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.

Camouflage, understanding, and a Big Professor

I’ve recently become aware that there are a number of non-typical things that I do when speaking to people, particularly when it’s a one-to-one conversation. The conversation subject could be anything, but the examples I use below are based on a work scenario, where something technical is being discussed.

Perhaps the most obvious (and annoying) trait in these scenarios is for me to finish other people’s sentences, in a questioning tone of voice. If you know or work with me, then chances are you are used to me doing this. I’m sure it must be a little off-putting when you first meet me.

Also, I want you to know that I am listening to you, and to this end, I interject with lots of reassuring noises – lots of uh-huhs and yups and yeps when you are speaking. Everyone does this, of course, but I’ve noted that I seem to do it rather more frequently than average. Sometimes, when stressed, I’m making an almost constant stream of acknowledging noises.

Another trait that I have is to ask lots of questions. If I’m going to help you (and lets be honest about this, I’m going to try and help you whether you are after my advice or not), then I need to be able to understand the problem you are facing.

I think there is a clear reason for these behaviours: I want to understand, and I want you to see that I understand. Ok, so that’s two reasons, but the underlying causes are very closely linked.

My ASD social interaction problems mean that I’m never sure how I should non-verbally behave in two-way conversations. So instead of whatever it is that ordinary people do to non-verbally signal their empathy and understanding (just what do people do, incidentally?), I use verbal signals that I’m in tune with what the other person is saying.

In light of this, my behaviours make a lot of sense. Finishing sentences, whilst annoying, clearly demonstrates that I have been listening and taking in what the other person was saying. The frequent noises of agreement do the same, too.

My asking of questions may also give this impression, but in reality it serves a different purpose. What I’m trying to do is build up a mental picture of the thing you are telling me about, in a language that makes more sense to me. This mental picture is typically quite visual and often manipulatable like a 3d model, with difficult concepts encapsulated into boxes with labels in my mind’s eye. This is what seems to work best for me, and it helps me see the bigger picture of your problem. This is me trying to understand in my own language, rather than wanting you to see that I do understand.

Wanting to understand is vital to me, perhaps simply because I am aware that I think in a different way to typical people. Experience has shown me that other people tend to grasp concepts far more quickly than I do. They can see the big picture in most scenarios and not just the minute details in the middle, and this view on things is straight forward to them and requires minimal brain power. I conversely tend to see the minute detail in the middle, but not the other surrounding details, with large amounts of brain power required for concepts – hence the questions.

I further suspect that most people don’t actually see the big picture at all – they just understand it is there, and how it works. I, on the other hand work far better if I can see it all in my mind’s eye, including how it all fits together.

From an early age, my observation that I don’t understand the same things as others, and that my level of detail is different to theirs has lead to the development of the camouflage techniques I’ve mentioned above. Let the other person know that I’m listening, and give them an impression that I understand what they are saying. Ask questions so that I can translate their language into one that I can see and comprehend.

Ultimately, it’s vital for me to understand, because experience tells me that typically that is what is expected of me – an ordinary person would understand. When you have grown up not being able to differentiate between what you are expected to trivially understand, and what it would be acceptable to admit that you don’t know, the best camouflage has proven to be to say that you understand everything, and then do your best to demonstrate that you do.

And that is exactly what I do.

These techniques are also ringing bells with me about a well publicised AS trait that is usually mentioned alongside talk of  ‘Little Professors‘. Your average Little AS Professor can speak at length about a subject of interest without actually having a detailed understanding of the mechanics behind the interest. I think this sort of  confident faking-it technique is most likely another string in the bow of the camouflage tools I’ve outlined above. Having signalled to the other person that I’ve listened to and understood what they were saying, and having asked questions so that I can formulate my own picture, I’d then be happy to go and tell someone else about the subject in question, in a tone of voice that suggested that I understood entirely what I was talking about.

I become a Big Professor.

I often don’t understand the subject in detail of course, but if it’s something that I judge I should know about, then I’ll act as though I do.

Partying with kids

It was my son’s fifth birthday a week or two ago, and we arranged a bowling party for him and twenty or so of his friends. It was one of his best friends birthday the following day too, so we had a joint party between the two families, to help spread the load and the costs too.

So – just how does a party with twenty or so five-year-old kids, assorted parents, bowling and food go when you have Asperger’s?

Well, there were some quite obvious things (to me at least) that happened.

