Aspies have no sympathy

Crazy, isn't it? The people who ignore your sage and logical advice are always the ones who come running when it goes belly up. This is the stage in life where you have to choose between smacking them up the side of the head or biting your tongue.

Luckily, this blog is typed so my poor, sore tongue doesn't have to do any of the work. I'm tested, though, I don't mind admitting it. I'm not really prone to smacking people, however much I would like to sometimes. But I am prone to a good sharp sentence or two, perfectly constructed and out of my mouth before I realise who said it.

Surprisingly, I have held off this time, most likely because I'm absolutely exhausted this week and was too weary to be caustic. Usually, I do say what I feel and think and then wonder why the person who ignored my advice is weeping on my front step, unable to gather the strength to go home.

I am ticked off, though. As a mistress of self-sabotage I can feel it hanging in the air with some people. For myself, it can be hard to spot - in others, it might as well be flying past with Snoopy at the controls. And again, for myself, if someone was to say, Do Not Do This Thing, well, sometimes I would listen as usually my self-sabotage goes right under the radar and isn't apparent to me or others until it is too late.

I would go as far as to say that professional self-sabotage always has an element of secrecy about it. As aspies, we are used to second-guessing ourselves so if we are to self-sabotage, we need to be able to divert our attention so we don't spot it when it happens. It's only looking back that you realise this step led to that and then the next step led to a trip.

With other people, it seems so simple. You see where they are going before they reach the first step, perhaps because they are better at expressing themselves and plotting things out? Or they are more likely to share how they are thinking and feeling? I know I'm not very open, in real-life at least, with my thoughts and feelings, often because I'm afraid of the usual criticism coming.

For others, sure of themselves and the way they think, it must be easier to express themselves, which then makes it easier for me to see it as it happens. And when I see where things are going and point them out, and am ignored, it can be very frustrating.

So, some time later, a sorry and sad person comes to me, surprised and horrified at how it all turned out, wanting to bend my ear with the details but not have any real reaction. I am supposed to be sympathetic and, possibly murmur 'there there' while I put the kettle on.

Oh, it's hard, you know? Having the right words to say, the logic to apply to it and seeing the whole shenanigan laid out bare and obvious in front of me. What is an aspie to do? How far can you stretch kindness and tolerance before it snaps back and takes your eye out?

Only so far, readers. Sooner or later, whether I like it or not, the comments I bite back at the wrong time escape and become a conversation, probably at what I think is the right time. It usually isn't the right time. Sometimes there is never a right time to tell someone they were a damn fool for not listening to you in the first place. They do tend to take it so personally.

Aspies have no sympathy; except that we do, we honestly do. Just don't expect too much of it if you will keep on running at the same wall and then wondering why you bounce right off when you hit it.

Amanda

  

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Chaotic, disorganised or just aspie?

Yesterday was a simple day - on paper. Here is my to-do list, as it looked the night before:

1. Get RT Teen to college on train
2. Take IT Teen to volunteering job
3. Prepare for maths lesson and creative writing class (in school)
4. Collect IT Teen and take dogs for their walk
5. Go to creative writing class (and do not be late!)
6. Pop home for food then go to maths lesson

There. A nice, organised list with my time allocated so that I know what I'm doing. And then,

RT Teen felt a bit off, so didn't go to college, but by then I'd done my usual trick of laying awake half the night, ready to get up very early. Went back to bed and laid awake in daylight instead.

Took IT Teen to his volunteering job, but forgot about my eBay parcels so did them instead of lesson prep while he was out.

Collected IT and came home to do the lesson prep and creative writing whatnots. Forgot I hadn't factored in time for lunch, so ate that. By now, the clock was ticking.

Worked out where the school was for the classes, was told by lying heap of donkey-leavings that is AA Routeplanner that it would take 15 minutes to get there from my house.

