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.

Post from: That Explains Everything

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

Out of the blue

Related posts:

1. Diagnosed: Part 2 Where do I start? Two weeks ago I was diagnosed...
2. Better to know? If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll...
3. Maybe we are not so different… This, in a sense, is a follow up to the...

These thoughts have been on my mind recently, so I thought I’d write about them a little.

I have considerable trouble expressing myself clearly to other people, particularly when feelings are involved. There are a few problems at play here, that conspire together to make something that should be straight forward just too difficult a lot of the time.

The first big problem is who to express myself to. My observation of the world over the years suggests that my answer to this question is rather different to that of most people. My best guess is that the usual answer is that you should speak to the person that is most appropriate. That may be your spouse, close friends, family, more casual friends, business colleagues, your doctor, your counsellor, the girl behind the bar. The answer really depends on what you need to express and why.

The answer that works for me, however, is to talk to my wife. I rarely confide in anyone else. Why? Well, as you’ve quite likely read before on this blog, friends are something of a problem and an enigma to me. I’ve never really managed to have good friends from my early teens, when life started to get beyond friends being there to play simple games with. I dont have an inner circle of trusted people in my life, or even an outer circle for that matter. I have my wife.

Secondly, there is a language problem. I’ve tried to explain this before on the blog, I think. I often find it difficult to translate my thoughts and feelings into words. Its like I speak a different language inside my head, one based far more on visuals than on words themselves. Sometimes, I can’t find the right verbal words to express what I’m thinking or feeling. I know how I think or feel, but I can’t express that to you in any sort of meaningful way.

Another issue at play is really a consequence of the other two, and of a lifetime of faux-pas. My self confidence is shot. A lack of self confidence compounds the above two problems, and means that I often don’t trust that my thoughts and feelings are worthwhile or even correct.

When added together, these problems make a potent block on self expression.

What happens when you don’t express your thoughts and feelings? In my case they get bottled up. I have bottled up my feelings for years, and the more this happens, the more they create a pressure that needs to be relieved.

The sort of self expression that ends up happening via pressure relief is often unpleasant. It frequently shows via anxiety or depression or both. Confusion and desperation can also put in an appearance, turning something that may have started out as a minor annoyance or even as a pleasant thought into a seemingly bleak hopeless spiral, which is often ends up expressed horribly inappropriately.

Clearly, bottling things up is not a good option although I do an enormous amount of it.

What I try and do these days to counter this problem is write.

This blog is more about self expression than anything else. It doesn’t really matter whether anyone reads what I write, although I’m continually amazed and flattered that people do, and from time to time find it useful. What really matters to me, is that this blog gives me an opportunity to express myself in an unhindered way. What you read here is pure me, with all of my faults. Indeed, my openness has grown over the time that I have been writing here. Unfortunately though, I can’t express everything that I would like to. There are some areas that are just too personal to cover. Whilst I write pseudonymously, there are people who read this blog and do know me in real life.

Writing works, though. With writing, I have the time and ability to express what I want to say clearly. I can (and do) go back and revise what I’ve written, sometimes several times, before I publish my thoughts. I like that – it works well for me, and I end up feeling like I’ve expressed my inner thoughts quite well. It is satisfying, and is also often something of a pressure relief valve.

How do I deal with those other thoughts and feelings that I can’t express here? At the moment, I don’t. That’s really not good.

I’ve paid for counselling in the past, and found that with the right counsellor, I can and do open up and express the sorts of thoughts and feelings I can’t express in any other way. I can’t afford to pay for a counsellor for the rest of my life though, which leaves me wondering if there is a solution.

Do you have any suggestions? How do you cope with this sort of problem?

Post from: That Explains Everything

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

Self expression

Related posts:

1. Diagnosed: Part 2 Where do I start? Two weeks ago I was diagnosed...
2. Is this what we’re all living for today? Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to...
3. Glass half full I’m sure that everyone finds it difficult to be positive...

