Is this what we’re all living for today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What more could you want from music?

Sparking

I’m highly charged today. Perhaps literally.

For the third day in a row I’m the only person in the office. There are usually three of us, with one of the other chaps spending almost his complete time ensuring that the system we run is performing properly. In his and my other colleague’s absence, it’s down to me to run the ship single handed. I’m busy, and rather agitated too, perhaps because of my routine having been thrown out.

My highly charged emotions might just be making themselves felt – every time I touch something metal today I release a bit of static charge. A little spark that reminds me that I’m feeling on edge by making me jump. This isn’t normal for me, I assure you, but perhaps it is just coincidence.

I feel full of things that needs saying – sparks of expression waiting to be released. They are probably always there, but today they are close to the surface and want to escape – and to be honest some of the sparks trying to get out frighten me a little. I can’t judge whether they are appropriate or not, and for that reason, they are going to stay exactly where they are now – in my head.

Every once in a while I have days like this, and I guess if I look back at the last couple of weeks, it was inevitable that a day like today was coming.

There is so much in me that never gets said, but I really do believe it’s better – well safer at least – that way.

Guilt

I like to think that in general my writing here is upbeat and positive. That isn’t always how I feel though, and this article reflects that. If that isn’t your thing, then maybe you’ll want to skip reading this time. This article also has some adult themes in places. You have been warned.

–

Guilt.

I’m feeling a lot of it now, and for very specific reasons.

In short, I don’t feel good enough.

I’m not good enough for my wife, she deserves better. I don’t meet all of her emotional needs, and I typically don’t see when she needs some TLC from me.

When I do see that she needs some TLC, I struggle to know how to respond. It doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s not that I don’t care – I do of course, I just don’t seem to be able to use my brain in a way that allows me to make decisions on what is appropriate in situations like this. “Just buy me a little something every now and then”, she’ll say. But that doesn’t work for me. What do I buy? I have no idea. When inspiration occasionally strikes, I worry that my choice is a bad one. It has been some times in the past, so I now feel I can’t trust the ideas I have.

Most normal people (and I include many men in this) do not have a problem in this area. So why do I? It’s not good enough, and it makes me feel incredibly guilty and frankly quite miserable that I can’t keep my wife happy.

My wife actually put it quite succinctly a few nights ago. It’s like I learned the physical side of intimacy, and paid enough attention to that to ensure that I was proficient, but then forgot about all the other aspects that are involved. I don’t do romance. My wife says she feels neglected at times.

She’s right, of course. Physical intimacy makes sense to me, and everything else surrounding it doesn’t. I’ve always tried to use physical intimacy to express my love, and as such have concentrated on making that side of things special for my loved one. But that doesn’t always work, does it? You can’t always make love to show someone you care. Sometimes they want support or to feel loved in other ways. Could I describe those other ways to you? Erm, well, not easily, no. I really do have trouble in understanding them and putting them into words.

My reliance on the physical aspects of showing love has caught me out in other ways in the past too. I can’t always judge all that well what is appropriate and what isn’t, and have been overtly sexual to female friends. The problem here is that expressing love physically is what seems natural to me. I want to show them I care, and, well, it can get messy and cost friends, as I have found out.

Another area that I don’t feel good enough at is being a parent. Perhaps no-one does – fathers especially.

I have always tried to be very hands on with my kids – I was heavily involved in changing nappies when they were small, and in feeding them, and bathing them and generally caring for them.

But now that they are a little older (they are five and three) I feel decidedly out of my depth. My son is learning to aggressively push boundaries, and his little sister is learning to copy him. This, I would imagine, is trying for the most competent and together of parents, but I’m finding it difficult to find the right words and actions to meter out the right degree of discipline. After a hard day at work for me, they are often noisy and aggressive, and I find that side of things to be a bit much from a sensory point of view. It can sometimes be difficult to keep my own aggression at bay.

Of course this makes me feel incredibly guilty as well, and something of a failure.

The final area where I feel guilty about not being good enough is at work.

I’m working on a contract basis in my current job, so I’m being relatively well paid versus the permanent members of staff. At the moment I’m struggling to actually get work done. There are no two ways about it – I’m not currently worth the money that my employers are paying me. I don’t like letting people down, and hence, once more, I feel very guilty that I’m not pulling my weight.

