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.

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A different focus

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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!

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The anatomy of a special interest

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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.

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Dysfunction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ironing my way to happiness

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I thought there would be an easy solution to this – create and use some form of written to-do list. I figured this out many years ago in my early years of work, and over the years, my process of list writing has evolved and been refined many times. I’ve flirted with computerised lists and various book methodologies, but have always ended up back with a daily hand written list that I create each morning, because it works best for me. The list is very regimented in the way it is written down, yet changes subtly every few weeks as I decided to use some new tweak that I think will help me.

So, I get things done these days, yes?

Well, kind of.

There is no denying that having a to-do list has improved my ability to concentrate and complete work enormously, but actually it’s ended up highlighting another issue too.

I have a terrible problem with procrastination.

With my to-do list constantly with me, I know what work needs to be done over the course of my work day, and I also know which the higher priority items are. So I tackle those first, don’t I? Well, sometimes. If there are high priority and easy items, then I will certainly do those first – right after I’ve spent some time on the Internet, checking the blog traffic, and reading some items from my RSS reader. I am, after all, a man of routine.

Then I’ll try and force myself to do the more complex high priority issues. Sometimes I manage, and other times I fail.

Often the barrier is obvious – perhaps I need to phone someone about a subject I’m not hot on, or to ask someone to do something that they aren’t going to like. I find scenarios like these difficult, and will actively try and avoid them.

Then there is the big problem of not being interested in the task. This, I think is the crux of the issue, and I also think it’s part of my Aspie make up.

If I’m not interested in a piece of work, I will find one hundred and one reasons not to start doing it. These reasons seem important and valid, and are very difficult for me to overcome. They are in reality neither important nor valid. For example, I’ll reason to myself that I need to do another task first, as it’s actually more important. Hmmm. Then why did I give this task a higher priority than the other on my list this morning? I’ll even go as far as to change the priorities I’ve written down, as though to justify to myself that my task avoidance is legitimate. Or perhaps I’ll decide that I can’t start until I’ve confirmed some aspect of the task with someone else in the office. In this case, I’ll then start to fall back on worrying about what I’ll ask them. I’ll need to get my story straight before I approach them. Then I’ll check my email. And browse the Internet a bit. When I finally get round to doing the asking, it’s not uncommon for hours to have passed.

I used to think this was normal. Everyone does it, don’t they? No. I’m an observant chap, and whilst my colleagues will flirt with a little procrastination, they don’t have a problem of my magnitude. They can all get on with tasks, regardless of how hard or boring they are – they chip away until they’ve broken things down into chunks they can manage. When they hit a bit they find difficult then they ask the relevant person. Everyone has jobs to do at work that they don’t look forward to, but people still do them.

It’s probably worth pointing out at this juncture that eventually, I do start, get on with and complete the tasks that I put off. I can only put off jobs for so long, and then I’m forced to tackle them, because not doing so would get me into trouble at work. Over the years I’ve become quite good at judging just how far out I can push tasks I’m not keen on before I have to start or risk trouble.

Interestingly – and this is something that’s just occurred to me – this tactic could almost be seen as a coping mechanism. By putting off a boring task until I can put it off no longer, I’m then forced to do the work, which ultimately immerses me into it. Once I’m immersed, I can get it done – the job suddenly seems like a challenge, and often it’s quite fun too. It’s no longer hard or boring. It’s almost as though I use my procrastination problem to my advantage, to push me into doing the very work that I’m procrastinating my way around in the first place.

So actually, despite having a self-confessed terrible track record at knuckling down to work, I still get my tasks done without them being late.

My procrastination and also my frequent browsing of the Internet and viewing of email are all compulsions, and I struggle to manage them. Yet somehow, they all seem to balance with my sense of responsibility and thus work in my favour, meaning I get my work tasks done on time, and with a level of care and detail that my bosses seem to be pleased with.

I can’t help thinking that those around me at work think that I just spend my day browsing the Internet, however.

Do any of you have a similar problem? How do you tackle it?

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Getting things done

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As it happens, this is no accident, but before I started writing, I had no idea it would work out this way.

I have no shortage of ideas to write about, but I usually find that I come up with an idea in the morning, and mull them over whilst I’m at work. By lunch time, or by mid afternoon if I’m very busy at work, I’ve usually got enough of an idea about where to take things that I’m keen to get writing. Lunch hour at work, or perhaps later in the afternoon once the day is a little less busy is when I usually end up writing. I often don’t know where the writing will take me, and the results often surprise me.

Writing whilst at work isn’t ideal, but it’ll have to do. I have a young family, so writing at the weekend doesn’t seem fair – it cuts into both family time and the time we set aside at the weekends to get various jobs around the house done.

