The work problem

I could have called this article Life derailed: part 2 or maybe even Derailed job. It’s really a continuation of my thoughts from the article I wrote yesterday, but applied to my work life.

My work life hasn’t been derailed as yet, well not completely at any rate. In my article yesterday I talked about how my life at work hasn’t lived up to my youthful neurotypical aspirations. There is no question that my neurology has held me back versus my non-AS peers, but I’ve still managed to perform adequately, especially when well managed.

But how long will that last? I don’t mean here that I’m likely to go off the rails simply because I now know about my AS. This is a slightly more subtle and long-term problem. I’m thirty six now, which means that in a few short years I’ll be forty. Age in itself isn’t the problem, but age and work mixed together is.

In general, I’m comfortable with the type of work I do these days. It’s technical work, and often repetitive. The problem is that older people don’t do jobs like this in the UK. I’ve been involved in the interview process with enough companies to know that technical ability (and I’m no genius on that side of things) doesn’t count for everything. Running alongside it is that wonderful characteristic of team fit. Here in the UK, you can’t use age as a reason for refusing someone a job. You can, however legitimately refuse to employ someone because you believe they wouldn’t be a good fit into the existing team, and I’ve been on interview panels where older applicants were rejected for that very reason.

IT is a young man’s game. The industry is full of bright young things fresh out of University, and I get a year older than the average age every year. As people progress in years, they also progress in skills, and usually up the corporate ladder too. Most of my peers are now either technical architects (which is about as far as you can go technically, and is a job reserved for the truly technically gifted), or are managers of IT teams. They’re either at the pinnacle of the technical ladder, or have already started to leave it behind.

At the moment I can still find work, but in the last three companies I’ve worked for I’ve been one of the oldest members of the team. In my last job, for a major online retailer, I was in my early to mid thirties, and the average age of what was a very skilled team was mid to late twenties. That’s quite a gulf. How much longer will it be before I find it difficult to land roles, no matter how well I come across in interviews? How long will it be before I’m hitting that “He could do the job, but he wouldn’t fit into the team” problem?

My IT train will get derailed in time, I have no doubt.

What can I do about it? Well, the standard route that my peers take to avoid the problem – moving into team management and ultimately further up the managerial ladder isn’t a realistic option for me. So what could I do instead?

I could take contract roles in IT. My view is that if you contract in IT in the UK, then you can go on in technical roles for a good few extra years than if you were in a permanent role. Whilst contracting is an option, I’m not well suited to it. Contracting is a risky game, with no job security. It often involves lots of short term roles with different people in different locations. As I’ve written before, it takes me a long time to settle in and find my feet in a new job, which makes short term contracts stressful for me, and stops me performing at my best.

I could start my own company. I’m reasonable at money management, and have a useful skill in setting up and managing email and websites that I could build a business around. I’m hopeless at marketing however, so finding clients and selling my talents to them would be difficult, and without a decent number of clients the business wouldn’t be viable. This, I guess is a dream that there is an outside chance might come true, but it would take a tremendous amount of effort and courage for it to be in with a fighting chance.

What about low risk options? Well, I could take a technical role whilst I still can with a large company that offers job security. I would need to join with the mindset that no matter how annoyingly badly run the company turned out to be, I’d have to grin and bear it. With a technical position in a large corporate, I could potentially tread water and stay in technical roles for years, but at the cost of not being able to move companies. My neurotypically-programmed responses tell me that this is a very lazy way to work, and I suspect that is how it would come cross to my managers in the company – “James has no ambition…”.

I could look at doing something completely different, outside of the technical IT world. Perhaps I should hone my writing skills and get into technical writing. I understand many technologies and my AS abilities to see things in detail may help me to document things. Could I motivate myself to write every day for a living however? I don’t know.

Maybe I should go and work in a shop. That would be less stress, but would have the difficulties involved in having to interact with people all day. It also wouldn’t bring in the sort of money that my family are used to living on.

There are no easy answers to this one, but ultimately I need to give this some serious thought, before it’s too late and I find that my train is completely derailed. That’s the one thing that isn’t an option.

Suggestions welcome!

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.

