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

First, I assume the other person is right by default, and I acknowledge this in lots of ways whilst I’m interacting with others. To do otherwise will often lead to me having to defend myself, and this feels both threatening, and difficult from the point of view of finding the right words.

Secondly, I’ll resort to communicating in a written way, if I can get away with it. In the office, email is king for me. By doing this, I can take more time to find the right words for what I’m trying to express. If you knew me, and really thought about it (I doubt people do), you’d realise that I can express myself far better in email than I can face to face.

I also use mimicry quite heavily, especially when in larger groups. If people laugh, then I laugh. I’m often not fully aware at what I’m laughing at, but I know that to blend in, I should laugh, so I do. Understanding the joke can come later, unless of course I’ve already reached the point of over-stimulation.

Perhaps the most intriguing technique I use is that of metaphor, analogy and allegory. This is a technique I’ve learned to apply frequently when I need to describe something to someone. It has been a technique many years in the making – probably a lifetime, and certainly from way before the prospect of having Asperger’s was ever on the horizon.

So, why do I use it?

I’ve always found it difficult to verbalise ideas and thoughts that are in my head. This, you may be surprised to hear is something of a new revelation to me, despite suffering from it my whole life. Mundane stuff can be easy to say, as can information about subjects which have become something of a special interest, but feelings, emotions, concepts, techniques and other things like that I frequently find difficult.

In the days before I understood that this might be part of a neurological condition, I realised that others found it difficult to understand what I was trying to convey to them when discussing something that I found difficult to put into words. I would get flustered, and would find that the more I tried to put it into words, the less sense it made to me, and unsurprisingly to the other person too. Suddenly, I would find that I didn’t have the words that adequately described how I perceived the concept in my head. What I didn’t know at the time, was whether the other person found my words to be difficult to interpret, or if it was the subject itself. I also didn’t understand why it was difficult for me – it just was, and that was that. In other words, I had no real concept as to whether others had the same difficulty in expressing things verbally in the same way that I did. I may even have assumed that they did, unless they were very obviously an extremely eloquent speaker.

My response to this was to try and find some other way to express what I was trying to say. Metaphor. Analogy. Allegory.

These techniques seemed to work very well for me, because they generally turned a concept in my head into some visual picture. A concept that was difficult for me to interpret could be shoe-horned into an allegorical story (well, just about), and it would then make far more sense to me. Then, when it came to trying to explain the concept to someone else, I’d resort to the allegory after my first attempt had caused confusion.

Does my use of these techniques help the other person to understand? I used to think that it always helped. That isn’t true, though. The real picture is that sometimes, yes, it helps. Other times, no.

What I can say with some certainty is that it helps me tremendously, much of the time. By turning a difficult concept or thought into a silly situation with characters that I can picture, it instantly makes more sense to me.

These days, I wonder if the language in my head is different from that of the typical person. I know, for instance, that I’m a very visual thinker. Could it be that the way that I process thoughts and feelings uses different techniques than a typical person? Might this explain why I don’t seem to have a very appropriate language to turn my thoughts into verbalised words? Might it also explain why I find feelings so difficult to explain, and why I find concepts difficult too? Maybe these things do have a language of sorts inside my head, but the language is not the same one I verbally use.  Indeed it’s happening right now, even in writing. I have a picture in my head of how this might work, but I can’t find the right words to describe it.

One thing is for sure though – in my tool kit that helps me make sense of the world,  allegory is one of the first tools that I reach for.

Was that a metaphor?

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An allegorical story

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Throughout this time in my life I was ignored by a great many of my female peers – almost as though I was invisible (something, incidentally, which Rachel writes wonderfully about here). In a sense, that didn’t bother me. I felt no great desire to interact with these young women – whilst many of my male class-mates and work colleagues found them to be hugely attractive, I didn’t.

Those that did interact with me – well that was a completely different story, and one that perplexed me until very recently. Maybe once or twice a year on average, someone who I was either at school or work with would discover me. They would always make the first move, and start talking to me. Whilst I find group conversation difficult, I have always enjoyed talking one to one with others. I can manage this sort of conversation quite well, and it allows me to feel a connection with others. Over the years I often found myself doing quite a lot of it with young women.

And at this point, expectations and desires started to go in different directions. For their part, the young women found a bright young man that they could get on with. Someone that they found strangely easy to talk to. Someone they could confide in and be themselves with.

Whilst I may have found this too, I invariably found something else. I started to see beauty. Not beauty in the sense that people typically use the term. Some of these women were, of course, conventionally visually beautiful, but the beauty I was seeing was in how they functioned and thought – all of what they were was beautiful. The more I spoke to them, the more beautiful they appeared to be to me, and the more I fell in love with them.

