Fallout

I’m continuing to experience fallout from my stressful evening at the theatre last weekend.

The flashbacks and replays of the events have stopped, thank goodness, but the evening has served to heighten my background levels of stress and anxiety considerably, and these have yet to abate.

Whilst not causing a downward spiral by any means, the increase in anxiety has had a very noticeable affect on my ability to function in every day life. Since Saturday night there have been many examples of this – here are a few:

On Sunday, I was a bag of nerves, and had a very short temper. In the early evening my daughter pestered to play a game. I felt over stimulated, and disinterested. We all played as a family, but luck wasn’t on my side. I helped my three year old daughter with the game, and she ended up doing twice as well as I did. Finishing last was just the way things turned out and had little to do with skill, but it made me feel lousy and even more grumpy.

On Monday, I got very little done at work. I wrote my previous article here to try and clear my brain out, but my stress and anxiety were terrible regardless. I found it very difficult to concentrate on what I needed to do, and spent much of the time just browsing the Internet. I simply didn’t feel capable of working.

My daughter has a cold. She was coughing in the night last night and up several times. My wife got up to deal with her first, but I got the nudge in the ribs the second time. Instead of being gentle and sympathetic, I was enraged. I stomped about, and in no uncertain words told my three year old daughter that it was the middle of the night, and that we should all be asleep. “I’ve got a runny nose”, she answered unhelpfully. I stomped around until I found a box of tissues, and then grumpily wiped her nose and almost menacingly told her to go back to sleep. Not a great example of good parenting.

It got worse this morning, when my wife pronounced that our daughter wouldn’t be in nursery today, because of her cold. Our daughter is only in nursery part time, and this gives my wife two days during the week where she can make appointments and get things done. “You’ll have to work from home”, my wife told me ten minutes before I was due to leave for work, “because I have an appointment I can’t cancel this morning”. Nooooooo! This sort of derailment to my schedule sits very badly with me. Not only do I want to ignore the change in plan and push on with what I was supposed to be doing, but in situations like this, I always feel guilt – like I’m letting work down by not being able to make it into the office. Add in the fact that since Christmas I’ve spent a lot of time working from home due to poor weather conditions, and my increased background anxiety too, and it meant that the prospect of working from home felt truly awful. What would I say to my boss? I worked from home two days last week due to ice on the roads (everyone else made it in), and I left an hour early last Friday because my wife was ill. I really did not want to face the prospect of explaining this one.

The crazy thing is that I know my boss will be fine with it, and I know that my many recent days absent from the office have been due to the weather which is out of my hands. I even said this to my wife, as I sat with a sulky face trying to persuade myself that working form home would be fine. She didn’t look impressed.

What happened next just made everything worse. My wife’s decision not to send our daughter to nursery was made whilst my daughter was still asleep. She woke up just before it was time for my son to go to school. She was fine! Change of plan again. I stayed at home with my daughter whilst my wife took our son to school, and then I left for work. And herein lies the next source of stress. I leave early for work – arriving around 8am usually, so that I can get a parking space. I know from experience that if I arrive after 9am, I am unlikely to get a space. This then means struggling to find a space somewhere else that doesn’t cost me £7.50 for the day. This in another of those situations that makes me anxious at the best of times. I took a deep breath and resigned myself to pay the huge fee for the car park that always has spaces. At least I had coins in the car with which to pay.

As it turns out, even at 9.30am, I managed to find a space in my usual car park today. Well, it’s not really a proper space, but spaces aren’t marked in this car park, and as long as you don’t block anyone in, it’s fair game.

So here I am at work once more, and still struggling to get going. I know that eventually my stress and anxiety levels will go down, but I have no idea really how to help that along or even how long it might take to feel better. You see, this sort of background stress is pretty common with me, but I’ve never really paid attention to it in the past – I’ve just assumed it is normal, and there is nothing I can do about it.

Do you have any suggestions for things I can try to help reduce my background anxiety levels?

The Timewarp

I’ve been left with a familiar feeling. So much so, that I nearly entitled this piece Groundhog Day. But to call it that that would just be showing another of my traits – the one where I present my own interpretation of things as fact, without having all the information needed. Passing off BS as fact in a confident way. To be clear, Saturday wasn’t a day I’d had before. The feelings I felt were very familiar, however.