Camouflage, understanding, and a Big Professor

I’ve recently become aware that there are a number of non-typical things that I do when speaking to people, particularly when it’s a one-to-one conversation. The conversation subject could be anything, but the examples I use below are based on a work scenario, where something technical is being discussed.

Perhaps the most obvious (and annoying) trait in these scenarios is for me to finish other people’s sentences, in a questioning tone of voice. If you know or work with me, then chances are you are used to me doing this. I’m sure it must be a little off-putting when you first meet me.

Also, I want you to know that I am listening to you, and to this end, I interject with lots of reassuring noises – lots of uh-huhs and yups and yeps when you are speaking. Everyone does this, of course, but I’ve noted that I seem to do it rather more frequently than average. Sometimes, when stressed, I’m making an almost constant stream of acknowledging noises.

Another trait that I have is to ask lots of questions. If I’m going to help you (and lets be honest about this, I’m going to try and help you whether you are after my advice or not), then I need to be able to understand the problem you are facing.

I think there is a clear reason for these behaviours: I want to understand, and I want you to see that I understand. Ok, so that’s two reasons, but the underlying causes are very closely linked.

My ASD social interaction problems mean that I’m never sure how I should non-verbally behave in two-way conversations. So instead of whatever it is that ordinary people do to non-verbally signal their empathy and understanding (just what do people do, incidentally?), I use verbal signals that I’m in tune with what the other person is saying.

In light of this, my behaviours make a lot of sense. Finishing sentences, whilst annoying, clearly demonstrates that I have been listening and taking in what the other person was saying. The frequent noises of agreement do the same, too.

My asking of questions may also give this impression, but in reality it serves a different purpose. What I’m trying to do is build up a mental picture of the thing you are telling me about, in a language that makes more sense to me. This mental picture is typically quite visual and often manipulatable like a 3d model, with difficult concepts encapsulated into boxes with labels in my mind’s eye. This is what seems to work best for me, and it helps me see the bigger picture of your problem. This is me trying to understand in my own language, rather than wanting you to see that I do understand.

Wanting to understand is vital to me, perhaps simply because I am aware that I think in a different way to typical people. Experience has shown me that other people tend to grasp concepts far more quickly than I do. They can see the big picture in most scenarios and not just the minute details in the middle, and this view on things is straight forward to them and requires minimal brain power. I conversely tend to see the minute detail in the middle, but not the other surrounding details, with large amounts of brain power required for concepts – hence the questions.

I further suspect that most people don’t actually see the big picture at all – they just understand it is there, and how it works. I, on the other hand work far better if I can see it all in my mind’s eye, including how it all fits together.

From an early age, my observation that I don’t understand the same things as others, and that my level of detail is different to theirs has lead to the development of the camouflage techniques I’ve mentioned above. Let the other person know that I’m listening, and give them an impression that I understand what they are saying. Ask questions so that I can translate their language into one that I can see and comprehend.

Ultimately, it’s vital for me to understand, because experience tells me that typically that is what is expected of me – an ordinary person would understand. When you have grown up not being able to differentiate between what you are expected to trivially understand, and what it would be acceptable to admit that you don’t know, the best camouflage has proven to be to say that you understand everything, and then do your best to demonstrate that you do.

And that is exactly what I do.

These techniques are also ringing bells with me about a well publicised AS trait that is usually mentioned alongside talk of  ‘Little Professors‘. Your average Little AS Professor can speak at length about a subject of interest without actually having a detailed understanding of the mechanics behind the interest. I think this sort of  confident faking-it technique is most likely another string in the bow of the camouflage tools I’ve outlined above. Having signalled to the other person that I’ve listened to and understood what they were saying, and having asked questions so that I can formulate my own picture, I’d then be happy to go and tell someone else about the subject in question, in a tone of voice that suggested that I understood entirely what I was talking about.

I become a Big Professor.

I often don’t understand the subject in detail of course, but if it’s something that I judge I should know about, then I’ll act as though I do.

Opening up: A stressful couple of weeks

I’m sure you know how it goes. You don’t find a release for your frustrations, and they very quickly build up, giving you an uncomfortable dose of anxiety.

Well, that’s certainly what has been been happening with me these last couple of weeks.

