It always does.

My wife wanted to talk. Not a friendly talk, but one of those talks where she wants to vent her huge frustration with me. She’s very good at this, and whether she realises it or not, has a canny knack of vicious character assassination, in these often one sided arguments that run from when the kids go to bed to when we go to bed.

Argument is not one of my strong points. I’m not often quick thinking, and so argument directed at me is typically just absorbed, and I remain quiet much of the time, unable to think of a decent counter to use. This, of course makes things worse. It makes it look like I don’t care. Of course I care. I just can’t produce the necessary come back that my wife expects and wants.

Our argument last night left me not only feeling down and unloved, but also completely misunderstood, and a little suicidal.

I didn’t see it coming. I rarely do. This perplexes my wife, who thinks she is being very obviously ‘off’ with me for days before hand. But I don’t usually see it, and I didn’t see over the last few days.

My life since my diagnosis has thus far seemed pretty good. I’ve felt like I’ve been achieving things – like I’ve moved on a bit. Except, as I discovered in a flash of inspiration that I had independently of last night’s argument, I haven’t actually been moving forward and achieving things.

What’s been happening is this: My focus has moved in a series of very fixed directions. For focus here, you can read special interest if you prefer. As usual with special interests, I feel to have no control over the direction the special interest takes. I’ll go further than this, and make another point, that I think is especially important here – for the most part, I’ve not even been aware that what I have been doing is indulging a special interest. Seriously.

For the last three or four weeks, I’ve felt like I’m making great progress at work. A series of disjoint jobs that have needed tackling for months have started to pull together into a larger project that is finally sorting out a whole chunk of loose ends. I’ve said as much to colleagues, telling my boss and my wife just a few days ago how satisfying I was finding it that everything seems to be pulling together and things seem to be getting sorted out.

As I mentioned above, my general thoughts on this have simply been that I’ve moved forward, and managed to get on with things and be productive. But that is an illusion.

In reality, it is special interest all the way. And after eight solid hours of complete focus at work each day for several weeks, the cracks have started to show this week. I’ve grown progressively more tired over time, and in recent days I’ve become snappy at home, especially with the kids, and I’ve not been sleeping well. My intense focus at work each day has left me drained outside of work hours, quite lacking in thought and speech, and I’ve clearly been uncommunicative at home – not that I’ve actually noticed this.

Yesterday, I broke. After struggling to get started at work, I found that I was obsessively hunting out cool applications and rearranging the home screen on my phone. I spent three hours on it, when I should have been working. The difference with this was I could see it was obsessive special interest. I couldn’t stop, much to my own horror. Even when I was hungry, it took me a whole hour to drag myself away and go and get some lunch.

So I was feeling quite depressed even before I left for home yesterday. For the first time I could see that I wasn’t a new more productive me, work had simply become my special interest, to the exclusion of everything else.

And then came the argument, which of course I didn’t see coming either.

It was extremely upsetting for me, because of course I was painted in a very bad light by my wife. I understand that this is what people do in arguments – you air your frustrations, and the other person in the argument airs theirs, and so the air ultimately clears, as both people get their grievances off their chest.

But of course, that dynamic doesn’t really work when I’m one of the people in an argument. I soak up the criticism, and don’t offer very much back. I feel more and more awful and useless and poorly understood, and reply less and less. This just makes the other person in the argument even more angry and the cycle goes round and round until bedtime, at which point the other person is often apoplectic with rage, and I’m a gibbering wreck.

So it was last night. I felt wretched, and useless, and that no-one understood me at all, despite my genuine best efforts to explain things from my point of view. The last part of this is perhaps the worst. We all feel useless from time to time and remorse too. But the feeling that the person closest to me really didn’t understand me or how I am, was almost indescribably painful. I felt completely alone, and that I would never truly find any understanding from anyone else.  I could see my life going forward being a series of unintended disasters where I unintentionally piss other people off. With those thoughts, and jibes from my wife suggesting our relationship was in trouble, and questioning whether I was capable of being a father in a family, it’s perhaps not surprising that I started to wonder where life was actually worth living.

I’m feeling a little better this morning – perhaps surprisingly, I slept well.

But I still feel wretched and useless. What’s more I hate myself too. Today is one of those mornings where I wish I didn’t have Asperger’s. I want to be normal. I want to feel like I’m understood for who I am. I want to have arguments with people and I want to be able to organise my life in a way that I get on with other people rather than piss them off. I’ve had enough of faux pas, and of hating social activities. I don’t want to be ultra-focussed on one activity at a time, and I’d like to be able to express emotions without difficulty.

And the daft thing is that my wife suggested last night that I can do all of this, because of a single sentence from the Diagnostic Assessment Report. She said I wasn’t trying. But I do. I try hard every day to fit in and do my best. Perhaps my best just isn’t good enough.

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Out of the blue

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In the grand scheme of things, I’m not very big on politics. However, whenever a general election happens, I end up getting very drawn into it all, with very set views all of a sudden.

