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.

Ironing my way to happiness

I’m sure you all have your own version of this – a task that has just the right elements in it to soothe you and make you feel good.

For me, ironing is one of these tasks. Give me some clothes to iron, and I’ll come out of the other end of the process feeling relaxed, soothed and happy.

Why? Well ironing has a couple of features to it that are great for aspies. Firstly, there is the attention to detail. There is a skill to ironing – making sure you push the iron the right way whilst often pulling the fabric in a different direction. You get instant feedback by looking at the detail of what you are doing – constantly adjusting the strokes of the iron to achieve the best results. Then there is the repetition. If you iron half a dozen shirts, then you are essentially repeating the same job six times. Each shirt will need different tweaks to the technique, depending on the fabric, but each will require the same routine.

With shirts, I iron the underside of the collar first, and then grab an arm which I iron both sides of. I’ll then tackle the other arm, before working around the trunk, from the button side to the other. This is how I’ve tackled a shirt for as far back as I can remember, and I feel comfort in using this same process each time.

Then there is the time to think. There’s something about the repetitive aspect to the process that allows my mind to unwind, forgetting about the troubles of the day, and allowing it to then concentrate on something else. I get some of my best thinking done whilst ironing.

I feel a great satisfaction in producing nicely ironed shirts, and other clothes too. Somehow, the following of the process, and the attention to the detail smoothes the creases out of my mind as much as it does the clothes. Perhaps it’s the concentration on the task in hand and the repetition. Whatever it is, it produces real beneficial effects.

Do you have a similar task that allows you to soothe yourself? I’d be interested to hear what it is.

Dancing the night away

Since my son started School in January, my wife has become quite involved in the parents’ association, and it’s various fund raising events.

This was why I found myself in the local village hall with my wife last Saturday night, to attend a ceilidh (pronounced something like ‘kaylee’). If you are British, then you’ll know what one of these is (I hope), but for those of you not familiar with this Scottish tradition, I suppose I’d better fill you in. A ceilidh is, I suppose a little like American line dancing. It’s a traditional Scottish folk dance performed by a collection of couples, accompanied by a traditional band with instruments like fiddles, whistles, accordions and a bodhran drum. A caller explains steps that the dancers then perform, making complex patterns, usually of intermingled people across the dance floor.

I’ve been to a ceilidh before, a couple of years ago. I didn’t join in. This time though, I was determined to take part. To this end, I dragged my wife up for the first two dances. I felt this was psychologically important, because if I had taken part at the start, when everyone was still finding their feet, I’d feel less out of place. This little trick worked, and both me and my wife took part in all but two of the dances across the whole evening.

It was fun!

It really was good fun, and I didn’t feel out of place. Most of those taking part (and there were fifty or so of us) had clearly never done much dancing, never mind much ceilidh dancing. We were a bunch of novices that made countless mistakes, and laughed about them as we made them! Fabulous!

This all meant that no-one noticed the extra little mistakes that I was making. The funniest of these was where we had to stand in a circles and then wheel either to the left or the right. I have trouble with left and right at the best of times – I have to consciously think which is which when someone asks me to do something that invovles a left or right action. So it was that for the first few dances we’d be commanded to ‘circle left’, and I’d be standing still thinking for a half second whilst the circle was already moving in the correct direction. In the end I gave up trying to think about it, and just went with the direction the circle decided to go. That worked nicely!

I found, to my own surprise that I didn’t have a problem keeping the rhythm of the dances, indeed many others were far worse at this than I was. I’ve commented in the past that I have no rhythm. This clearly isn’t true. I don’t dance well or imaginatively – that’s a better description, because clearly in a prescribed dance such as a ceilidh I can have a good go at the steps, and can keep the rhythm quite well.

Some dances had sequences of eight or ten different moves. I found these difficult from the point of view that I’d mix up the sequencing. I punctuated these dances with little verbalised reminders to myself – “right wheel, pass partner, dosey doe, oh – no – promenade then dosey doe – sorry, polka” – that sort of thing. Despite the sequence of moves repeating every minute or so for a good five minutes, I’d still make the same sequence errors each time. Oh – and because of the intense concentration on the moves and the sequencing, I didn’t hear much of the music – it just washed over me providing the rhythm and nothing more. That’s a shame, because the band were rather good, I thought.