Ah. A hopeless story on many levels. They found an unusual thing – a male friend who they could treat like a female friend. Some of them revelled in this for a while. I found unrequited love, and that ultimately lead to the end of most of these friendships.

You see, whilst I may be unconventional in the way I interact with people due to my lack of social intuition and sometimes even basic social skills, I’m still often engaging to talk to one to one. But whilst I’m clearly a gentle guy that doesn’t use body language that suggests that I’m trying to hit on you, I still feel those typical male urges. Perhaps my definition of attractiveness in a woman is different to my peers, but it is still very much there.

These friendships caused me a great deal of pain over the years. They are nothing, however, to the despair caused by missed opportunities.

There were only a small handful of these, and for the most part, they happened in my early work years, whilst I was single, and living in London. A woman I worked with would take the usual route of striking up a conversation with me, and would find, to her surprise, someone who she really like to talk to. No surprise here for me, of course, it was what I was used to. And then after a month or two, typically after a social evening at a pub, or at a party at someone’s house, it would happen. She’d make a pass at me. I’d miss it. Seriously. My uncertainty and lack of confidence meant that I acted too aloof when suggestions were made that could have lead to intimacy. Nothing intimate ever happened.

Like the time after a house party full of work colleagues, where many of us had decided to hang around until morning. A female friend of mine was in one of the beds, and had recently stripped off, complaining of being too hot. I was at the other end of the room, laying on the chaise longue. We’d been chatting with the female host, but she’d made some excuse to go and chat with someone else, so we were now alone. We were both quite drunk and stoned. My female friend took off her glasses, yawned, stretched and then smiled at me. She made a few little snuggly wriggles under the duvet, and then suggested that instead of shouting across the room, I should come over to the bed to talk with her. She even patted the bit of bed next to her. I didn’t. I stayed where I was – I could hear her just fine. We chatted some more, and eventually, our host rejoined us, and ultimately sleep overtook all of us. I slept on the chaise longue, and they shared the bed.

It wasn’t until the next day, having caught an early tube home, and after I’d caught up on some sleep, and shaken off the hangover, that I started to think over the events of the night before, and what was actually going on. The removal of clothes, the excuses made by our host to leave us alone. She even shut the bedroom door on her way out. The subtle but clear suggestions from my friend. At the time, I missed it all. Did I find my friend attractive? Of course. Could I have shared intimacy with her? Absolutely. If she’d said, “come over here and kiss me,” would I have reacted differently? I suspect so.

To this day, that night frequently haunts me and fills me with deep regret. Right now talking about it is nearly bringing tears to me eyes. How could I have missed what was so obvious?

And then there was the time that a group of us had a night out and agreed to all go back to someone’s flat and go our separate ways in the morning. A female friend from work who had been chatty with me for a few months was there. She confided early on in the evening that there was someone else there who fancied her, and that she couldn’t stand. Could I help her out? There weren’t enough beds for everyone, and the chap she didn’t like had suggested that they share a bed a the end of the night – purely in a platonic way. She wanted to avoid this, she said, and asked if I might share the bed with her. Platonic once more, course – I was such a good friend that she knew she could trust me.

I agreed. She almost immediately made the sleeping arrangements public, and everyone then agreed amongst themselves how the other beds would be shared out so that everyone got a mattress and no-one got the floor. How wonderfully democratic, I thought.

The night passed, and we all ended up back at the flat, drunk and happy. People started to drift off to bed, and my friend went a good half an hour before I did. When she decided to go, she made a point of saying it multiple times, like we’d not heard her the first time. When I decided that it was time for sleep, I crept into the darkened room, and saw her silhouette as she lay facing away from me in what turned out to be a single bed. Oh – I wasn’t expecting that – I’d never asked what size the bed was. I quietly called her to see if she was a awake. She wasn’t. So, taking off my jacket, but keeping the rest of my clothes on, I squeezed under the duvet next to her. It immediately became apparent that she was naked from the waist down, with just a T-shirt on her top half. I lay on my back, not daring to move. Had she forgotten that she said we’d share the bed? Should I go elsewhere? I was drunk. I lay there for what seemed like an eternity, and then eventually fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke, and nursed my hangover. It was a work day, so I needed to get up, and out to work – in the same work clothes (yup, full suit) that I’d been wearing the day before, and that I’d just slept in. I pulled the duvet back, and then went to sit on the edge of the bed. Once more I was reminded that my friend was naked from the waist down, so I gently covered her back up. She stirred, then turned and smiled an uneasy and slightly perplexed hungover smile at me. For days afterwards, my friend kept mentioning what a nice night it had been.