There are a number of things at play. Firstly, I’ve decided that the time is right to let my parents know about my Asperger’s. Secondly, work has, for one reason or another proven to be quite stressful over the last couple of weeks. Thirdly, I’ve not been writing here.

Why have I not been writing? Well initially it was just the way that the dice rolled – it was a long bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and I rarely write outside of work, through habit rather than anything else. I’ve also been quite busy at work, and also busy with point number one this week, and so didn’t write on Tuesday either. I then decided that maybe it would be nice to take a little break from writing for the rest of the week, to recharge my batteries as it were. This, it would seem has turned out to be a mistake, but perhaps only because of points one and two above also being on the go.

So – I told my parents I has AS. In many ways, the direction of this blog has been working towards this since I set it up. I needed to get my own head straight about AS before I could tell others, and in particular my parents. That’s because I’ve always known I would have a hard job selling my self-diagnosis to them, and in particular to my mother.

And I was right. I send a long but well considered and tweaked email to my parents at the start of last week. It barely scratched the surface of AS and me – how could it? AS is a big and all encompassing condition, and I’d need to write a book (or a blog!) to capture it all. A couple of days later I got an emailed response, that spent some time trying to point out how various aspects of my life meant that I couldn’t possibly have AS, as someone with AS wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I’d achieved, or wouldn’t have acted as I did. To cap it all, my mother flat outright rejected in writing that I had AS, after two whole days of consideration.

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised. This was the sort of thing I expected. Instead of a considered response that this was all a bit of a surprise, and that they didn’t really know enough to form an opinion, I got a flat rejection. I couldn’t possibly have AS, and I shouldn’t be so silly as to suggest it.

I wrote an angry email back, that argued that a snap judgment based on a couple of days of research and a small amount of background knowledge formed over the years that my mother served as a teacher (she retired seven years ago) was simply not valid, and further more was extremely insensitive. I’ve since followed this up with a series of emails that point out how the examples she gave of why I couldn’t possibly have AS actually missed a huge amount of subtlety in the situations that did show underlieing AS; or in some cases how the judgments were just plain wrong. I’ve not had responses to these as yet, as my parents disappeared abroad on holiday at the end of last week, and won’t be reading the correspondence until today at the earliest.

Despite the fact that I was expecting this sort of response, and was well prepared, I still felt as though the whole experience was a kick in the teeth. My stress levels are correspondingly up, as is my anxiety, and it took a few days from the first response for me to recover my composure and confidence enough to put up a well thought out and thorough rebuttal to my mother’s dismissals.

So when you add work stress to all of the above, it hasn’t been a great week. There are various mind games going on at work, with individuals such as myself, who are contract rather than permanent staff being subject to veiled threats regarding the stability of our jobs. It’s not much fun.

In hindsight, I picked a bad week to decide to open up to my parents, but I wasn’t to know that the work stress would start. It’s also been a bad week to decide not to write much here, as bottling up my thoughts has just lead to further stress and the associated anxiety.

So today has been different. I have worked hard to clear my to-do list of the most important work related tasks, and have cleared a half hour of schedule to write this, so I can get some of it off my shoulders. It feels good.

The next week or two are clearly going to be difficult, but I hope that a bit of time and patience on my part will allow my parents, and my mother in particular to accept that I do have AS.

Time will tell. Wish me luck.

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.

Common sense

As someone who sees logic as being at the core of how I act and interact, I seem to have a lot of problems with another concept that would also appear to be governed by logic a lot of the time – common sense.

It’s not that I don’t have any common sense – I most certainly do. It’s just that deciding how to react to a given input makes use of my ‘store cupboard’ responses a good deal of the time and common sense gets pushed to the side.

When I need to make a snap judgement on something – the sort of judgement where an ordinary person would simply dial up common sense and ask it to provide the answer, I find that I’m asking myself all sorts of questions, and often completely failing to provide any sort of rational answer at all. I want my answer to be right, yet because my brain frequently pushes me down the store cupboard path if I didn’t see the scenario coming, I find I’m asking myself whether a given response is appropriate, and then having instant self doubt. I stammer and try to fill the passing moments with words that sound as though they might be building up to a solution, whilst my brain has a little battle with itself over what the right store cupboard response might be. Meanwhile, common sense is over in the corner somewhere with it’s hand up waiting patiently for me to ask it for a response. I rarely see it.

