Awareness

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

My new job is going well – very well. That is the biggest reason that I’ve not been writing here.

It’s not that I couldn’t find the time to write, it’s a little more subtle than that. My new job has become my current special interest, and has taken on all the properties that that title bestows on it. Focus – that’s the main thing. By focus, I don’t mean that I’m getting lots done. I don’t mean that I’m obsessing about work when I get home either. Both of those attributes are what I would associate with a regular person who was committed to their job.

When my job becomes my special interest, something a little different than the above happens. Whilst at work, I am supremely focussed. Focussed on whatever it is that I’m doing at the time. I may have a to do list the length of my arm – indeed this is often the case, but I’ll struggle to get half of it done, despite working really hard. This isn’t due to a lack of productivity, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I complete the task I’m working on very thoroughly, and with great attention to detail, at the cost of the other tasks that need doing.

I won’t realise that I’m doing this whilst it is happening. To echo one of the great AS cliches, I lose track of time, and suddenly find myself near the end of the working day, aghast that I’ve not tackled several of the high priority items that I put on my list that morning. I will have had a blast of a day however, getting lost in the intricacies of some problem, and quite often bathing in the satisfaction associated with having nailed whatever the problem was.

It’s not just my other work tasks that get neglected, I’ll often have a few bits of personal logistics on my daily list – paying bills, finding a little something for my wife, that sort of thing – and much of the time I’ll not have tackled these either. I find this very frustrating, and over the years, no matter how I’ve tried to structure my day to allow me to complete more tasks, I’ve invariably slid back to a position where items get missed for the above reasons. I find that with great effort I can carry off some sort of structure that forces the execution of my list for a short time only. Invariably the effort required to make it work is just too great. I am not blessed with much of an ability to structure my life in a way that gets important tasks done in a reliable way. Call it executive dysfunction if you like.

At the end of the working day I drive home, and for the most part leave my work thoughts behind in the office. That’s great, but unfortunately I don’t get to enjoy my evenings in the sort of productive way that I note many of my peers do. There’s the initial feeling of exhaustion that I’ve written about before. That hour or so of feeling dazed and looking glazed that I put to down to too much sensory input at work and the forty five minute drive home. Once that’s worn off and the daily chores are done, I’m fit for nothing. I feel tired despite getting eight hours of sleep most nights, and find it difficult to bring myself to do anything productive.

But do you know what?

The above frustrations now also feel normal and comfortable. Whilst I have lived with the above challenges my whole life, it’s only really in the last year that I’ve become properly aware of them, and have had any kind of idea as to why they exist. My awareness has brought an acceptance of who I am. That’s incredibly powerful and empowering too. I’m never going to be all that good at getting a bunch of tasks done in a given day. By accepting that, I’ve removed the need to compare myself to those who don’t have AS. I no longer have to beat myself up for not managing to work in the way that I see many of my peers do.

Peter Pan’s new coat

Ah yes – Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I was left feeling like Peter yesterday.

It all started when we rushed out the door on Sunday morning. I took the kids to the rugby ground – my son for his weekly training session, and my daughter to stand and watch with me, whilst my wife went to the supermarket just down the road from the rugby club to get the weekly food shop done. I say supermarket, but it’s actually two right next to each other – Aldi, the lovely and decidedly quirky German import, and Asda, the local giant which is now owned by America’s Walmart. Asda’s name, incidentally, comes from a contraction of Associated Dairies.  I mention this because it is one of those odd little bits of information that frequently pops into my head when Asda is mentioned – there is clearly an association there in my brain, and my AS helps to push me into mentioning it. Only after I’ve told this to people will I start to feel embarrassed for having done so.