What I really wasn’t good at were the knots. These are complex moves performed in small groups where everyone holds hands and then people weave through each others arms and spin around to unwind the knots they’ve created. We’d try these slowly and a little repetitively without the music first, and then perform them in the dance. Whilst I’d feel I’d understood how it worked when we first tried it out, I’d inevitably have forgotten the intricate details by the time we danced, just a minute or two later. How did the other dancers manage? Well some managed the knots, and others didn’t, and everyone found them difficult.  Perhaps the difference here is that I was paying very good attention as to how the move worked and then still failed, whereas some others having trouble were clearly taking things far less seriously, and weren’t paying as much heed to the instructions as they might have.

So the dancing was fun, and because it was complicated and we were all amateurs, I didn’t feel self concious about getting bits wrong, or about forgetting the sequence of moves. Others were making the same mistakes.

What wasn’t so much fun were the social bits in between the dances. The dancing is hard work, so the format was typically two five minute dances and then a 15 minute break for people to recover. In these breaks, many of the attendees wandered around and chatted socially. My little group of me, my wife, my wife’s friend and her friend who we’d not met before didn’t really mingle. This suited me fine – the dancing was hard work mentally as well as physically, which didn’t leave much room in my head for making small talk. Even in our little group I kept mostly to myself, and listened more than I talked. My head was full of dance moves and how they worked.

I wondered before the start if I’d feel over-stimulated by the music and the noise. In reality I didn’t feel it as much as I thought I might. I was a bit blank during the breaks, and undeniably tired at the end, but elated. And the elation over-rode any feelings of over-stimulation.

Would I go again?

Yes. The combination of someone else telling me how to move, plus everyone being an amateur who made mistakes really did work well for me.

Feeling the fear

If you are on the spectrum, then you probably know this feeling. It’s the one where you look like a rabbit caught in car headlights just before it gets hit.

Fear is never far away for me. I’m sure it is connected to my background stress and anxiety in some way, but frankly the feeling of fear is distinct from that of feeling anxious.

The odd thing for me is that frequently there is no good reason for the fear to be there at all, but it still is. Is life that terrifying that it causes me to walk around feeling frightened? Well, maybe there is something in that. After all, I’ve said in countless articles on this site that I find the world a confusing and unpredictable place. In the past I’ve used this to justify the anxiety I feel, but could it also cause a frequent background fear, that on occasion flares up into terror?

I’ll explain what this fear feels like: It’s like when you were a kid, and you wanted your parents to leave the hallway light on at night (which mine did, incidentally). It’s an irrational fear that often appears to have no cause in particular, but it’s chilling all the same.

When I was a child, at least part of this night time fear was one of security. With the light on, I could see my surroundings, and this was comfortable. With the light off, I couldn’t see where I was, and then small creaks in the house would make me jump and my heart pound. Perhaps there is an over-active imagination at play here, or perhaps it’s just to do with the way I’ve always processed sensory inputs – in real time, with pattern matching. When you can’t see what you are doing, your other senses become hightened, and you start to hear every little sound. In the UK, our houses are built with wooden rafters and floors, and these creak when the house heats up and cools down in the daily cycle of life. To a young man, processing the noises in real time, and trying to understand and pattern match them, the creaks can sound like someone walking towards your room. When your parents are asleep in bed, this sort of thing can be very frightening, especially when your eyes can’t confirm or deny what you are hearing.

I wonder if my background fear as an adult is a similar mechanism at play?

If the input I get from my senses matches in some way to a previously scary event, do I then subconsciously start to feel scared? I’ve many times in the past suffered from unexpected outcomes in social situations. Outcomes where I’ve inadvertently provoked an aggressive response from someone. These leave me surprised and quite genuinely instantly frightened at the time. My social faux pas don’t happen often on this scale, but in a life time I’ve unintentionally provoked aggression on many occasions. I think there is a good chance that my brain has these stored away for use as pattern matches – after all, I know I have a great many past events stored in just this way – I make use of them daily to help navigate my lack of social intuition. So – what if my brain pattern matches something about a current innocuous situation to one of these old scenarios, and turns on my fear?