All of which is very negative and makes me feel very gloomy.

My ideas about what I should be able to achieve and my measures of these ideals are still very neuro typical. When I don’t live up to my own high standards – especially when I feel that my own lack of performance is impacting on other people – I feel very guilty.

Do any of you also feel this sort of guilt?

Where is everyone?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed – I certainly have – most of those who contribute to the debate here are female. More than that, almost all of the blogs that I read regarding ASDs are written by women. This isn’t me being selective, indeed I’d dearly love to hear more about AS from a male point of view.

There are a few notable exceptions - Gavin’s blog springs immediately to mind, but I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that most ASD bloggers are female.

There is of course absolutely nothing wrong with this, but I do find it odd. After all, one of those universal ‘facts’ that goes round and round is that four times as many males have ASDs as females. This may of course not be entirely reliable, but even if the real figure is a 50/50 split, you can’t escape the fact that there are precious few male ASD bloggers.

If you have trouble expressing your feelings and emotions verbally with others, as a great many of us with ASDs, both male and female find, then writing can be a wonderfully liberating release. The Internet provides a freely available, easy to use medium for people like me to express themselves in writing, and what’s more, if you persist at it, people will give you their own thoughts back. This is great – so where is everyone? And just where are all the male ASD bloggers?

If I looked hard I’d probably find a few hundred ASD blogs out there. If I tried really hard, spent a long time on search engines, and looked at forum sites like wrongplanet.net maybe I’d be able to push the number of people with ASDs who regularly write about it to a few thousand, but I doubt I’d get the figure much higher than this.

That really isn’t many, and is a tiny fraction of those who have been diagnosed.

Why?

This really makes no sense to me. Am I missing something? Anyone got any ideas?

Oh, and if you can find me the missing male ASD bloggers, I’d be very grateful!

Better to know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frightening, isn’t it?

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

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

–

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

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

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

And another thing…

Rachel has written a lovely series of articles on her Asperger Journeys blog about working towards a sense of belonging. Lots of aspects of the articles have struck chords with me, but perhaps the one that stood out most for me was how she intends to stop falling into old traps when dealing with organisations that get things wrong.

Rachel talks about how she feels she has to correct people in organisations that she gets involved with who are making what she sees to be clear logical mistakes, and how this never seems to result in a satisfactory outcome. She writes:

In every organization, there are all sorts of social, nonverbal, pecking-order assumptions about treating certain individuals with deference, about defending the organization, and about a number of other concerns that I just can’t see and don’t understand. So, a person I contact at any organization will very likely defend someone higher up, come out in defense of the organization, ignore me, or do something else that drives me nuts.

I too fail to see or understand many of these rules. I know the rules are there, but I don’t really ‘get’ them.

Rachel continues:

Unfortunately, what I consider bullshit is just basic social reality for most people. Needless to say, sooner or later, a relentless force (me) meets an immoveable object (them), and it’s not a happy experience.

How true this is. Failing to handle situations like this in a neuro-typical way is one of my most common causes of faux pas, and it gets me into a lot of trouble. You see, the organisations that I like to give a piece of my mind most frequently are those that I work for.

I guess that little annoyances at work get shrugged off by typical people. When they don’t, they tend to have a quiet word with those around them, or their boss to try and get things resolved. Unfortunately, my anxiety and problems with verbal interaction mean that I rule myself out of taking these approaches. Instead, I tend to let things build up to the point where I can no longer keep the issue inside of me.

Eventually, like Rachel, I feel that I have to point out what’s wrong. Whatever the issue is seems so logically wrong to me, that I can’t understand why others wouldn’t see it, or would choose to ignore it. So at that point, where my frustration is so great that I can’t keep it inside me any more, I write an email. The email is, in my typical style, brutally honest, long, detailed, and doesn’t hold back in saying what I think about situations and people. If someone is doing something I perceive to be wrong or dishonest, I say so. If that person happens to be the boss I’m writing to, I’ll still say so.

Writing the email is a great experience, in much the same way as writing for this blog is. It’s cathartic, and I pour huge amounts of emotion into it.