Anyway – Asda isn’t the star here, it’s Aldi. Aldi is great – it doesn’t stock the huge range of Asda, and it isn’t big on well known brands, but the things it stocks are usually of excellent quality, and many – such as cold continental meats – are better and also much cheaper than at their giant next door neighbour. Aldi also have a clever trick of having some non-food specials in twice a week at unbeatable prices. Everything from power tools to computers, light bulbs to bathroom furniture. At the start of the summer we bought a giant four berth tent and lots of camping equipment from them when they opened one Tuesday morning (just in case they would sell out before we got there), at prices far better than any of our local outdoors shops could manage. We like Aldi. Anyway…

Whilst I supervised the kids at the rugby, my wife went to Aldi first, and then across to Asda for the few items she couldn’t get at Aldi. We met up at the end of the training, and she told me that she’d seen some winter coats at Aldi – both for my son and me. We wandered down the road to take a look. My son liked his jacket, and I thought the one my wife had found for me was great. They were silly money too, so we bought them. For £18.99 I got a waterproof coat with an unzippable fleece lining. It’s nicely finished, is deliciously warm, and has plenty of pockets. My son’s is like a slightly brighter scaled down version of mine. The fleece lining doesn’t unzip on his, but hey – for £7.99 you really can’t complain – and it is still waterproof.

At home, after lunch, I found myself doing something that I remember doing when I was a child.

I took my new coat, and spent a good ten minutes pouring over it in great detail. I unzipped each of the pockets in turn, and explored them with my hands, seeing what size they were, and wondering where to put each of the things that I carry around with me. I marvelled at the stitching, and carefully cut off the couple of stray thread ends. I examined how the fleece was zipped in, amazed at the trickery used to hide the metal zip ends behind folds in the softer material where it might make contact with my neck.  I tried it on and then took it off again, and then put it back on and did up the zip right to the top. I unfolded the hood from it’s hidden compartment, and then carefully folded it back up. I felt the fabric of the fleece lining and of the outside too. I listened to the sound that my hand made on the outer fabric.

This is something I can always remember doing with clothes, but especially with coats. Coats tend to be quite complicated garments with lots of pockets, so there is much to explore. I can still remember a summer coat (this is the UK after all) that I got when I was about ten. It was green and blue and yellow – very garish in today’s terms, but quite fashionable back in the mid eighties. It had a pouch on the front for your hands, much like a hoody sweat top, but you had to peel the pouch off (it fastened on at the top and one side with velcro) to zip and unzip the jacket – really very unusual. I loved it for it’s unusualness, and for the lovely way it had been stitched together. To me, it was a coat to be proud of. I guess I feel much the same way about my new coat. It is a no-name brand, and in all likelihood the material probably isn’t wonderful quality, and maybe it’ll lose it’s waterproofness quickly. But it is well engineered in a very German way, and well finished, and it was an astonishing bargain to boot.

I keep wanting to put it on – in fact each time I’ve popped out of the office this morning, I’ve put it on. This is unusual – I usually brave the trip to the coffee shop or the post office in just my shirt sleeves, even at this time of the year.

So, I feel like Peter Pan, the boy that never grew up. I feel ten years old again, pouring pride and affection into my new coat. I can’t help it – it’s just me.

Yet whilst my actions may be very much like they were when I was child, I’m concious of the fact that they are not the actions of many, probably most kids. My son is only five, so I can’t compare directly with myself at ten, but his reaction to his new coat was, I think, fairly typical of boys in particular. He liked the colours, pronounced it as  cool and said he’d wear it. When we got home, it got discarded on the kitchen floor and forgotten about until this morning when it was time to leave for school.

Will he react that way at ten? I can’t say, but I suspect he’s more likely to continue to react that way than to have my fascination with the mechanics and design of it.

In lots of ways I’m like Peter Pan – many of the things I do now are the same as when I was a child. However, the child in me is still really rather different from your typical child, so the comparison feels strained to me. I’ve read many times over the last year about immaturity and naiveness in adults with Asperger’s, and associated behaviour being described as child-like. But it occurs to me that I’ve not seen it pointed out that the behaviour is child-like in a peculiarly ASD way – but it most certainly is. And remember how kids with ASDs get described? That’s right – as little professors.

So maybe I’m not like Peter Pan at all. Maybe I’m actually like a little professor, in an adults body, with a strange fascination for winter coats.

