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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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?

Saying one thing and doing another

“Hi James,” said a voice behind me in the baker’s shop this morning.

I turned, and there was the new manager from work. She’s based at the other end of the country, and visits us for a couple of days every other week or so. “Oh, hi Lynne,” I said. As I paid for my breakfast and she bought a Latte, we exchanged very basic small talk. I asked if she was here for a leaving do that’s happening after work tomorrow – Lynne is replacing one of those who is leaving.

Perhaps you may have taken from my last sentence that I was asking if that was the primary reason she was here. I wasn’t meaning that, but I think that’s how Lynne took it, judging by the slightly confused look on her face. She was going to attend, yes, but she was here for other things as well. Of course I hadn’t meant the question the way it had sounded, but – oh well.

By now I’d finished paying and was wondering if I should politely wait for Lynne, as she would be heading back to the same office as me. In the blink of an eye, she clearly sensed this too, and said,”Oh, don’t bother waiting – you get off.”

“That’s fine, I’ll catch up with you later,” I said, and then headed back to the office, feeling confident that I’d made a good impression.

A good impression, eh? Hmmmm. The passage of time, and the application of some rumination means I now feel rather differently.

The problem here, is that my facsimile of chatting is just that – it’s guess work rather than having anything solid behind it. I’ll catch up with Lynne later will I? Erm, no. I won’t. My comment appeared to demonstrate that we had things to talk about, but we don’t. It’s just what I imagine people say, and in a moment where I had to find something appropriate to end the conversation, my brain chose that phrase.

There is a bigger problem here too. By interacting with people in a way that mimics what I think they would be expecting to hear rather than a way that is actually acheivable by me, I often send the wrong signals or leave a sense of inconsistency with people. I must be frequently confusing to deal with.

“Can you do this for me James?”

“Sure”

Except that having confidently said yes to a piece of work without even finding out what it involves, I’ll often find that the work is outside of my sphere of knowledge or it simply doesn’t grab me and I struggle to complete it. Confident and happy to undertake work, yet not good at completing it. That’s a bit of a conflict, isn’t it?

Life is a constant battle to obtain the right script for James the actor, and unfortunately the script writer fails to see twists and turns in the plot of life.

A metaphor, yes, but not all that far from the truth either. My tool box of stock phrases, gleaned from years of observing others are something of a script that I act out. And as I am the script writer, and I don’t often see things coming in life, I’m frequently stuck with a script that doesn’t fit the situation very well.

If half the battle is finding suitable words when communicating with others, then the other half of the battle is realising that the things I say need to be doable. Maybe saying no once in a while would help, no matter how big and scary that sounds.

Because if I said no to something I couldn’t deliver, at least I would be being consistent.

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!

Life derailed

I’ve written before about how my daily routine is on railway tracks, and that when something comes along that alters the course of my day, I’ll find that I want to continue down those tracks rather than modify my routine to the new schedule.

Well, I’ve recently figured out that the whole bigger picture of my life is like that too.

You see, I grew up in a neurotypical world, with neurotypical expectations, hopes and dreams. I knew I was a little different from the norm, but I really didn’t see how big this chasm was in certain areas until very recently. Thus, neurotypical expectations felt normal and right for me. I had places to get to and things to do. After leaving school there was University to look forward to, and then a life of work, making my way up the career ladder. Somewhere along the way I expected to gain a wife, kids and progressively bigger and more comfortable houses to live in. I was expecting to lead a typical middle-class British life.

In some ways I did. I went to university, and got a good degree. I migrated into the world of work without too much pain either, and made an impression on people for providing the results they asked for. Indeed, it took several years before it became apparent that not everything was as plain sailing as I thought it would be.

I guess the wheels started to come off the wagon when, three years into my work life, I broke up with my girlfriend of six years. Sadly, the relationship had deteriorated in a way that left us as friends and little more. I decided it was over, and we parted company – the one and only time in my life where I’ve ended a relationship. In a neurotypical way I  imagined that once I was out of this relationship, I’d meet someone else in due course. But I didn’t – not for several years. Instead I failed miserably to get my act together.