Throughout this time in my life I was ignored by a great many of my female peers – almost as though I was invisible (something, incidentally, which Rachel writes wonderfully about here). In a sense, that didn’t bother me. I felt no great desire to interact with these young women – whilst many of my male class-mates and work colleagues found them to be hugely attractive, I didn’t.

Those that did interact with me – well that was a completely different story, and one that perplexed me until very recently. Maybe once or twice a year on average, someone who I was either at school or work with would discover me. They would always make the first move, and start talking to me. Whilst I find group conversation difficult, I have always enjoyed talking one to one with others. I can manage this sort of conversation quite well, and it allows me to feel a connection with others. Over the years I often found myself doing quite a lot of it with young women.

And at this point, expectations and desires started to go in different directions. For their part, the young women found a bright young man that they could get on with. Someone that they found strangely easy to talk to. Someone they could confide in and be themselves with.

Whilst I may have found this too, I invariably found something else. I started to see beauty. Not beauty in the sense that people typically use the term. Some of these women were, of course, conventionally visually beautiful, but the beauty I was seeing was in how they functioned and thought – all of what they were was beautiful. The more I spoke to them, the more beautiful they appeared to be to me, and the more I fell in love with them.

Ah. A hopeless story on many levels. They found an unusual thing – a male friend who they could treat like a female friend. Some of them revelled in this for a while. I found unrequited love, and that ultimately lead to the end of most of these friendships.

You see, whilst I may be unconventional in the way I interact with people due to my lack of social intuition and sometimes even basic social skills, I’m still often engaging to talk to one to one. But whilst I’m clearly a gentle guy that doesn’t use body language that suggests that I’m trying to hit on you, I still feel those typical male urges. Perhaps my definition of attractiveness in a woman is different to my peers, but it is still very much there.

These friendships caused me a great deal of pain over the years. They are nothing, however, to the despair caused by missed opportunities.

There were only a small handful of these, and for the most part, they happened in my early work years, whilst I was single, and living in London. A woman I worked with would take the usual route of striking up a conversation with me, and would find, to her surprise, someone who she really like to talk to. No surprise here for me, of course, it was what I was used to. And then after a month or two, typically after a social evening at a pub, or at a party at someone’s house, it would happen. She’d make a pass at me. I’d miss it. Seriously. My uncertainty and lack of confidence meant that I acted too aloof when suggestions were made that could have lead to intimacy. Nothing intimate ever happened.

Like the time after a house party full of work colleagues, where many of us had decided to hang around until morning. A female friend of mine was in one of the beds, and had recently stripped off, complaining of being too hot. I was at the other end of the room, laying on the chaise longue. We’d been chatting with the female host, but she’d made some excuse to go and chat with someone else, so we were now alone. We were both quite drunk and stoned. My female friend took off her glasses, yawned, stretched and then smiled at me. She made a few little snuggly wriggles under the duvet, and then suggested that instead of shouting across the room, I should come over to the bed to talk with her. She even patted the bit of bed next to her. I didn’t. I stayed where I was – I could hear her just fine. We chatted some more, and eventually, our host rejoined us, and ultimately sleep overtook all of us. I slept on the chaise longue, and they shared the bed.

It wasn’t until the next day, having caught an early tube home, and after I’d caught up on some sleep, and shaken off the hangover, that I started to think over the events of the night before, and what was actually going on. The removal of clothes, the excuses made by our host to leave us alone. She even shut the bedroom door on her way out. The subtle but clear suggestions from my friend. At the time, I missed it all. Did I find my friend attractive? Of course. Could I have shared intimacy with her? Absolutely. If she’d said, “come over here and kiss me,” would I have reacted differently? I suspect so.

To this day, that night frequently haunts me and fills me with deep regret. Right now talking about it is nearly bringing tears to me eyes. How could I have missed what was so obvious?

