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.

Food and textures

I grew up a fussy eater, but also as someone who enjoys food. If you feed me something I like, then I’ll enjoy it immensely. Feed me me something I don’t like, and well, I’ll be trying to disguise my horror.

Vegetables. They have been a big problem, cooked or raw. Cous cous, mushrooms, nuts and seeds. Fruit. Salad – in particular things like peppers and radishes and cucumber. Many vegetarian dishes cause me problems, especially if they have items like lentils or chickpeas in them.

So – I must have tried these foods that I don’t like at some point in the past, to reach the conclusion that I don’t like them, right? Well, maybe. I suspect, however that that isn’t the case a lot of the time. I think I’ve reached some arbitrary decision that I don’t like things.

When I was a child, I’d sit and pick out the bits I didn’t like from whatever meal I was presented with. Often I’d end up with a pile on the side of my plate that was almost as big as the food that I would eat. This was normal for me, and I couldn’t see what was wrong with it. Doing this as a child is perhaps not so unusual, but I carried it through into adulthood as well.

In the years since I met and married my wife, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown less fussy, and now eat many foods that I wouldn’t have entertained five years ago. My wife has been called a miracle worker by my mother, for managing to do what she failed to do whilst I was growing up.

So what was the problem, and how did my wife help me deal with it?

The most important revelation about my dislike of many food items came well over ten years ago, at some point in my twenties. When I dislike a food it is almost always because of it’s texture.

As a grown up man in his twenties, it was far more difficult for me to decline to eat food that others were providing for me, so I’d mentally grit my teeth and try and eat what I was given. It was the texture that more often than not caused me the problem.

One particular meal sticks out like a beacon in my memory. I was eating with my parents and brother at my aunt’s house. The first course was a large field mushroom, cooked and with some sort of topping on it. Mushrooms are a particular problem for me. I ate it. Well, I tell a lie there, I ate about half of it. I even got a quiet ‘well done’ from my mother (I was probably about 25 at the time!). What really sticks in my mind about it, however was the texture of the mushroom when I was eating it. There was no escaping it – it was the texture that I didn’t like.

It’s difficult to put into words what it is about the textures of some foods that makes me dislike them. They just have the power to send a chill down my spine and make me want to spit out what I’m chewing. Chewing is definitely a part of it, and I think that it’s a particular range of textures that have caused me the problems. If you look at the texture of cooked veg, or of mushrooms, for example, they have broadly speaking a soft texture but with a bit of bite left. It tends to be that sort of texture that causes me problems.

But as I’ve found, it doesn’t have to stay a problem.

I eat most cooked vegetables these days, and they no longer make me grimace. Cous cous is fine too, and I will eat some salad as well without picking all the bits out, but – if I’m honest it still wouldn’t be a meal of choice for me.

In the end, my wife simply wouldn’t stand for my fussy eating, and put pressure on me to eat a more varied diet. I felt silly about being fussy, and guilty that I was limiting her diet, and so braved the cooked veg.

After a while, it was fine – the texture was no longer a problem. It feels like I retrained my response to various foods.

Some are still a bit of a problem, however. I wouldn’t out of choice eat aubergine, nor tomoatoes in a salad (but of course tomato sauces are fine).

Now I’m aware of my Asperger’s, I wonder if my fussy eating was caused in some way by it. Were or are any of you fussy eaters? Are you raising kids on the spectrum who are fussy eaters? Is texture your problem too? I’d be really interested to find out if there is some correlation here, or if my fussy eating is coincidental.

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?