Peter Pan’s new coat

Ah yes – Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I was left feeling like Peter yesterday.

It all started when we rushed out the door on Sunday morning. I took the kids to the rugby ground – my son for his weekly training session, and my daughter to stand and watch with me, whilst my wife went to the supermarket just down the road from the rugby club to get the weekly food shop done. I say supermarket, but it’s actually two right next to each other – Aldi, the lovely and decidedly quirky German import, and Asda, the local giant which is now owned by America’s Walmart. Asda’s name, incidentally, comes from a contraction of Associated Dairies.  I mention this because it is one of those odd little bits of information that frequently pops into my head when Asda is mentioned – there is clearly an association there in my brain, and my AS helps to push me into mentioning it. Only after I’ve told this to people will I start to feel embarrassed for having done so.

Anyway – Asda isn’t the star here, it’s Aldi. Aldi is great – it doesn’t stock the huge range of Asda, and it isn’t big on well known brands, but the things it stocks are usually of excellent quality, and many – such as cold continental meats – are better and also much cheaper than at their giant next door neighbour. Aldi also have a clever trick of having some non-food specials in twice a week at unbeatable prices. Everything from power tools to computers, light bulbs to bathroom furniture. At the start of the summer we bought a giant four berth tent and lots of camping equipment from them when they opened one Tuesday morning (just in case they would sell out before we got there), at prices far better than any of our local outdoors shops could manage. We like Aldi. Anyway…

Whilst I supervised the kids at the rugby, my wife went to Aldi first, and then across to Asda for the few items she couldn’t get at Aldi. We met up at the end of the training, and she told me that she’d seen some winter coats at Aldi – both for my son and me. We wandered down the road to take a look. My son liked his jacket, and I thought the one my wife had found for me was great. They were silly money too, so we bought them. For £18.99 I got a waterproof coat with an unzippable fleece lining. It’s nicely finished, is deliciously warm, and has plenty of pockets. My son’s is like a slightly brighter scaled down version of mine. The fleece lining doesn’t unzip on his, but hey – for £7.99 you really can’t complain – and it is still waterproof.

At home, after lunch, I found myself doing something that I remember doing when I was a child.

I took my new coat, and spent a good ten minutes pouring over it in great detail. I unzipped each of the pockets in turn, and explored them with my hands, seeing what size they were, and wondering where to put each of the things that I carry around with me. I marvelled at the stitching, and carefully cut off the couple of stray thread ends. I examined how the fleece was zipped in, amazed at the trickery used to hide the metal zip ends behind folds in the softer material where it might make contact with my neck.  I tried it on and then took it off again, and then put it back on and did up the zip right to the top. I unfolded the hood from it’s hidden compartment, and then carefully folded it back up. I felt the fabric of the fleece lining and of the outside too. I listened to the sound that my hand made on the outer fabric.

This is something I can always remember doing with clothes, but especially with coats. Coats tend to be quite complicated garments with lots of pockets, so there is much to explore. I can still remember a summer coat (this is the UK after all) that I got when I was about ten. It was green and blue and yellow – very garish in today’s terms, but quite fashionable back in the mid eighties. It had a pouch on the front for your hands, much like a hoody sweat top, but you had to peel the pouch off (it fastened on at the top and one side with velcro) to zip and unzip the jacket – really very unusual. I loved it for it’s unusualness, and for the lovely way it had been stitched together. To me, it was a coat to be proud of. I guess I feel much the same way about my new coat. It is a no-name brand, and in all likelihood the material probably isn’t wonderful quality, and maybe it’ll lose it’s waterproofness quickly. But it is well engineered in a very German way, and well finished, and it was an astonishing bargain to boot.

I keep wanting to put it on – in fact each time I’ve popped out of the office this morning, I’ve put it on. This is unusual – I usually brave the trip to the coffee shop or the post office in just my shirt sleeves, even at this time of the year.

So, I feel like Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I feel ten years old again, pouring pride and affection into my new coat. I can’t help it – it’s just me.