I did wonder if I could write in the evenings, after the kids are in bed and the other jobs of the day are finished with. That’s turned out to be a non-starter – I’m just too tired by that time of the day.

And this, I think is, where Aspergers pokes it’s it’s nose into this article – work days really take it out of me. There’s a lot of brain power expended on the work, and on the various social interactions throughout the day. Add in a 35 minute commute at either end of the day – car driving really drains me – and when I get home I’m pooped. I often feel like I’m shuffling my way through bathing the kids and reading their bedtime stories – it certainly feels hard work some days, despite it not really being so.

Once everyone and everything is seen to, I just want to collapse on the sofa. Firing my brain up to write seems like it would be an immense effort.

So weekdays, slotted in amongst work is where the articles get written, because that’s the only time I can find to write. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to matter that this is an unlikely time and setting in which to write. I usually end up in the zone, and everything and everyone around me gets filtered out, with only the screen, keyboard and my thoughts in sharp focus.

And now, I really should get back to work…

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Finding the right time to write

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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.

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Digging a hole the Aspie way

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Indeed, I’m likely to think I’m not doing all that well if you don’t say anything.

You could argue that this has nothing to do with my Asperger’s, and you may well be right – it may simply be a lack of self confidence. I think it’s important to note, however that if it is purely down to this, then the lack of self confidence itself stems primarily from the AS.

Whenever I complete a piece of work, I know how I feel about it. It could be something for my employer, or work on the house of garden, or writing an article for this blog. Everything gets a little mental evaluation at the end of it. Often, if I’ve been in the zone whilst doing the job, I’ll feel very satisfied at the end – that I’ve done well. But if no-one else comments on this, then I’ll be left questioning whether I’ve reached the right conclusion. Self doubt creeps in. Can no-one other than me see how well I did that?

As I look at the world around me, and how people without Asperger’s interact in it, I notice that saying ‘good job’ to someone rarely happens. In fact I see very little to suggest that the recipients of decent work from someone even acknowledge it, let alone say it was good.

Or maybe I’m missing something here. Are non-verbals used to say thank you where the words are missing?

Perhaps if you don’t have Asperger’s you could let me know…

Post from: That Explains Everything

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Have I done well?

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When I find myself able to concentrate or think intensively about things, I tend to find I have a bunch of associated mannerisms.

I make little noises. I giggle and I snort and I snigger. I pull oddly over exaggerated faces that perhaps mimic the look of someone experiencing a particular emotion, happy or sad. Sometimes I look serious, with big wrinkles in my brow.

I can’t sit still. My leg pivots backwards and forwards at the hip, and I tap my heel and toe. I swivel about in my chair, and if you catch me in an especially intense moment, you may even see me spin my chair through 360 degrees.

My hand touches my face a lot – I rest my chin on my hand, or twiddle the hair in my sideburns with my fingers. I chew the insides of my mouth. I hunch up too much and don’t look at all relaxed. I type frantically and noisily, bashing the keys. Sometimes I cough or clear my throat repeatedly.

If there’s a conversation going on in the office I won’t hear it.

And yet amazingly, this is when I’m the most productive. If you want some good work from me, then you want me to be doing some or all of the above.

Post from: That Explains Everything

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Pops, whistles and crackles

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The zone is my blinkered mode of complete absorption in whatever I’m doing. If I’m working on something I enjoy, then getting in the zone comes easily, and without any concious effort on my part. When I’m not working on something of interest to me however, then the zone is nowhere to be found, and work is difficult and I’m easily distracted.

When I’m in the zone, the rest of the world quietly melts away. I stop hearing all the other conversations in the room, which is odd, as I usually subconsciously listen to everything that’s going on around me.

In the zone, all I can see is the task I’m working on. Most of my zone work involves a computer, so the screen and keyboard become the focus of my vision. My mind is focussed too. It walks deliberately through the route needed to complete the task at hand. It thinks a bit ahead, and looks at the options, before choosing one and sticking with that.

A good example of my zone work these days are my blog posts. At the current time parts of all of them end up being written in the zone, as talking about AS is of particular interest to me. I write like I think – very linearly – and these texts tend to get produced in one sitting, without much editing. When I start writing, I usually have a title and a vague idea of where the words will go, but nothing concrete. What you see here is what where my brain takes me, with little post processing.

Time doesn’t exist in the zone. Thankfully this doesn’t usually cause me a problem, because I work quickly and deliberately, and finish what I start. Once the work is complete, the zone fades away quickly. It’s rare for me to lose track of time in the zone for more than an hour or two at a time.

I like the zone. I’m creative there. It’s one of the positive aspects of AS for me, and I invariably leave it feeling satisfied and very positive.

I predicited I’d be in the zone by the time I finished writing this. I was right – I was in the zone by paragraph three.

Post from: That Explains Everything

That Explains Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

In the zone

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