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?

Frazzled

I’m finding that I’m needed to write each morning when I get into work this week. If I don’t attempt to empty my brain a bit, I can’t settle down to the work that I’m being paid to do.

So it’s Wednesday morning, and here I am writing once more. What’s on my mind today?

Well, I’m feeling agitated and stressed for a number of reasons. As usual with these things, a number of small issues trip me up in a short period of time and leave me feeling far more stressed and anxious than the sum of their parts should do.

A big one is to do with the hard work I’ve been putting in to starting up my own business. As I suspect many people in my position find, there is far more work involved in the set up of a new venture than you imagine there to be. I spent five and a half hours yesterday working on getting the last chunk of my managed email offering working in a way that I could sell to people, and felt a great deal of satisfaction when it all started to come together and work. But someone else was rather less satisfied – my wife. My working on it meant that I didn’t spend any quality time with her last night, and she wasn’t impressed. Indeed she questioned why I needed to spend so much time working on this at all.

In a way, she has a point. I manage her email already, and it works. Why then do I need to spend many hours working on something that as far as she can see already works?

Well, the problem is that her email works in a way that I couldn’t possibly sell to other people. It isn’t fault tolerant, and it wouldn’t scale. I don’t want to start selling the current configuration only to have to go back to those I’ve signed up in a month or two’s time and tell them either that I’ve lost all their email because my machine broke and I don’t have backups, or that I now have to inconvenience them to change their configuration because I’ve finished implementing the new system. I have a customer waiting for the email service, so don’t feel that I can hang around.

My wife has in general been very supportive of my decision to set up my own business, but last night wasn’t. My protestations that I was doing this in order that I could ultimately help support my family was met with derision. My wife said that I was just tinkering for tinkering’s sake.

This comment cut deep. In much the same way as I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, I was being told something counter to my understanding by someone that I trust and respect. I immediately felt that she was right. Who was I kidding? Setting up a business? Am I ever really going to be able to do that? Well am I?

More than just having a customer waiting, it’s true that I feel a compulsion to get this new email service up and running – like I have to prove something to myself. I need to know that I can do this – that I have a talent for something. I also need to see that I can finish things that I start. Perhaps it’s true to say that this business venture has become something of a special interest that I feel that I need to spend time on.

Has my wife just been humouring me all this time, or were her comments last night simply because she was angry that I wasn’t spending quality time with her last night? Only she can answer that of course.

There are other little things knawing at me too right now. My son missed his swimming lesson this week because my wife forgot to take him last night, and now he’s missed his place on the next course as it has now filled up in his absence. My wife said I should have reminded her about it yesterday. I now feel like I’ve let my son (and wife) down.

The chain keeps coming off my son’s bike, and he wanted to take it to the Holiday Club he’s at today. My wife told me that the chain was off when I got home last night, but I was too embroiled in my work efforts to remember fix it. I tried to hurriedly fix it this morning, but failed – either the chain ended up too loose, or the wheel ended up going on at an angle meaning the brakes rubbed the whole time. In the end he took his scooter to the club instead of his bike. Frustrating, and once again I feel like I’m letting my son and wife down.

On top of all of this I’m finding it difficult to get down to the work I’m being paid to do.

All of this just goes round and round in my head and doesn’t help. I don’t feel like I’ve been on holiday, I just feel more stressed and anxious than I did before I went on holiday.

Gah!

Still, I’ve got some of it on paper now, and I’m finally not feeling as sensorily wiped out as I have been doing since my long drive home from holiday on Saturday. Hopefully I can now knuckle down and do a bit of what I’m being paid to do.

I hope so – if I don’t knuckle down soon, people will start to notice the lack of output from me, and the potential consequences of that don’t bear thinking about.

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.

The quiet one

I wrote recently about dinner party that my wife and I hosted last month, and about how well it went. Well, last weekend the six of us present that night had dinner together again, with another of the couples acting as hosts.

The evening didn’t go so well for me this time. It wasn’t that I was too quiet, or that I felt too overloaded – I coped with both of those things reasonably well. The problem this time was that some of the topics of conversation hit home just how much of an outsider I am. The other guests, of course didn’t know or even notice this.

The big thing that the six of us have in common, and ultimately the reason we became friends is that we each have a son who started at the same local school in January this year. We’ve known one of the couples since before our son was born – they went to the same parenting class as us. We’ve not known the other couple as long socially, although our son went to the same nursery as theirs. The mothers in the other two couples are both teachers of kids their own age, but at different schools. Much of our conversation over the evening flowed around school annoyances, and in particular the social etiquette of parents at the school gates.

At the core of these discussions were how some parents were rude and cliquey. Our sons are in a class of nearly thirty, so on a typical morning, once you’ve discounted the kids that arrive with one of a couple of childminders, there are over twenty parents dropping their children off for my son’s class. Some, of course are friendly. Others, it would seem, aren’t. The five other adults at the table that evening had all been variously blanked, ignored, or cut short by some of the other parents in the school yard. There was a lot made of how incredibly rude this was, and much musing as to why various sets of parents would talk to each other but blank parents of other children in the same year.

