Feeling Down

Depression is a fact of life for many Aspies. I find I go in cycles. I can be fine for months and then things will build up and overwhelm me again. Occasionally the depression is deep enough that I contemplate just killing myself and putting an end to it.

On a couple of occasions over the past 10 years I have attempted to commit suicide by taking a handful (literally a hand full of course: I'm an Aspie) of pills but they just made me vomit and that was their only effect. I wasn't looking for help or attention; I made sure I was alone and wouldn't be missed quickly. And until I wrote about it here only my wife knew.

Depression is emphatically not a shutdown although I find it contributes to them. I can often carry on my day-to-day life despite feeling depressed: it just tends to make me quieter and less inclined to interact with people. At work I will restrict my interactions to the minimum necessary to get the job done. This means I can go through whole weeks without conversing with any of my colleagues except when it's work-related.

I have never suffered from loneliness. I am very comfortable in my own company; in fact I often prefer to be on my own because being around other people can be so stress-inducing. I think sometimes that stress of interacting with other people helps bring me down. It is the mental exhaustion which results from having to maintain such a high level of focus. Just so that I can hold a conversation in a social setting. Is it worth the effort? I sometimes wonder.

Right now I am feeling down but not (yet) depressed. I have worked 8 hours in my main job followed by 6 very busy hours in my second job as a barman so I am physically tired. Yet I am sitting here past 3am, writing this, because I have to deal with my feelings and writing helps.

My incipient depression might be put off for a while or it might hit me tomorrow. I don't know. I know that the main cause this time is a strained relationship with somebody I'm close to. I just can't seem to connect at the moment. They think I don't care because I don't show or express feelings much and have been unintentionally hurtful towards me. They are also not aware how much they are hurting me when they tell me I don't care.

I feel like I should be used to it after experiencing it for so much of my life but I can't help still feeling hurt when I get called cold or unfeeling.

Hurt Inside

How do you answer when somebody asks how you are?

Me, I just say "I'm grand" and leave it at that. It's not that I never feel fine, but even when I'm feeling down I don't like anybody to know it. I've always been a private person, keeping things to myself and it's hard to break the habits of a lifetime. Of course it's become habit because I find it so difficult to talk about my feelings.

It would be nice occasionally to have somebody to listen to me while I struggle to describe how I'm feeling but I've found that two things get in the way. Firstly I have to trust the person completely before I'm able to open up at all. Secondly they have to have the patience to let me take my time explaining.

I've found it can be easier to just write things down: I started writing an occasional journal in my mid-teens but kept it private. I did find it a help to put down how I felt in writing because I didn't get the mental block nearly as much as when I try to talk about it. I have a ritual that has evolved over the years: I write longhand in a particular notebook by candlelight. I have always found the act of writing about my feelings to be ultimately cathartic but it is emotionally tiring at the time. It is as if I have taken some of the pain out of myself and put it away in my notebook. It still exists but it's outside me. As this might suggest, depression or hurt is my main trigger for writing. I hardly ever write when I'm up because there's no need to.

I can't always find the time to be alone and write about how I feel, and when that happens the hurt remains inside me. The danger is that I have no other release for it until I shut down or suffer a meltdown. I find a shutdown is exhausting, not to mention the disruptive effect it has on my day-to-day life and relationships. So I think perhaps I ought to try to find somebody to talk to instead. Sounds simple, doesn't it? If only it were that easy to form the kind of relationship where I can trust somebody to the necessary degree. Although I know plenty of people well enough to no longer feel uneasy in their company, I have never learned how to move the relationship to a closer level, so I never feel that I can impose on somebody by asking them to do something that personal for me.

So that's why I expect I'll just carry on saying "I'm fine" and keeping the hurt locked away inside until I find time to take it out and preserve it in my notebook like a pressed flower.

A Positive Conversation

I had a short chat with an acquaintance last night about Autistic Spectrum Disorder. It was unprompted on my part: he was unaware as he started that I have Aspergers Syndrome. The conversation began when we got talking about what I do for a living and he brought up hacking and the case of Gary McKinnon. It turned out that he was well-informed about ASD to the extent that he knew it was a spectrum disorder and that while some people with ASD can be highly successful in their fields the autistic savant is not remotely as common as popularly imagined.

The conversation reassured me that there are NT people out there who know that ASD is much more than Rain Man or other stereotypes. It gave me some hope that the message is getting across and the condition is becoming more widely known. I remind myself that one swallow does not make a summer, but I still have a more positive feeling as a result of the conversation.

