The work problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggestions welcome!

Camouflage, understanding, and a Big Professor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is exactly what I do.

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

I become a Big Professor.

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

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.

Opening up: A stressful couple of weeks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time will tell. Wish me luck.

Feeling the fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dinner party, Aspie style

Last weekend, my wife and I hosted a dinner party for six. This is an unusual event in our household, but we had been to evenings at the other couples houses recently, so it was our turn to entertain.

With my new-found hyper-awareness of how my Asperger’s affects me, I wondered how the evening would go, and how my AS would colour things. As it happens, it went well.

Before the day itself, my wife and I split up the jobs. She was to sort out the nibbles and the dessert, and I was to cook the main course. We decided that as we don’t have much practice of juggling cooking and entertaining at the same time, that we’d stick to a pre-prepared dessert, and a main course that we cook regularly – a good old fashioned British roast dinner.

On the morning of the event, I did my first Aspie trick – I made a list. It was a timeline from mid-afternoon of when everything needed to be prepared, go in/out of the oven, and when we’d fit in feeding the kids and bathing them etc as well. With my list done, I was confident I knew the schedule. If I hadn’t taken the time to make it, then nothing would have been ready in time. As it turned out, the list worked wonderfully.

When our guests arrived, the kids were safely asleep in bed, my wife had finished assembling the nibbles, and I was hard at work cooking. My wife did the pre-dinner entertaining whilst I got all the final bits of the main course ready. This worked well. I was focussed, the food got delivered on schedule, and everyone enjoyed it. Great.

What I perhaps wasn’t expecting was just how little I would have to contribute after the meal was done. In usual dinner party style we adjourned to the lounge for coffee and chocolates and grown up chatter. But I had nothing left to give. Once more, I was the quiet one in the corner that wasn’t joining in with the conversation very much.

You may be surprised to hear that I wasn’t expecting this. I’m usually quite chatty at dinner parties, especially once alcohol has kicked in a bit. As someone who doesn’t discuss things verbally with people all that often or indeed all that articulately, rare occurrences like dinner parties at other people’s houses tend to provide something of an outlet for me. Alcohol helps.

But not that night. The intense focus on the list of things that needed doing, and the effort involved in preparing everything had wiped me out. I wanted so much for everyone to be impressed with the food that I had put every last ounce of effort into it, and left nothing for the social side of the evening.

This is another of my traits that I put down to my AS. Whenever I concentrate intently on something for any length of time I end up feeling tired and withdrawn. It’s a similar feeling to the one I get when I’ve experienced sensory overload. I feel vacant, and almost as though I’m looking at a video of the world around me rather than real life – like I’m detached from reality in some way. I get the feeling even after short periods of concentration – I’ll get it after publishing this article, for instance.

At least, with only six of us there, there wasn’t a great deal of time spent with people talking over each other. This meant that whilst I may not have been saying much, I was at least able to follow and enjoy the conversations. I think six people is about the right number for me for an evening like this. Any more and regardless of whether I’m the host or not, I’ll start to loose track of conversations, and the general background noise will start to annoy me and eventually overload me.

Did anyone notice my lack of input? I’m not sure, but it probably doesn’t matter. Everyone – me included – had a good time, and that is more important.

It’s interesting that we chose a roast dinner for the main course as we thought that would be an easy option. I think that the next time we entertain in this way, I’ll try and come up with a main course that can have at least some elements prepared ahead of time.

That way I might have a little something left to give in the second half of the evening.

Common sense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the record:

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

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

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

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

A not-so-mild form of autism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a bit of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meltdown

When I first started to discover Asperger’s and the various traits that those with it often possess, I was a little surprised by the concept of meltdowns.

Pretty much every trait I read about got a tick in my own personal list of traits that I have too, but I struggled to find a box for meltdowns, and indeed decided in the end that I didn’t have them.

The thing is, though, that I do have them – I just didn’t recognise them.

Through my pre-Asperger eyes of someone who suffered from occasional depression, it was very easy to write off my meltdowns as a bad depression day, but the problem with that description is that it takes no account of what lead to the meltdown.

Part of the reason I’m writing this article now, is that perhaps for the first time, I can see that due to various things that have happened, I’m sitting on the precipice of a meltdown right now.

So – how do I feel right now? Agitated is perhaps the best over all description. I’m rather hyperactive today, and my stress levels are very high. My brain is running at a thousand miles an hour through various potential articles for this blog, and through various Asperger’s attributes. The thoughts are bouncing around and none of them can get focus. If I try and concentrate on one at a time, then I almost instantly forget the other thoughts. This in itself is intensely annoying – it’s only now that I’ve been able to sit down and start writing, and I didn’t want to lose any of the different aspects that I was pondering over.