Firstly, I interacted with the kids, but not much with the adults. We had four bowling lanes, with five or six kids playing in each lane. An adult clearly had to supervise each lane, and despite most of the parents staying around for the whole party, very few of them joined in with the bowling or supervision. They stayed at the back, chatting to each other, and watching.

My wife and I had already figured out ahead of time that we’d most likely both have to be involved in running the bowling – at least to some degree, and so it turned out. I spent my time in one lane, helping the kids to carry the balls, and then rolling them down the ramps they had for the kids to use. I cheered them when they knocked pins down and chatted away to them.

I ended up supervising most of the 120 or so rolls in the game in my lane, despite the parents of most of the kids in my lane being there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, whilst I spoke to the kids, I didn’t speak much to the parents at all.

This is quite symptomatic for me – I can speak to kids quite easily most of the time, as there doesn’t feel to be that barrier there that there is with adults – there is no social game afoot with them. Adults are much more difficult for me. I knew most of the parents faces, but there were only a couple that I’d spoken to before. I barely said anything even to those I knew to some degree – it just felt too uncomfortable, that there was too much input for me to deasl with and I had nothing pre-prepared to say.

Was this due to sensory overload? Well, I think it played it’s part – the longer the bowling went on (and it lasted nearly an hour), the more I withdrew from the situation and behaved more automatically. It’s almost like you get race horse blinkers, and can’t see anything outside of what you are actually doing. This meant I could focus on the kid I was helping at the time, and chat to them about lining the ramp up and so forth, but beyond that, the world didn’t really exist as anything other than noise and a blur. The repetitive nature of choosing the ball, helping the child to carry it to the ramp, lining the ramp up, holding the ramp whilst they pushed the ball, making encouraging noises whilst the ball rolled, and then an appropriate noise depending on how many pins it knocked over was quite soothing. But then again, repetitive tasks almost always have that effect on me.

It’s clearly not all sensory related, however – if I was at a dinner function with all of the same parents I would have been equally uncomfortable and unsure of what to say, despite the situation being far less noisy.

After the bowling came the food. The kids were all sat down at a long table, and buffet food was brought out for them to nibble on. I floated around, occasionally saying little bits to the kids, but mostly helping my three year old daughter with her food. I did this because it meant that I didn’t have to sit down and talk with the parents. Good avoidance of a difficult situation for me, but actually at the time it just came naturally – I wasn’t doing it consciously.

And then suddenly, people were leaving. My wife had taken our daughter to the toilet, so I was left saying goodbye and thanks to everyone along with the parents of my son’s friend who we were sharing the party with. I didn’t know what to say. Perhaps the sensory overload was too much by that time, or maybe it was just lack of social intuition. I suspect it was a mixture of both.

“Thank you”, said one parent to me. My response? “Thank you”, in much the same tone of voice that they had used. Ummm. Where did that come from? Not “You’re welcome” or “See you again soon”, or even “Thanks for the present, good to see you”. Just “Thank you”. My brain didn’t know how to respond, and it repeated the same message it had just heard back – echolalia.

Echolalia isn’t something I suffer from all that often, but I do have my moments. Questions that offer me a choice often get reflected back as a question when I’m stressed – “Would you like ham or tuna in your sandwich?” will result in me saying “Would I like ham or tuna? Hmmm…” if I’m moderately stressed or overloaded.

When highly stressed or overloaded, I get a non-verbalised or sometimes whispered echolalia which often is word perfect – I end up saying “Would you like ham or tuna in your sandwich?” to myself , often several times in a row, before the question sinks in enough for me to come up with an answer. This feels to me like a sort of sensory processing overload at play. When stressed, it can take several repetitions of the question before my brain catches up and gets a chance to process what the questioner is asking. Perhaps this is also executive disfunction at play.

Back to the party. After that faux pas, I generally smiled and waved at people – if I couldn’t think of something sensible to say, and hey, I’d just proved that quite comprehensively, perhaps it was better to say nothing at all.

The scenarios I’ve painted above are nothing out of the ordinary for me – they are very typical of how I react in situations that I find difficult. They show quite clearly how I’ve learnt techniques to avoid or camouflage situations that I find difficult, particularly social ones. I learnt these techniques many years ago – well before I knew anything about AS – and have honed them over time, until they have become practically second nature to me.

Did I enjoy the party? On the whole, yes. It was stressful, and I felt socially very awkward at several points, despite the camouflage, but the bowling was fun.

Dancing the night away

Since my son started School in January, my wife has become quite involved in the parents’ association, and it’s various fund raising events.

