One, two, three, four…

You know how it goes:

Ring-Ring. One…

You don’t like calling people on the phone, and have just spent ages trying to pre-play the conversation in your head.

Ring-Ring. Two…

Anxiety is sloshing around.

Ring-Ring. Three…

It’s ok, people rarely pick up on three rings, unless they are sitting by the phone.

Ring-Ring. Four…

Ok, I admit it. I count the rings before people pick up the phone.

Ring-Ring. Five…

It’s partly to do with knowing when to put the phone down when the phone isn’t being answered.

Ring-Ring. Six…

It’s also to do with my love of patterns. I find myself counting involuntarily these days.

Ring-Ring. Seven…

Come on – where are they?

Ring-Ring. Eight…

Hmmm… Maybe they aren’t there. But eight rings isn’t all that long. (It’s actually around 24 seconds…)

Ring-Ring. Nine…

I can visualise them running towards the phone now.

Ring-Ring. Ten…

Pick it up! Oh no. They didn’t. Maybe they weren’t running after all…

Ring-Ring. Eleven…

Maybe this time! Oh – no.

Ring-Ring. Twelve.

Handset  down.

I don’t know why I picked twelve rings to be the cut off point if I’m honest. If I really think about it, most people have picked up by half a dozen rings if they are there. But twelve it is, most of the time. If I’m phoning a utility or some other sort of service I’ll hold on for longer. But with people, I count to twelve and then put the handset down.

Do any of you have a hidden and slightly odd use of patterns like this one? I’d love to hear about it!

Maybe we are not so different…

This, in a sense, is a follow up to the article I wrote earlier about my experience with dipping into autism advocacy. If you haven’t already done so, it would make sense for you to read that article first.

–

Imagine if you will, a hypothetical mother. She has an autistic son. She believes that her son was developing normally, but that sometime around the time of his early childhood injections, he started to regress with the signs of autism. She associates the two things, and now absolutely believes that the injections caused her son’s autism. This mother cares deeply for her son, and would do just about anything to reverse that regression, turning him into a normal child once more.

Her son is now seven, and has been receiving an array of treatments, including chelation and the use of a hyperbaric chamber over the last five years. The mother sees some signs of treatments working every now and then, but her son is clearly still autistic. She has learned not to trust mainstream Doctors, after all, they believe in the shots that gave her son this condition. Instead, she is more inclined to believe unconventional specialist Doctors who have brought their own treatments and potions onto the market, with very encouraging results promised by them. To hell with the cost – if it helps her son, it is worth every penny.

Now, this really isn’t meant to represent anyone in particular. It is just meant to give something of a picture of a mother who is prepared to go to any length to reverse a condition that she perceives her son has developed rather than inherited. If you are reading this, and think I’m talking about you, then I’m not, I assure you. I’ve just created a stereotype based on what I’ve read. It may well be an inaccurate stereotype, but I’m sure there are some parents out there who the above fits very well.
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The mechanics of visibility

It’s a funny old game, this blogging lark.

When I first had the idea for this blog back in January, I was very unsure of myself, and, indeed about what I would be able to write about. My first postings, back in the early spring were tentative, and I was relieved that no-one was watching whilst I was finding my feet.

As time passed, my confidence grew in my ability to express myself and occasionally produce some nice and/or interesting bits of writing. Satisfaction started to set in, and I grew somewhat addicted to assembling the jumble of thoughts in my head into coherent articles.

People were starting to take notice. Some have come and gone, others have hung around for the longer haul. New faces are always welcome, and it’s great to see.

In time I’ve turned from a shy and unsure blogger into a confident one, who wants his words to be read by others.

But frustration has started to hit on the visibility of the blog. I made a concious decision to host on my own server because I wanted control, and to have the ability to muck about with my own settings, and feel pride in having created my own hosting solution. At the time, this seemed like a great idea, but I can now see the drawbacks.

My blog is not part of a community.
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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.

Oh no, I’ve done it again!

It’s my first day back at work today, after a week of holiday.

I arrived at work a little after 0930, switched on the various PCs on my desk, and started to work through the large volume of email that had built up over the week.

And then it happened. It always happens.

