Waiting for, well, something that never comes

The last few days have been somewhat plagued by this feeling. I’m anxiously waiting for something that never arrives.

What is it that I’m waiting for? Well over the last few days, it’s been a number of things.

Calls to third-parties at work result in “I’ll call you back”. I then sit there waiting for the call back. Someone emails me asking a question. It looks urgent. I respond immediately, but ask a question of my own for clarification on some point. I then sit and wait for a response, which never comes. I check the stats on my blog. Then I check them again. Then again. Then again. Have they gone up from the last time I checked?

These are all manifestations of the same sort of issue. I’m expecting some sort of immediate response, based on criteria that I’ve set myself. I then sit there anxiously waiting for the response to arrive, unable to do anything else in the mean time, in case I then miss the response.

Part of this is a logic problem, I think. When someone says, “I’ll get someone on that right away – they’ll give you a call”, I take it to mean that some one will be calling me imminently. I don’t want to miss the call, so I sit there waiting for the call. Doing nothing.

Part of it is also that I can’t really hold much info from a variety of jobs in my head at the same time. If I persuade myself that I’m not going to be getting the phone call any time soon and then go and work on some other task, chances are that when the person does call me back, I’ll find it difficult to switch back to that original task. I find that awkward and embarrassing, so I try and avoid it.

The website stats issue I mentioned may look like something different, but I don’t think it is. When I find myself repetitively looking at the stats, it’s like I’m waiting for something. I don’t know what. But those familiar feelings of anxiety and of having to concentrate on nothing else are there in spades. Perhaps knowing that people are reading that I’ve written makes me feel like they are communicating with me in some way – a little like the guy eventually calling me back at work.

What I really need, of course is to shift the anxiety. None of the above are anything like this much of a problem with my anxiety levels are lower.

Do any of you have any anxiety busting tips?

Update: It’s a few hours now since I published, and non of you have been visiting to push my stats up! Have you any idea how badly that affects my anxiety?!?

…and for the avoidance of doubt, that was a joke.

Not such a great social engagement

You might have spotted that I’ve not been too up-beat of late. In the middle of last week, right in the middle of feeling not-so-great, I had to attend a social function that I’d accepted before I started to feel that way.

I nearly chickened out – a social engagement was the last thing I wanted to do, but I stuck to my guns and went. It was an after work do, arranged by a former colleague to show off some new facilities that his current company has just opened. So this was a very real social event – the whole purpose was for my former colleague’s company to drum up some business for themselves, and for those there to network with each other.

I dislike this sort of forced social event at the best of times – it feels really rather false, as half of those there typically out to hard sell whatever their product is. But I’d said I would go, and so I did.

You know how sometimes on TV programs and films they use a clever camera trick to show something and then quickly zoom out, from a first person perspective? Well, that’s how it felt for me when I arrived, feeling very apprehensive at the venue, having spent well over an hour in the car, fighting traffic. I saw everyone else intermingling and chatting, and there was I standing there on my own, feeling very small.

I shouldn’t have worried. Some other former colleagues shouted me almost the second I was through the door, and I was then able to ease myself into the evening by chatting with them first.

The IT business in this part of the world is surprisingly small, and there were a handful of other people that I’d worked with at the event too. Over the course of the next two hours I chatted to most of them, and we reminisced about the old days when we worked together.

Whilst clearly not as bad as I thought it was going to be – I’ll even admit to enjoying the reminiscing – the evening didn’t pass without incident.

First there was the wife of a former colleague, who works in public relations for a prominent charity, and spent twenty minutes telling me how as a small business, what I really needed to be doing was arranging PR, and not spending money on marketing. Useful stuff, for sure, but it was almost Aspie like in it’s hard sell, and I was left wondering constantly whether my responses were suitable.

Another problem was the name badges. I’d decided to put the name of my fledgling company on mine. This was a mistake. In a world of reasonably big business, I ended up having to repeatedly talk down the company name on my badge. “Oh – it’s just a little thing I’m setting up on my own. Fixing PCs, email and web hosting – that sort of thing”. I felt a fool. Most of those there had their main employers on their name badge. Big important companies, doing important things. Not a little one man band that’s not really doing anything much right now.

Then there was the helter skelter. I kid you not, the lovely new offices in which my colleague’s company are based has a three floor high helter skelter in the lobby, as a piece of installation art that is intended to foster creativity. I tried it. Everyone did at some point in  he evening. It was fun. That in itself wasn’t a problem, but it will feature in a problem that I’ll come to in a minute.

Come the end of the evening, I needed to say goodbye to my host. I was over stimulated – all fuzzy headed and exhausted feeling. My host was popular, in in my state I found it difficult to attract his attention, spending a good 30 seconds looking like an idiot standing on my own near him. When I did make contact and said thanks a lot, he did something I wasn’t expecting. Instead of an acknowledgement and maybe a “thank you for coming”, he did all of this, and then asked “I hope you’ve enjoyed it?”.