Music and Mood

I've always loved listening to music: I find it very soothing which is important as it helps me deal with the stresses that lead to shutdown or meltdown. My tastes run right through the spectrum from heavy and fast to light and slow and include such styles as heavy metal, blues, classical, folk and even some chart pop. In short, I'll listen to almost anything as long as it has a structure to its rhythm and melody and it fits my current mood.

When I'm in certain frames of mind I get the urge to listen to a particular track or album. For instance if I'm agitated and I want to relax I might want to listen to a slower piece such as Echoes by Pink Floyd. Now this particular track is over 20 minutes long and once I start listening to it I can't be interrupted or there's a risk of a meltdown. I put my headphones on, cue the track, make sure I'm sitting or lying comfortably and press play. I tune out my surroundings and immerse myself in the music, experiencing the sensations it evokes. These are primarily physical sensations with any emotional sensations being a result of these rather than directly from the music.

Listening to Echoes the primary sensation is of floating with a wave-like ebb and flow that varies in intensity with the music. I also get visual impressions: shapes, colours, textures, movement. The high-pitched pings that start the track are bright white pulses in the middle of my field of vision that expand and fade like ripples from a raindrop falling on a still pool of water. Sudden loud instrumental sounds that burst in on the underlying melody are broad, bright oblique lines like a cross between lightning and bold strokes with a paintbrush. Other parts of the track call up pictures akin to waves breaking on a shore. It's difficult to put the sensations into words accurately because of their complexity.

I never pay much conscious attention to the lyrics. I (mostly) hear the words but don't think about the meaning at all: I'm too busy feeling the music and would have to disconnect to some degree to think about the semantic content. This would interfere with my enjoyment. In effect I treat any vocals as just another instrument. In this I differ significantly from my neurotypical [NT] wife. She will always listen to the words and this will have an emotional effect on her that I just don't experience.

The way I lose myself in music has a similar effect to stimming. I find both to be calming and comforting: the fact that they occupy my conscious mind with rhythmic physical sensations is a definite parallel. This is how I can relax to a thrash metal album like Sound of White Noise by Anthrax just as well as I can to a "mellow" song like Albatross by Fleetwood Mac. I know from experience that this confuses a lot of NT folks who can have very different reactions to different kinds of music.

Letters Have Colour

I realised some years ago that I associate colours with particular letters. I don't know how common this is amongst people with Aspergers or whether it is even related. Some colour-letter associations are stronger for me than others:

• A is always bright red. The following letters then graduate through orange to yellow.
• M and letters around it are blue.
• O, P and Q are purple.
• S and T are green. R doesn't have a strong association.
• U is brown.
• V through Z start mid-grey and get darker.

If I see one of those letters in a different colour it feels wrong and makes me uncomfortable. Strangely, I don't have any similar associations for numbers or words. I wonder whether other Aspies experience anything similar?

How I Got Into Programming

My dad got us our first computer when I was 11; it was a BBC Model B+128 with a 40/80 track switchable double-sided 5.25" disk drive. And it came with a manual. Printed. On paper! Not just how to connect it up and switch it on but full details of all the OS commands and the built-in BBC BASIC programming language. So I started using it, learning to program in BASIC, slowly at first but with increasing speed and confidence. I subscribed to Acorn User magazine and slavishly typed in the program listings. I was hooked!

BBC BASIC was an great language in an great environment for learning to program. It introduced me to control structures: conditions and loops. It had named functions and procedures (rather than the usual GOSUB in most microcomputer BASICs). It had floating point as well as integers. It had strings and a set of built-in functions for manipulating them. It could access the machine's memory directly. It even had a built-in assembler. It gave me such a feeling of control over the hardware that I felt I could do anything with it.

When the 32-bit ARM2 Acorn Archimedes was released in 1987 I got one (one of the first batch of A305 machines with Arthur 0.2 OS), later upgraded to 1 MB RAM and Arthur 1.2; then RISC OS 2.0. I thought it was a marvellous machine, so fast and capable. I later upgraded to an ARM3-based A540 with 8 MB RAM and two SCSI hard disks for a total of about 160 MB storage. Huge for its time, especially for a home computer. I continued programming in BBC BASIC (version V included with the "Arc") which included additional control structures (WHILE...ENDWHILE, multi-line IF...THEN...ELSE...ENDIF, CASE...OF...WHEN...OTHERWISE...ENDCASE), RETURN parameters in procedures, libraries (via LIBRARY, INSTALL or OVERLAY) and had a built-in full-screen editor, the ARM BASIC Editor or ARMBE. I reckon I probably spent the majority of my time in front of the machine in that editor, developing programs.