Yet whilst my actions may be very much like they were when I was child, I’m concious of the fact that they are not the actions of many, probably most kids. My son is only five, so I can’t compare directly with myself at ten, but his reaction to his new coat was, I think, fairly typical of boys in particular. He liked the colours, pronounced it as  cool and said he’d wear it. When we got home, it got discarded on the kitchen floor and forgotten about until this morning when it was time to leave for school.

Will he react that way at ten? I can’t say, but I suspect he’s more likely to continue to react that way than to have my fascination with the mechanics and design of it.

In lots of ways I’m like Peter Pan – many of the things I do now are the same as when I was a child. However, the child in me is still really rather different from your typical child, so the comparison feels strained to me. I’ve read many times over the last year about immaturity and naiveness in adults with Asperger’s, and associated behaviour being described as child-like. But it occurs to me that I’ve not seen it pointed out that the behaviour is child-like in a peculiarly ASD way – but it most certainly is. And remember how kids with ASDs get described? That’s right – as little professors.

So maybe I’m not like Peter Pan at all. Maybe I’m actually like a little professor, in an adults body, with a strange fascination for winter coats.

Empathy from two perspectives

Last night, something dawned on both me and my wife. Whilst I can empathise with others, I can’t empathise in the same way that she can.

It’s not that my ability to empathise is less strong than hers per se, more that I can’t use empathy in the same scenarios that she can.

This all came about because my wife had asked me how I thought she felt at that moment, and I’d realised that I found it very difficult to gauge. My guess was just that – a guess – and as it turned out, it was well wide of the mark. I would never have guessed the emotions that she was actually feeling.

However, as soon as she had explained to me how she was feeling, I experienced a huge wave of empathy, and managed to express some of it too.

The difference in our abilities was suddenly clear to both of us.

My wife can easily put herself in someone else’s shoes and understand and empathise with them just through observation and an understanding of the general situation that the person is in.

I, on the other hand have to be told how the other person is feeling to understand and empathise. Once I’m aware of their feelings, my empathy is every bit as strong as my wife’s.

I’d never really appreciated this difference in experience before. I think that perhaps I had, if anything, assumed that my experience of empathy was normal. But to be fair it isn’t something that I’ve ever thought about all that much. I’m now thinking that it’s my experience that is unusual, and that indeed my wife’s is more typical.

Of course, it doesn’t always work this way. There are situations where someone’s emotions are immediately obvious to me, and I’m sure that there are others where my wife gets it wrong. But most of the time, we both fit our very different pattern well.

Armed with this new perspective on things, I wonder if this explains why people who aren’t autistic frequently comment that those of us who are can’t empathise.

If your average person can empathise and express their empathy without having to be told how the other person is feeling, then I can see how they would perceive someone like me as having no empathy at all. After all, I often don’t get how someone is feeling, and even when I do, I find it difficult to express my empathy, as I’m not sure of the right words.

Does this make sense to any of you?

An allegorical story

Perhaps the most visible aspect of my Asperger’s – if you were actually to look for it – is the way in which I interact with other people.

There is quite a distinct style behind this, and some strongly embedded techniques that I use all the time to try and make my life easier.
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Relationships with women and tales of regret

When I was growing up, my relationships with women were unusual. This article covers a time line that stretches from my early teenage school days, right through to my mid twenties, and as such, covers situations that happened at school, university and in my early work life. This article is deeply personal, and contains mild sexual references – if this isn’t your thing, then you may want to skip this one.

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.
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Maybe we are not so different…

This, in a sense, is a follow up to the article I wrote earlier about my experience with dipping into autism advocacy. If you haven’t already done so, it would make sense for you to read that article first.

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Imagine if you will, a hypothetical mother. She has an autistic son. She believes that her son was developing normally, but that sometime around the time of his early childhood injections, he started to regress with the signs of autism. She associates the two things, and now absolutely believes that the injections caused her son’s autism. This mother cares deeply for her son, and would do just about anything to reverse that regression, turning him into a normal child once more.