And of course, that’s where it should stop. I should write the email outside of my email client, and never send it. Unfortunately, my executive disfunction means that I don’t see this common-sense conclusion at the time. I bang away at the keyboard for an hour, honing everything I want to say into an email that usually reads much like an article here, and then without a second thought, I send it.

I’ve never been fired, but I’ve ended up in trouble with management at most companies I’ve worked for in one form or another, and typically it’s my use of email in this way that gets me on the trouble radar – I’m not playing by the rules.

It’s not just work, of course. Another of my bug-bears is recruitment agents that call and email me about work, and put zero effort into their sales pitch. At least spouting off at Job Agents doesn’t cause me any trouble. Every month or two I explode in annoyance and write a snotty email back explaining just how useless their communication to me was, and how I’m sticking them on my black list of agents that I won’t deal with when I’m next looking for a job. Indeed I did something very similar this afternoon, which along with Rachel’s article prompted me to write.

Here’s the email that the agent sent today:

Subject: URGENT! Please Get In Touch!

I have tried without success to reach you by telephone, so hope that you
receive this email.

I have a potentially interesting opportunity for you and would be
grateful if you could call me on the number below to discuss the matter.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

[Agents name]

Wow. How can I fail to be impressed by this. Remind me how this works again? Oh yes, that’s it – the agency put me in contact with a company looking to employ someone with my skills. I then attend the interview and put in the hard work that secures me the job. The agent acts as a conduit to get me the interview, for the contract paperwork, and well, not much else. For their brief involvement, the agency make about 20% of my starting salary, which amounts to many thousands of Pounds.

And this sort of email is frequently their opener. At least this one didn’t have the very wonderful ‘Dear Candidate’ at the start of it – I’ve often responded snottily to these by starting ‘Dear Agent’. But come on – there is nothing about where the job is located, what skills they are looking for, whether the job is permanent or contract, what level of seniority they are looking for or what sort of pay range they are looking at. Nothing at all that I can use to make any sort of judgement. It’s just pathetic.

Grrr.

Clearly, I need to find some way to deal with annoyances like this and those at work when they first crop up. I’m not sure how to do this right now, but I can see that it needs to be done. If I don’t tackle this, then I’m going to keep on sending inappropriate and pointless emails, and keep on getting myself into trouble.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to tackle this?

Meltdown

When I first started to discover Asperger’s and the various traits that those with it often possess, I was a little surprised by the concept of meltdowns.

Pretty much every trait I read about got a tick in my own personal list of traits that I have too, but I struggled to find a box for meltdowns, and indeed decided in the end that I didn’t have them.

The thing is, though, that I do have them – I just didn’t recognise them.

Through my pre-Asperger eyes of someone who suffered from occasional depression, it was very easy to write off my meltdowns as a bad depression day, but the problem with that description is that it takes no account of what lead to the meltdown.

Part of the reason I’m writing this article now, is that perhaps for the first time, I can see that due to various things that have happened, I’m sitting on the precipice of a meltdown right now.

So – how do I feel right now? Agitated is perhaps the best over all description. I’m rather hyperactive today, and my stress levels are very high. My brain is running at a thousand miles an hour through various potential articles for this blog, and through various Asperger’s attributes. The thoughts are bouncing around and none of them can get focus. If I try and concentrate on one at a time, then I almost instantly forget the other thoughts. This in itself is intensely annoying – it’s only now that I’ve been able to sit down and start writing, and I didn’t want to lose any of the different aspects that I was pondering over.

Why am I like this today? Well, I took an unexpected phone call yesterday that put a whole load of guilt on me. Someone in my family offloaded their problems on to me, and I feel guilty that I have had my part in that person feeling the way they do. That’s not the whole story, though. The bigger problem is that I feel that I hold the key in my hand to explain to that person a good deal of why they feel the way they do. However, by doing so, I’d be opening a huge can of worms that would reverberate through my extended family for some time.

I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I don’t know what to do. My guilt is intense, yet I know that what is missing from the situation is understanding on the part of the other person, and that they also need to seek some help from a professional for what has become a clinical depression. Yet dispensing that knowledge would throw my extended family into chaos, and I can’t predict what the outcome would be.