Firstly a warning. It’s not usual for there to be coarse language in my posts, but this post is an exception. Consider yourselves warned.

On Saturday night, my wife and I went to the theatre. But it was no ordinary play we were going to see, it was The Rocky Horror Show. You may or may not have come across this masterpiece of 70s kitsch rock opera, but if you haven’t, I’d best give a little background, as you’ll need it to help put my experience of the evening into context.

Rocky Horror is, well, a British institution. Gothic horror, sexual liberation and blurring of gender roles are the big themes, and it has a huge and very loyal following of mainly thirty-something Brits, who – man and woman alike – dress up lavishly, often in basques and fish-net stockings with suspenders to sing along and shout things at the players that over the last thirty years or so have become completely woven into the story.

So this isn’t your usual sort of theatre production. It owes more to a rock concert mixed with another British staple of theatre, the pantomime. The stage show is outrageous, the audience’s costumes are outrageous, and the audience participation is outrageous too, but all deliberately so, with a large amount of tongue in cheek thrown in.

If you are on the autism spectrum, you are probably now wondering why on earth I went to a show like this. Well, you have a good point, really.

My wife is a veteran of the stage show, so it is difficult to keep her away when the tour is in our neighbourhood, and I went with her for the first time a couple for years ago. We have the film too, and I enjoy the rock opera and find the themes fun. Despite this clearly being something of a minefield for an Aspie, there is also the potential there to have a good time.

On my first visit I didn’t dress up. This is perfectly acceptable – whilst dressing outrageously is the norm, the atmosphere is very relaxed, and frankly no one bats an eyelid if you haven’t dressed up. I felt out of place though, primarily, I felt at the time, due to the lack of costume, so for this visit, I was determined to go dressed up. Not in fishnets and a basque, mind you – that would make me feel more uncomfortable than not dressing up at all. Instead, I settled on a glitzy black evening suite with a red bow tie, red conical cardboard party hat and large sunglasses – a theme based on some of the background characters in the film version. My wife dressed in her usual Rocky outfit of fishnets, black mini dress, red feather boa, maids apron, crimped hair and white face paint. We both looked the part.

But that was where things started going wrong, really. If I was going to pull this off, I was going to need to arrive relaxed and happy, and with time to get a drink from the bar to relax me a little. Our plan built in time for this, but it wasn’t to be. We should have left at 19:00 for the thirty-five drive to the theatre, leaving plenty time for that drink and to soak up the happy atmosphere before the show started at 20:30. I was ready at 18:45, but my wife was running late, and we didn’t leave until 19:20. Un oh. Not to worry, I thought to myself, we’ll still have half an hour once we arrive before the show starts. Rewinding a little, during the afternoon, I checked our route to the theatre, and where we were going to park. I’d even updated the sat-nav software on my phone – Nokia have recently made the navigation free to use, so I wanted to make sure that if I needed it, it’d be there without me having to panic.

Half way there, and signs start showing on the motorway matrix signs – ‘Slow traffic ahead’, and ‘J28-J26 Delays’. Oh. No. We need to get off at J26. And then we met the tail of the queue midway between J29 and J28. We stopped. And then we didn’t move for the next five minutes. Oh dear. It’s about a quarter to eight.

Never mind, I tell my wife – we can come off at J28 and take the A road to the venue rather than the motorway. I know the road goes in the right direction, but I don’t know it well enough to drive unaided. I pull my phone out of my pocket, and start the sat nav software. I pull the theatre tickets out my pocket and get the street address of the theatre. It calculates the route for me, leaving the motorway at J26. So – and here is my first mistake – I go into the menus, and choose the alternative route option. This, I think calculates a different route for you – the non-obvious route. It now says I need to leave at J28, which is a mile and a half away. Great! Well, as you’ll see in a minute, it wasn’t, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

First, I had to contend with a surprise. No sooner had we started crawling along the motorway once more, than the sat nav software pops up a message, tellling me that my navigation subscription ran out three months ago. I f I wish to use the navigation feature, I’ll have to resubscribe. What? But is’s free now! I really need the navigation, so I choose the path of least resistance, and dig out my credit card, and pay, whilst crawling along at 5MPH. There. Done. Phew.