Took dogs for their walk, got dog-leavings on my shoes (not my dogs' dog-leavings), hurried home to wash shoes and get changed for school class. By this time, I had just enough time for getting to the school with ten minutes to spare.

Set off, only to find there are massive roadworks set up along most of my route (thanks again Routeplanner) and I spent longer than the whole journey should have taken siting on one little stretch.

Divert off across country as soon as possible, get behind lily-livered people who don't know the road and am frothing at the mouth by the time I reach the general vicinity of the school.

At this point, my directions didn't help as they were based on my original route. Putting aside my usual habit of not asking, I begged help from a dog-walker and she told me where the school was.

Finally walk into the school, almost 20 minutes late for a class only lasting an hour in total. The class was being led by a woman I went to college with, so she was more willing to forgive than most (and is always late for things herself). She introduces me and I open my mouth, ready to give my own little presentation before handing out worksheets.

As I stand there, my hand slips down my side and finds the tag on my top, which I am wearing inside out, having been in too much of a rush after washing the shoes. I do a quick mental re-cap of the top and decide my hair will cover the tag at the back. I surreptitiously shove the side ticket into the waistband of my trousers and hope for the best.

By now, I'm meant to be speaking and the presentation in my head has fled. I pick up my book, The Boy Who Broke the School, and do a very hasty rendition of the plot, of how characters can be naughty and then, shakily but creatively, lead into the worksheets. Not a sure start!

It takes 10 minutes for an eagle-eyed girl to notice I am wearing my top inside out but she whispers it to me and thinks it's funny, so we're okay there. I then spoil it a bit by telling my old college friend, adding the unwanted details that at least I was wearing all my clothes, and that standing on the step, checking you're fully dressed is good practice for when we're very old and might go out without pants. She laughed, but apparently is never in danger of going out without pants (yet).

I leave the lesson only a little scarred and jump in the car to dash home, eat and go to my maths lesson. Halfway home, I realise my maths papers are back at the school, tidied away with the creative writing.

Once home, I do get to eat, but then ferret about repeating my lesson prep and set off again, into the dark, cold night, to my maths lesson. Get there, take a moment to discover they're not in. They got mixed up about the night (specially rearranged, I wasn't even meant to be out that night) and thought I was coming the next day instead.

I go to the shop and resist buying placatory chocolate and also resist having a meltdown at the self-service checkouts where the assistant and the ten-items-or-less woman had just shared a hilarious, amazing joke and were shrieking with laughter the whole time I was self-serving, quieting for a second before one of them added another 'mazing, 'larious joke and starting again. It's amazing and hilarious how much hate can build up in your body in a short space of time.

I went home, collapsed on the sofa, discovered the Sky remote had broken (our TV has no buttons) and was trapped with an Australian soap opera for too long while I worked out how to not press the Off button on top of the Sky box. Apparently, Josh is a bad boy and Kieran feels no one understands him - which is a pity, as he seemed pretty transparent to me.

You'll not be surprised to hear, at this point I just went to sleep on the sofa. That was it, no more!

I decided the day might have been better if I hadn't got up so early or had more sleep the night before, but I'm still dubious. I think some days are just sent to try us. I'm only glad that, as an aspie, I am used to winging it and playing it by ear and acting on the spur of the moment. All the things which mean when life suddenly descends into chaos, it only feels a little different from a normal day.

Today, though, I am staying in.

Amanda

  

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The art of the mini-breakdown

The scenario is familiar: life becomes too much, you need to hide away and regroup but, this time, it doesn't work. You feel you need to burrow deeper into your hidey-hole, need to lock the door better, need to keep it all away so you can feel like it will never come back.

Sometimes, there isn't a small space small enough, there just aren't words comforting enough and the phone cannot be unplugged far enough to keep you safe from the outside world.

Every step along the road comes along your path, keeping your mobile on silent only means you check it more, the jobs you need to do stay undone but they bother at you, worrying at your leg like an impatient sheep dog.