This was why I found myself in the local village hall with my wife last Saturday night, to attend a ceilidh (pronounced something like ‘kaylee’). If you are British, then you’ll know what one of these is (I hope), but for those of you not familiar with this Scottish tradition, I suppose I’d better fill you in. A ceilidh is, I suppose a little like American line dancing. It’s a traditional Scottish folk dance performed by a collection of couples, accompanied by a traditional band with instruments like fiddles, whistles, accordions and a bodhran drum. A caller explains steps that the dancers then perform, making complex patterns, usually of intermingled people across the dance floor.

I’ve been to a ceilidh before, a couple of years ago. I didn’t join in. This time though, I was determined to take part. To this end, I dragged my wife up for the first two dances. I felt this was psychologically important, because if I had taken part at the start, when everyone was still finding their feet, I’d feel less out of place. This little trick worked, and both me and my wife took part in all but two of the dances across the whole evening.

It was fun!

It really was good fun, and I didn’t feel out of place. Most of those taking part (and there were fifty or so of us) had clearly never done much dancing, never mind much ceilidh dancing. We were a bunch of novices that made countless mistakes, and laughed about them as we made them! Fabulous!

This all meant that no-one noticed the extra little mistakes that I was making. The funniest of these was where we had to stand in a circles and then wheel either to the left or the right. I have trouble with left and right at the best of times – I have to consciously think which is which when someone asks me to do something that invovles a left or right action. So it was that for the first few dances we’d be commanded to ‘circle left’, and I’d be standing still thinking for a half second whilst the circle was already moving in the correct direction. In the end I gave up trying to think about it, and just went with the direction the circle decided to go. That worked nicely!

I found, to my own surprise that I didn’t have a problem keeping the rhythm of the dances, indeed many others were far worse at this than I was. I’ve commented in the past that I have no rhythm. This clearly isn’t true. I don’t dance well or imaginatively – that’s a better description, because clearly in a prescribed dance such as a ceilidh I can have a good go at the steps, and can keep the rhythm quite well.

Some dances had sequences of eight or ten different moves. I found these difficult from the point of view that I’d mix up the sequencing. I punctuated these dances with little verbalised reminders to myself – “right wheel, pass partner, dosey doe, oh – no – promenade then dosey doe – sorry, polka” – that sort of thing. Despite the sequence of moves repeating every minute or so for a good five minutes, I’d still make the same sequence errors each time. Oh – and because of the intense concentration on the moves and the sequencing, I didn’t hear much of the music – it just washed over me providing the rhythm and nothing more. That’s a shame, because the band were rather good, I thought.

What I really wasn’t good at were the knots. These are complex moves performed in small groups where everyone holds hands and then people weave through each others arms and spin around to unwind the knots they’ve created. We’d try these slowly and a little repetitively without the music first, and then perform them in the dance. Whilst I’d feel I’d understood how it worked when we first tried it out, I’d inevitably have forgotten the intricate details by the time we danced, just a minute or two later. How did the other dancers manage? Well some managed the knots, and others didn’t, and everyone found them difficult.  Perhaps the difference here is that I was paying very good attention as to how the move worked and then still failed, whereas some others having trouble were clearly taking things far less seriously, and weren’t paying as much heed to the instructions as they might have.

So the dancing was fun, and because it was complicated and we were all amateurs, I didn’t feel self concious about getting bits wrong, or about forgetting the sequence of moves. Others were making the same mistakes.

What wasn’t so much fun were the social bits in between the dances. The dancing is hard work, so the format was typically two five minute dances and then a 15 minute break for people to recover. In these breaks, many of the attendees wandered around and chatted socially. My little group of me, my wife, my wife’s friend and her friend who we’d not met before didn’t really mingle. This suited me fine – the dancing was hard work mentally as well as physically, which didn’t leave much room in my head for making small talk. Even in our little group I kept mostly to myself, and listened more than I talked. My head was full of dance moves and how they worked.

I wondered before the start if I’d feel over-stimulated by the music and the noise. In reality I didn’t feel it as much as I thought I might. I was a bit blank during the breaks, and undeniably tired at the end, but elated. And the elation over-rode any feelings of over-stimulation.

Would I go again?

Yes. The combination of someone else telling me how to move, plus everyone being an amateur who made mistakes really did work well for me.

Slow thinking

When it comes to talking with others, I’m often seen to be something of a slow thinker.

I’ll see the other person smile after saying something and look at me – they are expecting a response, but what sort of a response? Was it a joke they made? Were they looking for agreement on something? My brain will scramble and then often metaphorically shrug it’s shoulders. I don’t follow this up with a physical shrug – I’ve long since learnt that this isn’t an acceptable response. Instead I’ll use a tried-and-tested store-cupboard stock response of, ‘Heh, yeah!’.