We reach J28 at about 20:00. To compound matters, we are still crawling down the slip road too, but that turns out to be because the traffic lights at the end of them are not phased to cope with large numbers of folks leaving the motorway at eight on a Saturday evening. Once we get past the end of the slip road everything is free flowing, except there is a new problem. The sat nav now wants to take me back onto the motorway. No! This is wrong! Panicing a little I tell me wife I’m going to ignore it, because I know the road I need to take, and once we’re on that road, it’ll recalculate and then go the best way. I make it onto the road we need to be on, and true to word, the sat nav recalculates. It says we are 21 minutes away from our destination. No! It’s now five past eight… This really isn’t good. What’s more, I know that I’ve given the theatre address to the sat nav, and we don’t want to go to that road, we want to go to one that is nearby, where there is a large car park. The two roads are not immediately connected to each other. If I follow the sat nav, I will most likely miss the car park and end up at the wrong place, with no time to spare. I am by now hugely anxious. I know the road I need if I am approaching from the motorway, but not the road I need if I am approaching from the road I am on. I don’t even know the name of the road with the car park on.

I tell myself that I just need to push on, and get to the city centre – I can sort it out when we get to the right area. But I am thwarted again…

After a mile or so, I can see that sat nav is going to send me sharp right at a junction half a mile ahead. That isn’t right! The city centre is dead ahead down this road! So I hit the alternative route button again. It tells me to do a u-turn. What! This is crazy! And then the logic in my head kicks in. Alternative route doesn’t mean take the next most direct route, it means take a scenic route – I’m in no hurry. And whats more, the more you select it, the more scenic is seems to get. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to reset it back to the most direct route, so I tell it to stop navigating, and then I start from scratch and put the address in once more, all whilst driving. Did I mention it was foggy? Well, yes, it was. I was driving along in fog, fiddling with the sat nav, whitst very anxious, and running very late. Not good. But hey – starting from scratch sorted the sat nav – it now took me on the direct route. And what’s more, the arrival time dropped by five minutes. Phew.

It was nearly eight twenty, when we made it to the city centre. By now, we were following signs for the theatre as well as using the sat nav. Then, in the fog, I missed a turn. Damn. The sat nav suggested we turn right ahead to compensate. I did. More theatre signs. Phew. We carried on a bit further, and then, all of a sudden, I saw the car park we were aiming to park in. Completely by chance we had ended up approaching it from the other side. We parked, and, with five minutes until curtain up, we dashed towards the theatre, which happened to also be five minutes away. When we got there I relaxed a little – there were still plenty of folks pouring in through the door to the foyer. Phew! We both needed to pee. My wife looked dismayed at the queue for the ladies – isn’t it always the way – and I made my way to the gents. Imagine my shock to find it full of women! Not just men dressed as women either – actual women trying to evade the queues for their own toilets. I threw caution to the wind and used the urinal despite the giggling women just a few feet behind me (I thank my kids for this – once you’ve had a three year old girl stare at what you are doing a few times, you can probably pee anywhere).

The bell rang, and folks started to disappear. My wife was still in the queue to get in the toilet door. Anxiety still building. Bah. I hunted out my tickets so I knew where they would be. I checked our seat numbers, and then went to find out which door we’d need to go through. I went and bought a program. The foyer was just about empty now, and the stewards were shouting that the performance was starting. Damn!

After what seemed like an eternity, my wife appeared. I dragged her up the stairs, and we found our seats. We’d missed the opening number, but we were there. I sat there glazed, tense and panicy. We’d not had a chance for a drink, but we had at least made it to our seats.

After a minute or two it became clear that the theatre was very noisey. You expect noise in a Rocky Horror showing – that’s all part of it, but it was especially noisey with chit-chat, far noisier that I remembered it being on my first visit. That was distracting – I found it hard to concentrate on the dialog on the stage. People were whooping and cheering and clapping in all the right places, but I wasn’t. It was just all too much, and the anxiety and tension were not helping. Before I knew it, we were all stood up – another Rocky main-stay – and dancing along. I attempted to move myself in time with the music, but failed. Never mind – I knew if I could just relax a bit, I’d be fine.