I read an email that suggested that a fix that I had proposed for something that I was working on before my holiday was wrong. I was suddenly filled with self doubt. How could I have been so stupid? What must these people think of me for suggesting a solution that was wrong? Can I go home and curl up in a little ball now please?

I say this always happens – but of course it doesn’t always happen like the above. It is very common, however for me to arrive back at work from an absence and struggle to confidently pick things up from where I’d left them. It doesn’t take much to knock my confidence. I also find that in the short time that I’ve been away, I’ve forgotten the detail of the items I was working on.

So when I was confronted by an email that said my proposed solution was wrong in a number of ways, my natural reaction, countering my loss of detailed information about the issue was to assume what they were saying was right. A very familiar problem for me.

Lucky then, that I have something of a solution for this problem these days.

Instead of firing a quick email reply back apologising profusely for my mistakes, I held tight and went back to basics. Firstly, I wrote down what I thought the solution would be – that I’d made a bit of an error, but that it wasn’t as large as the email had suggested. This was an initial brain dump for me – a starting point of what I did remember about the problem.

I then went away and spent an hour researching and thinking about the problem once more. Then I wrote my email reply. I didn’t really know what it’d say before I wrote it – my thoughts didn’t fully make sense to me until I’d done the writing. How very typical – I can order my thoughts on paper, but not easily in my head or indeed verbally.

How well did my reply match what I thought the solution would be before I started researching? It didn’t. Not at all.

You see, I wasn’t wrong in my original solution to the issue. The colleague who had questioned it had some wrong assumptions.

Until recently, I’d have trusted the other person’s assertions, and would have written a very apologetic email back straight away, before later having to retract my apology when it became clear that I wasn’t after all wrong. That was terrible for my self esteem both at the point where I’d apologise, and also at the later point where I’d have to go back and say that sorry, I wasn’t wrong after all. Horrible.

So if I used to trust other peoples assertions in these matters, do I now trust my own? No – as you can see from my above writing, I still thought I was in the wrong. The assertions of my colleague made so much sense to me, and came from someone I trust and respect. They couldn’t be wrong, could they?

I can’t change my neurology. I’m always going to lose sight of detailed information of technical work issues after only a short period of time. I’m always going to be able to see the inherent logic in those who say my solution is wrong. Hey – if I trust the person and I no longer have the detailed information at hand to show they are wrong, who am I to argue?

Perhaps this subtly shows a larger picture of how I interact with people on a day to day basis. I either trust someone or I don’t. If I trust them, and if what they are saying sounds logical, then I assume they are right and that they are telling the truth. This is why sarcasm is often lost on me, and why I can be gullible. This is just how it works for me – it isn’t optional, and I don’t do it out of choice.

I can’t change my neurology, but I can change my response. Holding back on immediately replying in situations like this – regardless of how compulsive it feels to respond immediately – can and does often work. It doesn’t stop my initial feelings of stupidity from happening, but it does at least offer the possibility of me saving some of my precious self esteem.

An unusual feeling

When I first started writing this blog, I didn’t know where it would take me. I still don’t, to be honest, but the path which I find myself down now is not the one I thought I’d be down.

Popularity is an odd phenomenon. I’ve never sought it, perhaps because I fear it would show me for the social charlatan that I am. Instead I tend to seek obscurity, and in social gatherings I’m the aloof one in the background somewhere.

Some unexpected things have happened to my blog in the last couple of weeks. Firstly, people have started to actually read it. What’s more, they are commenting on what I write. This wasn’t what I expected when I started the blog.

It’s great – and entirely a surprise – that people are reading what I write, and that they are coming back for repeat visits. I had a lot to express when I started the blog – I still do – but I wrote thinking that ultimately the only person that was likely to be interested was me. That didn’t matter one jot – I needed to express things, and writing it all formally gave me a framework within which to work that was comfortable for me. Making it public on the Internet forced me to think about what I was writing, to a degree.

I’ve worked in online retail, have published my own writing on the Internet before, and am familiar with the various methods of tracking site traffic, so when I set up my blog I added Google Analytics tracking to it. I may have had low expectations as to other people visiting, but I still wanted to see the figures. I’ve also done some other tricks, such as trying to optimise my site keywords to help make the entries show up better in search engine results. The first three months went pretty much as I expected. Visitor numbers could be counted on a couple of fingers most days, and page impressions across both hands, often easily. The line was flat – my blog was, predicably, going nowhere fast.

