Timeout card

I got diagnosed this month.  I'm autistic.

Not the biggest surprise in the world; man who writes blog about minutiae, weird observations and pop culture has ASC.  

For years, I thought I suffered from depression and that this was the main problematical factor in my life.   Now I'm seeing it from a new perspective; my depressions and mood swings coincide with certain other events; for instance, I get both depressed and strangely angry after walking along busy roads or after long meetings, or in brightly lit shops.  More than two hours in a pub or restaurant also seems to trigger this.  My clinical psych tells me that my senses are taking in way more than they should and that the executive functions of my brain aren't able to distinguish what's important.

I took some time, thought about my reactions to the world, made some notes and observations.  Read a lot.  Some thoughts came to me, so I'm going to use this space to talk about them.  It's not the usual material and I genuinely won't mind if you don't want to read it.  Things are tough all over and they aren't getting any better, as Tom Waits once said.

 - Everything is conversation.  Seriously.  EVERYTHING.  If I'm talking to you, my brain is also listening to the music playing in the background and to the traffic noise outside and to the wallpaper and the feel of my socks.  And it's giving it all equal importance; all those things are speaking to me.  Each one has a message.  Today, I was trying to listen to a friend tell me about his daughter, whilst Hot Chocolate were standing behind me explaining their opinions on human relationship theory.  Also, the curtain rail above the firedoor was explaining that it had been removed some time ago and here were the screw marks to prove it.

 - If I shut my eyes at you, it's nothing personal.  It really helps.  Cutting off one sense for a few minutes helps me focus on the others.

 - So does coffee.  Yeah, but we all knew that anyway.

- I have reality hangovers.  Really do.  So, after a social engagement lasting longer than 90 minutes or so, I feel wrecked, morning-after-a-festival wrecked.  Headache, jittery, sick, not wanting to speak to anyone or do anything more complex than staring at YouTube.

- You need to be really, really clear when you explain stuff to me.  Example: "Look over these lists of names.  Put a tick next to the ones that you think should enrol on the literature A-level."

I couldn't do that because no-one told me what to do with the ones who I didn't think should enrol.  I had to go and check.  You put a cross or leave it blank, apparently.  Who knew?

- The telephone is the work of Satan.  I'm poly.  I'm in two long distance relationships.  I NEED the phone.  It keeps me with the people I love.  However, I have a question: HOW THE FUCK DOES ONE USE THE THING?  I interrupt constantly.  I reply by nodding.  My stress level goes through the roof.  I make random sounds or speak in a mumbling whisper.  I make up words.  I forget to listen.  I say "yes" when I mean "no" and vice-versa.  Bringing me to my next point:

- It's another language.  If you've ever been in the situation where you know just enough to get by in another language, you might be able to get this one.  I very, very often feel exactly like this; I'm just following the conversation.  But sooner or later (sooner if I'm tired or there's a lot of other things going on) the words start to confuse me (or rather, the meaning become less and less clear).  I guess that this is a result of the aforementioned lack of processing/filtering ability, but it feels exactly like asking someone for directions in Berlin and losing the thread somewhere around "gehen sie rechts"; I recognise some phrases but any nuance or detail is gone.  

 - I don't know who you are.  Well, I mean, if we've been on holiday together, or been on a picket line or we share a parent, I reckon I've probably got a good idea who you are.  Everyone else will have to put up with my quizzical look as I try to remember your name and why you aren't that other person with blonde hair.  I will stare at you a lot whilst I do that.  One of the few fuckin' times I can do eye contact.  Here's a thing: I've failed to recognise myself in a mirror before now.  If I'm stressed or if there's a lot of stuff going on around me, I sometimes mistake photographs for people.  And not in a funny, old timey haunted house movie way either.

- I'm going to tell you stuff.  I mean, if you've come here to read this, you know how I write.  Thing is, I'm very likely to talk exactly like this in real life too.  What one of my partners refers to as doing 'Wikipedia entry' at people.  The classic stereotype of ASC; I'm going to talk at you, faster and faster, my voice becoming more and more monotone, totally ignoring your anguished expression and, in extreme cases, the fact that you ran off twenty minutes ago.  

- There's embarrassing bits.  Yeah...see, before I started investigating whether I might have ASC, I worried about my mental health.  There are days during when I feel horribly depressed, as I've mentioned, often when I've just had too much input going on.  But there are also times when my frustration takes over.  I thought I was going crazy, punching the wall, banging my head, sometimes screaming or shouting randomly.  Thank fuck I kept this out of sight of everyone else.  I feel very, very sensitive about admitting to this, but it happens.  And now I know that it happens because it's a classic symptom of ASC.  And you know what makes it all worse?

- Pretending to be normal.  Yeah, did this a lot.  I'm not going to anymore.  Now, there's a lot of comedy mileage in the concept that my behaviour up until now has been me trying to be as normal as possible.  