Gah! A fatal and unanticipated question. My brain scrambled for something to say, and ended up with, “Oh yes, and the, um, <pause>,  um, <hand gestures to try and signify the helter skelter>, thingy, <pause> um, too!”.

“Oh!”, he said, with a slightly surprised look, and a little odd looking grin, “yes!”.

I left. I felt bad – like I’d just made a complete idiot of myself. On the half hour drive home, my head was full of action replays of not just that incident, but also how I’d handled the PR woman, and whether my conversations with others had gone ok.

It was close to bed time when I got home, but once I made it to bed, I couldn’t get to sleep. The events of the evening were still going around my head.

With the benefit of hindsight, I didn’t do that bad, despite how awful the non enjoyable bits of the evening were. I’m never going to be great in situations like this, because by the end of the evening (and often long before this), I’m going to have reached my saturation level for sensory input. When this happens, I start to go vacant, quiet and unresponsive. That’s just inescapable fact.

And you know what? My stumbling over the unanticipated question from my host wasn’t that bad either. Embarrassing, yes. But he knows me well, and this is just me being me. If it was the first time we’d met, then maybe he’d have taken away a different picture of me, but he knows I’m like this.

I’m glad I went.

And yes, I’m going to consider some PR ideas for my company instead of just placing adverts, once I have proper services to sell.

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?

What to do next

For as long as I have been in the IT profession, my best work has been produced from the ideas of other people. Tell me what needs doing, and I’ll do it. Typically I’ll do it well, and with a great attention to detail.

Leave me to my own devices, and I’ll struggle to determine what needs doing, and then what the priorities are.

This morning I found myself thinking that I could do with someone to tell me how to live my life. Discovering and embracing an autism spectrum disorder may well be wonderfully liberating and it has certainly answered a lot of questions, but it is leaving me feeling as though I don’t know where my life is going all too often.

Today is one of those days. Wouldn’t it be great if someone would come along and just tell me that now I have to do this. And when I’m finished with that, I should then do this – and so on.

Instead I feel stressed, anxious and bewildered. My to-do list tells me the things I have to try and get done today, but what do I need to do to get my life on track next week, next month, next year?

I don’t know.

The work problem

I could have called this article Life derailed: part 2 or maybe even Derailed job. It’s really a continuation of my thoughts from the article I wrote yesterday, but applied to my work life.

My work life hasn’t been derailed as yet, well not completely at any rate. In my article yesterday I talked about how my life at work hasn’t lived up to my youthful neurotypical aspirations. There is no question that my neurology has held me back versus my non-AS peers, but I’ve still managed to perform adequately, especially when well managed.

But how long will that last? I don’t mean here that I’m likely to go off the rails simply because I now know about my AS. This is a slightly more subtle and long-term problem. I’m thirty six now, which means that in a few short years I’ll be forty. Age in itself isn’t the problem, but age and work mixed together is.

In general, I’m comfortable with the type of work I do these days. It’s technical work, and often repetitive. The problem is that older people don’t do jobs like this in the UK. I’ve been involved in the interview process with enough companies to know that technical ability (and I’m no genius on that side of things) doesn’t count for everything. Running alongside it is that wonderful characteristic of team fit. Here in the UK, you can’t use age as a reason for refusing someone a job. You can, however legitimately refuse to employ someone because you believe they wouldn’t be a good fit into the existing team, and I’ve been on interview panels where older applicants were rejected for that very reason.

IT is a young man’s game. The industry is full of bright young things fresh out of University, and I get a year older than the average age every year. As people progress in years, they also progress in skills, and usually up the corporate ladder too. Most of my peers are now either technical architects (which is about as far as you can go technically, and is a job reserved for the truly technically gifted), or are managers of IT teams. They’re either at the pinnacle of the technical ladder, or have already started to leave it behind.

At the moment I can still find work, but in the last three companies I’ve worked for I’ve been one of the oldest members of the team. In my last job, for a major online retailer, I was in my early to mid thirties, and the average age of what was a very skilled team was mid to late twenties. That’s quite a gulf. How much longer will it be before I find it difficult to land roles, no matter how well I come across in interviews? How long will it be before I’m hitting that “He could do the job, but he wouldn’t fit into the team” problem?

My IT train will get derailed in time, I have no doubt.

What can I do about it? Well, the standard route that my peers take to avoid the problem – moving into team management and ultimately further up the managerial ladder isn’t a realistic option for me. So what could I do instead?

I could take contract roles in IT. My view is that if you contract in IT in the UK, then you can go on in technical roles for a good few extra years than if you were in a permanent role. Whilst contracting is an option, I’m not well suited to it. Contracting is a risky game, with no job security. It often involves lots of short term roles with different people in different locations. As I’ve written before, it takes me a long time to settle in and find my feet in a new job, which makes short term contracts stressful for me, and stops me performing at my best.