As the next few minutes passed, I did start to relax a bit, but the woman in the seat in front was annoying me. She was clearly very dunk, and determined to enjoy herself. That’s not a problem, of course, but she was doing things like throwing her head back in her seat, which was banging into my legs. In my already over-stimulated world, this was a huge distraction.

I did calm down a little and start to feel the show flow through me rather than around me. By the time the Timewarp came around for the first time, I was able to make a little bit of an attempt to join in. Not much - partly because even at the best and most relaxed of time I can’t dance well and look uncoordinated, but also because I’d forgotten the actions. However, I was feeling relaxed enough to try it now.

And then the real problem started. Whilst standing and dancing is all an accepted part of the show, we Brits are also unfailingly polite, and show etiquette dictates that once the dancing is finished, you sit down once more so that everyone can see. Everyone just does it. In lots of ways, it is a joy to see – it just happens in a coordinated manner, from the front towards the back, a row at a time.

But the drunken woman in front of me, and her friend in the seat to her left didn’t sit down. How awkward. I could just about see the action on stage in the gap between the two of them, as long as I kept moving about. How annoying. I didn’t feel annoyed though – it just made me feel more tense once more. After a couple of minutes, some of the women in the row behind me started shouting “Sit down!“. The standing women paid no attention. My anxiety was almost coming out of my ears now – I felt like a conduit for the brewing tension – but still I just sat and tried to see through the gap. By now I couldn’t hear the show any more, it had been drowned out by my internal dialogue, which was asking what I should do. I didn’t know what to do, but thankfully, I had the decision made for me. One of the women in the row behind me tapped me on the shoulder and shouted “can you get her attention so we can get her to sit down!”. As is often the case, once told what to do, I had no problem with the execution. I immediately tapped the standing woman on the shoulder , and as she turned, I shouted “Sit down!” at her. So did half a dozen women in at least one row and possibly two or more behind me.

Her reaction? “No! Fuck off!”. Oh, nice. This acted as some sort of catalyst for me. Instead of feeling anxious now, I suddenly felt very angry. So were the women behind me. The whole area behind me in the theatre were now shouting for the woman to sit down. She ignored them. Her friend didn’t though – she sat down. I stood up and right behind her shouted, with very obvious rage, words to the effect of, “Look – sit down! No one else is standing up! No one behind you can see! We’ve all paid to see the show! Let us see it! SIT DOWN!”. “No! Why the fuck should I?”, she said. The barrage from behind continued, and by now this had been going on for quite a while. Her friends were now asking her to sit down, and she was saying no to them too. Eventually, though, with repeated suggestions from her friends, she did sit down. She then spent the next five minutes talking loudly with her friends, in such a way that I was meant to hear, how pathetic and dumb I was being for asking her to sit down. This typical bullying behaviour has a devastating affect on me at the best of times, but in my current state is was crippling.

Literally crippling. I realised I was grasping both arm rests on the chair. I was stuck fast and tense in my seat. I could barely hear the performance, and I was hugely anxious once more. I was experiencing my strange anxious guilt that happens in situations like this. I know I’m not to blame for this situation, but my body tells me otherwise. The only thing being taken in by my senses were the actions of that woman. Fuelled by alcohol she was bullish, arrogant and aggressive, oh and completely irrational.

When the next stand-up section of the show happened, I didn’t stand immediately. Neither did many around me. Neither did the woman in front of me. She turned to her friends and said clearly, loudly, and with considerable sarcasm that she couldn’t possibly stand up, as it would block the view of those behind. Enraged, I tapped her on the shoulder and said “Look! You can stand up now – no one will mind, BECAUSE LOTS OF OTHER PEOPLE ARE STANDING UP TOO! Just PLEASE sit down when everyone else does, then everyone can see the show they have paid to see!”. She didn’t – she stayed sat down, as if to make a point.

