Metaphors, and a leap of logic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great stuff, Anna – thanks for the insight.

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.

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.

Why all those unneeded words are needed. Maybe.

I wrote last week about how I saw similarities with my own writing style and those of other Aspies whose blogs I read. The article has caused a lot of comment, with points made both for an against what I was saying.

One of the big style cues I noted was the use of a lot of qualifiers in my text – something that Gavin Bollard quite nicely described as writing in a ‘flowery’ style. I put a lot of these qualifiers in my writing, as, I note, do many other Aspies.

Having spotted the pattern, I have turned my attention as to why I might do this. I have a solution that makes sense to to me, so I thought I’d share it, and see what you all think.

Those of you who grew up with undiagnosed Asperger’s will well know the feeling that nothing ever quite makes sense in the world, and that people and their responses to situations are often wildly unpredictable. My response to a given situation often seems to be atypical from the population at large, and these faux pas often cause either derision or conflict.

I, for one, have built up something of a defence to this sort of thing over the years – I’ve had to to survive and keep my self-respect intact, and I suspect that it’s the path that many people with AS take. I do hope you’ll let me know as to whether it is the case with you too or not.

It’s often the case that I can’t tell ahead of time whether my response to a given situation is appropriate, and the one that an ordinary person would be expected to give. Thus I go into many situations ‘blind’, with my best guess, and braced for a negative response of some sort.

And this is where the flowery language comes in. When I’m not sure of myself, and suspect that I may end up eliciting a negative response for something, I’ll start adding in qualifiers. This happens both for verbal and written communication. By doing this, I’m saying to the other person, “What I’m saying/writing may be the case. It’s certainly the way I see things, but please tell me if you think I’m wrong, and don’t be too harsh on me if it seems ridiculous to you”.

Over the years, my use of this sort of language has ballooned. I think this is because as I’ve got older I’ve seen more and more clearly just how out of the ordinary my responses can often be. I’m not thick-skinned (is this a typical Aspie characteristic too?), and therefore I throw in anything I can say or write that might help diffuse any potential conflict. I’d rather do this and sound a little odd than sound rediculous and have my feelings hurt and confidence dented.

If my background stress or anxiety is up, then I use this sort of qualifier even more often, as I’ll in general feel less sure about myself and what I’m saying.

And so, the qualifiers show up a lot in my writing on this site. Whilst what I’m writing makes sense to me, and is a genuine description of the way I see things, I still don’t trust that I’m right, and half expect everyone who reads the site to laugh at what I’ve written, and publicly humiliate me.

You don’t, of course, but that’s an indication of just how much this tendency to faux pas has affected me over the years.

An unusual feeling

When I first started writing this blog, I didn’t know where it would take me. I still don’t, to be honest, but the path which I find myself down now is not the one I thought I’d be down.

Popularity is an odd phenomenon. I’ve never sought it, perhaps because I fear it would show me for the social charlatan that I am. Instead I tend to seek obscurity, and in social gatherings I’m the aloof one in the background somewhere.

Some unexpected things have happened to my blog in the last couple of weeks. Firstly, people have started to actually read it. What’s more, they are commenting on what I write. This wasn’t what I expected when I started the blog.

It’s great – and entirely a surprise – that people are reading what I write, and that they are coming back for repeat visits. I had a lot to express when I started the blog – I still do – but I wrote thinking that ultimately the only person that was likely to be interested was me. That didn’t matter one jot – I needed to express things, and writing it all formally gave me a framework within which to work that was comfortable for me. Making it public on the Internet forced me to think about what I was writing, to a degree.

I’ve worked in online retail, have published my own writing on the Internet before, and am familiar with the various methods of tracking site traffic, so when I set up my blog I added Google Analytics tracking to it. I may have had low expectations as to other people visiting, but I still wanted to see the figures. I’ve also done some other tricks, such as trying to optimise my site keywords to help make the entries show up better in search engine results. The first three months went pretty much as I expected. Visitor numbers could be counted on a couple of fingers most days, and page impressions across both hands, often easily. The line was flat – my blog was, predicably, going nowhere fast.

However, I got my first comments really quite early on and was over the moon. Someone had not only read what I had written, but they had empathised too! Fantastic!