However, I got my first comments really quite early on and was over the moon. Someone had not only read what I had written, but they had empathised too! Fantastic!

Then a couple of weeks ago the slow creep of comments started to speed up, and finally overtook the number of articles I’d written. At about the same time, the page impressions per day were starting to ramp up. On April the 7th, I had my first day where page impressions excluding my own visits and spider traffic went over 100. Add in the pages viewed in RSS, and I hit close to 150 page views. In the last month 132 different people have viewed pages on my site, including visitors from five continents, and places as far apart as New Zealand, Mexico, Poland, India and Russia. Most visitors are from the US, and the UK.

Is my blog popular? Of course not – not in the grand scheme of things. A grand total of 11 people subscribe to my RSS feed, one of those is me (to check it’s not broken), and I suspect most of the others are amongst those who also visit the site itself regularly. Popular blogs will do many tens of thousands of page impressions a day, and will also have thousands of RSS subscribers.

I feel popular, however. And for someone who courts obscurity, that’s an odd thing. I think, perhaps I feel safe hidden behind my false name on a website that can’t easily be traced back to me. I also feel safe because those of you who do read what I have to say understand me, most of the time. You understand because you have Asperger’s or a similar condition. I can’t tell you how unusual that feeling is. I’m usually the one in social settings that feels they don’t fit in, and that they don’t have anything useful to say – hence the aloofness off in the corner. It doesn’t work that way here though, and so to each and every one of you that has read what I have to say, and especially to those who have taken the time to comment, I say thank you. I hope you’ll continue to come back and provide me with interesting comments.

There is of course another reason for writing this article. It demonstrates quite effectively one of my Asperger’s traits. I can chat away in detail for hours about information that I’ve gathered that only has any significance to me. That famous Aspie trait works in writing too!

Why on earth would you want to know how many visitors my site has had? I still felt I had to tell you though…

Getting things done

I used to be terribly disorganised, and failed to get things done that I really had to do. My memory for tasks appears to be very transitory – no matter what I do to try and consciously remember things, the list slips quickly out of my mind, and I have no clue what I was supposed to be doing, often despite much thinking.

I thought there would be an easy solution to this – create and use some form of written to-do list. I figured this out many years ago in my early years of work, and over the years, my process of list writing has evolved and been refined many times. I’ve flirted with computerised lists and various book methodologies, but have always ended up back with a daily hand written list that I create each morning, because it works best for me. The list is very regimented in the way it is written down, yet changes subtly every few weeks as I decided to use some new tweak that I think will help me.

So, I get things done these days, yes?

Well, kind of.

There is no denying that having a to-do list has improved my ability to concentrate and complete work enormously, but actually it’s ended up highlighting another issue too.

I have a terrible problem with procrastination.

With my to-do list constantly with me, I know what work needs to be done over the course of my work day, and I also know which the higher priority items are. So I tackle those first, don’t I? Well, sometimes. If there are high priority and easy items, then I will certainly do those first – right after I’ve spent some time on the Internet, checking the blog traffic, and reading some items from my RSS reader. I am, after all, a man of routine.

Then I’ll try and force myself to do the more complex high priority issues. Sometimes I manage, and other times I fail.

Often the barrier is obvious – perhaps I need to phone someone about a subject I’m not hot on, or to ask someone to do something that they aren’t going to like. I find scenarios like these difficult, and will actively try and avoid them.

Then there is the big problem of not being interested in the task. This, I think is the crux of the issue, and I also think it’s part of my Aspie make up.

If I’m not interested in a piece of work, I will find one hundred and one reasons not to start doing it. These reasons seem important and valid, and are very difficult for me to overcome. They are in reality neither important nor valid. For example, I’ll reason to myself that I need to do another task first, as it’s actually more important. Hmmm. Then why did I give this task a higher priority than the other on my list this morning? I’ll even go as far as to change the priorities I’ve written down, as though to justify to myself that my task avoidance is legitimate. Or perhaps I’ll decide that I can’t start until I’ve confirmed some aspect of the task with someone else in the office. In this case, I’ll then start to fall back on worrying about what I’ll ask them. I’ll need to get my story straight before I approach them. Then I’ll check my email. And browse the Internet a bit. When I finally get round to doing the asking, it’s not uncommon for hours to have passed.