What I’ve just described is what would typically be called post traumatic stress disorder, but would I be at all justified to claim that this is what I am experiencing?

To be honest, I’m not sure it’s all that wide of the mark. The world is continually perplexing and unpredictable to me, and at times my apparent naivety has burnt me badly. I observe that I don’t learn from these sorts of mistakes over time, and continue to make them. Why then, wouldn’t my brain pattern match fear, when it thinks it sees another scenario that might provoke the same response? I may not have suffered from trauma in the way that people usually define it – as in a single horrendous experience – but I have suffered a catalogue of broadly similar moderately scary incidents over the years. Incidents that I’ve not learnt to avoid. Could they add up and reinforce the message over time in my brain? Maybe. It sounds plausible to me.

What do you make of this? Do you suffer from the fear too? If you do, what do you think causes it?

Slow thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metaphors, and a leap of logic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great stuff, Anna – thanks for the insight.

A lack of words

I get this problem frequently.

I run out of words to say.

That’s perhaps not quite true, but it sums it up succinctly.

What really happens is that I have a busy day, or a perhaps more accurately I have some time with too much sensory input. I need to recover a bit from that sort of thing, which means having quiet alone time. Except that my life means that I don’t get this because I’m either at work, or I’m out for the day with the family, or because I’m just home from work and the kids need bathing, or I’ve sat down after the kids are in bed, and my wife wants to tell me about her day and her ideas. This is real life, and I can’t very well just shut myself off from it – not unless I’m really badly overloaded at any rate.

So I’ll end up in conversations that are very one sided. The other person will make almost all the running, and my answers will be short. Sometimes I’ll forego answering at all, and I’ll just nod or shake my head.

What’s going on in my head is that I don’t have the words to respond. When I withdraw, be it in reality, or more frequently when it happens when I’m not on my own as above, the part of my brain that deals with social interaction pretty much shuts down.

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?”. This sort of process feels very much like hard thinking to me – it’s often quite a concious process where I’m trying to juggle listening and thinking of responses at the same time as trying to think three questions ahead.

With this thought process shut down, I sometimes litterally have no words of response for people.

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.

A not-so-mild form of autism

I’ve read many times that Asperger’s Syndrome is a mild form of Autism.

In really simple metrics this is true, but at the same time, that is an entirely unhelpful comment.

My reasoning here is that if you tell someone that you have a mild form of autism, then they will likely think that it has little impact on you, especially as those of us with Asperger’s are often good at hiding most of the visible signs of it. Unfortunately, whilst the condition may present as mild, that’s a long way from the truth of how it affects those of us with it.

I’m happy to state that my Asperger’s doesn’t cause me a lot of the problems that more profound autism does – I seek out social interaction at times, and can communicate well with people a lot of the time, especially in writing – but it does still cause me a lot of problems, in practically every area of my life.

Over the years I have adapted and learned techniques like mimicry to help me deal and fit in with the normal world, yet just because I appear to fit in most of the time doesn’t mean that my life is plain sailing.

I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that my life has frequently been hard going, and I expect it to remain so. I’m not saying this to elicit responses of ‘poor you’ – it’s not about that at all. I’m just trying to point out how those of us with Asperger’s tend to have to fight our way throughout life just to live a reasonably normal existence. It’s hard work a lot of the time.

There are many things that make it hard work. Here are a few examples:

People are unpredictable to me, and they often act in ways I don’t see coming. You could view this as an over-trusting type of nature if you like – to me it’s simply that I don’t have much of a natural ability to read people. Sometimes they can read me all too well, and take advantage of that. This unpredictability has caused me considerable anxiety and depression over the years.

Work is difficult – it is expected that I’ll be flexible and work on various different projects at the same time, and be able to literally drop something and immediately run with another if the need arises. I find this very difficult to do, as I’m much more naturally oriented to work on a single thing in immense detail. Time runs away with me, and my forward planning skills aren’t great either.

Phone conferences and meetings with more than a couple of other people in them stress me enormously, as I can’t follow input from multiple people well, and I suffer from the slow and immediate data processing style that many Aspies seem to have. This means that I may be slow to come up with timely input into meetings, and tend to get left behind when meetings move onto new subjects, as I’m still processing what was being said a minute or two previously. Allow me go away and think about what was said in a meeting however, and I’ll often provide valuable input as an afterthought.