I’m a liberal. Not out of choice or even out of spending great deals of time pouring over policies. I just am. I guess I was born that way – my ideals align with them rather better than any of their rivals.

The voting system in the UK does not favour the Liberal Democrat party which is where my voting intentions lie. We use a ‘first past the post’ system that skews and twists the will of the electorate wildly. In recent elections, the Lib Dems have typically polled approximately 20% of the votes, but taken only 10% of the parliamentary seats. The two larger parties – Labour (currently in power) and the Conservatives take the lion’s share of the remainder of the votes and the seats. It is, however entirely possible for one of the two big parties to win a majority of seats with fewer than a third of the popular vote.

It’s no surprise then, that voting reform has always been one of the big pledges of the Lib Dems, and one of the political causes that I support with a passion when there is an election in full swing. It’s the lack of logic in the current system that I despise.

Something unusual has happend in the last week of the current campaign. For the first time, there has been a televised debate between the the Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem leaders. The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg did something unexpected and refreshing. He talked about his parties policies and how they differed from the ‘old’ policies of his rivals. His rivals squabbled amongst themselves. Nick Clegg ‘won’ the debate – snap polls immediately after the event had around 50% of people thinking he won the arguments.

Wow! The Lib Dems have now risen from around 20% to around 30% in the opinion polls, very similar ratings to the two big parties. But here is where it all goes wrong again.  Let’s look at one single, but reasonably representitive poll carried out this week:

Liberal Democrat: 33%, Conservative: 32%, Labour 26%

Based on an average distribution of ‘swing’ from one party to another across the country, this would give the following predicted break down of seats in parliament, if the above figures held on election day:

Liberal Democrat: 134, Conservative: 244, Labour: 243

Ugh! Not only do the Lib Dems end up with approximately 45% fewer seats than either of the other two parties, but Labour, who have less of the popular vote than either of the other two actually end up with the most seats, although not enough to rule on their own – it would be a hung parliament.

That TV debate has been something of a catalyst for me, and I’m now heavily absorbed in what is going on. My search for information – typically via the Internet – is now quite time consuming each day, and my quest for further knowledge seems to have no bounds – my brain is like a big sponge trying to take in everything I can find. I smell a new Special Interest in the making.

The Lib Dems cannot win this election. They do however seem to have captured the public mood right now, where people are fed up of the old style politics and politicians. They can’t win, but the Lib Dems can force a change. If there is a hung parliament – and it looks very likely right now – then they would hold a lot of power, by forming an alliance with either Labour or the Conservatives to allow a government to be formed. It’s likely that part of that power would allow them to ask the populace if they’d like to see a change in the way voting works.

Who knows – maybe by the time the next general election comes round, a fairer and rather more proportional voting system might be in place. I for one have my fingers crossed.

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A new Special Interest

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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!

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One, two, three, four…

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–

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.

–

I don’t identify at all with what the above mother holds to be true.

I see autism as an inherited condition. I’m sure that the environment in which you grow up has a bearing too, but fundamentally, I believe that neurological differences are the causes of most of the differences in being that I experience compared to a typical person. I don’t believe that autism can be cured. The brain scans showing atypical brain activity that I’ve read about are one good reason why I believe this. The other, of course is that once again, I believe this is inherited, not acquired – and if it isn’t acquired, it can’t be reversed.

But do you know what?

I really think that our hypothetical mother and me actually have a lot in common.

Firstly, there is a small matter of relentlessness. Our mother will do anything to reverse what happened to her son. To this end, she has spend a huge amount of time researching anything she can find in book form or on the Internet that may offer a hope – no matter how small – of her son improving. Whilst the scenario is different, I know this trait well. It’s the one I indulge in my Special Interests. Let’s take Asperger’s as an example. In the last year, I’ve read and read and read about Asperger’s, until information is spilling out of my ears. I want so much to know and understand how I work, that I’ll spend long hours reading obscure texts to decide whether they apply to me. Along the way I have become very knowledgeable about the information I’ve read, and can talk at length about it. So can our mother. But there’s somethign that we’ve both missed here. Context.

I usually refer to this as seeing intricate detail, but missing the bigger picture. I do this a lot. I can talk at length about how Asperger’s impacts people, but I fail to see how it impacts my wife, and what more I might do to help her, or indeed what I might do to help myself for that matter. None of this often gets a look in. Instead, I continue to fill myself with information about my Special Interest. Our hypothetical mother clearly has a similar problem. She’ll spend hours reading about an obscure new procedure that is largely untested but might just help revert the damage to her son, but she’ll fail to see the well respected reports like this, that show that autism isn’t an epidemic, and that in fact there are just as many autistic adults (albeit many of them undiagnosed) as there are children.

In short, we both see very specific things about autism, but fail to see the bigger picture at times.