Years of rumination have left me concluding me that this situation was far less clear cut than the other I mentioned, but I do still think that on balance my friend had intended for us to get intimate at bed time. I’d failed to spot her signals, and she had fallen asleep by the time I got to bed. Another beautiful woman, another completely missed set of signals. Another lifetime of haunting regret.

–

If you aren’t autistic, then you’ll probably think that I’m crazy sharing the above with you. It’s very personal stuff, and not the sort of thing that people talk about. Even I know that. If you have an ASD, then I wonder if you also feel I’m crazy, or if you actually understand. I’d be grateful to hear from you.

You see, this is an area of my life that has been greatly influenced by my Asperger’s and how it affects my ability to interact with other people. The stories I relate have swirled around in my head for many years now causing repeated hurt, and I’ve never told anyone about them. I don’t want them to haunt me for the rest of my life, and I’m hoping that by explaining them, I’ll help to exorcise their ghosts from my memory.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that  another aspect of my neurological makeup means that I can’t remember the name of the young woman in the first tale. We worked together for at least eighteen months, and were close for several months, albeit without any intimacy. Whatever your name was, beautiful woman, I’m sorry.

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Relationships with women and tales of regret

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

Let me explain what it feels like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Blurry-eyed boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you see the similarity there?

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

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

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

Have any of you noticed a similar effect?

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A hangover without alcohol

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On other days – like today for instance, where my stress and anxiety levels are high – I can’t even contemplate using something like wesabe, even though I’m weeks behind on entering my receipts. On days like today, repetition feels too complex. It feels like too much of an effort, and so I don’t do it.

If I could persuade the malfunctioning executive function aspect of my brain to let me start to process my receipts, would I get into the swing of it and ultimately feel soothed? I suspect so – but the persuading is difficult to do, and I tend to follow my natural instincts and do what feels best on days like this. Which is to do very little.

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Repetition

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Leave me to my own devices, and I’ll struggle to determine what needs doing, and then what the priorities are.

This morning I found myself thinking that I could do with someone to tell me how to live my life. Discovering and embracing an autism spectrum disorder may well be wonderfully liberating and it has certainly answered a lot of questions, but it is leaving me feeling as though I don’t know where my life is going all too often.

Today is one of those days. Wouldn’t it be great if someone would come along and just tell me that now I have to do this. And when I’m finished with that, I should then do this – and so on.

Instead I feel stressed, anxious and bewildered. My to-do list tells me the things I have to try and get done today, but what do I need to do to get my life on track next week, next month, next year?

I don’t know.

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What to do next

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Yesterday was about writing for me. I wrote the last two articles for the blog – some 1700 or so words. I wrote a bunch of replies to comments, and some in-depth technical emails for work too. All in all, I spent most of the day putting my thoughts into writing.

And you know what? I felt absolutely great for having done so. I’d forgotten just how soothing I find writing.

When I got home, I felt my usual AS-over-stimulation-related tiredness from the working day, but it didn’t last anywhere near as long as it has been doing in these recent post-holiday days. I enjoyed a relaxed but not overly tired evening, and even managed a quick ten minutes of work towards my own business without putting it off or looking upon it with dread, which again is a first for this week.

So, my tip to myself, which I will of course instantly forget, and will probably not rediscover from this post at any point in the future – is to write whenever I can. Only writing truely clears out my thought processes, allowing me to feel relaxed, less stressed and thoroughly less over-stimulated.

I’m on holiday again next week with my family, this time in Scotland. I’m going to take my laptop with me, and will try to write a couple of articles whilst I’m there. It will be interesting to see how my exhaustion levels compare at the end of the week versus how they were at the end of last weeks holiday.

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I must remember to write

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I shouldn’t be. My body reacted no differently than it ever has done. What was different this time was that I was seeing it through the eyes of Asperger’s. My old explanations for the ways in which I reacted were cast aside, and I was able to apply some of what I’ve learned over the last year or so, and reach new conclusions.

All at once it was both satisfying, and a little alarming.

So what was I doing to push myself hard? If you don’t have autism, then this isn’t going to sound very strenuous. I was on holiday with my wife and two young kids.

I’m hoping that if you are an autistic parent, you’re nodding in agreement with me now.

I’ve learned over the years that life is exhausting. It hasn’t occurred to me very often that others don’t seem to share the same level of exhaustion as I do in fairly normal situations. When I have seen it, I’ve picked a ready made excuse – I’m unfit, or I’ve been working really heard at work over the last week, and this is just my body reacting to that – I’m sure you get the picture.

Don’t get me wrong – a week packed with activities and two small kids is hard work – no two ways about it, but I wasn’t tired at the end of each day, I was exhausted.

And perhaps for the first time in my life, I really thought about what my exhaustion was. Exhaustion falls into a category I have problems with – it’s really just a concept, and you have to create your own definition. I find concepts in general to be woolly and difficult to define. I found that over the years I had created a definition of exhaustion based on my own experiences, and that my definition wasn’t quite what I thought it was.