After a couple of minutes she turned round to me and asked what my problem was. She asked why I needed to shout at her, with the confidence of someone who knows she is in the right. Why was I spoiling her show? You know what? I was doing it all because I was selfish. That’s what she said. From her point of view, I was the only person who had a problem with her actions, and it was me being selfish. Shying away from a further confrontation, I shook my head, sighed, and took the fortunate opportunity to stand up and dance that had just presented itself in the show. I didn’t dance of course, I just stood there glazed and anxious, but it did get her out of my face.

She appeared to calm down a bit after this, but spent most of the rest of the first half of the show chatting with her friends, or sulking in her seat when other stood – the sort of behaviour I would expect from my three year old daughter after a telling off. Remarkably, for someone so keen to stand up, she was spending very little time actually watching the show. She did, however leave me alone. The first half of the show went on for another twenty minutes or so, but when I left for the interval I was still very tense, and not really enjoying myself. I chatted a little about it with my wife, over a drink. The drink helped – it took the edge off things. My wife hadn’t heard what had been said between the woman and me, and she said she was glad she hadn’t – she’d said she’d probably have ended up hitting her if she had, and my wife is not a violent woman.

We took advantage of an empty seat to the right of us for the second half of the performance, which meant that I didn’t have to sit behind the drunken woman. Instead, she had an empty seat behind her. She rolled in five minutes late for the second half, and when her friends arrived back five minutes after that, she refused to stand up, which meant her friends took some time getting past her to their seats, leading to extended blocked views for use and others behind. All of this, I am sure was done deliberately and for effect.

But finally, I was able to relax and get into the show. By the end, at the final reprise of Timewarp, I was able to join in and do all the actions without feeling tense or that I was doing it wrong.

It wasn’t the end of the story for the drunken woman though – she decided that she would stand once more, and at various times during the second half of the performance, she once more decided not to sit down when others did, to more angry choruses of “SIT DOWN!” from behind and drunken “NO! FUCK OFF!” responses from her. I was very glad to be out of the firing line.

All in all, it was a very stenuous night for me. The late arrival, the missing of the start of the show, the altercation with an aggressive drunk, and the general loudness of all of it had all taken a large toll on me.

Sunday was filled with a mix of emotions. Flash-backs to the aggression, and to the delayed journey. You’ve seen from my writing here that I remember it all in huge detail. Well, perhaps I’ve needed to write about it here to get it out of my system a bit – to stop that huge detail from playing and replaying in my head time after time.

Did I enjoy it? Well in some ways, yes I did. I like the Rocky Horror Show. I like the music, and I like the themes. It’s fun – even if you are an Aspie. But what was always going to be a difficult night for me was ruined by a stressful journey and the effects of alcohol on someone else. I’m still paying the price today, and that’s no fun.

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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You walk funny

It’s often said – indeed I’m sure even I’ve said it more than once – that Asperger’s is a hidden condition. What is meant by this, of course is that you can’t tell that someone has it simply by looking at them.

A great many people, it would seem, don’t believe in things they can’t see. I can understand that point of view – the world seems to be a much simpler place if you take everything you see at face value. If the world has taught me one thing, though, it is that you can’t take anything at face value.

From time to time, people have seen my Asperger’s in every day life, and have commented on it.

“You walk funny,” said one of my so-called friends at school. I’d maybe have been twelve at the time. I did walk funny – well I had assumed I did for some time, because I wore out the soles on my shoes in an unusual way, certainly in a different way to that of my peers. The jibe still hurt though.

Maybe a year or two later, and still at school, I took part in the annual sports day. I ran – slowly – in a 400m race. After coming in at the tail of the field, I made my way back to where my classmates were gathered, only to find them doing odd looking runs and laughing at each other. “You run funny,” one of them said to me. Their mimicry of my running style left me feeling terrible, yet I knew instantly that they were right.

When I was sixteen, my maths teacher took me to one side after a lesson one day, and asked if everything was ok. Actually he went much further than this, and astutely pointed out that I seemed to be suffering badly from stress. “You should try yoga. Really. Give it a go. If you don’t learn to unwind, you’ll end up making yourself ill.”

At some point in my mid twenties, I noticed that the default relaxed position for my face included a frown. By this time I already had deep wrinkles on my forehead, caused by the facial expressions I pull when stressed or anxious – which is a lot of the time. I’m often not concious that I’m pulling a face.