After the fact I can easily see what the obvious solution was, and interestingly, when it’s someone else having to make the decision, I often reach the same common sense answer as the other person before they say it. So common sense does exist in me – it just doesn’t find it’s way to the surface when it could be best used much of the time.

It’s not just snap judgements though, it’s interesting just how much of life relies on common sense:

What task do I do next on my list today? On my way home from work do I call home first, or collect my daughter from nursery on the way? Does this shirt go with these jeans? Should I cook dinner as my wife’s not home yet?

See what I mean? All of these could be answered instantly with a little common sense, and yet I find that I’m asking myself questions that either complicate matters further, or add procrastination into the equation such as:

Should I do this easy task before the one that’s important, and get it out of the way quickly? Can I put this other task off until tomorrow? Perhaps I should get this blog article that’s stuck in my head written first before anything else? Would my wife think the shirt and jeans matched? Does it matter? What would my wife think if they clashed really badly? Do they clash? I dunno. Should I put the dinner on? When will she be home? Will she be coming straight home? Hmmm. Not sure if she hasn’t already eaten. What if I make it and it’s ready way ahead of time?

The above are all questions I was asking myself yesterday, so are real-life examples. It’s mostly daft stuff like above, and it really does cloud my view of the common sense answers.

For the record:

I should do the most important item on my list first. My logical mind will tell me every time which one that is. The blog article can be done later. I should collect my daughter on the way home, as it saves an extra car trip. If I’m questioning if the shirt clashes with the jeans, then it most likely does and I should change. Of course I should put the dinner on. It doesn’t matter if it’s ready early – it’s often ready before I get home, when my wife is doing the cooking. I can even send my wife a text message  to let her know the dinner is on.

Perhaps the complications that I put in my own way show how making snap decisions stresses me, and just how badly I cope with stress at times. I like my day to be planned, and I don’t like it when plans change. Having to make an unexpected snap decision on something is just like having to change my plans.

Oh, and I did put the dinner on, but I didn’t pick my daughter up on the way home – I went home first. One good decision, one bad.

Do any of you find that you have plenty of common sense, but that you can’t use it when it’s actually needed?

A short, but important thought

It’s just occurred to me that if I could spend my whole working day writing about things I’m interested in, I’d be a very happy bunny indeed.

I enjoy writing about AS, but I also enjoy writing about more technical things at work.

Food for thought for me.

If I’m ever going to get myself into a job that both suits me and keeps me involved and happy, then thoughts like this are important, and shouldn’t just be ignored.

Flashbulb memories

I’ve been wondering on and off for a couple of weeks now about my memory. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how I store information about events that have happened in my life. The scientific name for this type of recall is Episodic Memory.

I used to marvel at one of my friends at school, who had an amazing ability to read and memorise practically every detail in books. I termed this to be photographic memory at the time – in the sort of way that an Aspie would – in other words at that age I would have heard vaguely how some people have ‘photographic memories’, but I would not have read anything about the subject. Which means this was basically guess work on my part based on a loose concept that I didn’t have much actual knowledge of. I do that sort of thing all the time even today as an adult – but I’m getting off track here, so I’ll have to talk about my presenting of guess work as fact another time.

What has really been fascinating me about my memory is just how visual my episodic memory is. Today I’ve stumbled upon this page in Wikipedia, that describes so-called Flashbulb Memory – the way that people will remember some events in their life in a lot of vivid detail. Where were you when you heard about 9/11 or when man first landed on the moon? It seems that these sorts of momentous emotional occasions form very detailed memories in people, and you’ll often be able to describe things in some detail, even many years later.

Where was I on 9/11? I was on a (completely out of character) lad’s holiday in Ibiza. We’d been out for the day, and just as we arrived back at the hotel, one our group got an SMS from his mother saying a plane had hit the WTC and that one of the buildings had fallen down. I was in a hotel corridor when this got read out to me. I remember lots more detail of that evening and the following day. Going to the bar across the road to watch their CNN feed and being amazed that someone caught the moment the second plane hit on video. I saw the tower fall replayed time and again. That night, in the early hours, a drunk man, high on the emotion shouted “Nuclear war!” out of their hotel window. I can hear him, and the echo of his voice to this day. The next day was spent reading newspapers on sun loungers. It was hard to take in what had happened. I was in Ibiza, and had spent the previous week getting very drunk. This kind of sobered me up. Flights were grounded and I was due to go home the following day. What would happen? Would I get home the following day? Anxiety was building up.