And then there was work. I’d been getting into trouble either for being too outspoken (something that I’ve written about before), and occasionally for not knuckling down and working hard when it was needed. I had developed an eye for seeing the ridiculous and unjust in the work environment, but had poor control over voicing my opinions. I was no longer the model employee that people turned to to get things done. I was the loose cannon that took a bit more managing than my peers, though with management I still produced good results most of the time, and was still valued.

Instead of trying to understand why life wasn’t going as planned, and trying to sort out my working problems, I pulled a trick that you can get away with when you work in IT in the UK – I moved jobs – sometimes within the company, and at other times to other companies. I was in a repeating cycle of joining a team full of enthusiasm, taking on responsibility and delivering on it initially, then starting to see the problems in the company, getting stressed, moaning about it inappropriately, failing to deliver what I said I’d do and then moving on once more.

After six years and six jobs in three companies I was a senior technician, well paid, but out of control. In the last months of my third job I was given a junior management role that involved looking after a track of work, and four technical staff. It went badly wrong, and I left the company, and ultimately my whole working life in London behind.

A big problem for me was that I could see my peers doing well. Many of them grew up with the same middle class values and aspirations as me, and I watched them climb the corporate ladder. That step into junior management that I found impossible was typically tackled by my peers with ease. Why couldn’t I do it? Why was the whole process of people management so intolerably stressful to me?

In the months leading up to work exploding, I’d been introduced by an old friend to a lovely woman who lived and worked in the town where I had grown up in Yorkshire. Our relationship was going well, so I left London behind, and followed my girlfriend (later to be my wife) back to Yorkshire. After six months of doing very little, I took up work again, in a much less senior technical role. That worked better, and for a while I consoled myself that I ‘just wasn’t ready’ for a management position, but that in time I would be.

A little over a year ago the chance arose for me to become departmental manager for the company I was at the time working for – to fill the boots of someone who was leaving. I walked away and left the company. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to hack it.

Where had my middle class dreams gone?

Well, these days, of course, I know the answer. My aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder, and everything that goes along with that typical middle class existence are the dreams of a neurotypical person. I’m simply not neurologically cut out for management, and – lets be honest here – I never will be. I don’t understand office politics and I come across as being hopelessly naive and optimistic a lot of the time, and lazy and rude at others. I now know and accept this.

Why then can’t I accept that my dreams of having a typical middle-class lifestyle simply aren’t going to happen? Well, it’s like I said at the top – my aspirations have been derailed, but my train wants to keep on going in that familiar straight line, chasing the dream that I can’t possible achieve. I’m finding this dream surprisingly difficult to shake, and reality difficult to accept.

The gulf between dream and reality shows itself frequently to me in every day life. I work with smart people, who run their own businesses, and know others, younger than me, who are doing very well in management. I live in an affluent village, and see other parents dropping their kids at school from large new expensive cars. I see the large new cars parked outside large houses too. This is the lifestyle that I was brought up to expect, and yet I can’t realistically hope to have it.

Does that matter? Yes – it feels as though it does.

But does it really matter? No. Look at what I have achieved. I have a lovely and very underastanding wife, and two great kids. As a family we live in a modest but large enough house in a lovely village. We eat well and can afford to run two cars (albeit old and small ones), and have enough spare cash for the odd treat. What’s more, because I understand and accept my limitations and their causes these days, I am in a good position to make work choices in the future that fit my skills better.  Whilst I can be a trouble maker at work, I’m also generally good at delivering the sort of results that people want as long as I’m well managed, and with a bit of practice maybe I can keep the trouble maker at bay now that I know what triggers his appearance.

Life is good. Now if only I could get my train to take the branch line off to the left that leads to Satisfaction rather than going straight on towards Middle-class Central…

Dysfunction

In the mid nineties, home computers were far less powerful and considerably more expensive than they are now. As a newly graduated Computer Sciences student, I wanted the best computer I could afford, and yet I had very little by way of disposable income to play with. To work around this problem, I decided to build my own desktop PC, so I could choose the parts that thought represented the best value for money at the time, and I also then decided to overclock the CPU. This was then (and to some degree still is) one of the easy and free ways to grab a little extra performance out of your PC, by making the CPU process more instructions per second than it is supposed to.