Over the last fifteen or so years, I’ve heard the same thing at least half a dozen times from concerned work colleagues: “Are you alright? Its just that you look really worried”. I’m typically taken aback by comments like this, and require some top notch acting to talk my way out of the situation. I’ll put on an instant huge smile, and make up some tale about being lost in thought about something, rather than being worried. Whilst I may have just been going about my usual routine, they have mostly been right – I will be have ruminating and worrying about something or other, and oblivious to me, it showed on my face.

The one thing all of these scenarios have in common is that people noticed something about me that was caused in one way or another by my Asperger’s. I’m sure that not one of them wondered if what they saw was connected to Asperger’s, however, and why would they? The human condition has many causes for all of the above traits, and people tend to plump for the explanation that they have come across before, and thus seems the most likely.

I’ve avoided what are perhaps the obvious examples of how Asperger’s shows itself here – examples that involve social interaction. Clearly, when I can’t or don’t shy away from a social event, there are often times, particularly towards the end of the event, where I get tired, overloaded, and my acting will start to slip. Indeed, I wrote about one such event recently. But just as I’ve focussed on this sort of trip-up before, so have many others, and I thought it would be nice to show that just sometimes, people do spot the outward signs of AS in other ways.

Asperger’s is a hidden condition, its true. With so many other potential causes of those outward symptoms that people do sometimes see, its easy to see why some people simply don’t believe in it. But if you know what to look for, and you know someone for long enough, just maybe, sometimes, you will see it, even if you have no clue what it is that you are really observing.

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?

Blurry-eyed boy

These days, if you catch me after I’ve been busy for a while, you may find me to be initially unresponsive. Many people over the years have commented that I seem to be away in a little day dream world.

From my perspective it’s no day dream, its more of a shut down.

Let me explain what it feels like:

My eyes lose focus. This is perhaps the single biggest clue that I can read these days to let me know that this sort of shut down is happening. I can cause my eyes to lose focus at will, which feels very calming, but typically when the sort of experience I’m describing happens, it happens automatically.

Despite my lack of visual focus, my eyes will still be looking at something. Something – anything – will be the centre of my vision. This un-focussed focus will move over time from object to object within my sphere of vision.

I will typically be still, and I’m often seated. If not, then my reactions will be distinctly dulled and slow.

My usually very sensitive ears will stop hearing the noises around me.

My brain will be still. Instead of the usual stream of thoughts that race through my head, I’ll find that I’m not really thinking at all. Indeed, I’m not really interacting with my environment at all.

All of this happens automatically, and without me realising it is happening. It feels comfortable, calm and safe. A strange blank contentment fills me.

So, when it looks like I’m day dreaming and you come and ask me a question, its perhaps no surprise that you don’t get a coherent or quick answer. Before I can fully comprehend you, all of my sensory and thought processing has to restart itself, and that takes a few seconds. Indeed, my ability to think sometimes seem to take a few minutes to re-engage properly, almost like I have been asleep.

It isn’t like being asleep though. I’m still aware, to a degree, of the unfocussed world around me. My body has just chosen to shut itself down.

The cause, of course is too much sensory input, and perhaps too much stress on occasion. Rather than face a continued onslaught that my body has started to find uncomfortable, it quietly shuts down, without consulting me.

Whilst my introspection on this trait is new, my experience of it isn’t. I’ve always experienced the blurred eyes, and people have always told me that I appear to be off in my own little world.

In my current world of intense self-discovery, this feels like a wonderful relief. It can be easy to worry that by turning inwards, I’m making my symptoms worse – a self fulfilling prophecy of autistic cut-off from reality.

The blurry-eyed boy has become a blurry-eyed man.

My autism is just the same as it ever was, I can just see it for what it is so much better these days.

Does sensory overload cause you a similar feeling of shutting down? Have people always told you that you appear to be off in a day dream?

A hangover without alcohol

Yes really.

I woke up on Monday morning, and felt terrible. My head pounded, my view of the world felt hazy and I had pain in my kidneys. I felt decidedly hungover. I cursed myself for drinking on what had been a rare night of being on my own.

