New year: the inscrutable future

Its a time when traditionally people do the who "new me" thing. Me? I don't think you can decide to change yourself based on a date. That's not a plan which will work in the long term. You need more incentive.

I feel I have been moving in a different direction for some months now, and when I look at january 2013 compared with now, I notice a few differences.

1 - I am now diagnosed (obviously)
2 - I am not on a knife edge in my marriage
3 - I have a new job
4 - I am substantially fatter (and i was never small)
5 - My right arm is in a cast (and trying to type is a proper bugger's muddle!)

While some of those things were fairly predictable (increase in girth) not all were, and all of them have come with different effects on my life: my diagnosis has drawn me into the AS community (including another irregular blog here, my happier marriage has reduced my worry, as has my new job, although it is less stimulating that the old one, my weight gain has made me unhappy with my size and appearance, and resolve that I must do something to fix it, and my arm in a cast - really surprising, overall - is
making everything more difficult, including blogging

So my decisions for this year are informed by last year but also by my attempt at long term planning. To be clear, I am not good at this.  I don't know if its an aspie thing or just a me-thing, but I can't visualise further than about 6 months in the future, which means I am generally good at short-term and annual planning, but not long term. Whatever the basis for it, I need to work at making long term plans rather than undertaking actions which will have long-term consequences.

As a result, here is my list of thinks I need to do this year, and feel I have or can gather the motivation to

• try to buy a house: long-term plan
• go on holiday: annual plan, but secondary to house buying, if something has to give way
• lose weight: a classic, but i think my health is suffering. I look and feel terrible and need to change that
• get more involved in the AS community online
• volunteer in real life, perhaps undertaking fundraising
• find a social activity to get involved with.

For me, this is a tall order, but i have 350-odd days to manage to make progress on each of these.

overall, i am feeling optimistic about 2014: financially I am in a better position, I feel more comfortable in my marriage and we are looking to buy a house for the first time. Knowing i have AS has really freed up my mind to stop worrying about those things which are "wrong" with me and accept them. no longer am I the self-hating geek I have been forever but a guy who finally knows why he is different, and that its no bad thing. I hope everyone else can view 2014 with a similar level of optimism.

Diagnosis!

Finally!

After a year or more of waiting, I have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

So. Aspie. Just as I had thought, hoped and feared.

And while it comes as a tremendous relief, it is also tinged with sadness as I know I can never be "normal". but then what is normal other than the average you get when you throw all elements of a sample together and find what is in the middle. No-one necessarily fulfils the criteria of normality perfectly, I am just farther from it than other people.

And in a lot of ways this is a good thing. I have a name for my little box, I can study it and I can become more self-aware. There are many other people who don't have this privilege; other people that don't have a ready-build support society both online and offline to assist in any adjustments and give advice.

I had always intended to "out" myself once I was diagnosed, no longer using the anonymousaspie handle and just using my own name (or at least my own picture), but over the last year I've become quite used to being A2, and to be honest I do still want some level of anonymity.  As some people have observed to me, much of my blog is very personal and brutally honest.  I know some of it would shock and upset my wife, and I don't really want to do that, so for the moment, so that I can continue writing with complete freedom, I'm going to stick to being anonymous.

What comes next?

Well, basically, nothing. Life goes on. I tell people who I feel need to know, I look into what support mechanisms exist and see if they would help me.  But in essence nothing changes other than I have the confidence of knowing who and what I am and where that puts me in relation to the rest of the world.

I can't actually imagine a more positive outcome than this.

Opening up: Asperger's & the new job

Its Day 4 of the new job, and while I am still waiting for that diagnosis (see previous blog) I have already made sure that both my line manager and the person I will be working most closely with, one of the office deputies, are aware of my situation.

On day 2 they decided to have a 10 minute chat with me about how it affected me, whether there was anything they could do to help and how it would manifest if there were issues.

I was really happy that it felt like someone was taking an interest without taking a negatively slanted view. Indeed, my line manager said that after she thought about what it meant, we could do with a few more with a touch of Asperger's in this line of work. It felt good :)

So, onto the job itself.  Mainly I am chaecking the structure of a data system and adding information to it under a strict set of guidelines with some complex user-tools.