Unfortunately, overclocking doesn’t always work. If the CPU you bought was already running near the limit of it’s capabilities, then overclocking it can cause your machine to crash. And so it was for the machine I built. When the machine was idle or working at well under capacity, then it was fine. It would trundle along happily for days. Then when you asked it to do something that was intensive on the CPU it would crash within minutes.

I’m using the above as a metaphor for my life right now. My life is a little like my mid-nineties PC. I can manage the low-level and background tasks reasonable well, but ask me to do something more complex and I’m struggling.

In aspie terms, my executive function is failing me badly right now.

This is nothing unusual. My executive function isn’t wonderful at the best of times. I’m typically disorganised, and unless I’m prompted in some way about events like birthdays or Father’s Day (this Sunday here in the UK), then I’ll forget about them. I use a to-do list each day, but often have trouble thinking ahead regarding what needs to be on the list. I’m used to all of this however, and I’ve never been better set up to stay relatively organised, and thus under the radar of typical people.

The current problems that I have are very familiar, however. I’ve had this sort of problem frequently, for as far back as I can remember. Simply saying that my executive functioning is worse than normal doesn’t really cover it, but it does provide a starting point – a key if you like – for how the problem presents itself.

Right now, planning and execution feel really difficult for me – far more so than normal. Getting items on my to-do list is proving difficult, as I’m forgetting to write them down when they occur to me. Then, of course, I’m forgetting what it was that occurred to me in the first place. I’ll pick up my list book, and sit there thinking that there was something that I needed to do, but completely failing to remember what it was. I have trouble with having a small working memory at the best of times, but right now it feels thimble sized. If I don’t immediately concentrate on the item in my working memory and externalise it in some way, then it is gone, and very difficult for me to retrieve later.

By way of example, over the last couple of weeks I’ve come up with various ideas for articles for this blog, but at times where I’ve not been near a computer to jot them down. I haven’t the faintest idea what those ideas were now, despite feeling that they had legs at the time. What a shame.

I’m not faring any better once I have items on my list. Instead of checking the list regularly to see what I need to do next, I find that I’m forgetting to look at it. Worse, when I do look at it, I’m oddly finding that I’m not properly taking in what’s there. This means that sometimes I only see half the list, and then miss the equally important items on the other half. It’s not a concious decision, it just happens.

When I forget to look, I often find that I’m procrastinating my time away browsing the Internet, following links about an arbitrary subject. This has been happening a lot over the last couple of weeks, and large tracts of time disappear without me realising it’s happening. This following of links about a subject is a soothing mechanism that I have, and I take in large quantities of typically useless information.

When I do drag myself back to tackling list items, I’m finding that I just can’t get started. In the past I’d simply have put this down to a lack of motivation – after all, that’s the problem that typical people have in this sort of situation. It’s more than that though, because it’s not just dull work tasks that are getting affected by this problem, it’s more interesting personal tasks too. It feels like there is some huge physical hurdle that I need to get over to get down to tasks right now. That’s not a lack of motivation, it’s a lack of executive function.

When I do finally get down to starting tasks, then I manage them reasonably well. Well, that is, if you consider working on a single task until it’s done to be a good thing. Frequently it isn’t, and I should be dividing my time up between tasks, especially at work. That isn’t really happening right now, where as normally I’d manage this much of the time, as long as the tasks were on my list.

Along with all this executive dysfunction and working memory issues go various other familiar characteristics. I’m very blank and unfocussed right now. I appear to be drifting through life. My usually very active brain is dull and just ticking over. It feels a little like that feeling I get after too much sensory input – like I’ve withdrawn to be alone, but instead of that lasting a half hour or so, it’s been going on for days, or maybe even weeks now. I have no spark, no zone. My special interests – this blog for one – appear to have fallen by the way side for the most part. I’m quiet and uncommunicative. My routine doesn’t seem to be fully happening – not because I’m choosing to do something different, but just because I seem to be forgetting it.