A number of times I would spend upwards of 12 hours at a stretch at the keyboard and some of the programs ran into thousands of lines. I wrote interpreters for scripting languages, bitmapped font editors, a parser for chemical formulae, a graphical plot of magnetic fields in a plane intersected by wires carrying current, and many others. I even wrote a kind of hypertext application inspired by the depiction of the "Guide" in the TV adaptation of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

It was on this A540 that I first encountered C. I got a copy of Acorn C and a book to teach me the basics. Once I grasped the concept of main() being the entry point for the program I was well away. The nature of BBC BASIC meant I already understood structured programming: conditions, loops, functions, and was used to thinking in those terms. It wasn't long before I got hold of a copy of Software Tools in Pascal and coded the programs presented therein in C. I wrote a utility to implement IO pipelines on top of RISC OS's pipefs (OS-implemented named pipes) so I could reproduce unix-style filters without needing intermediate files. I got a copy of Expert C Programming: deep C secrets and found it very informative and practical: it taught me a lot and by this stage I was proficient enough to program C professionally. I got my first job programming C on 16-bit DOS and Windows 3.1 despite having limited experience of those platforms: I was given the job on the strength of my performance on a C programming test at the interview.

I had had some limited exposure to a fairly new language called C++ that introduced something called classes. I didn't really get a lot of exposure to it until the mid-90's and it took a little bit of perseverance to get used to object-orientation. There were no templates in those days, at least not in the version of Microsoft C++ used where I worked, and exceptions were avoided because of concerns about performance. I really got the hang of it after taking a course in OO design which gave me the mental toolkit for thinking about classes naturally. The language support from Microsoft's compilers improved over time and it was really with the move to 32-bit Windows and new development for that platform that C++ became my new programming language of choice. I got copies of and read Effective C++ and Exceptional C++ to learn about best practices.

It's now some 15 years down the line and I consider myself a skilled C++ developer. (More to the point, so does my employer.) Along the way I've had exposure to several other programming languages, some of which I use regularly such as Python, sh, javascript, perl and awk while others I've used as and when the job has demanded it such as Java, C#, SQL, Visual Basic and several application-specific embedded scripting languages. I've dabbled with other languages such as Haskell, Lisp, Ruby, Pascal, Fortran and even Cobol at times just out of interest but never becoming fluent enough to use them as a first choice day to day.

So what started out as "just" a hobby is still, over 25 years later, my main hobby. The only difference is that I get paid to do it. I still feel the same joy and excitement when I produce code that does something neat. I get exactly the same satisfaction from my latest code to, say, ingest video and audio from an XDCAM disk as I did from my first BASIC program that just printed "hello, world" to the screen. What will I be doing in 10 or 20 years' time? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I'll still be programming and loving it.

What is Normal?

Why is it that most people find it hard to accept when somebody looks or acts different?

I've been on the receiving end of prejudice, bullying and verbal abuse because I don't "fit in". I'm a person with Aspergers. I don't think in quite the same way as a neurotypical (NT) person and I often don't react in the way they'd expect. I don't show much emotion. Some people seem to assume that because of this I don't have feelings which isn't true: I have feelings, I just don't show feelings. So they keep pushing my buttons looking for a reaction. Do they not realise the hurt they can cause? I can't understand their motivation. I tend to assume it's accidental and they don't realise what they're doing because I literally can't imagine that anybody would deliberately intend to upset someone.

I mentioned in a previous post that I can't handle confrontation. I've been mocked because of this; called a wimp and so on. Now I'm not a small guy. I'm 5' 11" and 210 lbs, but I'm not saying that I could handle myself if I was attacked: I've got slow reactions and my coordination is poor. The one time I got attacked I was on the floor before I even knew what was happening. But how can people find fault with being peaceful? I've not got an aggressive nature at all: I'm quite passive. I remember when I played rugby the coach started pushing me about in the changing room before a match. I wondered why he was doing that, what had I done to deserve it? It was only later that somebody explained that he was trying to fire me up. But it didn't work at all. I just stood there and took it, trying to figure out what was going on.

My appearance makes me stand out as well. I have long hair, usually tied back in a pony tail. I like to wear a hat. It's usually a flat cap but I also have a black leather bush hat, a selection of Panamas and a Stetson (black). I don't like to wear anything with writing or logos on it and I much prefer black. I prefer natural materials such as cotton and leather because they feel more comfortable. I will select an item of clothing based on how it feels ahead of how it looks. If it wasn't for the fact that so much of my wardrobe is black I'd probably stand out even more: I really don't care what I look like, it's about utility. I get attached to certain items of clothing and wear them until they literally fall apart. I can't even remember the last time I bought a new shirt, say, or a pair of jeans. Speaking of jeans, as a child I would never wear them. I found the material too stiff and rough, so I would always wear trousers. Naturally this made me stand out as all my contemporaries went around in jeans. They now produce jeans in softer kinds of denim so I invariably wear a pair of jeans (black) because they're harder-wearing and don't show marks as much (I tend to pick up marks on my clothes because I'm a little clumsy).

