, and we reminisced about the old days when we worked together.

Whilst clearly not as bad as I thought it was going to be – I’ll even admit to enjoying the reminiscing – the evening didn’t pass without incident.

First there was the wife of a former colleague, who works in public relations for a prominent charity, and spent twenty minutes telling me how as a small business, what I really needed to be doing was arranging PR, and not spending money on marketing. Useful stuff, for sure, but it was almost Aspie like in it’s hard sell, and I was left wondering constantly whether my responses were suitable.

Another problem was the name badges. I’d decided to put the name of my fledgling company on mine. This was a mistake. In a world of reasonably big business, I ended up having to repeatedly talk down the company name on my badge. “Oh – it’s just a little thing I’m setting up on my own. Fixing PCs, email and web hosting – that sort of thing”. I felt a fool. Most of those there had their main employers on their name badge. Big important companies, doing important things. Not a little one man band that’s not really doing anything much right now.

Then there was the helter skelter. I kid you not, the lovely new offices in which my colleague’s company are based has a three floor high helter skelter in the lobby, as a piece of installation art that is intended to foster creativity. I tried it. Everyone did at some point in  he evening. It was fun. That in itself wasn’t a problem, but it will feature in a problem that I’ll come to in a minute.

Come the end of the evening, I needed to say goodbye to my host. I was over stimulated – all fuzzy headed and exhausted feeling. My host was popular, in in my state I found it difficult to attract his attention, spending a good 30 seconds looking like an idiot standing on my own near him. When I did make contact and said thanks a lot, he did something I wasn’t expecting. Instead of an acknowledgement and maybe a “thank you for coming”, he did all of this, and then asked “I hope you’ve enjoyed it?”.

Gah! A fatal and unanticipated question. My brain scrambled for something to say, and ended up with, “Oh yes, and the, um, <pause>,  um, <hand gestures to try and signify the helter skelter>, thingy, <pause> um, too!”.

“Oh!”, he said, with a slightly surprised look, and a little odd looking grin, “yes!”.

I left. I felt bad – like I’d just made a complete idiot of myself. On the half hour drive home, my head was full of action replays of not just that incident, but also how I’d handled the PR woman, and whether my conversations with others had gone ok.

It was close to bed time when I got home, but once I made it to bed, I couldn’t get to sleep. The events of the evening were still going around my head.

With the benefit of hindsight, I didn’t do that bad, despite how awful the non enjoyable bits of the evening were. I’m never going to be great in situations like this, because by the end of the evening (and often long before this), I’m going to have reached my saturation level for sensory input. When this happens, I start to go vacant, quiet and unresponsive. That’s just inescapable fact.

And you know what? My stumbling over the unanticipated question from my host wasn’t that bad either. Embarrassing, yes. But he knows me well, and this is just me being me. If it was the first time we’d met, then maybe he’d have taken away a different picture of me, but he knows I’m like this.

I’m glad I went.

And yes, I’m going to consider some PR ideas for my company instead of just placing adverts, once I have proper services to sell.

Better to know?

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I discovered my Asperger’s  in the autumn of 2008, when I was thirty five years old.

Until that point in my life, I’d been plagued with feeling different from everyone else, getting into many scrapes of my own making that I didn’t see coming, and generally living in a high stress mode all of the time.

My discovery of Asperger’s, and my subsequent matching of its characteristics to my own personality was my real That Explains Everything moment.

I frequently wonder how my life might have been different if I was growing up today, with the reasonable chance that my differences might have been identified and diagnosed when I was still in childhood. Would my life have been easier or harder?

Let’s look at how it has been for me first:

My life has been lived under the almost constant feeling of high stress. As life has progressed and got correspondingly more complex, so my background stress level has increased. Tasks that a typical person would find to be not stressful at all – such as making a phone call – add intense peaks to my daily stress. Backing up my stress is anxiety. I’ve experienced this since at least my early teens, and it comes and goes in waves. This week I have it quite badly, but last week I was mostly fine. When bad, the anxiety can be crippling. A combination of it and the stress often leave me feeling dumbfounded just by regular life. I sit like a rabbit in the headlights of life, existing, but not really knowing what to do or how to behave.

You need to understand, however, that until a year or so ago, this felt normal for me. Whilst I knew that I was a little different in some way to most other people that I interacted with, I didn’t appreciate just how different I was. So, stress and anxiety felt normal – it’s all part of every day life for everyone. Isn’t it?

Life at work has always been a mixture of success and failure for me. When well guided, I work better than your average person, tend to get on with things without a fuss, and I’ve been well liked by various people that I’ve worked for for these reasons. When I work in a disorganised place, or for bosses who are underhand then I fare far less well. I’ve never been fired, but I’ve come close, and I’ve upset senior people at several companies with what I can now see were inappropriate outbursts. The problem is that I didn’t see them like this at the time. I’ve never seen the potential consequences of my whistle-blower-like activities in companies. I’m speaking the truth – what’s wrong with that? Bad times at companies also increase my stress and anxiety. So it goes.