My exhaustion wasn’t physical – that was quite surprising. I’d kind of assumed that it was. Yet I could still have gone on a long walk at the end of each and every day of the holiday, despite suffering from my own definition of exhaustion. Sure, I’d prefer to slump into a sofa and relax, but if push came to shove, my body really wasn’t that tired.

It was my mind that was exhausted. It was over-stimulated and stressed, and wanted to stop having to think about everything. And of course, that is how I process social interaction – I think about what is being said to me, and react in what I consider to be an appropriate way. After a full day of two demanding young kids, new scenery to take in and lots of people around me chatting amongst themselves, my brain was waving a little white flag and asking if it might have some quiet time to recover a little.

A pattern emerged. I spent the day working hard, with all of my mental resources firing on full power. At the end of each afternoon, we’d return to my sister-in-law’s house where we were staying for the week, and I’d crash. I’d just slump onto a seat and do nothing for as long as I could get away with it. My brain would do it’s best to block out most of the noise and I’d spend some time reading a newspaper, or on the Internet. A little antisocial? Yes. Necessary? Yes.

After a while, I’d either need to make myself move again, to help with food, or to bath the kids, or I’d reach a point where I felt better again, and ready to join in with the real world once more. Left to my own devices, this took somewhere between an hour and ninety minutes.

Each day the pattern repeated. And then, on Saturday, we had a final day out, and I drove us home – a not inconsiderable four and a half hours or so of driving, mostly on motorways. Saturday was a long day, and we didn’t reach home until around 9pm. By the time the kids were bathed and in bed, and the car unpacked, it was nearer 10pm.

Boy did it show on Sunday. The kids gave us something of a lie in in the morning, and the first few hours of the day went ok for me. I felt tired, but on the whole not too bad. The problems hit around lunch time. My energy dipped, and my brain was telling me it needed quiet time, and lots of it. I became grumpy and snappy at the kids.

We needed to get some food in after our week away, and my wife, who will be looking after the kids single-handed for most of this week asked if she could go on her own, leaving the kids with me. I agreed. Logic told me it was unfair not to. I spent the next two hours playing board games with the kids on the carpet in the lounge – I didn’t have the energy for much else. This worked well – the kids felt engaged with the games, and for the most part behaved themselves. I felt wiped out the whole time, and much of the interaction felt like a lot of effort. What my brain really wanted to do, incidentally, was pursue a special interest. We’d visited the wonderful Brooklands Museum one day in the week, and my brain told me it wanted to go away and research the undeniably interesting history of the birth place of both British motorsport and aviation. I craved this, I’m sure, as a means of escaping from having to interact with anyone. I resisted.

Two hours later, my wife arrived home, and asked if I would cook tea. Feeling really overstimulated, and wanting to do nothing other than go somewhere quiet, I humphed and reluctantly agreed. I agreed, because it meant that I didn’t have to entertain the kids. On the whole, a good move.

After eating, we settled down as a family to watch a film. This, surprisingly, worked wonders. Our entertainment was Disney’s Herbie Fully Loaded. Easy viewing. The light-hearted nature of the film really helped to untangle my brain enormously. I could focus on one input, and forget all the others for an hour and a half.

Wonderful.

I’ve learnt a lot over the last week. It isn’t the fact that I had a busy week at work that means I’m tired when I go on holiday. I don’t feel wiped out at the end of a busy day of holiday because my blood sugars are low, or because I didn’t sleep well the night before. I experience all of these things because I have autism, and I spend my holiday time running at 100% of brain capacity. That’s why I crash at the end of each day. And that’s also why the day after I get home from holiday is really not at all pleasant. My brain needs a proper holiday – not the sort of holiday it had for the previous week.

I need to explain all this to my wife, but I’m feeling reluctant to do so. I’ve set the scene a little over the last day or so, but haven’t really tackled the issue head on. I feel silly and a little pathetic, perhaps because my wife too is tired after our week away. Like I said earlier – a weeks holiday with two small kids is hard work, whether or not you are autistic. So I’m not looking forward to explaining all of the above to my wife.

There’s good news here too, though. In seeing my tiredness for what it really is, I can work towards solutions that will help reduce the problem. I can’t rely on getting time alone to recuperate each day – not with a young family and tired wife, but perhaps we can watch more films together at the end of our holiday days. That really did work well for me, and it kept the kids amused too.

Has anyone got any other suggestions for activities we might try that would keep the kids occupied and allow me some time to calm my overstimulated brain down at the same time?

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A holiday?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where had my middle class dreams gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Life derailed

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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.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Dysfunction

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