Behaviour and appearance: factors that make me stand out from the crowd. I know I sometimes attract attention because of this. I don't try to; if anything I try to stay out on the fringes of things. Because along with the attention tends to come judgement and remarks or worse. I've got a theory that it's a tribal mindset people have: the world is grouped into us and them. If you're not one of us then you're less than us. If you don't look like us or act like us it means there's something wrong with you. So we'll persecute you. We'll hound you until you give up and crawl away. This seems to be "normal" human nature. And it can lead to incidents like this murder of a woman for being "different". At the time I occasionally heard people put the blame on her: "it wouldn't have happened if she'd been normal".

It's absolutely pervasive. People band together based on what they have in common, whether it's supporting a sports team, residing in a certain region, sharing a set of beliefs. They seem to unconsciously view anybody different, anybody outside their group, as a threat. I don't fit in with any group. I'm me. Just me. Keep to myself, don't bother anybody. So leave me out of your playground games: I'm not playing. I have no emotional need to feel part of a group. I do have an emotional need to be left to live my life in my own way. Respect that or just leave me the hell alone.

Appreciating Poetry

I read Autism vs. Poetry by Peter Seebach recently and it got me thinking about my own appreciation of some poetry. I say some because there is a whole host of material I find impenetrable because the meanings are too far removed from my direct interpretation of the words.

I had some limited exposure to poetry in English lessons at school. Some, such as Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, present me with few problems. This poem in particular lends itself to a literal reading; it conjures up vivid images but is purely descriptive. However I don't have an emotional reaction to the words beyond delight at the skilful use of language, the economy with which so much is represented with so few words and the regularity of the syllabic structure. Mine is an appreciation of its technical merits.

I think this is why some poetry misses the mark entirely with me. Take Philip Larkin's Home is so Sad. "Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,/ Shaped to the comfort of the last to go/ As if to win them back. [...]". This appears to be ascribing emotion and intentional actions to the inanimate. "But a home's just a pile of bricks and mortar," I protest. "It doesn't make sense." So although the words fit together into coherent sentences I face a gulf in understanding between the literal interpretation and the opaque metaphor and my only reaction is puzzlement.

I have seen people react emotionally to poetry and other art (music, painting, sculpture). I can't understand the mechanism through which this happens. It appears that there is no conscious analysis of the work; it's something like a "gut reaction": instinctive. I don't experience that at all. For example I visited the Louvre once and saw the Mona Lisa. I'll describe it to you. It's about 2 feet wide by 3 tall. It's mounted on a wall behind a very substantial-looking glass screen and additionally there is a barrier that prevents you getting too close. The image is dark-looking, mostly greens, yellows and browns, and shows a dark-haired woman's head and upper body. I just remember wondering what all the fuss was about! No emotional reaction to it, you see, and I don't find something that's just a picture of a woman to be very interesting.

Getting Away From It All

Every now and again I need a break from things when I'm feeling under pressure and nearing meltdown. My preference is to go for a walk by myself in the countryside: I'm lucky in that regard because I grew up in the midst of farmland and now live in an area that, while not rural, has accessible natural areas.

Moor Green Lakes in the Blackwater valley is one such area. It's a nature reserve alongside the Blackwater river and I can walk along the riverside and relax watching fish, ducks, swans and, in season, the aerobatic mayflies and dragonflies. While it does attract other people, particularly dog-walkers, there are not too many of them and there are enough bends in the path that I can keep them out of sight and forget that there is anybody else around.

A swan on the Blackwater river

I took these pictures there last summer. It was a bright, sunny day but the path was shaded by trees and it was very comfortable. I lost all track of time and just kept on walking, not thinking about anything but just experiencing my surroundings. There is something about natural spaces that appeals to me: I loathe most cities with their crowds, noise, dirt and hard edges. Give me hills and valleys, fields and trees any day. Water in particular I find very relaxing. I have spent time in the Scottish Highlands around Lochs Tay and Rannoch and the English Lake District near Coniston Water and in both cases found the landscape a great help in promoting peace of mind.

My Mother

I want to write some words about my mother. This isn't going to be easy for me but I want to try to give some impression of the one person through my life who was always there for me, who I knew I could always rely on for support and who I miss more than I can express. I'm practically in tears now as I'm writing this, which as anybody who knows me can tell you is not like me at all.