In my personal life, I’ve been a serial monogamist. Without realising it, I’ve always dated women who could help take control of the areas of my life that I wasn’t very good at.

When I was younger, I held on for dear life to the romantic relationships that I had, and was desolate when they broke up. As I’ve matured (perhaps rather more slowly than a typical person would), I’ve become far more accepting of my responsibilities in relationships, and what I can realistically expect from my partner.

My dating methods have been unusual. When I was younger, it was always the girl that asked me out. I have always been sweet natured and queit and kind (although perhaps in an unusual way). I met my wife via an introduction from a friend and we text messaged first, before graduating to phone calls and then meeting. This took a huge effort on my part – effort that I assumed most other people had to use too to find a suitable partner. Without that introduction, there is a good chance, I think, that I’d still be single now, seven years later. I’ve never gone looking for love in bars, or using other typical methods that people use to meet other people.

I’m thirty six. I went to university, I have a wife, two kids, a house, two cars, and a job. I have a great deal to be thankful for.

How my life would have progressed if I’d been diagnosed with AS as, say, a young teenager:

Well for a starter, I doubt I’d have gone to university. University was expected of me, and hence I went. I didn’t enjoy it, as I failed miserably to make friends, and got though it only with the substantial help of a long term girlfriend.

I’d have decided that university wasn’t for me. So. No degree.

That would have meant that I wouldn’t have joined the graduate recruitment program of a large UK IT company, nor moved to London.

What would I have done for work? I really don’t know. I fell into the computing course at university more out of luck rather than good judgement. I toyed with chemical engineering and architecture first. IT suites me – but would I have seen that if I had been diagnosed with AS at a young age?

I suspect I’d have got a low paid, low status job – maybe a librarian or somesuch. Perhaps my work would have consisted of lots of reasonable short jobs.

I’d be stuck at home with my parents well into adulthood, because I doubt very much that I would have had the confidence to move out. After all – I’d been diagnosed with this big scary condition that made me vulnerable and easily led. My parents wouldn’t have wanted me striking out on my own in that condition, I suspect.

Relationships? I doubt there would have been many, if at all. A man in his twenties, living at home, with no friends, who perhaps doesn’t have a job, and who doesn’t socialise is going to find it difficult to find love. That isn’t rocket science.

And now, at thirty six, where would I be?

My best guess is that I would be living in a rented flat, with no career, and possibly not much regular work. I’d have made a few friends in the autism community, but I wouldn’t be married, and I’d probably have been single for many years. I’d be anxious and depressed, and frankly quite downtrodden and pissed off with the hand that life has dealt me. I would most likely get about by bus, having never learned to drive.

Frightening, isn’t it?

Life has been hard work to get to here, but it felt normal, because I had no expectations that there was really anything fundamentally out of the ordinary with me. I was different yes, but not that different. I got on with life, because that what you do – that’s what everyone does. I had expectations of living an ordinary life, and that’s what I set out to do, and ultimately did.

I genuinely believe that my life expectations, if diagnosed at an early age with AS would be very different. Everyone’s expectations of me would have been far lower, as would my own expectations. Even independent living would be a serious and hard to achieve goal. Life would be a struggle in a very different way to the way in which I’ve found it a struggle in reality.

–

The reason behind my thinking about all of this is perhaps not obvious, but has been knawing at me for a little while.

At times I see some of my AS-like traits in my own children. They are five and three right now. Would I wish them to undergo a diagnosis if it started to become clear that they fitted an ASD profile? It’s a difficult moral question to answer.

Based on how I think my life might have been different, can you guess which way I’m leaning on this right now, should it become an issue?

An upside down ‘h’

“Why is that ‘h’ upside down?” asked my son a couple of mornings ago. It was first thing in the morning, and he’d come into our bedroom. Now he was perched on my wife’s side of the bed, and was holding her digital alarm clock.

I smiled. I couldn’t see what he was pointing at, but I knew instantly what it was that he was referring to. This was one of those things that used to occupy my own mind.

“It’s not a ‘h’, it’s a stylised 4″ I told him.

My son, who is five, probably didn’t grasp the whole concept, and maybe he’ll end up with the same thoughts about seven segment displays that I had whilst I was growing up.

Until some point in my mid-teens, I didn’t understand the 4 on a seven segment display. I accepted that the arrangement of segments was a four, but it never ever looked like one to me. It looked like a ‘u’ with a long tail.