I’m not sure if this sort of way of being has a trigger. I can’t think of anything in particular that has set this one off. Perhaps it’s just cyclic. Perhaps it’s a change in brain chemistry for some reason.

Maybe, and I whisper this, as it feels like a slightly scary proposition, it’s just that after a long period of acting as NT as I can, my brain waves a white flag and gives up. Perhaps this is just the more naturally autistic version of me, where my brain and nervous system are refusing to try and live up to NT expectations as they have become worn out doing it.

I do feel like I need a holiday. I am tired, and my life is hectic and not well organised right now. So just maybe my whisper is reality. Maybe my body can’t keep up the pretence right now, and the exaggerated (versus my normal state) executive dysfunction and working memory issues are the end result.

Whatever it is, I’d be willing to bet my mid-90′s PC would understand how I feel right now.

Slow thinking

When it comes to talking with others, I’m often seen to be something of a slow thinker.

I’ll see the other person smile after saying something and look at me – they are expecting a response, but what sort of a response? Was it a joke they made? Were they looking for agreement on something? My brain will scramble and then often metaphorically shrug it’s shoulders. I don’t follow this up with a physical shrug – I’ve long since learnt that this isn’t an acceptable response. Instead I’ll use a tried-and-tested store-cupboard stock response of, ‘Heh, yeah!’.

This is a highly refined response from me, and has been carefully honed over the years to try and covey many messages at once in an ambiguous way. It has a little humour in it, in case what you were saying was actually a joke. It has a positive response in it too, so that if it wasn’t something funny, I’ve indicated that I acknowledge what you were saying. It works a surprisingly large amount of the time.

And then it comes, eventually – I’ve decoded what you were saying to me, and I suddenly see the joke, or why you were wanting some agreement from me. Occasionally of course I’ll eventually see that my response wasn’t very appropriate. Oh dear, but then again, you can’t win all the time.

Why do I miss the intent of what people are saying to me in the first place? Well there are a number of competing Aspie traits at play, and they often collude together.

Firstly, there is my lack of social intuition. I do have some sometimes, but it isn’t enough to get me by most of the time. With little by the way of social intuition to help a conversation flow, I have to real-time process what is being said to me, and then try and figure what to say next. This consumes a lot of brain power, and concentration, leaving me little room for anything else going on in my head. Sometimes the responses are easier to come by than others. But put me in a situation where I know little about the subject matter, and I very very easily get lost, especially if it’s more than a 2-way conversation.

Think of it as having a meeting where the other people speak in a foreign language that you don’t fully understand. You have to listen very hard to catch what is being said, and then spend a little time processing what was said to turn it into English, before what they’ve said makes sense. My lack of social intuition presents itself in much the same way but when everyone is speaking in English.

Then there is my lack of reading non-verbal social cues. Because I concentrate on what’s said, and don’t see the body language or facial expressions very much, I miss much of the subtlety that people often convey whilst they speak. This makes the decision making regarding what people are saying even harder at times.

The third main trait at play is strongly related to the other two, and is that I easily get sensory overload in social situations.  The amount of time this takes varies, but you can be sure that a multi-person face-to-face meeting will cause it remarkably quickly. Once I’m overloaded, my body involuntarily starts to shut itself down, to shield me from the constant input. This feeling is one of blankness. I feel to have withdrawn inside myself, and the voices become distant echos. My eyes blur and I kind of switch off. This, of course means that I miss a fair bit of what’s being said, and that means that the impact of the other traits gets magnified hugely.

With all of these traits at play, it’s not surprising that I often find verbal communication, be it social or work meetings, to be very hard going. It’s also not surprising that I can be perceived to be slow of thought, and disinterested.

At work, at least, I tend to get away with this, because I come back with well though out responses to things after the event, and people respect me for doing this. I seem to have a well-honed ability to reply recent events and from this work through peoples thoughts and intentions before drawing my own conclusions. It’s rumination, but it works very well for me. Whilst I may not have good instant answers for anyone, I do at least have well thought out follow-ups.