I’m dancing around the specifics here on purpose. I find it difficult to say them even here on this anonymous blog. I’m concious that one day this blog may not be anonymous any more, and I worry about how this article may be perceived by those same family members after the fact. The information I have almost feels like a dirty secret.

It’s not a dirty secret, of course, it’s simply Asperger’s, which I’m sure crops up a lot through my family. No one right now talks about it, and I have to assume that for the most part, those affected and those around them are unaware of it’s existence. It even may be the case that everyone affected barring me has no idea of it. Whilst they don’t know it exists, it sure as hell impacts them, and at times very badly.

The family member that offloaded onto me yesterday was ultimately complaining about the traits of those in the family with Aspergers wearing her down to the point of absolute frustration. Those affecting her are those closest to her, and understandably through lack of understanding she sees idleness and lack of caring from those people as the causes for her current pain.

We’re not idle nor lacking in the caring department. We’re just typically Aspergic, and find it difficult to express ourselves, especially verbally – which is where my guilt lies – I don’t phone or do much to keep in touch. I find using the phone difficult, and I never known what to say past the usual pre-learnt small talk of how people are and what they have been up to. Making small talk is also a problem, because it’s never been important to me in the same way that it is to typical people. I understand that it is important these days – I know that typical people don’t just intuitively do it, they enjoy it, they need to do it, and it helps build and confirm their social structure and standing. That doesn’t hold for me though – that concept simply doesn’t apply.

So, that’s the problem of the day.

If I look back to previous meltdown situations, then one of two things has tended to happen when I’ve been presented with just too much stress to deal with. I’ve either collapsed in a withdrawn gibbering heap – as it often the case with Aspies, or I’ve vented via writing.

The venting via writing is interesting – it has often been the cause of my getting into trouble at work by sending emails that point out all the problems in the team or with the software we are developing. In cases like these, the meltdown has been caused by a combination of bad practice at work and too much work load, often caused in the first place by the bad practice. My stress soars, and eventually, something has to give, and instead of collapsing in a heap and taking time off sick with stress, I’ve vented all my thoughts – inappropriately, with fingers of blame – in email. I’m not saying that collapsing in a heap would be the right solution, incidentally – the right solution would be not to get into that position in the first place, if at all possible.

Extreme emotional stress has caused both types of reaction over the years, but mostly the gibbering  heap. Often an emotionally triggered meltdown happens over a much shorter period of time – something will happen, and bam – I’ll be unable to cope within minutes. I withdraw and become quiet and tearful. I feel like I’ve put up an invisible shield, and that if I stay quiet, then the emotional problem won’t be able to touch me any more. Those around me get frustrated, because I can’t answer their questions – it feels to them like I’m avoiding the difficult situation.

Have I avoided a meltdown today? Well, I’ve certainly vented by writing this, and feel much better for it. I did the same last night too, by writing a much shorter version of this post as a draft. That meant I slept well, which is good news too. By externalising in some way, I avoid the gibbering heap phase, and by doing the venting in a direction where I’m not pointing fingers, just maybe I don’t put myself in a position where I get unhelpful come back.

See – in a way, I was dancing around the specifics above because I saw what I was doing was venting in just the same way as with all those angry emails that pointed the finger at work. My brain spotted the pattern and responded by telling me to hold back, to avoid any possible negative come back. I’m glad I felt able to say what the root of the issue was in the end, without making it too negative, and without apportioning any blame.

No-one is to blame for the position my family is in right now. That doesn’t make the right way forward any easier to see, my guilt any less real, nor make the hurt felt by some any less painful.

Do I upset the apple cart and live with the consequences, or do I continue to pretend that I don’t know why my family is the way it is?

I don’t have an answer.

I do, however feel much further from meltdown now. My stress has abated some, and my mind isn’t racing in the way it was. Maybe now I’ll be able to get some work done.

Go get ‘em boys!

Last weekend, myself and my wife took the kids to the theatre to see Lazytown Live.

We also took one of my son’s friends along for the day, so there were two adults and three kids. We took the train, as it beats taking five by car, and we thought it’d result in a little less stress too. It probably did help a bit on the stress front, but along the way I discovered that I find shepherding three young kids running around in a busy city centre to be very stressful. I’m used to two of them, and I can mostly watch both of them at the same time, but three – well, I don’t have enough resources to keep an eye on what they are all doing at the same time. Cue stress and tetchy shouting on my part.