  I would copy the behaviours of people around me; laugh in the right way at the right time, smile at the appropriate points, ask them the same questions they'd just asked me.  But I'm not very good at this sometimes.  I would start using their accent by mistake.  Or laugh too much when I didn't understand.  Or get the smile wrong, so it all went a bit The Man Who Laughs.  

Expression #34: mild pleasure at an amusing story about someone's dog

  You know what I felt like?  It's an old stereotype, but it's like being an alien, trying to copy the apparently random actions of the people around me.  It's horribly, horribly stressful and it leads right into having a meltdown of some kind later on.  So I'm not going to do it anymore.  This isn't always nice for the people around me, which makes me feel really bad; I talk like a robot sometimes now and that's going to make people feel weird, which is Not Good.  In future, I'm hoping to be able to strike a balance so that I can talk to the people I care about without being either The Joker or the android guy from Prometheus.  

This GIF is making me laugh quite a lot.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

I could totally carry this look off.

I suppose it says quite a lot that this is the terminology I use to explain how I see human emotions; using pop culture references to explain important emotional issues is a Thing, apparently.  I'm so sorry that this isn't making the most sense...

- Not making much sense.  Yeah.  You said it.  Well, I said it actually, but you know.

- BIG emotions.  Don't believe all that crap about lack of empathy or coldness.  If something makes me sad, I might cry for hours.  If it makes me angry, I feel like I can tear the city down around me.  Yeah, Hulk SMASH puny political debate.  And happy?  Oh, I can laugh myself into a frenzy, bouncing off the walls at the very oddest things.  The word "tea" for example, is hilarious.  As is the phrase "smoked all them fags" and "please accept this punch in the face".  The other day I remembered that I owned a copy of The Evil Dead on Blu-Ray and laughed for five minutes in sheer joy.  That, my friends, is a bit fucked up, innit?  Ah well, I was cheerful. And terrifying.


Now here's the thing, and if you've stuck with me this long, thanks.

I wouldn't change this for the world.

I like being me.

I see all these crazy patterns in the world.  I get entranced by tiny perfect details.  I think and act and respond to situations like a cat.

How could I want to give that up?  

I can lie awake at night and listen to a thousand little voices of the city around me.  I can replay songs and movies in my head pretty damn close to word perfect and dream whilst I'm wide awake with my eyes open.  I see the all wonder and sadness and beauty and sheer outright screaming joy in the world around me and I can see it all at once, all together rushing into my head and I feel it so hard that it hurts, so that I look and act as though I'm completely insane and I couldn't care less anymore. 

And that's all.  Normal nonsense very soon. 

Summer

When I lived with my parents, I'd sleep with the windows open in the summer.  Try it sometime, if you never have; it's worth putting up with the moths just to hear the city at night.  

Sounds drifting in close and falling away again.  You could hear a single three AM car from half a mile away, speeding through and then off somewhere else.  The occasional voice singing, shouting, laughing, fighting.  And when there was nothing else, the voices of the trees, the wind.  I remember lying back, trying to identify each sound; creaking of the wooden fences, dripping pipe somewhere down the road, cat's pawsteps right on the very edge of hearing.  Just now and then, every so often, there'd be the call of a train passing through the tunnel at the bottom of the hill.  The two-tone sound that echoed like a welcoming ghost.  A haunting sound, but not a frightening one.  

I paid such close attention.  I tried to write down what it made me feel like.  I tried to express the joy of living in the city, of the summer heat and the friendly dark and the songs of trains and cats.  Thing is, I also had a black and white TV set and a pair of headphones.  Literary ambitions had no chance because Grip of the Strangler was on again.  And so the world lost a South Yorkshire Ray Bradbury, which is probably a very good thing.

Last time I promised "actual TV stuff" without first thinking through what that would mean.  I'll level with you, I'm a bit short on ideas here.  It's nearly summer now and, just like back then, I don't feel like watching TV.  I feel like watching everything else, or at least observing it all.  The sounds carry so far and I seem to get a bit lost in thought (massive understatement there, I'm sure you'll agree).   Perhaps in the summer we reclaim our days; children are let out of school for six weeks and the luckier of the adults get freedom from work for all of a fortnight.   

In Summer, the light shines through the curtain and reflects on the screen.  All those afternoon matinees, Great Expectations or The Runaway Bus, it's all the same when a quarter of the viewing area is invisible.  The summer sun is brighter than the telly.  There's a rubbish moral right there for you, I suppose.

This has not been the funniest or most in-depth post ever, but, to be honest, I have a fair bit of Serious Life Stuff on my mind right now, events that I'll write about soon.  I'll return to these themes another time.  There'll be jokes and amusing captions and everything.

Whilst we await a return to normal service, here is a picture of a transmitter in the summer.  Sunrise.  See?

It makes me all Yorkshire patriotic.  Sort of.

Bear with me for a while longer, in other words.