My mother, Maureen Forshaw, nee Lowe, was born on 22nd October 1940. Her mother was Elsie Lowe, nee Broxton. She died in Wigan Hospice in the early hours of 19th December 2009 having lapsed into a coma a couple of days earlier after a long battle with cancer. Her initial ovarian cancer was not spotted in routine scans due to lack of clarity in the X-ray images and spread to her brain before being diagnosed. Despite aggressive treatment through surgery, radio- and chemotherapy her condition deteriorated over time ultimately leaving her barely able even to lift a cup to her mouth. Throughout her illness my father took care of her full-time, having retired from work before she first became ill. I can only admire him for his dedication over this period of about 3 years without a break. But even more than that I admire the way my mother handled her illness, rarely showing the immense frustration she felt with her failing body and remaining cheerful throughout.

She was born and grew up in Wigan, Lancashire, one of four siblings. Her father was a coal miner, one of the major industries in the area at the time. Although as a working-class family they were not wealthy she had a happy childhood and always remained very close to her immediate relatives. She met my father, James Forshaw, at a dance as a teenager in the 1950's and they started going out together. They got married in the early 60's after courting for a few years. My mother had fertility problems and was unable to bear children so they elected to adopt. I was adopted at the age of about 2 weeks in 1973 and my brother in 1975. As children we were always aware of having been adopted and it never caused any problems: as far as we were concerned we had one mother and father and that was that.

She had worked in a dentists' surgery before I was born and later for the Home Office (British government). Very little is known about this latter work because it is covered under the Official Secrets Act: I understand that it was a part-time clerical position but she obviously never divulged any details. She gave up work completely before I started school and devoted her time to bringing up my brother and me. I've talked about myself elsewhere so I will just say that she had tremendous patience to be as calm and supportive as she was with me.

I can't emphasise too much just how much I relied on her while I was growing up. Maybe I was spoiled but I can't remember anything ever being too much trouble for her as far as we were concerned. She taught me to read and even write (a little) by the age of 3. She never put me down; she let me know when I had done something wrong (just being called by my full name, Benjamin, was enough of a clue as to what was coming) without getting angry or belittling me, and more importantly she always explained what I had done wrong and why it was wrong. It was as if she instinctively knew how to deal with somebody who has an autistic spectrum disorder. Equally importantly she always let me know that she was proud of me when I had achieved something. When I was going through my bad time during my school years she tried her best to help me and get me to open up about what was causing the problem and it certainly wasn't due to any lack of persistence or caring on her part that it took me years to even talk about that time. Likewise when I finally returned home feeling very down after dropping out of university she never showed much of her worry or disappointment: she just reassured me and helped me get back on track towards a job.

She suffered several losses in her life. Her mother-in-law died very shortly after I was adopted. She devoted a lot of time to looking after her father-in-law following this, having him up for dinner every night at first, later reducing to 3 times a week until he died. Her father died aged around 60 of psittacosis as a result of his mining occupation. I can remember going to visit him in Wigan Hospice shortly before he died. Her brother Alan died in his 50's of cancer and I can remember how much it upset her. She was the main one out of her siblings to spend time looking after her mother as she aged: her mother died in her late 80's. She also lost a number of close friends over the years.

I received a phone call from my father the morning that she died informing me. In some ways it was a relief that she was no longer suffering with her illness. I needed to be alone with my thoughts and despite the cold weather and inches of snow on the ground I went out for a walk through the local woods. The serenity of the surroundings and the clean crispness of the snow helped bring a degree of calm to my thoughts and I reflected on times spent with her through my life.

She was a very special person who made a positive impression on everybody she met. Since she died I cannot get used to knowing that she isn't there to support me any more. She was the unassuming rock around which the family was built. I doubt that I ever let her know just how important she was to me and how much I owe her. I hope I have done her memory justice with these few words, although I know that there's no way I can give more than a brief insight into her life.

I'm Different. Deal With It.

 I sometimes get people telling me I'm weird. As if I don't know. I'm happy to be different: it makes me individual, it makes me me. It's 2 or 3 years now since I discovered that I have Aspergers Syndrome. I find it useful that the condition has a name: it allows me to explain to people why I'm different. Notice that I say different. I'm not broken, it's just that my brain isn't wired the same as the average person's.

Several aspects of my behaviour mark me out as different: I tend to interpret things literally (to the perennial annoyance of my wife), I have great difficulty starting conversations or keeping them going, I can't handle confrontations and either just stop interacting totally or blow up, I don't tend to show emotion and so get labelled as "cold", I usually dislike being touched...