And then there was the time that a group of us had a night out and agreed to all go back to someone’s flat and go our separate ways in the morning. A female friend from work who had been chatty with me for a few months was there. She confided early on in the evening that there was someone else there who fancied her, and that she couldn’t stand. Could I help her out? There weren’t enough beds for everyone, and the chap she didn’t like had suggested that they share a bed a the end of the night – purely in a platonic way. She wanted to avoid this, she said, and asked if I might share the bed with her. Platonic once more, course – I was such a good friend that she knew she could trust me.

I agreed. She almost immediately made the sleeping arrangements public, and everyone then agreed amongst themselves how the other beds would be shared out so that everyone got a mattress and no-one got the floor. How wonderfully democratic, I thought.

The night passed, and we all ended up back at the flat, drunk and happy. People started to drift off to bed, and my friend went a good half an hour before I did. When she decided to go, she made a point of saying it multiple times, like we’d not heard her the first time. When I decided that it was time for sleep, I crept into the darkened room, and saw her silhouette as she lay facing away from me in what turned out to be a single bed. Oh – I wasn’t expecting that – I’d never asked what size the bed was. I quietly called her to see if she was a awake. She wasn’t. So, taking off my jacket, but keeping the rest of my clothes on, I squeezed under the duvet next to her. It immediately became apparent that she was naked from the waist down, with just a T-shirt on her top half. I lay on my back, not daring to move. Had she forgotten that she said we’d share the bed? Should I go elsewhere? I was drunk. I lay there for what seemed like an eternity, and then eventually fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke, and nursed my hangover. It was a work day, so I needed to get up, and out to work – in the same work clothes (yup, full suit) that I’d been wearing the day before, and that I’d just slept in. I pulled the duvet back, and then went to sit on the edge of the bed. Once more I was reminded that my friend was naked from the waist down, so I gently covered her back up. She stirred, then turned and smiled an uneasy and slightly perplexed hungover smile at me. For days afterwards, my friend kept mentioning what a nice night it had been.

Years of rumination have left me concluding me that this situation was far less clear cut than the other I mentioned, but I do still think that on balance my friend had intended for us to get intimate at bed time. I’d failed to spot her signals, and she had fallen asleep by the time I got to bed. Another beautiful woman, another completely missed set of signals. Another lifetime of haunting regret.

–

If you aren’t autistic, then you’ll probably think that I’m crazy sharing the above with you. It’s very personal stuff, and not the sort of thing that people talk about. Even I know that. If you have an ASD, then I wonder if you also feel I’m crazy, or if you actually understand. I’d be grateful to hear from you.

You see, this is an area of my life that has been greatly influenced by my Asperger’s and how it affects my ability to interact with other people. The stories I relate have swirled around in my head for many years now causing repeated hurt, and I’ve never told anyone about them. I don’t want them to haunt me for the rest of my life, and I’m hoping that by explaining them, I’ll help to exorcise their ghosts from my memory.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that  another aspect of my neurological makeup means that I can’t remember the name of the young woman in the first tale. We worked together for at least eighteen months, and were close for several months, albeit without any intimacy. Whatever your name was, beautiful woman, I’m sorry.

Post from: That Explains Everything

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

Relationships with women and tales of regret

Related posts:

1. Where is everyone? I don’t know if you’ve noticed – I certainly have...
2. Subtlety I have always been astonishingly good at faux pas. Since...
3. The Timewarp I’ve been left with a familiar feeling. So much so,...

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?

Post from: That Explains Everything

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

Is this what we’re all living for today?

Related posts:

1. Glass half full I’m sure that everyone finds it difficult to be positive...
2. Maybe we are not so different… This, in a sense, is a follow up to the...
3. Apostrophes and other problems I seem to have mislaid my apostrophes. Oh, and I...

–

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?

Post from: That Explains Everything

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

Guilt

Related posts:

1. Slumdog and me This isn’t the sort of article I thought I’d be...
2. Glass half full I’m sure that everyone finds it difficult to be positive...
3. Diagnosis Books make a big thing about getting diagnosed. If you...