Her son is now seven, and has been receiving an array of treatments, including chelation and the use of a hyperbaric chamber over the last five years. The mother sees some signs of treatments working every now and then, but her son is clearly still autistic. She has learned not to trust mainstream Doctors, after all, they believe in the shots that gave her son this condition. Instead, she is more inclined to believe unconventional specialist Doctors who have brought their own treatments and potions onto the market, with very encouraging results promised by them. To hell with the cost – if it helps her son, it is worth every penny.

Now, this really isn’t meant to represent anyone in particular. It is just meant to give something of a picture of a mother who is prepared to go to any length to reverse a condition that she perceives her son has developed rather than inherited. If you are reading this, and think I’m talking about you, then I’m not, I assure you. I’ve just created a stereotype based on what I’ve read. It may well be an inaccurate stereotype, but I’m sure there are some parents out there who the above fits very well.
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Sitting on the advocacy fence

I got a shock last week, and it has made me realise that I have been subconsciously keeping quite a tight control over what I read and how I publicise my blog.

In a blog article I wrote a week or so ago, I lamented about how few hits the blog was getting. I felt that over the last nine months or so I had grown into a confident blogger, and now I wanted my words to be read by more people. To try and put this into practice, I restarted my AS twitter account, and also started commenting on more blogs – some of which have been on my feed reader for a while, others of which were new to me.

Commenting on other people’s blogs is something that I started out doing, but which I have become more and more tardy with in recent months. Those blogs that I have tended to comment on over time are from folks who present to the world in broadly the same way as me, and whose blogs also have a distinctly this is what it is like for me tone to them. This type of blog, of course, is only a subset of the autism-related blogs out there on the Internet. Many others take a news-like approach or advocate autism, some rather militantly. Perhaps, it turns out, there is a reason why I’ve steered away from these sites.
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Apostrophes and other problems

I seem to have mislaid my apostrophes. Oh, and I keep wanting to spell apostrophes as apostrophies.

As a child, my spelling was never very good, and whilst I tried hard to learn the rules surrounding grammar, apostrophes, and how to write speech using quotes, my execution was never very good. I could write a good story, but I couldn’t quite master the execution properly.
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A different sensory overload

Here’s an interesting one.

One day last week, I wrote a couple of articles for this blog. They were quite long and intense, and I ended up with nearly 2000 words bashed out in a little over an hour. I felt great. I usually do after writing a blog post. The physical act of typing words out de-clutters my brain and forms logical sentences of the thought fragments that swirl around in my head.

My euphoria didn’t last long though. By the time I got home from work I felt very overloaded, and the evening passed in something of a haze. The next morning, I felt hungover.

I’ve talked about each of these states recently, and have put the cause down to sensory overload – specifically too muich sensory input. But that day, I didn’t have too much sensory input.

Now, it’s probably wise to remember that I ‘see’ much of what I write. Both my long-term and working memories are very visual. So, in writing about how I feel about the diagnosis of Asperger’s, and how I frequently say one thing to people, and then don’t follow through with the actions, I spent a good deal of time playing and replaying scenarios in my head. Visually. I can kind of ‘hear’ the other people talking in these scenarios too.

Could it be that the intensity of generating and seeing all this information in my head and the act of getting it all down in writing caused much the same effect as too much visual, auditory or tactile input does? I can’t be sure, of course, but that is the best conclusion that I can reach. It’s not too much sensory output, as such, yet it is about experiencing a lot of sensory information, albeit internally generated.

A different form of sensory overload.

What do you think?

Close of play

When someone who feels like they have authority for something makes stupidly arbitrary rules with little thought to how ridiculous the rules are, my spidey-senses tingle.

Oh all right, they don’t. What really happens is that I get irate and whine and moan to people about how stupid the rules are. It is your turn, dear blog readers.

A case in point is the timesheet system at work. Until recently, I could submit my timesheet for the week on the following Monday morning. No problems there.

Recently, it was decided that you had to have your timesheet in by close of play (undefined) Friday instead. Ok. Not a big problem. It would be nice if a time was given, but still. I can have the timesheet in by the time I finish work, and I can do it as my last task of the day, so that it accurately reflects the time I’ll be leaving.