I can see all of this.

I see the view from the sun loungers. I can see the newspapers scattered all around us, and the two litre bottles of water we were using to try and rehydrate. I remember the vegetation around the wall-hung TV in the bar. The curve of the wall of the hotel and the noisy nightclub across the way with it’s flashing lights – the neon was light blue in colour.

None of this is surprising – this was one of those world defining flashbulb moments, and I’m sure that a great many people could recall that day in just as much detail as I could.

But it’s not just that day. I remember a visual snapshot of the bar we spent our time in at the airport on the flight out. I remember the boat trip we took and being told to be careful which hand I held my beer in (the wrong hand meant you had to down it – ah the joys of package tours for young people). I even remember many of the sights on the long drunken walk up the bay to our hotel after a night out. Many many aspects of that holiday nearly eight years ago present themselves as quite vivid pictures and videos in my head. But do you know what? I don’t remember is the names of most of those I was on holiday with.

It’s not just that holiday. Lets use my school days as an example. I can see myself churning butter at nursery when I was four. I can see me walking to junior school and swapping football stickers with a friend. I can see his face to this day, but I can’t remember his name. Maybe, just maybe, it was Mark.

I can see the whole route from my house to the junior school as a little real-time video, where I can pan the camera around and zoom in on things at will. I know how many houses there were down the side of the road, where the junctions were, how steep the hills were, how deep the gulley was where the stream went – pretty much everything. I haven’t lived in that house since 1992, and I haven’t walked that school route since 1986, but there it is, still vivid in my head.

I note that a lot of this information is spacial as well as visual. I know how the building blocks of houses and roads and walls all fit together. I don’t remember the names of roads, though.

If I think about it, I can probably do the same visual video trick for most journeys I’ve made repeatedly throughout my life. If I have to give someone directions somewhere then my internal video starts, and I give them the directions by navigating my way visually in my mind’s eye.

Everything that I can think of that I would class as an episodic memory presents itself to me in some form of visual way. The clearer memories are little videos, and those that are fainter are a series of pictures. Occasionally I’ll remember smells and emotions too.

But is this unusual? Clearly I’ve never seen it as such – it’s just how it works for me. The admittedly limited reading material that I’ve digested thus far (three online articles, and a few Wikipedia pages) hasn’t used the word visual at all to describe episodic memory.

So maybe it is unusual.

How about you? Do you see your memories in much the same way as me, or do you experience them in some other way?

Oh – and this, of course, is where my tangent at the top becomes relevant again. Instead of hitting the publish button, I could go away and read up a lot more about memory, and about episodic memory in particular, and then publish, with real facts to back me up.

But I won’t. I’ll leave you with my current decision, based on little evidence that perhaps perceiving my memories in this way is unusual. And doing this says as much about me as telling you how my memory works.

Labels and preconceptions

Are labels important? Does applying a label of Asperger’s Syndrome to myself help or hinder me?

I spent thirty five years without a label to describe my differences, but at the same time I couldn’t escape labels. Those years were hard at times, and confusing too. Without a name to attach to how I was, I was left wondering if I really was different from the norm. I certainly perceived differences between myself and my peers, but maybe I was just lacking in intelligence, or had an odd sense of humour. You see – there we go already – lacking in intelligence and odd sense of humour are really labels that I was applying to myself to see if they fitted. They never quite did.

I think we all need to be able to define ourselves. This labelling of characteristics not only confirms who we are and what makes us tick, but it also tells others a lot about us in very few words – he works in IT, she’s a mother to five kids, he’s single and keeps cats, she’s a doctor. Not only do these labels pinpoint one fact about a person, they also open up a set of preconceptions about other aspects of their lives. These may be right or wrong, but it seems to be a trait that we all – aspie or not – share, to parcel assumptions around the labels we know. I bet the doctor is comparatively well off financially. Is the keeper of cats lonely? Does the IT person have social interaction issues? Is the mother of five children catholic?

