Variability

Today has been an OK day.
Not amazing,
Nothing much achieved,
Just clothes
And a bit of lunch,
But fine, OK
Perfectly contented
Just to be.

Yesterday was miserable.
I didn’t want
To exist
At all.
Really depressed,
Really low.
Not seeing any value
To my life
Nor any point
In staying alive.
Desolate.
Hopeless.

The day before was nice
I visited my best friend
Had coffee with my husband
Bit of shopping
Good stuff
Nice dinner.
Contented
Fine.

The day before was impressive
Coffee and breakfast
First thing
Cheese and mushroom toastie.
Two lots of shopping
Trousers, washing powder,
Bath foam, food.
All good stuff.
And then a 12K run.
Successful, good day.
If all days were like that
Life would be worth it
Totally.

The day before that
Tried to make tea
Couldn’t.
Drove to town, parked.
After three different coffee shops,
All too busy, frightening,
No words, even to ask for
A latte, which is what I always have.
No hope of buying food.
Returning home
In tears.
Fighting the urge
To damage myself.
Not able to eat.
Seeing no hope.
I’m a jobless, childless, useless
Person in their 40s
Who cannot even
Get a hot drink for myself.

This is the variability of my life.
This is the difference in capability
From day to day.

And I never know
How the new day will be.

And I struggle desperately
To imagine how life
Could be any different
From how it is
In that moment.

When it is good
I make plans
Based on the good persisting
And I imagine
Things will improve
Consistently
And I can achieve
So much.

When it is bad
I see no way
It is worth staying alive
And I have to fight the urge
To give up.
Sometimes
Taking it
One hour, minute, second,
At a time.

This is the variability
Of my life.

(And is also why
This blog
Is so unpredictable.)

A Silly Tale

My Executive is not functioning
Their suit is creased,
They cannot find their papers
And their briefcase
Is full of ash.

The ash is from my burnout
And it spills all over the office
In great clouds,
Covering everything
In a fine dust
That will take some time
To clean up.

In the meantime
My constant hand flapping
Is spreading the ash still further
And it reflects the light
Coming in from the windows
And makes stimmy patterns
In the air.

When the ash settles on the desk
I like to run my fingers through it
And make circles in it
And then wash my hands
Because it feels a bit weird
On my skin.
Sand is nicer to play with.

My Words keep going AWOL
But they never leave a forwarding address
They just disappear.
I think they go off for a holiday
Sometimes.
Or perhaps they’re just down the pub
Enjoying a few pints
And a pie and chips.

Maybe that’s why my Diagnosis
Was so late.
It was sitting in the pub
For 45 years
Eating pies and drinking beer
And because it has such
Severe
Time agnosia
It didn’t realise that it had missed
The last train.

Although it finds trains
Rather stressful anyway.
And leaving the pub
Would have meant change,
Doing something different.
So maybe
It just gave in to
The inertia.

And, of course
Because everybody has such poor
Communication skills
Nobody was able to tell anybody
Where it was.

And night after night
My Executive got home
And ate the same takeaway for dinner
Every night.
Because even before the burnout
They couldn’t function very well
And needed their friend Routine
Who liked to have the same thing
Every night for dinner anyway.
And keeping Routine happy
Was always good.

Mask bullied my Executive
And tried to make them function properly
And told Routine to stop being so stupid.

Mask was an annoying tit.
Irritating and itchy,
No matter how many labels I cut out of it.
It looked good though
Everybody told me so.

But it got too warm.
Overheated.
It kept trying to keep the Words
At home
But they kept slipping out
The back door
And vanishing.

Then things started to melt
At the edges
Senses went a bit haywire
And there were explosions
And people started to notice.

My Executive stopped coming home some nights
And stayed at the office
To keep cool
And avoid the bullying.
Routine gave up eating
And sat in the corner
Rocking hard and hitting themself and tearing their skin.

And then when the Words got home
After a night on the town
They told me that my Diagnosis
Had been seen in the pub
And that closing time
Was fast approaching.
Last orders had been declared.

When my Executive
Returned from the office the next evening
They found Routine crying in the garden,
Clutching a fidget cube and a furry tangle.
My Words explained what had happened
By typing into an iThing.

Mask had got too hot.
Way too hot.
Melting down had increased
No time to cool.
Mask had cracked in the heat and would no longer stay on.

Sparks, flames, and total burnout.
Explosions so loud that ear defenders were needed.
Piles of smouldering ash everywhere,
Which my Executive tried to put into their briefcase,
Though they didn’t help with functioning
And eventually made a mess in the office.

But just as all seemed lost,
My Diagnosis finally got back from the pub
With an official Report
(And a kebab).

Mask should never have been worn for that long
Masks when worn for long periods
Can overheat
And are a burnout risk.
Safety procedures had not been followed.