How is it that sometimes all you need is a small period of hibernation, but other times, you feel like you need to shuck off the whole world and become a permanent hermit, just to stay sane? And then feel that you've left it too late for sanity anyway.

Days (if you're lucky), weeks or months later, you emerge out of the cave and take baby-steps to being a real human being again. Like magic, a switch finally flicked over and you were able to function again.

It is not a breakdown, most of the time. You don't need to cut all ties to your old life, or take up new therapy, nor do anything particularly drastic. What do you need, however, is to be allowed to breakdown in peace.

Readers, the mini-breakdown is truly an art. It requires the sort of finesse which comes naturally to aspies, as you need the ability to live at least two lives at the same time.

One or more of your lives follows a normal path and you do what you have to do, albeit at a muted level. But then, the main life, the one that matters and other people rarely get to see, is breaking apart while you watch. You are often the one doing the breaking, snapping pieces off, unlocking couplings, setting yourself off to float down river, never to be seen again.

You swear you'll not need those pieces of yourself again. You are done with it! (Whatever it is). You are going to keep yourself safe and warm and cosy until you feel able to cope again, and then you'll never pick up those pieces again, because they made all this other stuff happen.

Does it ever work like that though? In the end, I often find myself wading off down river after the life-pieces, dragging them back out of the water and onto the bank. Then, after all that breaking up and freedom-thinking, I have to wait for the pieces to dry off in the sun so I can link them all up again and have my life back together.

This process repeats so often, I get bored with myself - but am no better at managing it. I am rather more able to accept it, though. If this is what it takes to move on, at some future date, then I will let those pieces go, even if it makes things harder. I have to do it that way as the alternative is an onward struggle where life just gets worse and I am going past not-coping to never-again.

The mini-breakdown, readers, your friend and mine; always there for us in times of trouble and often in times of happiness too. Always at hand to help us shake away the burdens weighing us down and offer us the possibility of a life without constraints, where we can ignore everything and it will go away. No matter what.

I urge you not to feel bad when this happens, and not to be persuaded it is permanent. The only thing of permanence in our endless drama is the aspergers itself. The rest is malleable, transitory, a creative response to the world's dogged determination to make us reinvent ourselves in order to survive.

We are insightful, determined individuals with the ability to dissect and manipulate a confusing life where everyone else seems to know what they are doing. Dear readers, if we can work out real life, even a piece at a time, then we can allow ourselves a mini-breakdown now and then, as a way to recover from it.

You just have to become adept at putting things back to together, and at wading in deep waters. Having already learned so many unusual life-skills, I promise you, this you can do.

Amanda

  

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Don't train your aspie!

You know how they say, if you hear something often enough, you start to believe it? I was torturing myself with some past stuff last night. I was caught up in that replay mode, where you know you've heard it a thousand times before, a bit like granny's stories of when she told Mrs so-and-so just what she thought of her, but can you stop it? Of course not.

It's not just at night. Through the day, in normal life, the replay starts and you hear the old voices, the familiar phrases. Most of them tell a 'truth' about you, something you learned growing up or which formed part of a significant relationship.

One of my truths was always that I was not practical, followed by the well-worn and amusing diatribe on how the practical gene skipped a generation, how my children would probably get it instead. And then the sideways jump to how it didn't skip past my cousins though - at which point I'd be likened to my great-grandmother, who preferred her gardening to keeping the house clean and tidy. She died a heroine so I never minded that too much.

Except, when I've become more assertive with age (and it took a loooong time), I discovered that while every nail I might knock in was likely to bounce back out, I was very good at looking at the bigger picture and showing other people where to put the nails.

This often meant I was seen as being critical too, but my advice or reasoning usually solved some difficult problem that the practical people had spent an hour scratching their heads about. It was obvious to me, but being so resolutely not practical, I stayed away until the sound of cursing and nails being removed was too much to bear.