A different focus

I wasn’t intending to have a break in writing these last few weeks – it’s just the way that things have worked out. Interestingly, the reasons behind my lack of writing have ended up being very life-affirming for me.

First, the good news: I was approached by someone I used to work with a couple of months ago, about joining them in a new work venture. At the time, I completely failed to grasp the subtle undertones used by them in their email approach. They asked if I knew of anyone with my job skills who might be available, and incidentally, was I available? I couldn’t think of anyone else, and then told them I wasn’t available right now. They pursued me more, and suggested that the job they had available would be pretty exciting, and that maybe I’d like to pop round and have a chat with them about it in more detail. Having thought things over, I decided against pursuing it further, and politely declined.

End of story.

Well, no. I got another email a couple of weeks ago, asking if I might want to reconsider. It was only really when I read this that I realised just how much they were specifically interested in me, and not in whether I knew of anyone with my sort of skills.  You see, this time they said that they were disappointed that I’d turned them down before, and that they were interested in me because I’d worked with them before, and thought I’d be a great fit in their company. I don’t do subtlety very well – it tends to pass me by. Spell things out though, and well, I can see what is really being said.

So, once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I went and had a chat with them, which essentially involved me interviewing them, and them trying to sell the opportunity to me. They succeeded. I join them in a month or so! My skills suit the new job far better than the one I’m doing now. I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into it.

My investigation of my potential new employer shifted my focus somewhat. I found that I was spending a lot of my time thinking about the opportunity, and I also made a concious decision not to do any writing here whilst I was preparing to meet them – to help me focus. Without realising it, my job prospect suddenly took on all the familiar aspects of a special interest, and everything else got pushed to the back burner. I was getting the same intense feelings about the job opportunity as I have been getting most of this year from thinking about Asperger’s. I went from checking my blog visitor stats every hour or two, and ruminating over what to write about several times a day, to not thinking about the blog at all, and checking the stats every few days. Just like that.

The sudden change in focus has surprised me. Introspection regarding Asperger’s, and writing this blog has felt so deeply ingrained in me these last few months, that the possibility of not thinking about it has been, well, unthinkable. And yet, without expecting it, that was exactly what had happened. Initially, I was intrigued.

With Asperger’s shifted from being the core of my thinking, would life be any different?

Well, at times it has felt like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. By not ruminating deeply about Asperger’s and not looking in microscopic detail at how it affects my life, I’ve not been seeing as many aspects of my life where I feel that I don’t do well. My mood has lifted – but then again, I’ve got a new and exciting job to look forward to, so my mood is going to have been lifted by that too. I’m sure the lack of Asperger’s special interest has played it’s part, but I can’t solely put down my better outlook on life down to lack of it.

Here’s the really interesting thing for me: I wondered if my lack of focus on AS would make my life better – whether I would somehow revert to being more normal if AS wasn’t the middle – and indeed edges – of my world. I think that deep down, that little grain of self doubt in me that isn’t sure that I have AS wondered if my lack of AS focus would have an impact on my behaviour. Is any of my behaviour simply down to conditioning over the course of this year? Have I talked myself into being an Aspie? Have I played out a stereotypical Aspie interaction with the world simply because I’ve learned to do so?

No. I’ve already admitted that I simply replaced one special interest with another – AS got replaced with new job. I thought about it and poured over the pros and cons of joining a small business in every bit as much detail as I have recently thought about AS. I spent a day pretty much solely tracking down hardware and then making a recommendation about what I’d like to use on my desktop when I join. This was fully costed out, with alternate options, all spelled out in an email that took me hours to write in a way that I felt was just right. I’ve spent another day pouring over Google maps, trying to work out the best commute for the new job, including costing out the various options. In short, I’ve been every bit as focussed and all consumed by my new special interest as I have been by Asperger’s all these months.