Which means it suits me down to the ground.

I decided it would be nice to create a quick list of Pros and Cons comparing this job to the last one, and the results were as follows

Cons

• It pays less

Pros

• I don't have to deal with the horrific bitch who ran the last place
• My commute from door to desk is 8 minutes
• I am working in the same location that my wife is undertaking her teacher training and work placement
• My level of responsibility is significantly lower
• I am not responsible for other people
• It is less stressful
• Communication is much more open and honest, so there is very little politicking going on
• There doesn't appear to be any "us" and "them" within the department
• I can park 2 minutes walk from my desk
• There are gym facilities on site that I can use
• There is a library where staff can hire out DVD's. for free :)
• The atmosphere is much more laid back
• I get 4 days more holiday than I got at the old place, and thats at the starting allowance!
• There don't appear to be any periods that I can't book holiday during

OK, I'm only 4 days in and it already looks pretty good!

The other thing that is making me happy today is this: I have discovered that my former workplace have made my position redundant. Why does this make me happy? Because it reinforces my claim that they were trying to force me out, and it would mean that a case for constructive dismissal is more likely to succeed.  Added to that is the fact that they had a round of voluntary redundances a few months ago. I inquired informally about VR and was told that my position was too important to be made redundant, and so i was not eligible.

So, my former boss lied to me, denying me a redundancy payout, then bullied me out of the job and made my role redundant. 

I think i might just be talking to my union rep and possibly my solicitor very shortly.

Finding the balance: Social interaction vs: social isolation

this is approximately how I socialise

I like being in my own company.

I don't get lonely on my own very often.  I don't feel the need to be with other people. I don't enjoy being with most people and, frankly, if I can avoid a social engagement without offending people, I normally will.


I do understand, however, that this is not universal, and a lot of people would say this is not normal.

At the moment, Wife is trying to encourage me into more social activities. With all the changes that have happened to us in the last 12 months, she has decided to be more pro-active about her own social life rather than relying on me for one, and so now she has joined 2 different folk music groups, and her weekends are normally taken up with practice, ceilidhs, gigs and gatherings.  And she loves it. It makes her very happy.

So, understandably, she is trying to encourage me to find something that I am passionate about and locate a group to join. This isn't a new drive on her part, but it is more sustained than it has been previously.  I completely understand her perspective: that finding something you love to do is a blessing, that its fun, that it will help me develop friends and relationships, that she won't feel the pressure of being my entire social circle.

But here's the thing: while I'm not against the idea of having a social life per se, the more she tries to talk/ force me into doing it, the less likely I am to do it.

There is also the fact that the people with whom I am most likely to spend time are people not too dissimilar from me. Gamers, geeks, nerds and social outcasts, and if I'm perfectly honest, most people like that make me cringe, and while I might be happy to game with them, i really don't want to spend social time with someone likely to incorporate RP conversations into real life activities. I just can't deal with that.

What wife doesn't understand is that the biggest issue for me now is one of confidence.  Before I realised the extent of my difference from other people I was bulletproof in social situations: full of confidence uncaring about what other people thought of me and happy to do my own thing. It didn't occur to me that there could be anything wrong or inappropriate about what I said, what I did and how I approached people.   Now, however, things are different.  I am now very aware of my shortcomings in comparison to "normal" people, and i can't stop worrying about whether I am offending people, upsetting people or acting inappropriately.

Which means I am boring. I do nothing. I don't engage in conversation of my own accord, but wait for people to talk to me - which given that I am the silent stranger in the corner happens rarely.

I feel its a conundrum.  I don't want to socialise for the sake of it, but I can see that Wife thinks it will help both of us.  I don't mind doing it, but don't want to be forced into it. I can't be the brash, confident person I was before - turns out ignorance really is bliss.

I will work on it as i don't want to completely isolate myself, particularly with my recent marital issues, but I don't know what the solution is.

What I'm hiding from

For a week or so now I have been aware that I'm avoiding writing a blog, I'm avoiding tweeting, and I am avoiding thinking about or addressing "the Aspie Question".