I used to think this was normal. Everyone does it, don’t they? No. I’m an observant chap, and whilst my colleagues will flirt with a little procrastination, they don’t have a problem of my magnitude. They can all get on with tasks, regardless of how hard or boring they are – they chip away until they’ve broken things down into chunks they can manage. When they hit a bit they find difficult then they ask the relevant person. Everyone has jobs to do at work that they don’t look forward to, but people still do them.

It’s probably worth pointing out at this juncture that eventually, I do start, get on with and complete the tasks that I put off. I can only put off jobs for so long, and then I’m forced to tackle them, because not doing so would get me into trouble at work. Over the years I’ve become quite good at judging just how far out I can push tasks I’m not keen on before I have to start or risk trouble.

Interestingly – and this is something that’s just occurred to me – this tactic could almost be seen as a coping mechanism. By putting off a boring task until I can put it off no longer, I’m then forced to do the work, which ultimately immerses me into it. Once I’m immersed, I can get it done – the job suddenly seems like a challenge, and often it’s quite fun too. It’s no longer hard or boring. It’s almost as though I use my procrastination problem to my advantage, to push me into doing the very work that I’m procrastinating my way around in the first place.

So actually, despite having a self-confessed terrible track record at knuckling down to work, I still get my tasks done without them being late.

My procrastination and also my frequent browsing of the Internet and viewing of email are all compulsions, and I struggle to manage them. Yet somehow, they all seem to balance with my sense of responsibility and thus work in my favour, meaning I get my work tasks done on time, and with a level of care and detail that my bosses seem to be pleased with.

I can’t help thinking that those around me at work think that I just spend my day browsing the Internet, however.

Do any of you have a similar problem? How do you tackle it?

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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Digging a hole the Aspie way

I’ve spent much of the last three weekends digging a big hole in our back garden, so that we can get some flat land onto which to build a garden shed.

The hard manual labour involved in the digging and disposing of five-or-so tonnes of soil and clay has had a wonderful effect on my mood, and the time spent alone doing the job has helped me to see just how some of my Asperger’s traits show themselves.

The soil I’ve dug out has been put into large plastic bags weighing something like 40kg each when full, and has then been loaded into the back of our car, fifteen bags at a time and driven to the local tip, where it has gone into the rubble skip to be recycled. I’ve so far filled, driven and emptied 120 bags-full over three weekends. Doing so has shown a very exacting repetitive aspect to my nature. After a little experimentation in the first couple of trips, the same pattern was then followed each time:

The bags were loaded three at a time into my wheel barrow (same order of loading the barrow each time), and wheeled round the house to the car. Once there, they were off-loaded in the same order and stacked into the boot and folded-down back seats of the car, once again in the same order. With the car full, I drove to the tip, and then unloaded in the same order once more, in the reverse of the order that I loaded, with the last six bags coming out via the rear door of the car rather than the boot.

Repetitive. It felt right, and it felt good – this was the way to do it. Loading and unloading in a different order simply didn’t cross my mind – I knew this was the best way to do it.

The actual act of the digging itself put me deep into the zone. I was at one with my spade and the hole I was digging. The rest of the world was a blur around me. I worked for hours at a stretch and it seemed like no time had passed. It was hard work, and I was sweaty and achey at the end of each day, yet whilst I worked I didn’t feel it. I only felt tired and sore once I’d stopped and sat down.

The exercise and alone time really did wonders for my mood. My anxiety is pretty much non-existent right now, and I have a huge sense of achievement and of peace and calm in me. I’ve written recently about not knowing if I’ve done a good job or not, well, in this case I know I’ve done it. But then again, I know we need the shed, and I know that if I don’t do the digging we won’t be getting one. I can see the results. I know I’ve done a good job this time.

And then there was the hole that needed filling…

Our garden has a couple of feet of soil, and then below that is solid orange clay. I needed to remove an old wooden gatepost from part of the area I was digging, as the new shed was going to be on top of it. After digging round the post and using my own weight to pull the post over and out of the hole, I was left with an eighteen inch deep and foot wide hole in the clay where the post and it’s concrete footings had been.