As a non-practical person, I have also been pushed away from sites of busy-ness and doing, as if my very presence would hold up the fine industry of real people, the ones who can knock in a nail. 'Here, get out of the way!' was the usual phrase, or 'Can you not do anything but stand there and look?'

If you get used to being sent off or made to take part (rather than stand and look) then cause problems, you start removing yourself from the situation. You grow accustomed to sitting in another room and listening to the sound of those hammers, working away with the kind of industry that built empires (and you know how they usually turn out).

You become adept at reading through the disturbance, or pushing refreshments through the gap in the door so you won't be drawn in to helping or told off for being there at the wrong moment. And, you really, really get used to admiring other people's shoddy handiwork because you know you couldn't have done it half as well yourself.

In other words, you train yourself to step back and only take part when it's all over, by which time you have no choice but to say it all looks good. You have no room for manoeuvre once you have vacated the situation.

If you have the courage to stay and help in your own way, not by wielding the hammer but by looking at things from your unique perspective, then you have a far greater chance of helping out. You can often make things better than by leaving the room. However - and this is a big however - this only works if the nail-hitters will allow you to help in your own way.

If they insist on doing it their way, or on your space in the plan being dictated by how they see the world, then you will do little to help and might make things worse. Blaming you for your part in this compounds your feelings of helplessness and detachment, making it less likely you will be involved the next time, and so on.

So, taking part in situations you have been trained to avoid does take courage and not just on your part. Other people need to put down the hammer occasionally and consider there may be a better way to make the world than by fixing one plank at a time. They also need to be brave enough to look at their aspie and say, 'What do you think? Is there anything else I can do?'

And then, they have to listen to the answer too.

Amanda   

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It's a process. Pro-cess. Prrr-ocess. You know, a PROCESS!

For anyone who missed it, the word for today is PROCESS. See, now I'm shouting. You can always tell what kind of week it's been if you're shouting by Wednesday.

So, RT Teen, fellow aspie, artist and person extraordinaire, is going to a new college in a nearby city. He needs to get there and back on his own and do all the little, important things which non-aspies take for granted. In other words, he has to connect with the real world without real-ectifrying himself.

He started at the college last week, so as part of the preparation for independent travel, I drove him there a couple of times, doing a reccy of the train station he would be using, tracing the routes around the city, finding out the best way to get to college and so on. An important part of this is the minutiae of city life, such as knowing which side the traffic will come from when you cross the road and which side streets cut out whole swathes of walking.

We picked out landmarks, such as the Aga shop with teapots made to look like little stoves with food on top (all right, I picked that one out. I so want a stove teapot now). We admired the smell from the biscuit factory and memorised the road name he needs to find if all else fails.

At the station, once we were ready to do the journey by train, it was a comedy of errors. I'd forgotten I didn't like train stations until the minute before we had to use one. So, throughout our process of familiarisation, I had to fight a feeling akin to when I drive into a dark, scary multi-storey car park.

We did manage this journey, though almost got on the wrong train which would have taken us on a beautiful route across Northern England and into Yorkshire. As we don't live in Yorkshire, this would have been an interesting detour.

So, as you can see, we have hopefully covered the whole journey and, fingers crossed, RT Teen will do it by himself tomorrow.

I'm very happy with his progress but, as the days have passed since he started last Monday, I am feeling increasingly aeriated with the people around me who think that he should be able to hop on a bus or a train and do the journey by himself from the start.

Let me be clear: anyone who knows him, knows he is an aspie and most of them have known him his whole life. Since when was RT the kind of person who could switch off his aspieness and suddenly manage, as if by psychic lightning-bolt, things he has never done before?

Day by day, people have assumed he's going to college on his own, has been 'popped' on the bus or train at my end and left to it. He is an aspie, he's always been an aspie. He gets his sense of direction from his mother and takes the disconnect from real-life to a whole new level.