As forward planning is a constant battle for me, providing a fun and relaxing home life for my wife and kids is something of a constant battle. It’s extremely unusual for me to think ahead and book a night out with my wife – even something straight forward like going to the cinema or out for a meal. What are we going to do this coming weekend? I don’t know, and I still won’t on Saturday morning, most weeks. Family holidays don’t occur to me either, so it usually falls to my wife to pick up the pieces and be the constant social secretary of the family. Doing all of this work on her own annoys her, and rightly so. It frustrates me, as I don’t neglect these things on purpose, they simply don’t occur to me.

My lack of natural social flair and the anxiety that has sprung up around it makes my life difficult too. I go through short patches of trying to force myself to be more sociable, usually by accepting invitations to social events via tools like Facebook. I typically don’t enjoy them though. The social world is very alien to me, I feel dislocated much of the time, and tend to get drunk far too quickly in the hope that it’ll remove some of the feeling of otherness from me. It rarely does. I feel the normal feelings of needing to connect with others – the need to have friends, yet in reality I don’t have any. Barring my wife, not one true friend. That hurts, yet despite many efforts over the years I’ve not succeeded in keeping friendships going over any length of time.

Whilst the above gives a flavour of some of the ways that Asperger’s has impacted on my life, there are many many more examples.

With all the above doom and and gloom, you might expect me to hate Asperger’s, and to jump at the chance to look for a cure.

Not a bit of it.

Firstly, I don’t believe there is a cure for Autism Spectrum Disorders – I think they a genetic cause.

Secondly, and most importantly, Asperger’s makes me who I am. It doesn’t define every aspect of me, but it has had a large input on making me the man I am today. And despite of the problems I face, I like me. I’m a worthwhile person, and my life has purpose. I have a lovely wife and two great kids.

I may have had to battle through life, but so far I’ve won. I may not be financially rich, but I feel rich as a person. I see the wonderful tiny repeating patterns in leaves on trees, and the beautiful colours in spring meadows, and all sorts of other things that most people seem to overlook.

Asperger’s may be mild when compared to some other forms of Autism, but it’s affect on those who have it is far from mild – it’s all encompassing and causes life-long challenges. At the same time it bestows unusual and useful skills which can provide a lot of pleasure both to ourselves and to others.

I wouldn’t change my Asperger’s even if I could.

I wouldn’t call it a mild form of autism either, it’s too pervasive for that.

Red lorry, yellow lorry

I’ve mentioned in other articles here how I spot all sorts of seemingly unimportant detail in everything around me, including when I’m driving.

The degree to which this happens was brought home to me earlier this week when I was driving home from work. I listen to the radio whilst I drive, and had on my regular afternoon programme, Chris Evans’ Drivetime, on BBC Radio 2. Chris’ style of broadcasting means that his show goes off at odd tangents, and the previous evening he’d mentioned that he was buying a yellow car, which had lead to a yellow car club being established with his listeners.

It was now the following evening, and he’d got a guest on the show to talk about how popular yellow was as a car colour, and to find out what the popular colours were. Odd? Yes, but it’s very much his style to do things like this, and I really enjoy listening to it.

Silver is the most popular car colour in the UK – no great surprise there for me, and black is a close second. If I’d taken a guess before hand, that’s most likely the order I’d have chosen. By this point in the interview, I was already wondering whether they’d mention white cars. You see, I’ve noticed over the course of the last year or so that white cars are making something of a come back. A couple of years ago, you’d barely see any, and those that you did would be on cheap ultra-mini sized cars. Nowadays they appear to be popular on sporty hatchbacks.

The guest said, “…and of course white is making a strong come back”. I knew it, and raised a huge smile. Chris didn’t though. He made noises of surprise. So did my wife when I relayed this story to her.

I wouldn’t class cars as one of my special interests, yet I noticed this trend in colour. I didn’t set out to notice it, I just did. My wife says the things I spot are quite fascinating and one of my endearing features. Just as well really, because it’s not something that I have much control over.

There must be all sorts of trends in information that I’ve seen over the years, simply through my collection of seemingly unimportant detail int he world around me. I wonder if I could harness this attention to detail in some productive way?