I decided that I had to fill the hole with clay. Not soil. Clay only. In my mind there was a logic to this – if I filled this big hole with soil, then when it rained it would fill with water at a different rate than if I filled it with clay. The hole was going to be near the edge below my shed, and I didn’t want my shed to subside where the hole had been.

I know it’s crazy, and doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but I spent 30 minutes separating clay from soil in the large pile that I’d dug out that hadn’t yet been bagged up. The big bits were easy, but the little bits took a while. In the end, the hole was filled. With clay.

At the time, this made perfect sense. It was the right way to do the job. Would it really have made a difference if I’d filled the hole with soil? No. It was a hole surrounded by miles of clay. The soil wouldn’t exactly go anywhere, would it?

So there you have it – a simple thing like digging a hole in the garden shows a whole range of my more Aspie-like behaviours.

Could I use Special Interests to my advantage?

Talking in depth about my special interests is easy. I could do it for hours, and sometimes as a proper two way conversation with someone who is interested too. Yet making small talk with other people is excruciatingly awkward for me most of the time.

I’ve had a crazy thought about this, and it stems from something my wife has said to me. She’s seen my indulgence of special interests from long before either of us knew about my Asperger’s and has observed that I can quickly learn things in areas where I had no previous knowledge.

Based on this, could I make small talk and other social interactions a special interest, and thus sort them out?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and have decided that it’s not quite that simple. Here’s why:

My special interests are all very specific things, and whilst they have covered a multitude of different areas over the years, they usually have one of a few threads in common. They mostly involve something technical that has a well mapped out sphere of knowledge readily available, either in book or Internet form. Local history often pops it’s head in too. Thus over the years I’ve looked in depth at things like the Space Shuttle, the London Underground, maps, underground passageways and bunkers, mobile phones, Apple Macs, Linux, coal mining in the area I live in, historical photographs, the history of London Docklands. This is only a small fraction of the list, but I hope you can see that there is something of a common theme that runs throughout.

I feel like I don’t choose my special interests, more like they choose me. One often flows from another, and they have some link not just to whatever my previous focus was, but also to either my current environment, or a current technology.

My current special interest is Asperger’s itself. This in turn flowed out of learning about anxiety. If you thought that these two special interests didn’t follow the usual pattern, then you’d be right. The trigger for these has been to do with how something affects me personally, rather than anything external.

My special interests are all about the consumption of information, and from time to time the regurgitation of that information. Sometimes that is done appropriately with someone else who is interested, but often it is done in the more typical Asperger’s style of talking at someone else who isn’t really interested. As I’ve written elsewhere, this isn’t really something that I have much control over – a connection is made from a talking point to some piece of information I’ve got stored away that may only be tenuously linked, and I then feel compulsion to talk about it.

So – lets say for the sake of argument that I could persuade myself to get immersed in learning about social interaction.

If I did this I would end up with a lot of facts. I could talk about these facts  until the cows came home. Could I learn from the information I’ve read? Yes, to a degree. When I looked in depth at anxiety, I learned a few things that could help me reduce my anxiety levels, and I use them regularly. To be honest, however I learned far more about how anxiety affects people, how to treat it in general, and how it often goes hand in hand with other conditions, than I did about anything else. Facts like that are background information and less useful to me.

What I’d need to learn were techniques that I could use to interact – information that has an application rather than just being fact. I’d then need to apply it rather than just regurgitate it.

If I could do this about social interaction then I might just make some headway.

There is a catch though.

I have, in a sense, being doing just this all my life. When you don’t understand the subtle social interactions of your peers as a growing child, you find ways to make yourself fit in. As I wrote in some depth here, I observed others and stored away how they interacted in the hope that I’d be able to use what I’d seen as templates for similar situations as they arose for me. I already have a databank in my head of probably many thousands of reactions to things people say to me, that I hope are roughly suitable.

Making social interaction a special interest might gain me a few more.

I probably have the ideal opportunity now to find out. Investigating anxiety lead to investigating Asperger’s and that in turn could flow into investigating social interaction. I say could, because frankly, it hasn’t grabbed me yet in the way that my special interests usually do. I doubt the investigation of Asperger’s has run it’s course yet, and it’s unusual for me to have more than one special interest at a time.

I will keep you informed of how this develops.