This all went very much over my head, with a bit of a feeling of horror. I take my son to school once or twice a week on average, depending on my shift pattern. After nearly six months of this, I recognise only a handful of the parents. Many are still unfamiliar faces to me. I’ve never been blanked nor cut short by anyone – but then again I’ve never made the effort to approach parents that I don’t know and introduce myself. As for who is the parent of which child – well I haven’t got a clue, and nor do I know what the children or parents are called. It became very clear to me over dinner that my normal mode of operation in this sort of scenario was very out of the ordinary. I felt quite ashamed and embarrassed. I’m well aware these days that I’m a little different from the norm, but I’m not used to having it pointed out (albeit inadvertently) just how unusual and unsophisticated my interaction with other people is.

I felt awful during dinner, but I didn’t let it show. It felt like I was one of these parents who my friends (ok, not sure of the best word here – friends are a tricky concept for me) were laying into. I was being overly hard on myself, of course.

Whilst I don’t talk to the other parents in the school yard much, I will say hello back to folks, and even engage in a little small talk, as long as the other person is doing the hard work of thinking up the direction of the conversation. But this is always with people I know already – the adults from the dinner party, and a couple of others who I know because my son went to Nursery with their child too. I’m not being cliquey or rude. I’m just finding the social etiquette of the school parent role difficult to master. The odd thing, from my perspective is that until that evening, I didn’t think I was finding it difficult to master. I was just doing what I always do in this sort of situation. I thought I was doing fine.

I am doing fine. I’m doing as well as I can hope to do at the moment. I’m just different from the norm.

Of course what this thread of conversation also showed is just how well I do hide my AS. Not once was there any suggestion from any of the gang that I might fall into the camp of those who don’t communicate with them. But these people already know me, and will happily start and perpetuate small talk with me at the school gates. This of course means that they don’t see how I go out of my way to avoid talking to the other people, to those I don’t know.

But maybe those who I don’t know think I’m rude because I don’t talk to them.

I’m not. I’m just coping the best I can.

Partying with kids

It was my son’s fifth birthday a week or two ago, and we arranged a bowling party for him and twenty or so of his friends. It was one of his best friends birthday the following day too, so we had a joint party between the two families, to help spread the load and the costs too.

So – just how does a party with twenty or so five-year-old kids, assorted parents, bowling and food go when you have Asperger’s?

Well, there were some quite obvious things (to me at least) that happened.

Firstly, I interacted with the kids, but not much with the adults. We had four bowling lanes, with five or six kids playing in each lane. An adult clearly had to supervise each lane, and despite most of the parents staying around for the whole party, very few of them joined in with the bowling or supervision. They stayed at the back, chatting to each other, and watching.

My wife and I had already figured out ahead of time that we’d most likely both have to be involved in running the bowling – at least to some degree, and so it turned out. I spent my time in one lane, helping the kids to carry the balls, and then rolling them down the ramps they had for the kids to use. I cheered them when they knocked pins down and chatted away to them.

I ended up supervising most of the 120 or so rolls in the game in my lane, despite the parents of most of the kids in my lane being there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, whilst I spoke to the kids, I didn’t speak much to the parents at all.

This is quite symptomatic for me – I can speak to kids quite easily most of the time, as there doesn’t feel to be that barrier there that there is with adults – there is no social game afoot with them. Adults are much more difficult for me. I knew most of the parents faces, but there were only a couple that I’d spoken to before. I barely said anything even to those I knew to some degree – it just felt too uncomfortable, that there was too much input for me to deasl with and I had nothing pre-prepared to say.

Was this due to sensory overload? Well, I think it played it’s part – the longer the bowling went on (and it lasted nearly an hour), the more I withdrew from the situation and behaved more automatically. It’s almost like you get race horse blinkers, and can’t see anything outside of what you are actually doing. This meant I could focus on the kid I was helping at the time, and chat to them about lining the ramp up and so forth, but beyond that, the world didn’t really exist as anything other than noise and a blur. The repetitive nature of choosing the ball, helping the child to carry it to the ramp, lining the ramp up, holding the ramp whilst they pushed the ball, making encouraging noises whilst the ball rolled, and then an appropriate noise depending on how many pins it knocked over was quite soothing. But then again, repetitive tasks almost always have that effect on me.

It’s clearly not all sensory related, however – if I was at a dinner function with all of the same parents I would have been equally uncomfortable and unsure of what to say, despite the situation being far less noisy.

After the bowling came the food. The kids were all sat down at a long table, and buffet food was brought out for them to nibble on. I floated around, occasionally saying little bits to the kids, but mostly helping my three year old daughter with her food. I did this because it meant that I didn’t have to sit down and talk with the parents. Good avoidance of a difficult situation for me, but actually at the time it just came naturally – I wasn’t doing it consciously.

And then suddenly, people were leaving. My wife had taken our daughter to the toilet, so I was left saying goodbye and thanks to everyone along with the parents of my son’s friend who we were sharing the party with. I didn’t know what to say. Perhaps the sensory overload was too much by that time, or maybe it was just lack of social intuition. I suspect it was a mixture of both.