Last Friday, I got a snotty email at 14:29 from someone whom I have never heard of saying that my timesheet was late. It is now apparently policy (no communication has been sent in this regard to anyone) for the business unit that I work in to have your timesheet for the week submitted by noon on Friday. This, the email continued, was to allow the sender to run a report on timesheets, to see who hadn’t submitted one.

Ummm…..

You can see why I’m mad at this, can’t you?

Firstly, I only need to submit it before noon so that someone can run a report to see if I have submitted it. Not because they need to have the report to someone by 2pm Friday. They can’t apparently run the report at the wonderful close of play Friday like other business units, because, I suspect, the person that runs the report wants have a feeling of huge power, and frankly can’t be arsed to stay late on Friday to run the report then.

Secondly, by noon on Friday, I can’t tell you what time I’ll be leaving at close of play. Therefore, any timesheet I submit is at best a guess. It may not be wildly inaccurate, but it isn’t factually correct either, especially as we have to account for our time in 15 minute intervals. My Aspie logic doesn’t like circumstances like this – it feels like I’m fibbing and thus I feel uncomfortable doing it. Is it even legal to submit a timesheet for time I haven’t worked yet?

The whole system is patently crackers.

I have to assume that it works something like this:

The company I work for is large. It has well over 100,000 employees. Times are tough, and money is tight. The folks at the top who run the business want to know how well they are utilising people resources. Fair enough. I imagine that they have asked their underlings to have a report on their table every Monday lunch time with the resourcing stats for the previous week.

These people, who invariably feel big and important too, have asked the people that work for them to gather the stats. They’ve probably told them they need them first thing Monday morning, just so they can be sure that they’ve got them in time to show to the big bosses.

These people in turn tell their lines of business managers to get the reports to them by close of play (there’s that wonderful phrase again) Friday. Most of the l-o-b managers can do this without a problem (or more likely on Sunday afternoon via their VPN connection to work), but a few decide that they need a bit of extra time and tell their staff they need to have it in by noon. Oh, and it isn’t half a power trip to tell your staff that they must have their timesheets in by noon on Friday or else they have a black mark against their name for it being late. A fantastic power trip, and one that makes you feel like you are doing your bit to keep your manager and their manager and the bosses at the top happy. Look! Look! I used my own initiative to ensure you got your numbers in time! What a good chap I am!

Like The Emperor and his New Clothes, however, I can see that he is naked, and actually looks like an idiot. I’m not the only one in this case. The rest of the business can manage to set a close of play Friday deadline and make it work. What’s more, their figures are likely to be accurate – and surely that’s what the business is really looking for?

I mean really – you may as well tell me that my timesheet has to be in by close of play Thursday for the week. It’s unlikely to be any less of a guess, is it?

Not reading between the lines

One of my tasks at work right now is to pick up new cases that have been logged on behalf of our clients, and raise cases on our internal ticket system to deal with them.

Once such case was waiting for me when I got back from lunch today. The basics of the case were obvious, and I created a ticket for it. However, one of the specifics wasn’t at all clear to me, although it looked to me like what the client was intending was implied, but not actually stated

Not wanting to misinterpret what the client was asking for, I pushed the case back to the call handlers, and asked for clarification on the item I was unsure of. I got an immediate reply. It was almost rude.

The reply stated in no uncertain terms that the original information in the case clearly stated what was being asked for, and of course the client was wanting the item that I was clarifying. The email essentially said, “What? Are you stupid or something? Did you not read what was written?”.

And in retrospect I could see that perhaps it was obvious what was being asked for. The problem is that unless someone says, “This is what I want,” I find it difficult know just what it is that people are asking for. I’ll have an idea of what they want much of the time, but because I’m not sure, I’ll end up asking for clarification. This produces reactions of surprise and astonishment from people. How could I possibly have not understood what they were asking?

There is a degree of reading between the lines of what people are saying that is just lost on me.

Can you read between the lines?