He does not, by virtue of reaching voting age, suddenly know what other people know. If it was really like this then we'd all be automatons who could download a new program when we wanted to do something (tempting, isn't it?).

He. Is. An. Aspie.

I've had to say this as if it was news and then endure the pause while the other person tries to work out where I'm going with the statement and what it has to do with RT going to college or their comment that he'll 'soon get into the swing of things if you let him'.

Readers, if I was to leave RT to get into the swing of things, he would be in Bronte country by now, possibly holed up in a Yorkshire tea room somewhere, being looked after by friendly old women, feeding him cake and asking him when he's going to have his hair cut.

Every day people have expected him to be going alone by now, when what we've been doing is working through the whole process so that he reaches a stage of travelling independently without panic. If something goes wrong, he needs to be able to fall back on the other things he has learnt about his journey.

It is a process, I've said, over and over. A process.

I've tried to explain where we are in the process and again, that moment of silence where their image of a teenager doesn't match up with the idea that RT planned out landmarks today and worked out which subway to use.

If I have to tell one more person about the process, I may just scream. Tomorrow, he'll go by himself. He'll follow the process we built up over the last week and a half. And he won't panic because he was a part of that process and not simply thrust into the situation and expected to manage.

Sometimes we all need a little bit of process in our lives, even those people who think the lives of others are like pop-up cards, all merry and ready to use. And after helping RT get ready to take this journey alone, I've also realised how much the process has also helped me.

From now on, when I do something new, I'm not going to wing it and tell people everything is fine. Instead I'm going to say, 'I'll get the hang of it eventually, it's a process you know.' And let them fall silent if they want, I'm done explaining.

Amanda   

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Hiding behind yourself

I dreamt last night that I had found a really good new mask to wear. It was white and slightly transparent so you could see my face through it. I knew people wouldn't be able to see my face clearly, so I was going to wear lots of black make-up around my eyes, kind of like in the first days of television when they exaggerated the make-up so it would look real on the screen.

The aim was for my blackened eyes to show through the mask and then people would see my eyes as normal. I have no idea how this was meant to work, it was a dream after all, but I remember the relief I felt at having a plan. I knew this one would work and I could relax at last.

Funny how you need a plan to relax. When most people think of relaxing, it's because they can forget everything, including planning, and just kick back. For me, I can't relax unless I have planned and know I'm ready for what might come.

Two things resonate in this dream: my need to plan and my need to have a mask that works. Do you see how it never occurred to me not to cover my face? How sad and strange!

I've often worried about how I present myself to the world and I know my feelings tramp across my face in hob-nailed boots. When I think I have them hidden, I'm aware of how much my eyes still show. And, in the dream, the eyes still showed because I made sure they did. Yet. even though I was making them more visible, I was also covering them with make up. I didn't cover them with a mask, like the rest of my face, but I still disguised them under war-paint.

In the dream, I was trying to explain to my mother why the make-up needed to be black and so bold. It was all over my eyes and it shone. I guess I looked like Cleopatra when she wakes up in the dumpster after an all-nighter. My mother wanted me to leave the make-up off but I told her, 'Then nobody will be able to see me.'

Again, the paradox. After hiding for so much of my life, I want a mask to keep myself safe in front of other people but then to highlight my eyes so they can see me - the very eyes which betray my feelings so often.

In the cold light of day, I have no desire to share my feelings with everyone by highlighting my eyes. The mask, though, I can see why I'd approve of that. Imagine the relief at finding just the right one and being able to feel safe when you go out into the world.

The eyes? They're a different matter. I guess part of me does want to share the real me with the world, so long as that self is protected by the mask and make-up. Possibly that's what we all want, even the most open of us. Who really wants to be naked and vulnerable in this bad old world?

Amanda

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Coping with The Shouters

Sometimes I feel like having a sign with me, ready to haul out at a moment's notice: Don't Shout At Me. Do you think it would work? Do you suppose the Shouters would pause long enough to read it?