Why am I like this today? Well, I took an unexpected phone call yesterday that put a whole load of guilt on me. Someone in my family offloaded their problems on to me, and I feel guilty that I have had my part in that person feeling the way they do. That’s not the whole story, though. The bigger problem is that I feel that I hold the key in my hand to explain to that person a good deal of why they feel the way they do. However, by doing so, I’d be opening a huge can of worms that would reverberate through my extended family for some time.

I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I don’t know what to do. My guilt is intense, yet I know that what is missing from the situation is understanding on the part of the other person, and that they also need to seek some help from a professional for what has become a clinical depression. Yet dispensing that knowledge would throw my extended family into chaos, and I can’t predict what the outcome would be.

I’m dancing around the specifics here on purpose. I find it difficult to say them even here on this anonymous blog. I’m concious that one day this blog may not be anonymous any more, and I worry about how this article may be perceived by those same family members after the fact. The information I have almost feels like a dirty secret.

It’s not a dirty secret, of course, it’s simply Asperger’s, which I’m sure crops up a lot through my family. No one right now talks about it, and I have to assume that for the most part, those affected and those around them are unaware of it’s existence. It even may be the case that everyone affected barring me has no idea of it. Whilst they don’t know it exists, it sure as hell impacts them, and at times very badly.

The family member that offloaded onto me yesterday was ultimately complaining about the traits of those in the family with Aspergers wearing her down to the point of absolute frustration. Those affecting her are those closest to her, and understandably through lack of understanding she sees idleness and lack of caring from those people as the causes for her current pain.

We’re not idle nor lacking in the caring department. We’re just typically Aspergic, and find it difficult to express ourselves, especially verbally – which is where my guilt lies – I don’t phone or do much to keep in touch. I find using the phone difficult, and I never known what to say past the usual pre-learnt small talk of how people are and what they have been up to. Making small talk is also a problem, because it’s never been important to me in the same way that it is to typical people. I understand that it is important these days – I know that typical people don’t just intuitively do it, they enjoy it, they need to do it, and it helps build and confirm their social structure and standing. That doesn’t hold for me though – that concept simply doesn’t apply.

So, that’s the problem of the day.

If I look back to previous meltdown situations, then one of two things has tended to happen when I’ve been presented with just too much stress to deal with. I’ve either collapsed in a withdrawn gibbering heap – as it often the case with Aspies, or I’ve vented via writing.

The venting via writing is interesting – it has often been the cause of my getting into trouble at work by sending emails that point out all the problems in the team or with the software we are developing. In cases like these, the meltdown has been caused by a combination of bad practice at work and too much work load, often caused in the first place by the bad practice. My stress soars, and eventually, something has to give, and instead of collapsing in a heap and taking time off sick with stress, I’ve vented all my thoughts – inappropriately, with fingers of blame – in email. I’m not saying that collapsing in a heap would be the right solution, incidentally – the right solution would be not to get into that position in the first place, if at all possible.

Extreme emotional stress has caused both types of reaction over the years, but mostly the gibbering  heap. Often an emotionally triggered meltdown happens over a much shorter period of time – something will happen, and bam – I’ll be unable to cope within minutes. I withdraw and become quiet and tearful. I feel like I’ve put up an invisible shield, and that if I stay quiet, then the emotional problem won’t be able to touch me any more. Those around me get frustrated, because I can’t answer their questions – it feels to them like I’m avoiding the difficult situation.

Have I avoided a meltdown today? Well, I’ve certainly vented by writing this, and feel much better for it. I did the same last night too, by writing a much shorter version of this post as a draft. That meant I slept well, which is good news too. By externalising in some way, I avoid the gibbering heap phase, and by doing the venting in a direction where I’m not pointing fingers, just maybe I don’t put myself in a position where I get unhelpful come back.

See – in a way, I was dancing around the specifics above because I saw what I was doing was venting in just the same way as with all those angry emails that pointed the finger at work. My brain spotted the pattern and responded by telling me to hold back, to avoid any possible negative come back. I’m glad I felt able to say what the root of the issue was in the end, without making it too negative, and without apportioning any blame.

No-one is to blame for the position my family is in right now. That doesn’t make the right way forward any easier to see, my guilt any less real, nor make the hurt felt by some any less painful.

Do I upset the apple cart and live with the consequences, or do I continue to pretend that I don’t know why my family is the way it is?

I don’t have an answer.

I do, however feel much further from meltdown now. My stress has abated some, and my mind isn’t racing in the way it was. Maybe now I’ll be able to get some work done.