I've learned that taking things literally can be used for humorous effect. I'll answer either-or questions with "Yes" from time to time: it's always my first reaction in any case but I've learned to interpret a lot of the things people say to get at their intended meaning and I reckon I'm reasonably good at it now. I can still get flummoxed by metaphor and simile especially when it's unfamiliar. One thing that hinders me is the visual aspect of my interpretation: if somebody says that they're "on fire" when they're hot I'll picture them literally in flames and then get momentarily confused when they evidently are not.

I tend to find literal interpretation is a benefit when doing cryptic crosswords to the extent that I sometimes take longer to work out why a clue is supposed to be cryptic than I do to solve it. The flip side of thinking literally is that it is reflected in the way I speak. I rarely generalise; it's the same with analogy: the exceptions are too glaringly obvious to me and I feel obliged to explain the limits. I think this just confuses people so I try to avoid it.

I have numerous problems with conversations. One of the biggest is that if I'm not interested I won't concentrate on what people are saying and just sit there looking blank. And then somebody will direct a comment or question towards me and I'll either miss it or have to explain that I wasn't listening and don't know the context. On the other hand when I am interested and have something to say I don't understand the rules for inserting my comment. Usually I will wait until I think somebody has finished their turn and start mine, only to have somebody else start talking at the same time, so I stop and miss the opportunity. I really believe that having some token that gets passed to each participant when it's their turn would improve the "art" of conversation.

I try to stick to one-on-one conversations about subjects I know. Even here I'm not on safe ground. I find that people interrupt me or change the subject: this might be a sign of boredom or lack of interest but I can't tell and they don't explain. I am told (by my wife) that I am long-winded when I try to establish the background before getting to the point. The trouble is that I have to do it this way because if I don't then I think that people might misinterpret what I'm saying because they could be missing some information. It confuses me when I hear people talking about a subject at a high level without mentioning the detail. How can they be sure that they have the same mental model of the subject under consideration?

I find it next to impossible to put feelings into words. As soon as somebody starts talking about emotion or asking me how I feel I get tense and nervous and start to clam up. Most people assume that I'm unemotional because I don't express how I feel; the truth is that I can't usually even describe it to myself. I know happy, nervous, afraid, frustrated, angry, sad. And "neutral". My rest state. To be honest, I almost never stop to analyse how I feel: I just don't think about it. If I'm busy doing something then emotion isn't a factor. I can think back over it at some point later and I might think "Wow! That was great!" (or not) but at the time I'm not conscious of my emotional state.

Confrontations overload me. Well to be honest it's anything that overstimulates one or more of my senses. It can be shouting or certain loud noises, it can be light that's too bright, it can be a claustrophobic feeling from being in the midst of too many people or in too small an enclosed space. But not every time. There are times when I can handle it without any problem. I just don't know in what situations I will have a problem. But confrontations in particular are impossible to handle. It's the combination of proximity, emotional content and volume. I just shut down and can't think about anything other than wanting to be somewhere else. So I can't get into a heated argument: the other person will be ranting away and I'll just stand there. Strangely this winds my wife up even more: I think she should know better after 10 years...


The touching business is a tricky one. Even I haven't figured out the rules yet. There are times when I am hypersensitive to any contact and just instinctively flinch. There are certain parts of my body that I can't stand to be touched at any time: mainly around my throat. Other times I'm OK with being touched. I can handle it better if it's reasonable pressure and over an area of at least a few square inches. Light touching with fingertips is right out! That just irritates to the extent that I usually have to rub the area that was touched to relieve the sensation; otherwise it can tingle for several minutes afterwards and can make me shiver. Not pleasant.

My life is built around routines, mostly beneath the level of consciousness. I have trouble adjusting to any disruption to these routines: I get stressed, sometimes to the point of meltdown. One trigger for meltdown is where I am expecting a particular thing and I get something different. When I was growing up my mum and I went to a cafe and I asked for a meat and potato pie. My mum cut the pie into quarters! That was at odds with my expectation: I had pictured the pie whole, and I couldn't handle it being cut. Instant meltdown. The symptoms of a meltdown vary but can range from a full-blown tantrum, shouting or screaming and hitting/throwing things in the worst instances, right down to an uncommunicative sulk, often lasting for hours. The trouble is that I can't explain what's going on at the time: I'm just reacting subconsciously. And if I try to explain later somebody who doesn't understand my condition dismisses the cause as trivial and accuses me of overreacting hugely.

I used to exhibit autoecholalia: I would repeat out loud the last thing I said, over and over, completely oblivious to it unless somebody passed comment. I guess the comments started bothering me because although I still often repeat my last words I now do it silently and it rarely gets noticed. I also talk to myself when I'm focused on some task. Occasionally gets me a funny look in the office but I'm that deep in concentration I rarely notice. Besides, the software business tends to be used to eccentric behaviour.