We both see intricacy of detail in things too. She sees how a new treatment has lead to a little more eye contact or more words from her son over the last week. I see how I’m a little more anxious this week, after writing about certain topics.

But maybe here we are both missing the bigger picture again. Hypothetical mother is failing to take in how even autistic children develop over time – it is just often delayed or a slower progression than with a typical child. I’m probably reading too much into my anxiety levels too.

We are quite similar, in many ways. But why?

Well, it occurs to me that when children get diagnosed on the autism spectrum these days, it is not uncommon for one or more of their parents or for other family members to start their own journey of autistic self-discovery. Unless of course you are hypothetical mum, because she knows her son was damaged by injections, he didn’t inherit the condition.

But what if he did inherit it? What if he inherited it from his mum?

Maybe we are not so different…

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Maybe we are not so different…

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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.

If I’d decided to write on Livejournal, or even on the core WordPress.com platform, then observation suggests that I would have more readers and more comments. Searching across these platforms is easy, and if you wish to belong to a community, it is easy to do so. Indeed these platforms provide a natural melting pot for communities.

Way back in April, I applied to get the blog added to the Autism Hub. It looked like a great site, and as it was platform neutral, it surely wouldn’t be difficult to get added, and thus drum up a little more interest. I was wrong. My application went unacknowledged until the start of August, at which point it was answered with an apologetic email, saying my site was now being vetted and that I should be contacted again within a few weeks. It’s now nearly the end of September, and I’ve heard nothing. I fully appreciate that sites like Autism Hub are run by the good will of people in their spare time, but please, if you are going to offer a service like this, you need to actually maintain it. Perhaps this indicates that Autism Hub is in its death throes?

I’ve joined Wrong Planet, and indicated that I use an external blogging service. Wrong planet say that if you do this, they will link your external blog to their blog page. Do they heck! It doesn’t work, and my emails to them asking for an explanation and if I was doing something wrong went unanswered. Thanks for nothing, Wrong Planet!

Across the months I’ve tinkered with the Google Webmaster site, and of course added Analytics, so I can accurately track site usage. I’ve tweaked my keywords, and I’ve registered with Technorati. My blog has always pinged search engines when I post new articles. All of this has helped a bit. but to be honest, not very much.

I note that Livejournal have an active Asperger’s community. I’m seriously toying with the idea of using a Livejournal account to point at my blog posts, and then cross posting this to the Asperger’s community there. Why? Well, I’d bet that 90% of those who have posted recently to that community have never seen my blog. Certainly none of them have ever posted a comment here. Why would they? They have a ready made community there on Livejournal. Why look elsewhere?

I’ve gone from two or three page impressions a day back in March, mostly from Google search hits, to an average of about sixty page impressions from about twenty distinct users a day today. More than half the people who read articles have been here before, and many are veterans. My RSS feed hit the magical (to me at least) twenty subscribers last week for the first time, and usually generates about a further forty page impressions a day, giving a total daily average of around a hundred page impressions for the site. A couple of times a week – often mid-week – I’ll add another hundred or so impressions a day, excluding spiders and spammers. These spikes are usually when someone new is going through the back catalogue.

All of this is really quite humbling, and if you are reading this now, then I thank you whole-heartedly for doing so.

But it’s also frustrating, because I can see plenty of other Asperger’s blogs that (and I’m judging by the quantity of comments here) get far more visitors – simply, it would seem, because they chose a route that instantly gave them a community. Now I’d like that too, but it seems to be continually elusive.

And of course, community is a two way thing. I have been rather neglectful of posting comments on other people’s sites over the last couple of months. I need to do far more of that, as well as looking at what possibilities there are to get my site more traffic.

All of which leaves less time for writing here. Hmmm. A tricky balance, but one I feel I need to tackle.

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The mechanics of visibility

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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.

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Frazzled

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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.

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Oh no, I’ve done it again!

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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…

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

An unusual feeling

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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?

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Getting things done

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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.

At least some of the time, the trait at play is the same one that pattern-matches useless information that I blurt out during conversations – like I wrote about here. The rest of the time, it just feels like an answer is expected from me, despite me being well aware most of the time that actually an answer isn’t expected.

This is one of the compulsions that I’m most aware of, and I find it quite embarrassing – it stirs up do you think they noticed type feelings in me.

Subtle variations also exist. If my boss at work happens to say that he really should get round to finding someone to do a particular job, then I’ll ask if he’d like me to do it. It feels at the time like that is what he’s suggesting, but in hindsight, of course, I can see that he was just musing out loud about something that was of a low enough priority – it was just a verbalised reminder that something needed doing someday.

I’ve reacted in the above ways since I was lad. Perhaps these behaviours stem out of my inability to read non-verbal cues. In the absence of really knowing if a question was rhetorical, or if a verbalised thought was directed at me, I reply as though it was.

That way I won’t have missed something if it was indeed intended for me to pick up on it.

Post from: That Explains Everything

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Don’t answer that…

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