Settling in

I often hear other Aspies express the thought that they dislike change, and that they find change to be stressful.

I too suffer from this problem, so can empathise with all those that this problem affects.

Indeed, the very first article I wrote on this site talked about how changes to routine are difficult for me, using the metaphor that I’m a train on a track, and when the change comes along, I tend to want to keep on going on the rails.

There’s another facet to this issue that I need to talk about as well – and that’s the problems I have settling in to new places.

This issue most obviously rears it’s head when I change jobs, but equally, other big location changes such as moving house  and even things like getting to grip with my finances (which I did recently) can cause similar feelings of stress and disorientation.

I’m going to focus on what it’s like when I change job, because it’s probably the easiest of the scenarios for me to put into words.

Once I’ve been working somewhere for a while, I could just about walk around it blindfolded. I know the shape, size and layout of all the rooms, and how they fit together. I know who sits at every desk, and how best to approach them – be it in person, on the phone or by email, etc. This is the closest I come to work Nirvana – all the jigsaw pieces fit together well, and I can interact with both the work environment and it’s people efficiently. All of my jobs so far have ended up at this point, eventually.

Usually it takes me at least six months to get there. The time leading up to it is a big curved graph of decreasing stress and disorientation.

I always find my first week in a new job to be incredibly disorienting. As is the common courtesy, I’ll usually have been show round the facilities and introduced to team mates and probably others that I’ll come into contact with on my first day. I don’t know about anyone else, but this plain doesn’t work for me. I suspect that my initial stress levels are so high that I fail to take in any names – sometimes not even the name of the person who has just shown me around. I also think that I’m prioritising trying to take in the spacial arrangement of the office and the other facilities. I have some deep down need to know my surroundings, and this seems to override the perhaps more important (in a typical view) priority of getting to know those i’ll be working with.

After an hour or so, I’ll often have to ask the person on the desk next to me where the toilet is. Despite trying to take it in on the tour, I’ll most likely have forgotten if it is more than a room and a corridor away. What’s more, I’ll feel it essential to be overly polite to the person I’m talking to. I’ll most likely start my questioning with something like, “Excuse me, sorry to interrupt but…”.

Those first couple of weeks will feel like I’m an intruder in all the public spaces. Whilst I may get to feel at home at my desk in a few days, I’ll find the canteen and yes, probably the toilets too to be an alien landscape into which I’ve strayed and in which I’m not welcome. It’s not that anyone is setting out to make me feel unwelcome – that’s just how the surroundings feel – they are unfamiliar and disorienting to me.

I kept a track when I changed jobs last year of how long it took me to learn the names of those in the office. It’s not a large office in this case – only a dozen people. After a week, I had remembered the names of about half of those in the office, and after two weeks I had all bar a couple of names off by heart. First names, at least. Some surnames took many weeks to learn. Those whose first names took longest to learn were those with whom I had no reason to communicate – which is perhaps obvious.

So, after two to three weeks in a typical job I’ll know the names of those around me, and the way around the facilities. I’ll also have some idea of the roles that those around me have too, and who to approach for what. I won’t feel settled, however, nor part of the team. This takes far longer – as I have already said, typically six months or so. Until that time I feel detached – an outsider. I do what I can to fit in, but as I dislike small talk and find it difficult to do most of the time, this perhaps prolongs the length of time I spend in my detached limbo. I spend this time feeling like I’m faking it, and wondering if anyone has spotted that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Eventually, however, all the jigsaw pieces fit, and I feel comfortable and part of the team.

The same feelings apply for big events like moving house or even organising my finances. Clearly the ground rules involved are somewhat different in these cases, but the feelings of not belonging and being disoriented are the same.

I have one final example. At high school age, I chose to go to a school that was outside of the catchment area for my junior school. This meant that barring one friend who did the same thing, I moved to a school where I knew nobody. I was part of the decision making process for this, but ultimately I used my parent’s logic, and agreed with their choice. The school had a better reputation and better exam results than the local one.

I felt very alone and out of place for a long time at that school. After a term or two, my mother asked me how I was liking it. “I don’t fit in”, I told her, and it was true. I can’t imagine how that must have felt for my mother – it must have been awful to hear. Eventually I fitted in to a degree with the other misfits in my year, and had friends of sorts who would last me the remainder of my time in the school.

So, my feelings of disorientation and of not fitting go back a long way, and still show themselves frequently. Obviously everyone – Aspie or not – is going to take some time to settle into a new experience, but it certainly looks to me like it doesn’t take a typical person months. Do any of you experience similar things?