This is a highly refined response from me, and has been carefully honed over the years to try and covey many messages at once in an ambiguous way. It has a little humour in it, in case what you were saying was actually a joke. It has a positive response in it too, so that if it wasn’t something funny, I’ve indicated that I acknowledge what you were saying. It works a surprisingly large amount of the time.

And then it comes, eventually – I’ve decoded what you were saying to me, and I suddenly see the joke, or why you were wanting some agreement from me. Occasionally of course I’ll eventually see that my response wasn’t very appropriate. Oh dear, but then again, you can’t win all the time.

Why do I miss the intent of what people are saying to me in the first place? Well there are a number of competing Aspie traits at play, and they often collude together.

Firstly, there is my lack of social intuition. I do have some sometimes, but it isn’t enough to get me by most of the time. With little by the way of social intuition to help a conversation flow, I have to real-time process what is being said to me, and then try and figure what to say next. This consumes a lot of brain power, and concentration, leaving me little room for anything else going on in my head. Sometimes the responses are easier to come by than others. But put me in a situation where I know little about the subject matter, and I very very easily get lost, especially if it’s more than a 2-way conversation.

Think of it as having a meeting where the other people speak in a foreign language that you don’t fully understand. You have to listen very hard to catch what is being said, and then spend a little time processing what was said to turn it into English, before what they’ve said makes sense. My lack of social intuition presents itself in much the same way but when everyone is speaking in English.

Then there is my lack of reading non-verbal social cues. Because I concentrate on what’s said, and don’t see the body language or facial expressions very much, I miss much of the subtlety that people often convey whilst they speak. This makes the decision making regarding what people are saying even harder at times.

The third main trait at play is strongly related to the other two, and is that I easily get sensory overload in social situations.  The amount of time this takes varies, but you can be sure that a multi-person face-to-face meeting will cause it remarkably quickly. Once I’m overloaded, my body involuntarily starts to shut itself down, to shield me from the constant input. This feeling is one of blankness. I feel to have withdrawn inside myself, and the voices become distant echos. My eyes blur and I kind of switch off. This, of course means that I miss a fair bit of what’s being said, and that means that the impact of the other traits gets magnified hugely.

With all of these traits at play, it’s not surprising that I often find verbal communication, be it social or work meetings, to be very hard going. It’s also not surprising that I can be perceived to be slow of thought, and disinterested.

At work, at least, I tend to get away with this, because I come back with well though out responses to things after the event, and people respect me for doing this. I seem to have a well-honed ability to reply recent events and from this work through peoples thoughts and intentions before drawing my own conclusions. It’s rumination, but it works very well for me. Whilst I may not have good instant answers for anyone, I do at least have well thought out follow-ups.

You could conclude that this article is about mental agility, and my lack of it. However it’s more subtle than that. I don’t have great mental agility in group verbal communication scenarios, but I do when it comes to rumination or philosophising. This is signalling parallels to me regarding this article I wrote last week, where I said that I don’t appear to others to not have much common sense, but really it’s just a case that I can’t express it when I need to. Maybe that article and this simply describe different facets of the same issue.

As ever, what this article really says is that I’m different from the norm, but perhaps in ways that aren’t what you first think. I have skills that are very typical of any intelligent person – I can reason arguments, suggest ways forward and make rational decisions. I just can’t access these results in the same sorts of timescales that typical people can.

I’m not slow-minded, I just can’t respond in a way that meets your neuro-typical expectations.

The cuckoo in the nest of life

One of the really great things about the Internet from my perspective is that you can learn from others. Each morning I eagerly look at my Google Reader to see which of the blogs that I follow have new entries. I follow lots of content about a lot of different things, and I learn a lot from the experiences of others, but perhaps my favourite blogs are those written by others on the Autism Spectrum.

This morning I read a short but rather striking piece by Sophia Battenburg on her An Ordered Mind blog. I say striking, because as often happens with AS blogs, the writer has put things in a slightly different way to me, and from that I’ve seen new connections to how I behave and interact that I’d not seen before.

Sophia says, in the context of having her routine interrupted by noisy people in her living space:

I am coming to terms more with emotions, as I’m conscious that I block a lot of the negative ones out.

This rings true for me. What it has also done is make me think about why both I and Sophia block out the negative emotions in situations that we are not comfortable with. I think I know why.