And in the mean time, my daily interaction with the world has gone on, pretty much unchanged. On days where my mood has been especially buoyant, I’ve maybe taken a little more time to try and make small talk with folks – but that too is normal. My interaction with the world has always been governed by mood – I have good days and bad days, just like everyone else. It’s my wife’s 40th in less than a month, and I keep finding myself thinking that I must sort out her present. I have been saying this every day for a couple of weeks now, and have only managed to spend a little time on one day actually doing something about it. As usual, on all the other days where I should have been sorting it out, my focus on something else (the new job in this case) means it simple doesn’t cross my mind at a time where I can do something about it – even if I’ve written it down in my book of things to do.

So there you go – despite not thinking about AS, my life has carried on in the same familiar AS-like way that it has always done. If you can sense a little surprise in my writing you’d be right, because that little grain of self doubt can be very powerful. But that little grain of self doubt is wrong. I don’t act Aspie, it is simply, and always has been a part of who I am.

Frazzled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gah!

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

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

Tools of the trade

In the front left pocket of my jeans is a pen. And my mobile phone. Oh, and a tiny little USB thumb drive with data for things I’m working on. That last item is a new addition in the last couple of months.

In the front right pocket of my jeans are all my coins, and some used tissues. I know. The tissues should really be in the bin. If I need to take my watch off – like when I bath the kids, for instance – it goes in that pocket too, despite me wearing it on my left wrist.

In the back right pocket of my jeans are receipts that I’ve not dealt with yet. The back left pocket of my jeans is always empty.

In my coat, the left hand inside pocket has my wallet, and my list book. The inside right pocket has any keys I happen to have with me.

Predictable.

Comfortable.

Of course, when I’m at work, the pen, the list book and my phone will all be in front of me on my work table – but that’s predictable too.

I’m fussy about the tools I use.

The pen is a Fisher Space Pen, in brushed chrome. I love its simple lines, its small size when shut, and the feel of the brushed metal in my hand. I can of course depend on it to write on anything too.

The list book is a Italian leather-bound lined CIAK Notebook. Its small enough to fit into my coat pocket, yet large enough to be useful. The paper is thick and a lovely cream colour. It is a pleasure to use.

I carry the pen and the book because I need a list to help me organise my day. The list tells a tale of predictability too.

Each day gets it’s own double page in the book.

At the top of right hand page, I write the date:

Wednesday 20090806

My head likes the logic of the date format  use, which has come from my life in IT. If you view the date as a number in its own right, then the number will always be bigger than it was yesterday. I always underline it too. This date format can have hours minutes and seconds added to it too without the incremental pattern breaking, though clearly this level of detail isn’t needed here.

Below the date is a blank line, and then a list of items that I need to do for work that day. I leave a space at the start of the line for a priority number that I can add later, and then I draw a little check box, and then write the task. I use a number of shorthand tricks:

□ #5437: @PC – What needed?
□ Call @TG – place order?
□ AHU4: Fault. Raise call?

At the bottom of the right hand page I write a letter to indicate which shift I am on at work, and then my actual start and end times. Below this I’ll note any time taken for lunch, and next to the time worked I’ll tot up the total for the day, when it’s time for me to go home:

L: 0945 – 1815    8h15m
15m lunch

Above this, I leave a blank line, and then write my list of tasks for the day that are non work related, back up the page towards the other set of tasks.

With my lists written, I can then prioritise. The priorities go before the checkbox, as I mentioned above. I use the following:

* 1 2 3

I hand draw the star as a five pointer, and it generally indicates something I really have to get done. You can guess how priorities 1 to 3 stack up after this.

Occasionally I draw a star with a circle round it. This is used rarely and indicates something that really really really needs to get done that day

I don’t always tackle the list in the order of priority I have assigned. They are my rules, so I can break them as much as I like too. Generally, if I have a 1 or 2 priority item that I know will only take a few minutes to complete, I’ll do that before I tackle a star item that I know will take longer. I have no hard and fast rules about whether work items should be tackled before non-work items.

When I complete an item, the check box for it gets a tick, and I feel a degree of satisfaction.