You could conclude that this article is about mental agility, and my lack of it. However it’s more subtle than that. I don’t have great mental agility in group verbal communication scenarios, but I do when it comes to rumination or philosophising. This is signalling parallels to me regarding this article I wrote last week, where I said that I don’t appear to others to not have much common sense, but really it’s just a case that I can’t express it when I need to. Maybe that article and this simply describe different facets of the same issue.

As ever, what this article really says is that I’m different from the norm, but perhaps in ways that aren’t what you first think. I have skills that are very typical of any intelligent person – I can reason arguments, suggest ways forward and make rational decisions. I just can’t access these results in the same sorts of timescales that typical people can.

I’m not slow-minded, I just can’t respond in a way that meets your neuro-typical expectations.

Metaphors, and a leap of logic

I have Anna, one of my regular contributors to thank for this one.

A wrote a couple of days ago about how I’m sometimes at a loss for words when I’ve experienced too much sensory input. I used a throw-away metaphor in the article about how my brain goes away and decides whether it needs to use a stock answer:

This is the pattern matching bit of my brain that says, “So the question was this, do we have an easy/obvious/logical answer to use, or do I need to fetch something out of the stock cupboard?”.

I like metaphors – they have a wonderfully simplifying effect on me. I usually coin them to make something easier for me to understand, and I often find it easier to describe a tricky concept using metaphor rather than describing the concept itself.

It looks like other Aspies find this sort of trick useful too. Anna expanded on my metaphor:

I think it is the same for me. The more tired I am, the longer the walk to the stock cupboard seems, and sometimes I just can’t walk that far at all, and so no words are forthcoming. Does that make sense?

Brilliant. I really couldn’t have put it better myself. And then she said this:

Do you suppose that for the more severely autistic people who don’t speak, it might be because they reach sensory overload much sooner than us, and their stock cupboard of words is even further away than ours?

Well. I think it’s great when we amateur psychologists come up with little leaps of logic like this.

I can’t say whether the trait behind this metaphor actually works like this in those with more pronounced autism. It sounds however, to be both a logical and plausible extension of what happens in those of us with the more high-functioning variants of autism.

This is one of those “you won’t find this in a book” leaps of logic that I’ve written about before. But then again, could you write about the way this sort of trait works without resorting to metaphor? I’m sure I couldn’t, and metaphor isn’t used much by those non-autistic people who write the books.

Great stuff, Anna – thanks for the insight.

Settling in

I often hear other Aspies express the thought that they dislike change, and that they find change to be stressful.

I too suffer from this problem, so can empathise with all those that this problem affects.

Indeed, the very first article I wrote on this site talked about how changes to routine are difficult for me, using the metaphor that I’m a train on a track, and when the change comes along, I tend to want to keep on going on the rails.

There’s another facet to this issue that I need to talk about as well – and that’s the problems I have settling in to new places.

This issue most obviously rears it’s head when I change jobs, but equally, other big location changes such as moving house  and even things like getting to grip with my finances (which I did recently) can cause similar feelings of stress and disorientation.

I’m going to focus on what it’s like when I change job, because it’s probably the easiest of the scenarios for me to put into words.

Once I’ve been working somewhere for a while, I could just about walk around it blindfolded. I know the shape, size and layout of all the rooms, and how they fit together. I know who sits at every desk, and how best to approach them – be it in person, on the phone or by email, etc. This is the closest I come to work Nirvana – all the jigsaw pieces fit together well, and I can interact with both the work environment and it’s people efficiently. All of my jobs so far have ended up at this point, eventually.

Usually it takes me at least six months to get there. The time leading up to it is a big curved graph of decreasing stress and disorientation.

I always find my first week in a new job to be incredibly disorienting. As is the common courtesy, I’ll usually have been show round the facilities and introduced to team mates and probably others that I’ll come into contact with on my first day. I don’t know about anyone else, but this plain doesn’t work for me. I suspect that my initial stress levels are so high that I fail to take in any names – sometimes not even the name of the person who has just shown me around. I also think that I’m prioritising trying to take in the spacial arrangement of the office and the other facilities. I have some deep down need to know my surroundings, and this seems to override the perhaps more important (in a typical view) priority of getting to know those i’ll be working with.