And then it dawned on me. I hadn’t been drinking. No alcohol whatsoever. I was confused…

I’ve spent some time thinking about this over the course of the week, and I wonder if I’ve figured out what was going on.

I had an odd weekend. It was a mixture of very high stress, too much sensory input and very quiet evenings of solitude. My sister in law gave birth to her first child – a healthy boy – on Friday, and my wife played the part of dutiful auntie and went to see them on Saturday morning. This left me with our two kids from then until Monday evening.

Saturday went well. I’d managed to plan it a bit, and everything slotted together nicely, albeit with high stress on my part. On Saturday evening, I drank a couple of glasses of rather nice red wine, and stayed up later than I should. This was me making the most of my alone time, and also trying to unwind a little from the stresses of the day.

On Sunday, I had some help, in the shape of my father in law. I, of course had to do all the arranging, driving, and cooking, but he helped entertain the kids, and for that I’m very grateful. I was tired, having not got enough sleep, and was feeling hungover too. The hangover was very much like it would prove to be on Monday morning, but I didn’t pay much attention – after all, I had been drinking on Saturday night.

As previously mentioned, I took it easy on Sunday night, mindful of how I had felt that morning. I knew I had the kids on my own on Monday, so alcohol was completely out of the question, and I felt really quite exhausted, and a little displeased at how I had managed to tackle the day. So I relaxed in the evening once more, but didn’t go to bed late.

Monday morning’s hangover was worse than Sunday’s had been.

I dragged the kids out to a local attraction for the day feeling lousy, stressed, and acting decidedly grumpy. I didn’t enjoy it, although the kids seemed to, which was the important thing.

I can’t tell you how relieved I was to go and pick up my wife from the railway station on Monday evening. Nearly three days of having the kids to myself had been a huge drain on my resources. So much so, infact that when I awoke on Tuesday morning feeling not at all refreshed and hungover once more, I booked the day off work to recover. My wife kindly took the kids out for the day so I got most of the day to myself to recover slowly.

So – why was I feeling hungover each morning, despite not drinking?

Well, whilst I don’t recall often having felt this way without alcohol, I can think of many occasions in my life where I’ve spent an evening out drinking in loud and crowded bars, and have come home feeling completely overstimulated. The hangover on the day after a night like this is always quite spectacularly bad.

What if this sort of hangover wasn’t completely alcohol induced?

Remember that too much sensory input leaves me with my senses shutting down – my eyes glaze and I lose focus and my brain starts to block out much of what I’m hearing. To protect me from what have become hostile inputs, my body starts to shut off the senses through which I receive the hostile inputs.

What if much of what I’ve always perceived as a hangover is actually a more extreme shutdown response? Certainly the fuzzy head I experience along with a lack of focus is rather like the visual shutdown that I get at times of over-stimulation. The grumpiness I meter out when hungover is almost always directed towards attempts to make me accept more sensory input once more. For example, I was grumpy with the kids at the weekend when I felt hungover because they were pestering me to pay attention to them. When I feel hungover, I’d rather just sit and do nothing, processing as little sensory information as possible.

Do you see the similarity there?

Maybe when I have a day or even just an evening where I get far too much sensory input, I then get a sensory-induced hangover the next morning, regardless of whether I was drinking alcohol or not.

It’s easy to see how I might not have spotted it before – after all in my day to day life, it’s only really going to be nights out drinking in loud bars where I’m going to get really badly over-stimulated. And the hangover from those nights can easily be put down to alcohol.

I think I need a few more examples of this happening without alcohol to be sure, but right now it feels like there is some sort of correlation there, and that I’m not just imagining it.

Have any of you noticed a similar effect?

Not such a great social engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m glad I went.

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

Long days and food

A little under two weeks ago, I was on holiday with my family in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was the end of the afternoon, on what had been a long day. We’d spent some time at the Museum of Childhood, seeing children’s toys down the ages. We’d also seen some street performers taking part in the famous Festival Fringe – including a couple of chaps who juggled firey clubs between themselves whilst one of them was balancing on a ladder and the other balancing on a six foot unicycle. As an armchair juggler, I can tell you it was impressive stuff.