This strange, unthinking, blind acceptance that what I saw as a ‘u’ was actually a ‘4′ is quite characteristic of a larger aspect of my Aspergers.

The arrangement of segments made no sense to me, yet everyone else saw them as a number 4. That meant that I too accepted that it was a 4 I was looking at. It wasn’t. It was a ‘u’. But that didn’t matter.

This is a very specific example of how I’ve accepted the words of others over the years, as opposed to trusting my own instincts. It’s a key part of my camouflage technique. By not standing out from the crowd, I can hide my differences away unseen in the background.

Indeed this example goes further than demonstrating camouflage – it also shows how I simply didn’t question the assertions of others. I saw a ‘u’, but not once did I tell anyone else that I saw it. Not once did I ask others why that arrangement of segments had been chosen to represent a number 4. I just accepted that for some odd reason, some committee somewhere had decided that a 4 on a seven segment display should be represented by a ‘u’ with a long tail. End of story.

And then one day, I saw it.

It wasn’t a ‘u’ at all. It was just a stylised 4. You can’t draw a 4 on a seven segment display very well, but actually, if you squinted, and imagined some of the lines to be in different proportions, then you ended up with a ‘4′. Kind of.

You can imagine how foolish I felt at not having seen what must have been obvious to most people for all those years. So I then kept quiet about it for the next twenty or so years.

Quiet, that is, until my son saw the same problem that I had done all those years ago.

The quiet one

I wrote recently about dinner party that my wife and I hosted last month, and about how well it went. Well, last weekend the six of us present that night had dinner together again, with another of the couples acting as hosts.

The evening didn’t go so well for me this time. It wasn’t that I was too quiet, or that I felt too overloaded – I coped with both of those things reasonably well. The problem this time was that some of the topics of conversation hit home just how much of an outsider I am. The other guests, of course didn’t know or even notice this.

The big thing that the six of us have in common, and ultimately the reason we became friends is that we each have a son who started at the same local school in January this year. We’ve known one of the couples since before our son was born – they went to the same parenting class as us. We’ve not known the other couple as long socially, although our son went to the same nursery as theirs. The mothers in the other two couples are both teachers of kids their own age, but at different schools. Much of our conversation over the evening flowed around school annoyances, and in particular the social etiquette of parents at the school gates.

At the core of these discussions were how some parents were rude and cliquey. Our sons are in a class of nearly thirty, so on a typical morning, once you’ve discounted the kids that arrive with one of a couple of childminders, there are over twenty parents dropping their children off for my son’s class. Some, of course are friendly. Others, it would seem, aren’t. The five other adults at the table that evening had all been variously blanked, ignored, or cut short by some of the other parents in the school yard. There was a lot made of how incredibly rude this was, and much musing as to why various sets of parents would talk to each other but blank parents of other children in the same year.

This all went very much over my head, with a bit of a feeling of horror. I take my son to school once or twice a week on average, depending on my shift pattern. After nearly six months of this, I recognise only a handful of the parents. Many are still unfamiliar faces to me. I’ve never been blanked nor cut short by anyone – but then again I’ve never made the effort to approach parents that I don’t know and introduce myself. As for who is the parent of which child – well I haven’t got a clue, and nor do I know what the children or parents are called. It became very clear to me over dinner that my normal mode of operation in this sort of scenario was very out of the ordinary. I felt quite ashamed and embarrassed. I’m well aware these days that I’m a little different from the norm, but I’m not used to having it pointed out (albeit inadvertently) just how unusual and unsophisticated my interaction with other people is.

I felt awful during dinner, but I didn’t let it show. It felt like I was one of these parents who my friends (ok, not sure of the best word here – friends are a tricky concept for me) were laying into. I was being overly hard on myself, of course.

Whilst I don’t talk to the other parents in the school yard much, I will say hello back to folks, and even engage in a little small talk, as long as the other person is doing the hard work of thinking up the direction of the conversation. But this is always with people I know already – the adults from the dinner party, and a couple of others who I know because my son went to Nursery with their child too. I’m not being cliquey or rude. I’m just finding the social etiquette of the school parent role difficult to master. The odd thing, from my perspective is that until that evening, I didn’t think I was finding it difficult to master. I was just doing what I always do in this sort of situation. I thought I was doing fine.

I am doing fine. I’m doing as well as I can hope to do at the moment. I’m just different from the norm.

Of course what this thread of conversation also showed is just how well I do hide my AS. Not once was there any suggestion from any of the gang that I might fall into the camp of those who don’t communicate with them. But these people already know me, and will happily start and perpetuate small talk with me at the school gates. This of course means that they don’t see how I go out of my way to avoid talking to the other people, to those I don’t know.

But maybe those who I don’t know think I’m rude because I don’t talk to them.

I’m not. I’m just coping the best I can.