In my experience, they would. They'd be able to read that sign and carry on shouting if they liked. Or, for effect, stop what they were doing, read it and then shout louder because I've committed another atrocity.

They must be atrocities, right? I mean, I don't shout unless I have to or my temper has really got the better of me. I did used to shout a lot more, then realised it was learned behaviour and adapted to weed it out. Now I try not to do it, I take advance warning if my mood rises or my voice does the same.

I'm only human. I can shout if I have to; I can lose my temper and bawl and scream if I'm really pushed. And I can have an aspie meltdown and storm off, bellowing like Chewbacca when you call him a cissy.

Shouters, though, they just loooove to shout. They like the sound of their own voices, because that means other people must be listening. But just to be sure, they raise their voices as then they can be pretty certain they're the centre of attention.

Once they've done that, they concentrate on your reaction, the measly little audience who dared to cause this outburst. You, the audience, you think they're out of control and can't stop the shouting or have a runaway temper. It may be true, but I doubt it. Do you know what they're really doing? Behind all the noise and bluster and thunder their beady eyes are watching to see how you're taking it.

Are you upset, like a good wrong-doer? Do you look guilty? Do you want to cry? All great results, people, but you want to know what the big one is? The thing they really want, on top of all these? They want you to shout back.

You see, like bullies (and most Shouters are bullies), they don't want a proper fight. So, why would they need you to shout back? Simple, they need you to be the bad guy in all this. If they stand and yell at you with no response, their satisfaction-to-temper ratio diminishes and they have to increase the range of their performance.

If you stay completely silent and don't feed the fire, what do you get? Want to know? You actually get a whole lot more shouting. Like a toddler rolling around on the floor, a tantrum is no good unless someone sees and reacts.

Eventually, if you do nothing, the Shouting will cease as the perp moves off, full of veiled threats and hastily-disguised venom. They know you are in the wrong (otherwise, why would they need to be shouting?) but if you won't play the game and behave as if you're in the wrong, they're not sure what to do. Sometimes, instead of stomping off, they'll change tactic and there will be tears.

Oh dear! The distraught nature of your confounded Shouter! Now you can see they were the victim and you were the baddie! Now you'll react, won't you? Now you see those pitiful orbs of saddy-water dripping down their chin? Only a heartless beast would turn away from such a display.

Readers, it took me years to learn this is a perfomance, as much an act as when I pretend to be normal and force myself to enter real-life. Unlike my own performances, this one always, always needs an audience, whereas mine is solo street art, meant for nothing except getting through a crowd.

How is the aspie meant to know this manipulation for what it is, though, when we have trouble understanding even ourselves? Shall I tell you the big secret? You'll know when it's not the right kind of argument, or you're not the right kind of villain, by how you feel about it.

You might not be able to explain, even in pictures or images, why you feel this is wrong or what is wrong about it, but your whole being will be off-kilter. It's one of those times when you have to follow your instincts and believe you are not to blame.

Like many aspies, I have been shouted at. Quite a lot, in fact. I don't know whether it's low self-esteem, or a quiet personality, or the willingness to get along with the worst of people as well as the best: whatever lies behind it, I've attracted Shouters. And then, I've let them Shout.

The secret to beating them at their own game is to walk away. If you can't do that, you have to learn to deal with it and the best place to start is with yourself. Other people shout because they can. They have mouths and vocal chords and (presumably) brains to make these things work. They choose to shout. It is not your fault.

Breaking the best china or falling on the dog might be your fault; wiping the memory stick clean or deleting all of Game of Thrones might be your fault; calling their mother a crusty old witch and forgetting to press the red button on the phone may be your fault too. But the decision to shout and not talk is theirs.

Never be tricked into believing it is you who causes the Shouting or that it would happen with other people too. Shouters choose their audience wisely, and aspies can be a very good audience indeed.

Here's to all the people who told me these truths over the years, and eventually helped me believe them.

Amanda

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