When I attached the Asperger’s label to myself, I felt complete for a while. Suddenly a large set of the characteristics that made me who I was could be parcelled under one label – and not only that, for the first time in my life, it was a label that was comfortable – it felt right, and it fitted.

The internal dialogue that the simple attachment of a label has opened has been immense, and very satisfying. In six months or so I’ve explored areas of my behaviour and my interactions with people that I had never seen in any detail before. I now understand a great deal about Asperger’s, and far more importantly, how it colours my life, and I continue to learn more each day. I can’t state enough just how important I feel this is in allowing me to accept who I am, and give me the best possible chance to move onwards in my life in a positive way.

So – the attaching of a label of Asperger’s to myself has been both a powerful and positive catalyst towards understanding and change.

The flip side of this coin, of course is how others perceive this label that I have. I’m much more wary of this side of things.

As I mentioned above, people tend to parcel assumptions around labels, based on their preconceptions of what a given label means. With a label like doctor, then everyone has an idea of the sort of lifestyle that typical doctor has, and therefore whilst still being a generalisation, it’s probably not wild of the mark to assume that any given doctor is financially well off. However, with a label like Asperger’s or Autism, then there is far more of a problem.

I can only speak for the UK here, but the understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the general populace is very low. Everyone has heard of autism – the vaccines scare of a few years ago has seen to that. But ask someone what autism is, and I doubt you’d get a very clear response. I suspect you’d get told more often than not that it makes children withdrawn and uncommunicative. That’s some of it, of course, but far from the full picture. Ask what Asperger’s is, and I’d guess that most people in the UK wouldn’t know. I didn’t until I read up about it and realised I had it.

Saying to someone here in the UK that you have Aspeger’s is quite likely to lead to you having to qualify it by saying that you have a form of autism. This in turn is quite likely to fall prey to the wrong or very incomplete picture that people have of autism.

And this is why labels can prove to be unhelpful, and probably why I’m not running around making my own label public to those close to me just yet.

Instead, I’ve decided I need a plan. When I do make my label public, I want some way to allow those that I tell to easily overcome their preconceptions of what my autism might mean. This blog has a lot of useful info on it, but I can’t ask them to read it – it’s far too long. My ability to verbally explain isn’t wonderful, so that won’t work well either.

What I intend to do is this: I’m creating a concise version of this site. It’s a single page into which I’m going to try and distil what I’ve learnt about Asperger’s. I want to create something that someone who knows nothing about Asperger’s can spend no more than five minutes on, and leave with a good grounding. This way, I can point those that I tell at the page, and hopefully they’ll choose to visit, and leave with some understanding.

I’m not great at keeping my writing concise, but I’m going to treat it as something of a list and make a concerted effort. You can help too – visit the page, read what I’ve written and tell me what I’ve missed. How could I improve some of the points?

Genetics news brings mixed feelings

It’s big news this morning in the UK that scientists have found strong evidence that genetics have a key role in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

If you ask me, it’s bloomin’ obvious that genetics has a key role – I’m a strong advocate of autism being an inherited condition, having reached this conclusion through simple observation.

It’s good to see that steps along the way to understanding this link by science are being made – for I think it’s important. Indeed when I first heard the news on the radio this morning, a source was quoted as saying that the breakthrough was as important as those made in cancer research. I agree.

Whilst I feel strongly that understanding the genetic mechanisms behind ASDs is important, it also worries me.

If, in ten, twenty five or maybe fifty years time we understand the genetic make-up of ASDs, will we use this information to allow in-utero genetic testing for the disorders? Would this testing lead to the aborting of foetuses with the genetic markers associated with ASDs?

This would be highly controversial, because a great many people of the spectrum lead full and (mostly) happy lives, despite having this perceived disability. But testing of this sort is routinely done for Down’s syndrome these days, so why not for Asperger’s syndrome too?

If I wasn’t born 35 years ago, but in the near future, where genetic screening for autism was possible, would I even make it as far as birth? I find this a worrying thought.

Each and every birth is a miracle of a million genetic coincidences coming together, but I, for one am not bitter to have the genetic make-up that life has given me. I wouldn’t change it, and I would sincerely hope that the future-me with similar genetic make-up would be allowed their chance at life.