If some event of interest happens at work, that I might need to refer back to at a later date, I write it between the two lists on the right hand page.

As the day progresses, I’ll start to use the left hand page in the list book. This serves multiple purposes.

Firstly, starting at the bottom, and working up, I’ll list items I’ve spent:

□ Cash in +50
□ Lunch 4.23c
□ Tesco 78.45d -> 16 clothes + groceries

There’s that shorthand again. The ‘c’ or ‘d’ after the amount indicates cash or debit card, and I categorise how our money is spent (Hey – they are just more lists when it comes right down to it). Eventually this all feeds into Wesabe, where I track our spending habits. At that point, the check box will get a tick.

At the top of the left hand page, I’ll often add events happening that day:

* @1030: Team conf call
* Collect A from Nursery on way home

The rest of the page is used for whatever it is needed for. This could be work or non-work related notes, or more frequently sub lists where a work-related list item is broken down into smaller items, each with their own check boxes so I know what I’ve got done.

Weekends are of course rather simpler. There is just one list, and no work times to note.

So there you have it.

You know, until I actually wrote about it just now, I really wasn’t aware of just how much effort I’ve put into devising this system. If you’re not autistic then you’ll probably think I’m crazy to have thought about this so much. If you’re on the spectrum, then I hope that you’ll see just how much order it adds to my life, and can appreciate how much it helps me to get things done.

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?

The anatomy of a special interest

Whilst browsing the web a few evenings ago, I found myself – as I often do – following my thought process to see where it would lead me.

My starting point was a news item I’d seen earlier in the day that had piqued my curiosity. The story was this – a ghost village near to where my parents live in Scotland is to finally be demolished after thirty five years of sitting empty.

I love stories like this – local history and it’s odd quirks in particular have long been a fascination of mine, making this a special interest that makes regular and usually unanticipated repeat visits.

Over the course of an hour and a half, I let my thought processes dictate where this starting point would lead me. It lead to somewhere quite unexpected, but still in the same special interest thread (just) – Drax power station.

What follows is a little dissection of my thought processes that show how I got from A to B, via C on the way.

As I’ve said, we started here – a BBC news story about how the ghost village of Polphail in Argyll is to be demolished thirty five unhappy years after being built and never having been occupied.

The village, it turns out, was a legacy of the Scottish oil boom of the 1970s. A series of dry docks were built at that time around the Scottish coast for building giant concrete oil rigs, and Polphail was built next to one of these to house the expected workers. But the workers never came – the technology changed, and when it comes down to it, this dock and village were built on the west coast of Scotland, and all the oil is off the Eastern seaboard. The government has long since sold off the dock, which has recently been redeveloped into a marina, having served time as a fish farm. The unused village has changed hands several times, and has had a long and unhappy history of promised demolitions which have never been carried out.

A link from the BBC page (the link is no longer there) took me to a collection of photographs by a local photographer, that document the decay in the village, along with surprising details such as a rack of keys for the houses, and washing machines in a launderette – all still in place after thirty five years. The photos are eerily beautiful, and the website is well worth a visit.

Google maps showed me where Polphail was. After seeing it, I wondered if Google could tell me any more about it’s history. I found this – a wiki about secret and obscure sites in Scotland. This had some useful additional information, but I’ll come back to this in a few moments.

At this juncture, I wondered if there were any other ghost villages in the UK, so I searched. I found a couple.

The British military, it would seem has been the main cause of ghost villages in the recent past. During the Second World War, it commandeered three villages for exercises – Tyneham in Doset on the south coast, Imber on Salisbury Plain – not far from Stonehenge, and Mynydd Epynt in Wales. In each case, the government told the occupants that the land was temporarily required for military use, and gave them a month to leave. None has ever had their home returned to them, even to this day.

Figuring all this out took a while, and involved a lot of quick searches and looks via Google Maps to see what was there on the ground today. Some of the websites I found along the way were wonderful examples of amateur passion and campaigning turned towards the direction of a new technology like the web, including this great example here. You’ll find a great tour of Tyneham here.