Anyway – the show was fun, and the kids enjoyed it – it was quite funny seeing their little faces agog at the familiar characters from the TV being on the stage in front of them. For our two kids it was the first time they’d been to a theatre to see a show, but they both took it in their stride, and when pantomime time comes round next Christmas, I suspect we’ll be taking them to see that too.

For one kid, in the row behind us, the show was something else completely. He was maybe about nine in age, and he was absolutely caught up in the action. Completely engrossed. At several points in the show he jumped out of his seat and shouted loudly across the theatre, to the embarrassment of his mum.

I had a smile on my face – his behaviour was somehow familiar. I remembered a story my mother reels out every now and again to embarrass me. When I was about the same age as the boy in the row behind us, my mum took me and my brother to the cinema, to see a Saturday afternoon Matinee performance of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I too got rather caught up in the excitement of the film, it seems, and at one point shouted, “Go get em boys!” at the top of my lungs across the packed cinema, much to the embarrassment of my mother.

I don’t remember doing this, and I don’t do things like this nowadays, but I still get caught up in a good show and feel strong emotions welling up in me. The Lazytown show had me close to welling up with tears. Why? I’m not totally sure, but my thoughts at the time surrounded how well they had translated a TV show to the stage, and how slick and clever, yet simple the set was. I admired the job they’s done of putting on a show.

I hope that like me, the boy in the row behind us never loses his passion for life. Getting engrossed in activities is one of the most pleasurable things I do, and I knew just how he felt during those 90 minutes of theatre.

Oh, and a little part of me wonders if – just maybe – he was on the spectrum somewhere.

Why all those unneeded words are needed. Maybe.

I wrote last week about how I saw similarities with my own writing style and those of other Aspies whose blogs I read. The article has caused a lot of comment, with points made both for an against what I was saying.

One of the big style cues I noted was the use of a lot of qualifiers in my text – something that Gavin Bollard quite nicely described as writing in a ‘flowery’ style. I put a lot of these qualifiers in my writing, as, I note, do many other Aspies.

Having spotted the pattern, I have turned my attention as to why I might do this. I have a solution that makes sense to to me, so I thought I’d share it, and see what you all think.

Those of you who grew up with undiagnosed Asperger’s will well know the feeling that nothing ever quite makes sense in the world, and that people and their responses to situations are often wildly unpredictable. My response to a given situation often seems to be atypical from the population at large, and these faux pas often cause either derision or conflict.

I, for one, have built up something of a defence to this sort of thing over the years – I’ve had to to survive and keep my self-respect intact, and I suspect that it’s the path that many people with AS take. I do hope you’ll let me know as to whether it is the case with you too or not.

It’s often the case that I can’t tell ahead of time whether my response to a given situation is appropriate, and the one that an ordinary person would be expected to give. Thus I go into many situations ‘blind’, with my best guess, and braced for a negative response of some sort.

And this is where the flowery language comes in. When I’m not sure of myself, and suspect that I may end up eliciting a negative response for something, I’ll start adding in qualifiers. This happens both for verbal and written communication. By doing this, I’m saying to the other person, “What I’m saying/writing may be the case. It’s certainly the way I see things, but please tell me if you think I’m wrong, and don’t be too harsh on me if it seems ridiculous to you”.

Over the years, my use of this sort of language has ballooned. I think this is because as I’ve got older I’ve seen more and more clearly just how out of the ordinary my responses can often be. I’m not thick-skinned (is this a typical Aspie characteristic too?), and therefore I throw in anything I can say or write that might help diffuse any potential conflict. I’d rather do this and sound a little odd than sound rediculous and have my feelings hurt and confidence dented.

If my background stress or anxiety is up, then I use this sort of qualifier even more often, as I’ll in general feel less sure about myself and what I’m saying.

And so, the qualifiers show up a lot in my writing on this site. Whilst what I’m writing makes sense to me, and is a genuine description of the way I see things, I still don’t trust that I’m right, and half expect everyone who reads the site to laugh at what I’ve written, and publicly humiliate me.

You don’t, of course, but that’s an indication of just how much this tendency to faux pas has affected me over the years.

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…