Blurry-eyed boy

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

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

Let me explain what it feels like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hangover without alcohol

Yes really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you see the similarity there?

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

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

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

Have any of you noticed a similar effect?

Is this what we’re all living for today?

Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to feed
Take a look at all the suffering we breed
So many lonely faces scattered all around
Searching for what they need

Is this the world we created?
what did we do it for?
Is this the world we invaded?
Against the law?
So it seems in the end
Is this what we’re all living for today?
The world that we created.

You know that every day a helpless child is born
Who needs some loving care inside a happy home
Somewhere a wealthy man is sitting on his throne
Waiting for life to go by.

Is this the world we created
we made it on our own
Is this the world we devastated
Right to the bone?
If there’s a God in the sky looking down
What can he think of what we’ve done
To the world that he created?

Lovely words – I hope you agree – and absolutely laden with sentiment that I find irresistible these days.

They are the words to a song by Queen with perhaps an obvious title, Is this the world we created…?, which was written by Freddie Mercury some twenty five years or so ago. For perhaps the quintessential performance of the song, click here to see Freddie and Brian perform it at Wembley Stadium in 1986.

Mentioning music in my blog is a first, but it isn’t for the lack of trying. I’ve started a number of articles about the relationship between me and music since I began writing here, and yet somehow none of them have captured the emotion well enough. This isn’t going to be the article I’ve been struggling to write either – that will have to wait – but hopefully this piece will start to give you a sense of just how much music – the right sort of music – works on me.

Is this the world we created…? only popped back into my life a couple of days ago, after a hiatus of perhaps fifteen years. I’d forgotten about it’s very existence, and only rediscovered it again by accident, on one of my follow-the-link sessions whilst using the Internet.

Having clicked on the video link, the opening chords sent a chill down my spine, and made the hairs on my arms prick up. I knew this song. I knew it was good, but I had forgotten just how good it was.

I was in something of a sad and reflective mood – I’d been reading with some disbelief how it was nearly eighteen years since Freddie had died. I found that incredible.

I remember hearing about his death almost like it was yesterday. For me it was one of those moments that stays with you forever. I was at sixth-form college, and I’d heard the news on breakfast television, and then again on the radio on my walkman on the bus to college. I remember feeling sad, and disappointed that someone so wonderfully charismatic and influential had been taken away at such a shockingly young age – Freddie was only 45 when he died.

When I watched the above video clip for the first time a couple of days ago, the sense of loss I felt was immediate. In two and a half minutes I had been reduced to big choking tears. I watched it a couple more times, and really cried hard for a few minutes.

What was I crying about? A very good question. I felt the loss of something. Was it the loss of a teen idol all those years ago making itself finally felt? Perhaps there was an element of that there, but that wasn’t really it.

Was I mourning my loss of youth? Well, youth clearly has a bearing on this. The music brought back very hazy memories of feeling young and energetic, but also of feeling fundamentally lost, alone and unhappy in a world that made little sense to me.

I think the music had brought back how I was really feeling at that time in my life – a feeling that I kept very well hidden, for fear of, well, I’m not sure what. My peers all seemed to be happy and relaxed with life. They were all starting to look for independence, and were achieving it by going to colleges on the other side of town by bus and by applying for university or planning to go travelling around the world. I too was doing this, but primarily because that’s what everyone else was doing, and I was filled with with a feeling of barely controllable terror much of the time.

I’ve been quite teary on a number of occasions over the last few days. Perhaps this is because I’ve had a bit of alone time in the evenings for a change that have allowed me the luxury of thinking about things in detail. This is a natural conclusion to the anxious and down feelings that I’ve experienced over the last week or two, and I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to try and express and deal with it, finally.

Going back to Freddie’s lyrics, I can’t help but notice just how well they sit with my own view of the world these days. I’m sure they didn’t back when I was a teenager.

It seems to me that there is hard-core logic in the words. Their truth is self evident, yet so wonderfully understated, allowing you to fill out the detail yourself using your own thoughts and experiences of the world. This too may go some way to explaining why the song makes me cry.

The world didn’t make much sense to me at seventeen, and it still doesn’t today at thirty-six.

This song, however is as relevant now as it was twenty-five years ago. Brilliantly simple, yet powerfully touching and perfectly executed.

What more could you want from music?

Long days and food

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong wrong wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether it will continue to work remains to be seen.

Repetition

Sometimes, repetition is soothing. On the right day, actions like inputting my receipts into online tool wesabe can be very soothing. It’s the same keystrokes and mouse movements over again for each receipt that I enter. At the end of the process I feel calmed and soothed. There is an order to the repetition that I like. It disentangles my brain in some way.

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.

I must remember to write

I’ve almost certainly said something like this before, but with my memory processes being what they are, I can’t remember if I have or not.

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.

A holiday?

I’ve spent the last week listening. Listening to how my body reacts when pushed hard. I’ve been quite surprised at what I’ve heard.

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?