And the reason for it is pretty simple, and pretty sad, really. I don't want to acknowledge that I am Aspie.

There are some days where the knowledge of AS and how it relates to me is a real comfort, as it means there is something that explains the often inexplicable in my life: the odd choices, the strange habits, the behaviour that even I have never been able to justify.

But then there are the other days, where I realise how different I am, how little I understand the people around me, how often I am excluded from conversations in a passive fashion, just because I can't read the body language of others, and I don't react as they understand.  Sometimes I look at it, and think that this is too much of a burden to bear, that if I stop acknowledging it I can continue on with my life as I understood it before someone suggested I might be Aspie.

However, today has stopped me in my tracks because of two incidents, each of which is powerful in their own right and together brought me to tears.

At my work, one of my colleagues has M.S.. I am her line manager, but she is one of the only people who I have told about my AS issues, because I feel she understands what it is to be different but look the same, and I really value her opinion and just to have someone to listen to me who can get it.  To be honest I see her more as a friend than a colleague. A couple of days ago she had a M.S. relapse, and as a result has permanently lost some feeling in her hand, her arm and her leg, and some bladder control.  She told me this, and I was truly sad about it.
 Today, I was spoken to by my boss, who told me that my colleague with M.S. doesn't feel she can talk to me as I gave very little reaction to her news to me about her relapse and her lack of feeling in her hand.  I was appalled! I am really sad for her and sometime give her lifts into work to try to make things easier for her, and am genuinely concerned for her well-being  but to hear her view, apparently all I did was stop typing for a few seconds when she told me, then started typing again.
 When I told my wife about this, she said that's normal for me. the bigger the news, the more emotional, the less likely I am to react to it. I simply sit still and absorb the information. I wasn't really aware of this, but I thought back and realised that she's right. Petty things can get me very animated. Big things stop me dead.

But following on from this, wife said to me that it often appears that I take things too well, and I joked about when our eldest was born by c-section. I was at work and the hospital called me to tell me that I didn't have to worry and that the baby would come today, I just said "OK, call me if the plan changes" at which point the person on the phone said "ah. no. you're maybe being a little too laid back. you need to come to the hospital now!" Wife didn't laugh though. she pointed out that she had thought about that recently, in the light of AS, and realised that this was typical of my reaction. someone said not to worry, so I didn't, but it hadn't even occurred to me that she might feel lonely, or in need of company, sitting lone in a delivery ward awaiting an emergency c-section, which is major surgery when you come right down to it.

And so I sat there, at the dinner table, considering that moment of 5 years ago, realising that not once had I considered how lonely and scared she might have been; how worried for our baby's health. I don't know what I did think, I really don't. but sitting at the table, for the first time, I became tearful thinking about how hard it must be on wife. 2 AS children and an AS husband who is now undertaking a journey of self discovery.  How hard is it on her to hold all this together. how often her needs get put last. how often her desires get overlooked.

And while I deny my Aspie nature I will never change, and I will always be that self-absorbed.  So, my task tonight is threefold:

1 - Read theories on Aspergers and dealing with it by experts, and find things that work for me
2 - Write my blog and remember why I started doing it in the first place as a self-therapy
3 - Acknowledge, and never forget.

Some days its hard, and some days its ok, but its an ever present fact that I need to face

I am Aspie

Joining the community

In the last few days I have dipped my toe in the water of the Aspie and wider ASD community online, and I have to say that being able to see the struggles of others and reading about the support they receive has been  very comforting for me.
 After creating myself a twitter account and making a couple of posts under the #Aspie hash-tag I suddenly found myself receiving mentions and direct messages from people who wanted to talk to me and invite me to interact with the community at large.  To feel so welcome so quickly into a society where my experience has always been one of social awkwardness, long pauses, anxiety and not knowing what to say was a blessed relief.
 And its been very constructive: finding a good description of what it is to be aspie, joining a group to discuss ASD and Aspie issues or simply having people respond to you or forward your tweets
Finally after having spent so long feeling I have to work as hard as anyone else and never get the level of social acceptance that they do, I'm finding that there are other people out there who are having very similar experiences, and suddenly I don't feel quite so isolated.