Some further searching for other possible ghost villages turned up this gem of a website. I’ve barely scraped the surface of it yet, but have it tucked away to devour in full when I get the time. This site just about left me agog, as it talks about a now vanished village that I have driven past the site of many times – Glenbuck in Ayrshire, Scotland. Glenbuck is on the road I drive down when I visit my parents, which is the same road that we used to drive down to visit my grandmother when I was a child. Due to this I know the road well, and can create a wonderful 3D video of it in my head. The old mining town, with houses and a main street, has gone – vanished under a scar of open-cast mining. The industry that made it also in the end tore it up too.

With other ghost villages examined, it’s time to go back to Polphail, where we started.

I noticed on the Secret Scotland website that there were links to various planning documents (isn’t it amazing what you can get easy access to these days online?), so I had a bit of a read of these. Not only did these tell me a lot more of the history of village including the various efforts to try and get the owners to demolish it, but the site also had some interesting reading about how much public money had been wasted on building it in the first place. It wasn’t the cost that grabbed me however, it was mention that the costs for it were listed with the costs to build the Hunterston Deep Water Terminal, which is literally just down the road from where my parents live. I’ve always known that Hunterston was a port for bulk materials, but I’d never really know what. A quick trip to Wikipedia told me that these days coal is offloaded here, and then taken over the road via a large conveyor (easily visible in Google Maps) to the railway, where it is sent elsewhere.

And this is where Drax comes in. Wikipedia told me that one of the places that coal from Hunterston is shipped to is Drax – a huge coal-fired power station located in my neck of the woods, and just a couple of miles down the road from where I worked for a little over two years. Drax is huge and imposing – on a clear day you can see it from near my house, which is some twenty miles away as the crow flies. It’s huge in terms of output too – on it’s own it can provide 7% of the UK’s electricity, and if you classed Drax as a country in it’s own right, it would rank as the 76th biggest produces of CO2 in the world. Wow!

So – Polphail to Drax, via Tyneham and Glenbuck. All in all a very interesting ninety minutes.

Was it really ninety minutes? It seemed like much less time than that. I’ve been writing this piece for about that amount of time too, and once more the time has flown. This is what special interests are about – I get so thoroughly absorbed in them that time just disappears.

I think the above dissection of my thought processes gives a good example of how special interests drag me in, and of how my brain becomes a huge sponge for new information, devouring anything and everything vaguely related that I can find.

It also shows the other side of special interests too – the desire to share the knowledge I’ve learnt, often in detail to people that aren’t interested. This article is exactly that, but in written form.

I’d be willing to bet that some of those who start reading don’t make it here, and I can’t blame them.

As for you – well thank you for listening!

Dysfunction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mother of all Special Interests

Warning: Many of my articles may appear to be a bit unusual to those of you who don’t have an autism spectrum disorder. I do however usually expect those of you with an ASD to understand and empathise with that I’ve got to say, and I trust that you do. Be warned that this article may appear to be very left-field even to those of you who usually understand my work. The article is also rather long.

The following is all true and from the heart. I hope you can take it at face value.

I grew up in a family of mixed but unspoken religious views.

My father never spoke about his take on religion, and my mother went to the local Methodist church every Sunday. Until the age of eleven or so, my brother and I went too, and attended the Sunday School as well.

By the age of ten or eleven I was developing a strong sense of logic, one that has stayed with me ever since. I reached the conclusion at around that age that the bible was just a set of stories – the people mentioned had never existed, and that the church was playing a cruel trick on those who attended. I also decided that Sunday School was a lightly masked attempt at brain washing those who were too young to make up their own minds to become believers.

I told my mother about my thoughts, and following a brief argument I no longer attended church. I had made my own mind up, and logic told me that church wasn’t for me. Over the next few years I’d tell my school mates that I was an atheist if anything remotely like religion cropped up as a conversation.

Then, when I was fifteen, something happened that would change how I saw the world forever. I changed my views on religion and why we are here, and many other things besides.