Both Sophia and I did not discover our AS until we were adults. This means that we’ve grown up having to make sense of the world from an angle where it actually doesn’t make a great deal of sense a lot of the time.

In my case at least, social interaction has most of the time come from repetition of what I’ve seen others do, through a bit of guesswork, and from learning when my reactions have seemed to be inappropriate. In other words, it’s lacked the intuition that most people use. In order to survive, I’ve had to blend in, using mimicry.

You have to remember that this was the thing that came naturally to me, not the intuitive interactions that my peers used. It seemed like the normal thing to do, even if it was a little confusing, as it didn’t seem to be quite the same as what my peers were doing.

With all this in mind, you can see how a situation such as that described by Sophia ends up with her bottling up her negative emotions. When I feel uncomfortable with a situation such as invasion of my space by noisy people, I too will bite my tongue.

Why? Because I have observed over the years that no-one else comments on it.

These days, I can see that no-one else sees it as a problem – they simply don’t have the same sensory overload and broken routine issues as me. Until it became clear how my Asperger’s affects me, I assumed that others too felt the same discomfort, but simply didn’t feel it polite to comment on it. As my social responses are primarily learned from others rather than being from original thinking, I’ve always towed what I think is the correct line. I say nothing, because that is the response of those around me. I bottle up the discomfort and negative emotions, just like Sophia.

Those of us who grew up with undiagnosed Asperger’s are cukoos in the nest of life. We mimic those around us to get by. If that means keeping quiet about situations that cause us discomfort, then that’s what we do, because that’s what those from whom we learned appeared to be doing.

Can I break this behaviour now that I’m aware of it? I think so. Ask me in a year.

Don’t answer that…

Compulsion is a key trait in my Asperger’s, and it seems to be behind one of the more annoying things that I do regularly.

I answer rhetorical questions. I can’t help doing it, and even though I usually know these days when they are meant to be rhetorical, I still feel that I have to answer.
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Mixing special interests and camouflage

Via a friend’s twittering, I recently saw a link to a new digital camera that was coming out. I clicked through and took a very brief look. The page I saw was this.

I’m not a photography fanatic, but I do like gadgets. I quickly took in the big facts – it’s one of those ‘cross over’ cameras that looks like an SLR, but doesn’t have interchangeable lenses. It has a 24x zoom – goodness that’s a lot. It wasn’t much cheaper to buy than an entry level SLR. I didn’t read the full article, and in 30 seconds, the page was closed, and I was on to something else.

I mention this, because a week or so later this camera was to make a re-appearance in my life.

I was sitting at home chatting with my wife. Our conversation was about nothing in particular, but at one point it touched on some photographs we’d taken recently.

Ding!

My brain had made a connection back to the camera I’d seen a week earlier. Compulsion overtook me. I had to tell my wife about this new camera that was coming out with the amazing zoom lens on it. So I did – badly. I butted in with something like, “There’s a new camera coming out soon, Pentax I think it is, with a 20 something zoom lens on it”. My wife takes this sort of interruption in her stride these days, because I make them frequently.

She made a dismissive comment such as “oh that’s nice”, and then carried on with whatever the conversation was about at that time. I couldn’t tell you what we were actually talking about, because my brain was still off at a tangent about the camera.

How big was that zoom? I knew it was 20 something, but I couldn’t remember what. Was it a Pentax? I think it was, but I can’t be sure. What if I’ve told my wife the wrong make? Our current camera isn’t very good. Maybe we should think about buying one of these. Or maybe a proper SLR – they aren’t much more expensive. Then the kids could use our not-very-good compact – they’d enjoy that.

In and amongst these thoughts I held the conversation with my wife going. My camouflage saw to that pretty much automatically. I bet my input wasn’t scintilating though.

This is very typical of how I work. Much is made in AS literature about how we have ‘Special Interests’ that we can talk about for hours on end. Much is also made of how we use a social camouflage where we use a pattern match mechanism to give a canned response to a given situation or line of questioning.

I think my behaviour in the above scenario is basically a combination of both of these things, and kind of a back-firing of the camouflage mechanism at the same time.

The moment of pattern match and subsequent response is the camouflage mechanism working. The talk about photographs triggered the response about the camera I’d recently read about. The compulsion to speak and the thoughts that followed are special interest.

But cameras aren’t one of my special interests, despite the response being very typically special interest. I guess these two mechanisms are so deeply ingrained into how I work that my brain decided that this combination was the correct response to the situation. Even as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t, but the compulsion was too strong to ignore.