Then a couple of weeks ago the slow creep of comments started to speed up, and finally overtook the number of articles I’d written. At about the same time, the page impressions per day were starting to ramp up. On April the 7th, I had my first day where page impressions excluding my own visits and spider traffic went over 100. Add in the pages viewed in RSS, and I hit close to 150 page views. In the last month 132 different people have viewed pages on my site, including visitors from five continents, and places as far apart as New Zealand, Mexico, Poland, India and Russia. Most visitors are from the US, and the UK.

Is my blog popular? Of course not – not in the grand scheme of things. A grand total of 11 people subscribe to my RSS feed, one of those is me (to check it’s not broken), and I suspect most of the others are amongst those who also visit the site itself regularly. Popular blogs will do many tens of thousands of page impressions a day, and will also have thousands of RSS subscribers.

I feel popular, however. And for someone who courts obscurity, that’s an odd thing. I think, perhaps I feel safe hidden behind my false name on a website that can’t easily be traced back to me. I also feel safe because those of you who do read what I have to say understand me, most of the time. You understand because you have Asperger’s or a similar condition. I can’t tell you how unusual that feeling is. I’m usually the one in social settings that feels they don’t fit in, and that they don’t have anything useful to say – hence the aloofness off in the corner. It doesn’t work that way here though, and so to each and every one of you that has read what I have to say, and especially to those who have taken the time to comment, I say thank you. I hope you’ll continue to come back and provide me with interesting comments.

There is of course another reason for writing this article. It demonstrates quite effectively one of my Asperger’s traits. I can chat away in detail for hours about information that I’ve gathered that only has any significance to me. That famous Aspie trait works in writing too!

Why on earth would you want to know how many visitors my site has had? I still felt I had to tell you though…

Wasn’t it obvious?

If you’ve read a few of my articles, you may be left thinking that I surely must have noticed that I had Asperger’s, or at least that I had something that was causing me problems in my life, and that I should thus have been able to tackle it.

Well, yes and no.

As I’ve written in other articles, I’ve always been aware that I was different. However, I had no well-defined point of reference with which to compare myself. This may sound a little odd, as like everyone else I live in and amongst other people. Don’t they provide a good point of reference?

No.

If you think about it, all you have to go on is what other people do and say, and for the most part this doesn’t give very much away. Also, everyone is unique – that’s easy to see, and frankly, clouds the view. If everyone is unique, and I can see that I’m different to everyone else, well, that makes me pretty normal, doesn’t it?

What’s much more difficult to see from simple observation is that there is an underlying neurological make-up that works in pretty much the same way across all ordinary people, and that it is this that is different in those of us with Asperger’s. You can’t see this through simple observation, and if you don’t know what you are looking for, how are you going to find it? I’m not typical, so how would I know how someone who is typical works? The only accurate point of reference I have is me.

I’ve only recently, at the age of 35 discovered just how different my make-up is compared to a typical person. I’ve discovered it by reading specifically about the differences, and then observing them in action. If it wasn’t for the work of those who have thoroughly researched Asperger’s, I wouldn’t know – they have provided me with the well-defined point of reference that has been missing all my life.

Without a point of reference to lead me in the right direction, I’ve been left for the whole of my adult life with a slight sense of something being not quite right. I’ve made many attempts over the years to figure out what was causing it, but it wasn’t until last year that I had my that explains everything moment.

My usual stock thoughts on my problem have been that I’m shy, and a little under confident. When other explanations have failed to fit, this is what I have fallen back on. Over the years I’ve thought I was suffering from depression – I have been from time to time, but this has been a symptom, not the cause. I’ve also wondered if I had an unusual mix of male and female characteristics – whether I was a lesbian in a male body if you like. It’s not difficult to see how I reached this conclusion – I am very sensitive, emotional, gentle and caring – all of which are attributes I associate more with women than men. Interestingly, my trait of feeling over-stimulated from too much visual and audible input also feels like a female characteristic too. I’m not sure why it feels that way to me, but that’s the way it’s always been.

I’ve had therapy for depression, which focussed on my lack of confidence and tried to teach me techiques to stop ruminating over things. What it didn’t do was address why I was depressed and ruminating in the first place. That remained a mystery. There was nothing that had happened in my life that appeared to account for it. Years later I received another round of therapy to tackle my anxiety. That too didn’t tackle why I might have cause to be feeling anxious, but it did provide useful techniques to help control it. In the end it also proved to be the gateway to discovering I had Asperger’s.

I can’t emphasise enough just how enlightening it was to read about Asperger’s for the first time. It really did feel like it explained everything.

I know why I’m different now. Vivre la difference!