I have a tendency to fidget. This is "stimming": providing sensory stimulation to myself that I find calming. It's subconscious; I'm not usually aware I'm doing it. It usually takes one of these forms: tapping or stroking myself, usually hands/arms or face, tensing and relaxing my jaw muscles, or some form of rocking motion.


Quite a list of symptoms. Reading this you may wonder that I can function among "normal" people at all. My usual strategy is to keep to myself as far as I can and try not to be noticed. Obviously some of my behavioural traits do draw attention but I have got into the habit of generally ignoring the reactions of people around me. I tend to stick to environments that I know well and feel comfortable in: this reduces sensory overload. I mix with people I know rather than going to new places. Where I can't avoid interactions with people I don't know I have developed the strategy of playing a role: I guess it's another example of a routine or ritual, but I have my "software developer" role for talking to technical people, my "barman" role for when I'm behind the bar, and so on. I can even talk to strangers on the phone as long as I have a clear goal and a plan for how the interaction will progress.

So in conclusion I have got to the point now where I can get by from day to day and even cope with some of the spanners life throws into the works. Some things still throw me, and I doubt that I'll ever get the hang of conversation. But I don't mind. It's not important to me. I've got my hobbies to keep me amused.

Growing up with Aspergers Part 2

I went up to Cambridge in 1992. The introductory Freshers' Week was very organised (by the 2nd and 3rd years) in terms of events but there was nobody who just told me what I would be doing. So I wasn't told where or when my lectures were, or how to find out, and I couldn't ask because that would mean speaking to somebody I didn't know. Luckily I got to know some others on my course through one of the Freshers' Week events and got hold of a timetable through one of them. However I was still feeling somewhat lost because I had no routine established.

I was surprised to find that the timetable left so much free time during the day: that was a big change from school where each day was filled. I could not get used to having so much time on my hands and so little structure to my days and this caused me to begin to lose interest. Now one of my traits is that I have to be interested in anything I am doing to be able to motivate myself. I started to miss lectures and supervisions (called tutorials outside of Cambridge) and just scraped through the first year exams.

The end of the first year also involved organising a place to live for the coming year (the college didn't have enough accommodation for all the undergraduates for the whole duration of their courses). I had no idea where to start with this one and found it very stressful. It was just luck that I was asked to join 3 others in sharing a house.

The second year continued the downward trend of the first. I began to feel very depressed and at one stage was self-harming. I was drinking every day and generally taking very poor care of myself. My clothes were usually unwashed and I hadn't shaved or had a haircut for over a year. I rarely ate in college, instead living off takeaways. It was no surprise to me when I failed the end of year exams. My parents couldn't understand what had happened and I couldn't explain any of it because that would involve talking about my feelings. I still find it very difficult to express how I feel: the words won't come to mind.

One constant throughout all my education was the lack of any goal on my part. I have never viewed anything I have done as a means to an end; I have done it because it interested me at the time, or I felt that it was what I had to do to meet peoples' expectations. I believe that university falls into the second category and that was why I ultimately failed. Looking back now I can understand that the university approach to learning just doesn't work for me. I am capable of learning new things in a very short space of time: this is something I do regularly in my job, but I need to be interested. Time at university seemed to drag because of the amount of time spent doing things unrelated to the course and I got bored.

As if to demonstrate that intelligence is not the same as common sense (or maybe I was a glutton for punishment) I attempted to continue my degree at Nottingham University, entering the second year there in 1994. I did this because I felt that it was what I was expected to do and I hadn't analysed the reasons for the failure at Cambridge. It was a disaster. All the problems I had faced before were present with the additional problem that I was in among a whole new set of people whom I did not know.

I was reluctant to return home to face my parents because I had failed again and felt that I had let them down. I stayed on in Nottingham for a couple of months after I had dropped out before I crawled home with my tail between my legs feeling utterly defeated.

I was at a loose end for some months. I signed on to the dole and tried to work out what direction to take. I volunteered for a local charity and did some computer work for them (mostly desktop publishing and databases). I took a correspondence course in programming and found the course work almost trivially easy. It was at that point that I had a flash of inspiration.

I had been programming as a hobby since I was aged 11. I started when my father bought our first computer, a BBC Model B+. While I had little interest in playing games on it there was something about programming that caught my attention and held it. I became proficient in BBC BASIC and progressed to the much more powerful Acorn Archimedes. It was on that machine that I first encountered C which I proceeded to teach myself in due course. All through my time at school and university I had continued to program: even through the times when I was depressed I could sit there programming and forget about the world for a while.