After lunch we’d caught a bus that took as to the Ocean Terminal to see the Royal Yacht Britannia – the former sailing vessel of the British Royal Family.

By late afternoon we were still at the Ocean Terminal, the kids were hungry, and we were on the other side of town from my mother in law’s, where we were staying. We decided to buy the kids their dinner in a restaurant, and that we’d eat later, after the kids were in bed.

My brain was screaming at me – “eat something!”.

I didn’t though – my wife and mother in law were adamant that they weren’t eating at the restaurant, and so my instincts told me that it was best to follow the status quo, rather than potentially appear to be rude.

After we fed the kids, we caught the bus back towards Princes Street, in the vicinity of which we hoped to get a second bus back to the house.

Edinburgh’s roads are all being dug up at the moment in preparation for a new tram system that will be up and running in a couple of years time. We battled the traffic until we were about half way up Leith Walk. Then the bus stopped in road works, and well, didn’t move at all for the next ten minutes. When it then did move, it moved about half a car length each time, often several minutes apart. I felt exhausted and my brain was telling me that I should eat, and that I was a fool for not having eaten with the kids. By now, about half the passengers on the bus had got off and started walking the half mile or so back towards the centre.

I suddenly felt we had to do this too, and in a grumpy and clearly stressed manner told my wife. So we walked. The bus overtook us about half way. Bah.

It took us well over 90 minutes to make the five mile journey back from the Ocean Terminal to my mother in law’s house.

When we got back I collapsed in a chair. I felt dazed and exhausted, and my brain was screaming at me. “You’ve only eaten about 900 calories today! What are you playing at?”. It was at about this time that my wife started talking about dinner again. She wasn’t feeling very hungry. She and my mother in law would have a bit of a salad once the kids were in bed. Would that do me?

NO! It jolly well wouldn’t! I need proper food! I should have eaten at the restaurant!

Now – I don’t know if you are seeing a pattern here yet. My symptoms were all of sensory over-stimulation. It had been a very busy and long day and we had seen and done a lot. My senses had taken in more than they can manage for one day. But my brain was telling me something rather different. It was telling me that the problem was that I needed to eat.

Why might it do this? Well, I think it’s a learnt behaviour that is wide of the mark. I have of course experienced these sensations of feeling dazed and exhausted following busy days my whole life. Long before I learned about Asperger’s, I had to put some sort of a label on why I ended up like that, and what the cause was. I decided that the problem was that I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough over the day, and that my blood sugars were low. From my reading of Wikipedia, I can see that this sort of extrapolation is pretty common in people who think they know what low blood sugars means. At the time I acquired the label, and until very recently, it felt like this scenario fitted very well. After all, the exhaustion would come towards the end of the day, and if I stopped, sat down and ate, then after an hour or so I would feel much better again. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

So, on that day, as on many others, my brain was telling what I thought I knew – that I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough, and now my body was crashing because of it.

Wrong wrong wrong.

The real reason for my feeling dazed and exhausted was simply the AS-related sensory overload that I was experiencing after a full-on day.

It’s interesting to note that despite the way I was feeling, I could have walked miles effortlessly if I had needed to. As it was, we briskly walked a good half a mile up hill to try and outrun the bus, without it feeling a strain.

Of course I feel better after I’ve sat down for a while and eaten some food and drank some water. But it isn’t the food and water that are having the magic effect – it’s the proper rest. I wrote recently how on another family holiday I started to sense how I was over stimulated at the end of each day, and how time was the healer – an hour or ninety minutes restored me. Well, this is the same thing.

The problem is that I’ve been wrongly viewing my feelings of exhaustion as a signal to eat for many years, and in that time I’ve put on quite a lot of weight.

And do you know the real big give away that should have told me long ago that the problem wasn’t hunger? I frequently don’t feel hungry even when my brain is telling me that I need to stop and eat. How can I possibly have missed that?

This week I’ve started trying to pay more attention to what I’m eating. I’m trying to trust my own judgement about when I’m actually hungry, and not just to stuff my face when I feel overloaded. It’s difficult, but on a couple of of days worth of evidence, it’s working so far.

Whether it will continue to work remains to be seen.

Better to know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frightening, isn’t it?

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

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

–

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

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

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