You may be suspecting that I had something of a religious awakening, and in some ways it was – but at the same time it was something completely different.

This is the story behind what would turn out to be the biggest and most obsessive special interest of my life to this date, and the profound effects it has had on me.

When I was fifteen, I had an after-school newspaper delivery round. I’d pick up the local evening paper from the little newsagents a half mile from my house, and I’d spend forty five minutes or so wending my way back home delivering papers as I went. I’d done this for the previous couple of years, and could do the job pretty much with my eyes closed. I never did though – then as now I spent my time observing the world, seeing the patterns in every day things.

It was early autumn, and the evenings were drawing in. It was around 16:45 and still light – dusk was probably another hour away. I’d finished delivering the papers and was making my way up the little lane that led to our house. The road is single track and one way with the traffic flowing in the opposite direction to my up-hill walk, so I walked close to the side, near to the slightly ramshackle dry stone wall. As I passed the gate into the field on my left, something flew silently over my head, above the trees. Thirty seconds or so later I was passing the first of the houses on my left something caught my eye, and I looked up, whilst still walking.

The next five or six seconds would change my life forever.

What I saw made me stare wide eyed. I followed it, whilst still walking as it tracked across from the left of my view, over the park to my right and over the brow of the hill. I was agog, but not frightened. It was dark in colour, and cigar shaped. It had an intensely bright white light about half way along it that stayed on, and about half way through my sighting an intense red light came on towards the back of the object and then stayed on. Both lights had a strange single colour wavelength feel to them – much more like the colour you get from an LED than from a regular light. The object made no sound, and size-wise was equivalent to holding my thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart at arms-length.

I walked the remaining ninety seconds or so home, and sat down a little dazed. I was the first one home. What had I seen? We lived at that time about 20 miles away from one the UK’s large airports, and our house was over one of the regular approach paths to it. I saw planes every day, and they didn’t look like this, nor sound like it either. What’s more the object was flying at 90 degrees to the usual flight path, and felt to be flying much lower, although it’s impossible to judge the height of an object that is uniform in size and colour. Perhaps it was very small and flying low and fast, or maybe it was much bigger and flying slower. I couldn’t say then, and I can’t say now.

My mother arrived home some fifteen minutes later, and I made a decision about what I’d seen. “I’ve just seen a UFO”, I told her, and I explained what I’d seen. I don’t remember her reaction, or indeed my immediate thoughts and feeling from that point about it in detail.

What I can say is that my life took a new direction from that point onwards. I needed to know more. I took books out of the library about UFOs. I bought some books with my pocket money too. I read everything I could find. I joined the regional UFO group, and started getting and pouring over their amateur magazine.

In ways similar to my later discovery and dawn of understanding of Asperger’s, I started to see that I was far from alone in the sort of experience I had witnessed.

The group I’d joined had aspirations being UK wide, and they were publishing various case studies of famous (well in UFO lore at any rate) events. I spent my spare cash on buying lots of it, re-reading it over and over again.

Clearly, this had become in Asperger’s terms, a special interest. It was so much more than that though. It was obsessional. It was deeper than that even. Getting embroiled in a subject like this is in my book very similar to getting deeply into religion. You ask the same sorts of philosophical questions about where you come from, and just what your role in the universe is. Where did we come from? As a deep logical thinker and from a science background, this was a profound question to be asking.

And then there was the anxiety. This perhaps is the one feeling that you wouldn’t see coming. The more I read, the more I saw a hidden sinister side to things. I had a huge feeling that something big and organised was going on across the world, and that whilst it was understandable that the populace didn’t know about it, it seemed that perhaps the governments didn’t know it either. If they did, I got the impression they were powerless. That feeling not only made me hideously anxious at times, I also found it chilling, and at times terrifying. It felt like I was in on a big secret, and that no-one around me saw it.