How I was taken in by press distortion

The New Scientist has just published an interesting article by Simon Baron-Cohen about how his latest research into autism got misrepresented in the UK press earlier this year.

Simon points out that whilst the authors of the article, which appeared in The Guardian in the UK, did a reasonable job of reporting the actual facts of the study – how it measured a correlation between testosterone levels  in the amniotic fluid of 235 children who do not have autism and various character traits – the article badly misrepresented the results of the study. Simon feels that the editors of the article distorted the facts by attaching misleading and wrong headlines and by using an emotive picture. The article also linked the research to pre-natal testing for autism – something which Baron-Cohen points out wasn’t a part of the research at all.
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Small mistake, big effect

My anxiety is back once more.

Anxiety is my big co-morbid condition. I’m fairly certain these days that it has been caused and reinforced over the years because of my Asperger’s and my reaction to a world that has never quite made sense or felt predictable to me.

I’ve had a few days feeling very positive and confident, and all of a sudden it’s all evaporated again.
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Don’t answer that…

Compulsion is a key trait in my Asperger’s, and it seems to be behind one of the more annoying things that I do regularly.

I answer rhetorical questions. I can’t help doing it, and even though I usually know these days when they are meant to be rhetorical, I still feel that I have to answer.
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Digging a hole the Aspie way

I’ve spent much of the last three weekends digging a big hole in our back garden, so that we can get some flat land onto which to build a garden shed.

The hard manual labour involved in the digging and disposing of five-or-so tonnes of soil and clay has had a wonderful effect on my mood, and the time spent alone doing the job has helped me to see just how some of my Asperger’s traits show themselves.

The soil I’ve dug out has been put into large plastic bags weighing something like 40kg each when full, and has then been loaded into the back of our car, fifteen bags at a time and driven to the local tip, where it has gone into the rubble skip to be recycled. I’ve so far filled, driven and emptied 120 bags-full over three weekends. Doing so has shown a very exacting repetitive aspect to my nature. After a little experimentation in the first couple of trips, the same pattern was then followed each time:

The bags were loaded three at a time into my wheel barrow (same order of loading the barrow each time), and wheeled round the house to the car. Once there, they were off-loaded in the same order and stacked into the boot and folded-down back seats of the car, once again in the same order. With the car full, I drove to the tip, and then unloaded in the same order once more, in the reverse of the order that I loaded, with the last six bags coming out via the rear door of the car rather than the boot.

Repetitive. It felt right, and it felt good – this was the way to do it. Loading and unloading in a different order simply didn’t cross my mind – I knew this was the best way to do it.

The actual act of the digging itself put me deep into the zone. I was at one with my spade and the hole I was digging. The rest of the world was a blur around me. I worked for hours at a stretch and it seemed like no time had passed. It was hard work, and I was sweaty and achey at the end of each day, yet whilst I worked I didn’t feel it. I only felt tired and sore once I’d stopped and sat down.

The exercise and alone time really did wonders for my mood. My anxiety is pretty much non-existent right now, and I have a huge sense of achievement and of peace and calm in me. I’ve written recently about not knowing if I’ve done a good job or not, well, in this case I know I’ve done it. But then again, I know we need the shed, and I know that if I don’t do the digging we won’t be getting one. I can see the results. I know I’ve done a good job this time.

And then there was the hole that needed filling…

Our garden has a couple of feet of soil, and then below that is solid orange clay. I needed to remove an old wooden gatepost from part of the area I was digging, as the new shed was going to be on top of it. After digging round the post and using my own weight to pull the post over and out of the hole, I was left with an eighteen inch deep and foot wide hole in the clay where the post and it’s concrete footings had been.

I decided that I had to fill the hole with clay. Not soil. Clay only. In my mind there was a logic to this – if I filled this big hole with soil, then when it rained it would fill with water at a different rate than if I filled it with clay. The hole was going to be near the edge below my shed, and I didn’t want my shed to subside where the hole had been.

I know it’s crazy, and doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but I spent 30 minutes separating clay from soil in the large pile that I’d dug out that hadn’t yet been bagged up. The big bits were easy, but the little bits took a while. In the end, the hole was filled. With clay.

At the time, this made perfect sense. It was the right way to do the job. Would it really have made a difference if I’d filled the hole with soil? No. It was a hole surrounded by miles of clay. The soil wouldn’t exactly go anywhere, would it?

So there you have it – a simple thing like digging a hole in the garden shows a whole range of my more Aspie-like behaviours.