I realised that I could earn a living from my hobby. I had confidence in my abilities. All I needed was a foot on the ladder; that first step. That proved to be the hardest, most frustrating time of my life up to that point. I lost count of the number of interviews I attended only to be rejected because of my lack of experience or degree and poor interpersonal skills before I had a chance to show what I could do. I finally got an interview with a small firm based in Camberley, Surrey. At the interview they set me a written C programming test which I completed fairly quickly (they later told me that I had completed it faster than anybody else who had taken the same test) and accurately. I went home and waited, expecting to be turned down yet again. To my complete surprise I got a phone call the next day and was invited back for a second interview a week later. I got offered the job as an Analyst/Programmer and immediately accepted: I was off and running in my working life.

Growing up with Aspergers

When I was growing up I was always identified as a shy but intelligent loner. I was never one to initiate interaction with others. I was happiest playing on my own with my Lego: I didn't have any need for company. I did very well academically at primary school and passed the entrance exam to get into Manchester Grammar.

I can remember one of my first lessons there. I realised that I didn't know the correct way to present my work in this new environment. I couldn't ask anybody because I was afraid. I spent a little while just deciding whether to write in pencil as I had done at primary school or to use ink. I was so nervous about making the wrong choice that years later the memory of that anxiety is still vivid.

I suffered from a degree of bullying as a result of being socially awkward and physically somewhat out of shape: this took the form of intimidation, name-calling and teasing rather than anything physical. I guess that was just my good luck to be much bigger than the average kid my own age. I never had much of a circle of friends: mostly spent time walking round the corridors on my own at break time. I did enjoy the lessons however with a couple of notable exceptions. I never enjoyed Religious Studies and never got good marks because I approached it all from the position that religion is a tool used by those in positions of power to keep the "peasants" in line by stifling critical thought. I also loathed PE. I have never felt comfortable undressing or getting changed in front of others and that combined with my poor fitness made it all hard work.

It was around the age of 14 that things took a serious turn for the worse. I don't know what all the factors were but one of the major ones was when I received a detention (my first ever) for not doing a homework assignment in English. Up to this point I had assumed that my teachers were supportive. I explained that I hadn't heard any assignment being set and was told that that was no excuse and I should have asked somebody. I couldn't explain that I wasn't able to ask anybody because that would mean making the first move in a conversation. (In fact I never analysed it to that degree at that stage.) I felt that the situation was very unjust: I had been penalised for something that I had no knowledge of. From that point I began to lose interest in school, my grades suffered and my behaviour deteriorated to the point that I was receiving regular detentions.

Before long I began to dread going to school. I thought about opening the car door and jumping out but was worried about injuring myself. My dad did not react well to all this and would frequently shout which would make me very withdrawn. In the end I took to barricading myself in my bedroom and generally only coming out at night. This continued for a number of months and in the end social services became involved and I was dragged out to see a "child psychologist". That was all "half full/half empty" bullsh*t and I felt she was simple-minded and patronising.

What broke the cycle in the end was moving to a different school: William Hulme's Grammar where my younger brother was already enrolled. I entered the 3rd form close to the end of the academic year, being put into one of the lower sets on account of having missed so much schooling that year. The difference was remarkable. The teachers at that school were genuinely supportive and helped me to get established, identifying areas where I needed to catch up and others where I was actually ahead. When it came to the end of year exams I performed very well and was put into the top form for the 4th & 5th years (O-Level/GCSE - it was around the time of the transition from the former to the latter).

That was the end of my troubles at school: I aced my GCSEs and had teachers asking me to take their subjects at A-Level. I opted for the scientific subjects: physics, chemistry, maths and further maths without really having any idea where I was wanting to end up. When it came time to apply to university I opted for Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge because my chemistry teacher had gone there. I didn't put any thought into alternatives and only put any on my UCCA application because I was told to do so. In due course I got good A-Level results and a place at Cambridge reading Natural Sciences. I'll talk about my university experience next time.

Welcome

Welcome to my little world.

Guess I'd better start with a bit about myself. I was born in Wythenshawe, Manchester in the early 70's and adopted at the age of about 2 weeks. I was brought up in Billinge, near Wigan, where I lived until I moved away, first to university and then more permanently in the mid 90's when I got a job at the other end of the country -- down South -- where I've been ever since. I've now spent about half my life living away from the North but still feel a strong attachment to it and my home county of Lancashire in particular. I found out just a few years ago that I have Aspergers Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, which means in simple terms that my brain is wired a bit differently from the norm.

I've started this blog to put down in writing for the first time what impact Aspergers has had on my life. It has both positive and negative aspects, like pretty much everything in life. Perhaps reading about my experiences will help others understand the condition a little better, and even understand me a little better.

At the very least I hope I don't bore you.

Ben.