Do any of you experience this combination of traits?

Concepts are difficult

I have trouble with concepts. Concepts are woolly. You can’t easily define them.

What is a friend? What makes you romantic?

My Asperger’s causes me problems with interaction and the expression of empathy, which is why the above two concepts in particular cause me trouble.

I’ve figured out over the years how to respond to many social interactions, to the point that for most day-to-day conversations I have sufficient camouflage in place for them not to be a problem. These are learned responses – something that if you’ve got AS will seem very normal to you, but if you don’t, will seem odd. Those of use with Asperger’s learn from an early age to mimic other people, and store away canned responses for many scenarios, as a way to camouflage our lack of natural intuition when it comes to interacting with other people. It works in a trigger/response sort of way – the specific situation I’m in acts as a trigger for a given learnt response.

Canned responses are all very well for specific interactions, but they don’t work for things like friendship and romance.

Romance is a particular problem of mine. To be honest, it’s something that my wife complains about a lot, and I struggle to explain why I find it so difficult. Surely I could learn to be romantic?

I find romance difficult because it isn’t a clearly defined thing, and it doesn’t have a trigger that requires an instantaneous response. Thus, my usual coping camouflage simply isn’t appropriate.

What do I think romance is? This is a really difficult question for me to answer. I think it’s about showing someone that you care, by doing something thoughtful. It’s about taking your loved one away from their usual night in to see a film, or for a nice meal. It’s about effort expended by me to make my wife’s life easier.

Are those right?

I can cope with the above sorts of things, but here’s the killer for me – for romance to work well, it has to appear to the other person to be spontaneous, yet well thought through. This is where things tend to go wrong for me.

To get things done in my life, I need a hand-written to-do list. If something isn’t on the list, it doesn’t tend to get done. I use an online calendar to try and schedule future events, and also to act as a reminder for the things I’ll forget – like birthdays, and renewing things like car tax and insurance. The calendar sends SMS messages to my phone, and I then write the task in my list for the day to make sure I get it sorted. This may seem like an overly complex system, but it works for me – the act of writing down helps me to get more things done than simply having a rolling to-do list on a computer.

I could schedule romance into my calendar, but when the reminder SMS arrived, I’d find it difficult to implement. It’s at this point in discussing romance that my wife tends to get frustrated and angry with me. If I can schedule a reminder to buy a birthday card for someone which I then manage to do, why can’t I schedule in time to be romantic and follow that through too?

It’s a really good question, and I wish I had a really good answer. I don’t, but I will try and explain.

If I sent a reminder via SMS to my phone to ‘Be romantic’, I’d instantly hit a problem. Romance is a concept, and as I’ve already said, I find it difficult to make sense of something that is by definition woolly. Buying and posting the birthday card is easy – it is a well defined thing to do.

If I’m going to succeed in being romantic, then I’ll need to do something that both shows that I care, and is sufficiently different from anything I’ve tried recently to show that thought has gone into it.

But what? We went to the cinema recently. Going for a meal is something we do reasonably often as well. Whilst I could fall back on a scenario like these once in a while, they are not very imaginative, are they?

How about a little trinket? That’s potentially a great idea, as choosing something that she liked would not only be romantic, and show that I was thinking about her, but would also show that I knew her taste in things. But what? Anxiety and self-doubt creep in almost immediately. I don’t know what makes a great little gift – that’s a woolly concept too, but I do know that the sorts of things that I’d like wouldn’t be what my wife would like. Rather than buy the wrong thing, I’d rather buy nothing.

Flowers? No. I am aware that flowers are a tricky one. I have never regularly given flowers during the whole seven years of our relationship, so giving them out of the blue is actually likely to give rise to unfounded suspicion rather than anything else. I recently bought her a house plant, however, and that did go down well. Can’t do that one in a hurry again, though.

I’ve even got a little book at home that is supposed to give romantic ideas for gentlemen to try. It doesn’t work, because most of the items in it are either too skewed towards the American market for which it was written, or the ideas seem far too twee. If I’m going to be romantic, it has to be something that would seem right coming from me. But that’s the problem – if I can’t define romance very well, what would seem right coming from me?

Occasionally inspiration does strike, and I’ll buy my wife something small and practical that I’d noticed she would clearly benefit from. But practical and occasionally are the key words here, which means that my gestures are seen more as a kind thinking-of-you sort of thing rather than being romantic.

So what do I do? Typically, regretfully, nothing.

I don’t have the answers for how to make this work better at the current time. Has anyone got any suggestions that I might try?