Odd things happened. I attended two UFO conferences put on by the regional group that I’d joined. These proved to be strangely tense affairs, with people looking shiftily at each other for the whole day. One of the speakers mentioned that he was aware that there were undercover military people in the room. Another speaker’s presentation was ruined because their slides had been tampered with, rearranged into the wrong order. A previously working slide projector suddenly didn’t work when it was needed for the first time. All in all these conferences were strange.

And then there was the day when I was around 18, where I told my then girlfriend about my sighting. She went white, and started to tremble. She couldn’t immediately tell me why. Eventually, on another day she felt able to tell me. A couple of years previously she’d turned a corner on a road near her house and confronted a huge object hovering above the road. Despite not being good at reading non verbal signals, I could see she was terrified just recounting this to me. She said her memory of what happened next was hazy, and that she couldn’t tell me any more that day. Indeed she never chose to bring the subject up again. I can’t say that I blame her.

My obsession followed me to University when I was 19. As I’ve written elsewhere, I had trouble making friends at University, and I felt very disjointed from the usual university life. I received some counselling towards the end of my first year there, and as the obsession-lead anxiety was at times a big part of the problem, I once spent a whole hour of counselling just pouring out my knowledge and theories of UFOs to the counsellor. How very wonderfully, one-sidedly, Aspie.

Eventually the obsession waned. I think this probably happened once I left university, moved to London, got as job, and started living with my girlfriend. Perhaps I’d grown up a little. Perhaps I found new special interests that took it’s place. By the time this happened, UFOs had been my obsessional special interest for something like seven years. It had taken over my life at times, and had permeated pretty much every aspect of my life.

It’s never quite gone away. The fear and anxiety flares up from time to time. I repeated my hour-long monologue to another counsellor when I was being treated for depression in my final years in London. It cropped up again at bed time last night, which is why I’m writing this today. Last night I could feel the fear once more, and could hear my heart beating in my chest.

The reasons for it recurring, of course, is that I have no concrete answers. I may have spend huge amounts of time and effort trying to understand what my sighting meant, and what lay behind it, but I never did reach any conclusions that I had any way of proving.

Conclusions about UFOs are hard to come by. Many thousands of people see unidentified objects in the sky every year. Many of these are trained observers. There are a remarkably small number of similar shapes of object that come up time and again, and there are characteristics such as the lack of any noise from the object that are very commonly reported too. My logic tells me that I saw something real. Extrapolating that tells me that thousands of people a year also see real objects.

Do governments have a better picture of what is going on than I do? I suspect so, to a degree.

Were famous incidents such as the supposed Roswell crash actually UFO related? I have no way of knowing.  I’d put money on these objects having crashed somewhere at some time. But Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947? I don’t know.

Did I see something man-made and super secret? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Reports from the 1940’s talk of similar objects. I doubt very much we had the appropriate technology at that point in time.

Did the Dogon tribe from Mali get their thousands of years old folk lore that appears to rely on modern astronomy from extra terrestrials? I don’t know. I’ve read a book that suggests they did.

Were the stunning photos taken by Ed Walters in Gulf Breeze, Florida, in the late 1980s actually faked? I don’t know, but on the balance of probabilities, I suspect so.

Is the whole Majestic 12 thing for real? I don’t know. Could be. Might not be. People really do go to unimaginably long lengths to fake UFO-related material, and I’ve never understood the rationale behind that, so who knows. In the midsts of the obsession, the Majestic 12 documents seemed like a smoking gun. But was that just gullibility on my part?

I have, however, reached conclusions of sorts about God and my place in the universe.

I think life exists in many places in the vastness of space, and whilst I don’t believe in a God that took his time to create the Earth and everything on it, I can these days happily conclude there is some form of higher power at play. This may, as I tend to think,  spring from the physics of the universe itself, but I see no problem with someone else describing this as God, or Allah, or anything else for that matter. My place in things is here on earth at a wonderfully exciting point in human existence. I’m a tiny dot in a vast existence that stretches billions of miles in all directions, and that feels a good place to be.

What did I actually see that day half a life time ago? I don’t know.

But I did see something real, and it has shaped my life.