After an hour or so, I’ll often have to ask the person on the desk next to me where the toilet is. Despite trying to take it in on the tour, I’ll most likely have forgotten if it is more than a room and a corridor away. What’s more, I’ll feel it essential to be overly polite to the person I’m talking to. I’ll most likely start my questioning with something like, “Excuse me, sorry to interrupt but…”.

Those first couple of weeks will feel like I’m an intruder in all the public spaces. Whilst I may get to feel at home at my desk in a few days, I’ll find the canteen and yes, probably the toilets too to be an alien landscape into which I’ve strayed and in which I’m not welcome. It’s not that anyone is setting out to make me feel unwelcome – that’s just how the surroundings feel – they are unfamiliar and disorienting to me.

I kept a track when I changed jobs last year of how long it took me to learn the names of those in the office. It’s not a large office in this case – only a dozen people. After a week, I had remembered the names of about half of those in the office, and after two weeks I had all bar a couple of names off by heart. First names, at least. Some surnames took many weeks to learn. Those whose first names took longest to learn were those with whom I had no reason to communicate – which is perhaps obvious.

So, after two to three weeks in a typical job I’ll know the names of those around me, and the way around the facilities. I’ll also have some idea of the roles that those around me have too, and who to approach for what. I won’t feel settled, however, nor part of the team. This takes far longer – as I have already said, typically six months or so. Until that time I feel detached – an outsider. I do what I can to fit in, but as I dislike small talk and find it difficult to do most of the time, this perhaps prolongs the length of time I spend in my detached limbo. I spend this time feeling like I’m faking it, and wondering if anyone has spotted that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Eventually, however, all the jigsaw pieces fit, and I feel comfortable and part of the team.

The same feelings apply for big events like moving house or even organising my finances. Clearly the ground rules involved are somewhat different in these cases, but the feelings of not belonging and being disoriented are the same.

I have one final example. At high school age, I chose to go to a school that was outside of the catchment area for my junior school. This meant that barring one friend who did the same thing, I moved to a school where I knew nobody. I was part of the decision making process for this, but ultimately I used my parent’s logic, and agreed with their choice. The school had a better reputation and better exam results than the local one.

I felt very alone and out of place for a long time at that school. After a term or two, my mother asked me how I was liking it. “I don’t fit in”, I told her, and it was true. I can’t imagine how that must have felt for my mother – it must have been awful to hear. Eventually I fitted in to a degree with the other misfits in my year, and had friends of sorts who would last me the remainder of my time in the school.

So, my feelings of disorientation and of not fitting go back a long way, and still show themselves frequently. Obviously everyone – Aspie or not – is going to take some time to settle into a new experience, but it certainly looks to me like it doesn’t take a typical person months. Do any of you experience similar things?

Yoko Oh No!

It was World Autism Awareness Day last Thursday. I was very busy at work, and unfortunately didn’t find the time to comment on the day itself.

I did read this article though, about Yoko Ono auctioning off a work of her art as jigsaw pieces in aid of Autism Speaks – an organisation that I know very little about.

Initially I thought it was a wonderful way to help raise awareness of Autism Spectrum Disorders, but this feeling didn’t last long:

Speaking in front of a crowd at the unveiling, she said, “Once the solution for autism is discovered, we will see the sky shimmering in its original beauty, with no holes.”

Oh dear. A solution for autism? Bad use of metaphor that not even I would use?

Now – I am well aware that well-tailored therapies can help those of us on the Spectrum enormously. Even without therapeutic intervention, many of us can lead full and satisfying lives.

What therapies can never do is cure autism. I don’t want to put words in Yoko’s mouth here – she didn’t use the word cure, and indeed solution may not equal cure in her eyes, but it sure as hell sounds like she thinks that ultimately autism can be eradicated.

To me, she also suggests that to have an ASD is to have a life that isn’t complete. I find that insulting.

I understand that you want to help, Yoko, but I won’t be buying a piece of your jigsaw. The sky does not have holes in it, and my life is no less beautiful simply because I have Asperger’s. Indeed I often think quite the opposite – I can see a side of life that most people cannot, and that in itself is beautiful, and can be a very useful skill.