Dysfunction

In the mid nineties, home computers were far less powerful and considerably more expensive than they are now. As a newly graduated Computer Sciences student, I wanted the best computer I could afford, and yet I had very little by way of disposable income to play with. To work around this problem, I decided to build my own desktop PC, so I could choose the parts that thought represented the best value for money at the time, and I also then decided to overclock the CPU. This was then (and to some degree still is) one of the easy and free ways to grab a little extra performance out of your PC, by making the CPU process more instructions per second than it is supposed to.

Unfortunately, overclocking doesn’t always work. If the CPU you bought was already running near the limit of it’s capabilities, then overclocking it can cause your machine to crash. And so it was for the machine I built. When the machine was idle or working at well under capacity, then it was fine. It would trundle along happily for days. Then when you asked it to do something that was intensive on the CPU it would crash within minutes.

I’m using the above as a metaphor for my life right now. My life is a little like my mid-nineties PC. I can manage the low-level and background tasks reasonable well, but ask me to do something more complex and I’m struggling.

In aspie terms, my executive function is failing me badly right now.

This is nothing unusual. My executive function isn’t wonderful at the best of times. I’m typically disorganised, and unless I’m prompted in some way about events like birthdays or Father’s Day (this Sunday here in the UK), then I’ll forget about them. I use a to-do list each day, but often have trouble thinking ahead regarding what needs to be on the list. I’m used to all of this however, and I’ve never been better set up to stay relatively organised, and thus under the radar of typical people.

The current problems that I have are very familiar, however. I’ve had this sort of problem frequently, for as far back as I can remember. Simply saying that my executive functioning is worse than normal doesn’t really cover it, but it does provide a starting point – a key if you like – for how the problem presents itself.

Right now, planning and execution feel really difficult for me – far more so than normal. Getting items on my to-do list is proving difficult, as I’m forgetting to write them down when they occur to me. Then, of course, I’m forgetting what it was that occurred to me in the first place. I’ll pick up my list book, and sit there thinking that there was something that I needed to do, but completely failing to remember what it was. I have trouble with having a small working memory at the best of times, but right now it feels thimble sized. If I don’t immediately concentrate on the item in my working memory and externalise it in some way, then it is gone, and very difficult for me to retrieve later.

By way of example, over the last couple of weeks I’ve come up with various ideas for articles for this blog, but at times where I’ve not been near a computer to jot them down. I haven’t the faintest idea what those ideas were now, despite feeling that they had legs at the time. What a shame.

I’m not faring any better once I have items on my list. Instead of checking the list regularly to see what I need to do next, I find that I’m forgetting to look at it. Worse, when I do look at it, I’m oddly finding that I’m not properly taking in what’s there. This means that sometimes I only see half the list, and then miss the equally important items on the other half. It’s not a concious decision, it just happens.

When I forget to look, I often find that I’m procrastinating my time away browsing the Internet, following links about an arbitrary subject. This has been happening a lot over the last couple of weeks, and large tracts of time disappear without me realising it’s happening. This following of links about a subject is a soothing mechanism that I have, and I take in large quantities of typically useless information.

When I do drag myself back to tackling list items, I’m finding that I just can’t get started. In the past I’d simply have put this down to a lack of motivation – after all, that’s the problem that typical people have in this sort of situation. It’s more than that though, because it’s not just dull work tasks that are getting affected by this problem, it’s more interesting personal tasks too. It feels like there is some huge physical hurdle that I need to get over to get down to tasks right now. That’s not a lack of motivation, it’s a lack of executive function.

When I do finally get down to starting tasks, then I manage them reasonably well. Well, that is, if you consider working on a single task until it’s done to be a good thing. Frequently it isn’t, and I should be dividing my time up between tasks, especially at work. That isn’t really happening right now, where as normally I’d manage this much of the time, as long as the tasks were on my list.

Along with all this executive dysfunction and working memory issues go various other familiar characteristics. I’m very blank and unfocussed right now. I appear to be drifting through life. My usually very active brain is dull and just ticking over. It feels a little like that feeling I get after too much sensory input – like I’ve withdrawn to be alone, but instead of that lasting a half hour or so, it’s been going on for days, or maybe even weeks now. I have no spark, no zone. My special interests – this blog for one – appear to have fallen by the way side for the most part. I’m quiet and uncommunicative. My routine doesn’t seem to be fully happening – not because I’m choosing to do something different, but just because I seem to be forgetting it.

I’m not sure if this sort of way of being has a trigger. I can’t think of anything in particular that has set this one off. Perhaps it’s just cyclic. Perhaps it’s a change in brain chemistry for some reason.

Maybe, and I whisper this, as it feels like a slightly scary proposition, it’s just that after a long period of acting as NT as I can, my brain waves a white flag and gives up. Perhaps this is just the more naturally autistic version of me, where my brain and nervous system are refusing to try and live up to NT expectations as they have become worn out doing it.

I do feel like I need a holiday. I am tired, and my life is hectic and not well organised right now. So just maybe my whisper is reality. Maybe my body can’t keep up the pretence right now, and the exaggerated (versus my normal state) executive dysfunction and working memory issues are the end result.

Whatever it is, I’d be willing to bet my mid-90’s PC would understand how I feel right now.

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.