“Thank you”, said one parent to me. My response? “Thank you”, in much the same tone of voice that they had used. Ummm. Where did that come from? Not “You’re welcome” or “See you again soon”, or even “Thanks for the present, good to see you”. Just “Thank you”. My brain didn’t know how to respond, and it repeated the same message it had just heard back – echolalia.

Echolalia isn’t something I suffer from all that often, but I do have my moments. Questions that offer me a choice often get reflected back as a question when I’m stressed – “Would you like ham or tuna in your sandwich?” will result in me saying “Would I like ham or tuna? Hmmm…” if I’m moderately stressed or overloaded.

When highly stressed or overloaded, I get a non-verbalised or sometimes whispered echolalia which often is word perfect – I end up saying “Would you like ham or tuna in your sandwich?” to myself , often several times in a row, before the question sinks in enough for me to come up with an answer. This feels to me like a sort of sensory processing overload at play. When stressed, it can take several repetitions of the question before my brain catches up and gets a chance to process what the questioner is asking. Perhaps this is also executive disfunction at play.

Back to the party. After that faux pas, I generally smiled and waved at people – if I couldn’t think of something sensible to say, and hey, I’d just proved that quite comprehensively, perhaps it was better to say nothing at all.

The scenarios I’ve painted above are nothing out of the ordinary for me – they are very typical of how I react in situations that I find difficult. They show quite clearly how I’ve learnt techniques to avoid or camouflage situations that I find difficult, particularly social ones. I learnt these techniques many years ago – well before I knew anything about AS – and have honed them over time, until they have become practically second nature to me.

Did I enjoy the party? On the whole, yes. It was stressful, and I felt socially very awkward at several points, despite the camouflage, but the bowling was fun.

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.

A dinner party, Aspie style

Last weekend, my wife and I hosted a dinner party for six. This is an unusual event in our household, but we had been to evenings at the other couples houses recently, so it was our turn to entertain.

With my new-found hyper-awareness of how my Asperger’s affects me, I wondered how the evening would go, and how my AS would colour things. As it happens, it went well.

Before the day itself, my wife and I split up the jobs. She was to sort out the nibbles and the dessert, and I was to cook the main course. We decided that as we don’t have much practice of juggling cooking and entertaining at the same time, that we’d stick to a pre-prepared dessert, and a main course that we cook regularly – a good old fashioned British roast dinner.

On the morning of the event, I did my first Aspie trick – I made a list. It was a timeline from mid-afternoon of when everything needed to be prepared, go in/out of the oven, and when we’d fit in feeding the kids and bathing them etc as well. With my list done, I was confident I knew the schedule. If I hadn’t taken the time to make it, then nothing would have been ready in time. As it turned out, the list worked wonderfully.

When our guests arrived, the kids were safely asleep in bed, my wife had finished assembling the nibbles, and I was hard at work cooking. My wife did the pre-dinner entertaining whilst I got all the final bits of the main course ready. This worked well. I was focussed, the food got delivered on schedule, and everyone enjoyed it. Great.

What I perhaps wasn’t expecting was just how little I would have to contribute after the meal was done. In usual dinner party style we adjourned to the lounge for coffee and chocolates and grown up chatter. But I had nothing left to give. Once more, I was the quiet one in the corner that wasn’t joining in with the conversation very much.

You may be surprised to hear that I wasn’t expecting this. I’m usually quite chatty at dinner parties, especially once alcohol has kicked in a bit. As someone who doesn’t discuss things verbally with people all that often or indeed all that articulately, rare occurrences like dinner parties at other people’s houses tend to provide something of an outlet for me. Alcohol helps.

But not that night. The intense focus on the list of things that needed doing, and the effort involved in preparing everything had wiped me out. I wanted so much for everyone to be impressed with the food that I had put every last ounce of effort into it, and left nothing for the social side of the evening.

This is another of my traits that I put down to my AS. Whenever I concentrate intently on something for any length of time I end up feeling tired and withdrawn. It’s a similar feeling to the one I get when I’ve experienced sensory overload. I feel vacant, and almost as though I’m looking at a video of the world around me rather than real life – like I’m detached from reality in some way. I get the feeling even after short periods of concentration – I’ll get it after publishing this article, for instance.

At least, with only six of us there, there wasn’t a great deal of time spent with people talking over each other. This meant that whilst I may not have been saying much, I was at least able to follow and enjoy the conversations. I think six people is about the right number for me for an evening like this. Any more and regardless of whether I’m the host or not, I’ll start to loose track of conversations, and the general background noise will start to annoy me and eventually overload me.

Did anyone notice my lack of input? I’m not sure, but it probably doesn’t matter. Everyone – me included – had a good time, and that is more important.

It’s interesting that we chose a roast dinner for the main course as we thought that would be an easy option. I think that the next time we entertain in this way, I’ll try and come up with a main course that can have at least some elements prepared ahead of time.

That way I might have a little something left to give in the second half of the evening.

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.