I could start my own company. I’m reasonable at money management, and have a useful skill in setting up and managing email and websites that I could build a business around. I’m hopeless at marketing however, so finding clients and selling my talents to them would be difficult, and without a decent number of clients the business wouldn’t be viable. This, I guess is a dream that there is an outside chance might come true, but it would take a tremendous amount of effort and courage for it to be in with a fighting chance.

What about low risk options? Well, I could take a technical role whilst I still can with a large company that offers job security. I would need to join with the mindset that no matter how annoyingly badly run the company turned out to be, I’d have to grin and bear it. With a technical position in a large corporate, I could potentially tread water and stay in technical roles for years, but at the cost of not being able to move companies. My neurotypically-programmed responses tell me that this is a very lazy way to work, and I suspect that is how it would come cross to my managers in the company – “James has no ambition…”.

I could look at doing something completely different, outside of the technical IT world. Perhaps I should hone my writing skills and get into technical writing. I understand many technologies and my AS abilities to see things in detail may help me to document things. Could I motivate myself to write every day for a living however? I don’t know.

Maybe I should go and work in a shop. That would be less stress, but would have the difficulties involved in having to interact with people all day. It also wouldn’t bring in the sort of money that my family are used to living on.

There are no easy answers to this one, but ultimately I need to give this some serious thought, before it’s too late and I find that my train is completely derailed. That’s the one thing that isn’t an option.

Suggestions welcome!

Feeling the fear

If you are on the spectrum, then you probably know this feeling. It’s the one where you look like a rabbit caught in car headlights just before it gets hit.

Fear is never far away for me. I’m sure it is connected to my background stress and anxiety in some way, but frankly the feeling of fear is distinct from that of feeling anxious.

The odd thing for me is that frequently there is no good reason for the fear to be there at all, but it still is. Is life that terrifying that it causes me to walk around feeling frightened? Well, maybe there is something in that. After all, I’ve said in countless articles on this site that I find the world a confusing and unpredictable place. In the past I’ve used this to justify the anxiety I feel, but could it also cause a frequent background fear, that on occasion flares up into terror?

I’ll explain what this fear feels like: It’s like when you were a kid, and you wanted your parents to leave the hallway light on at night (which mine did, incidentally). It’s an irrational fear that often appears to have no cause in particular, but it’s chilling all the same.

When I was a child, at least part of this night time fear was one of security. With the light on, I could see my surroundings, and this was comfortable. With the light off, I couldn’t see where I was, and then small creaks in the house would make me jump and my heart pound. Perhaps there is an over-active imagination at play here, or perhaps it’s just to do with the way I’ve always processed sensory inputs – in real time, with pattern matching. When you can’t see what you are doing, your other senses become hightened, and you start to hear every little sound. In the UK, our houses are built with wooden rafters and floors, and these creak when the house heats up and cools down in the daily cycle of life. To a young man, processing the noises in real time, and trying to understand and pattern match them, the creaks can sound like someone walking towards your room. When your parents are asleep in bed, this sort of thing can be very frightening, especially when your eyes can’t confirm or deny what you are hearing.

I wonder if my background fear as an adult is a similar mechanism at play?

If the input I get from my senses matches in some way to a previously scary event, do I then subconsciously start to feel scared? I’ve many times in the past suffered from unexpected outcomes in social situations. Outcomes where I’ve inadvertently provoked an aggressive response from someone. These leave me surprised and quite genuinely instantly frightened at the time. My social faux pas don’t happen often on this scale, but in a life time I’ve unintentionally provoked aggression on many occasions. I think there is a good chance that my brain has these stored away for use as pattern matches – after all, I know I have a great many past events stored in just this way – I make use of them daily to help navigate my lack of social intuition. So – what if my brain pattern matches something about a current innocuous situation to one of these old scenarios, and turns on my fear?

What I’ve just described is what would typically be called post traumatic stress disorder, but would I be at all justified to claim that this is what I am experiencing?

To be honest, I’m not sure it’s all that wide of the mark. The world is continually perplexing and unpredictable to me, and at times my apparent naivety has burnt me badly. I observe that I don’t learn from these sorts of mistakes over time, and continue to make them. Why then, wouldn’t my brain pattern match fear, when it thinks it sees another scenario that might provoke the same response? I may not have suffered from trauma in the way that people usually define it – as in a single horrendous experience – but I have suffered a catalogue of broadly similar moderately scary incidents over the years. Incidents that I’ve not learnt to avoid. Could they add up and reinforce the message over time in my brain? Maybe. It sounds plausible to me.

What do you make of this? Do you suffer from the fear too? If you do, what do you think causes it?