Report said that
Routine needed care and love,
My Words should be allowed to come and go as they liked.
My Executive needed an assistant to function
(And would also have to sweep up the burnout ash,
Which could take a while).

Diagnosis explained that communication was hard
For everybody
And that Report had said so.

And everybody finally understood
What had been going on
And jumped up and down to celebrate.

Diagnosis was a bit drunk by now
So they went on the Internet
And ordered loads of spinners and toys and pretty lights
And everybody settled down
Under their weighted blankets
To recover from the events.

And they ate kebabs every night for months.
Because they always ate kebabs.
Because Routine liked them.

Lost Day

I woke early, feeling exhausted, and not a proper sort of sleepy exhausted, but an odd sort of depleted exhausted, like all the energy had drained out of me somehow and I could hardly move. I could hear birds, very very loud birds, wood pigeon calls burning the insides of my ears.

I knew I had to be somewhere today. I knew also that getting there would be difficult. I looked at the schedule for the rest of the week, which I had photographed and saved on my phone. I tried to work out what I might be able to skip without causing too much inconvenience or annoyance. My head wouldn’t think very well, so I started to try to type into my phone:

If this were real life and I’m at sensory levels of now and tiredness. Would be schedule looking.

This was how the language emerged from my finger. I knew it was wrong and that it needed editing. And I also know that when WRITTEN language becomes difficult and starts to go wrong in that way, that I’m heading into shutdown. This is something I’m starting to learn, now that I’m actually observing myself with some knowledge, rather than just declaring myself “ill” or declaring that “my head went wrong” as I have done in the past.

I attempted to speak. There was nothing. No surprise there. If the written words are starting to go wrong then the spoken ones are almost certainly non-existent.

It was still early. I still had to get a message to the outside world that I wasn’t going to be where I was expected to be. The best I could do was to message my husband a few words and hope he could interpret what I was trying to say in order to convey some sort of message to those who needed to know that I wouldn’t be appearing for rehearsals this morning. He received the following messages:

Fail now. Is. Words. Morning. Not.

Now. Schubert. Prob. Can’t.

Tell.

Write hard. Speak not. Food not. Later.

And because he has long experience of such communications, he was perfectly able to send a message saying that I wasn’t able to get to the Schubert rehearsal and had asked him to pass on the message and that I didn’t need food and wouldn’t be able to communicate for a while.

At some point during the morning someone brought me a cup of tea and left it outside my tent. I was unable to respond, unable to move from where I was curled up under the duvet, unable to do anything at all for a while. This is all absolutely normal for me at such times, which have been happening since my early childhood. My mother observed the behaviour, still remembers it well, going right back into my early childhood, and even had a word for it, zonking, which I mentioned in Losing The Words.

Having successfully conveyed a message of sorts to the outside world, my brain then simply closed off. I slept a bit. I lay there staring at the side of the tent, a bit of plain fabric being as much visual input as I could take. I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I don’t usually remember much from these times, just a feeling of being utterly drained, no energy at all, and something like a deep depression, not being able to form thoughts properly, no ability to translate things into words, nothing. My head is simply closed for business and my body follows it. There is nothing to do at that point except wait – it’s like some sort of reset is required before my overstimulated and exhausted brain will function properly again. I don’t respond, I don’t communicate, I just lie there and breathe, nothing more.

After a few hours I regained the ability to type and to form words and typed some of the thoughts that had by then started to emerge from my head into the notes app on my phone. Having established that I could once again produce proper typed sentences, I was then able to contact the outside world by facebook without my husband having to make the sentence structure for me. It was lunchtime. I was aware that I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all morning (and couldn’t have – something else my mother had observed about zonking was that food was an absolute no during those times, and when I have attempted to eat or to keep functioning I have simply ended up physically sick and it’s been assumed I had some sort of bug or similar).

Somebody brought food and left it outside my tent. I was unable to thank them except online, but was able to eat by mid-afternoon, and was, it seemed, by this stage, quite hungry – even though I didn’t feel any sort of hungry, once I started to eat it was obvious that I was.

It took another couple of hours for the shutdown to be properly over and a further hour for spoken words to fully return. Although I can’t always tell when I’m going IN to shutdown, or that that’s what it is (though I am getting better at recognizing it as I’m learning), it’s really obvious when I’m emerging because I start to stim again, I start to rock and to move and get back to what for me is “normal”, a state of dynamic equilibrium as I like to think of it. For me, being still either means I am masking furiously and working hard to stay still, or I am ill and in shutdown, or I am asleep, or, occasionally, that I am relaxed under a weighted blanket or completely immersed in something or similar. The rest of the time I move, and that movement restarting is always a good sign – it’s the feeling that you didn’t know something was wrong until it was solved, and the minute it’s solved it was obvious how wrong it was before!

My sensory system remained on high alert for the rest of the day – I managed to go and sit in the audience to hear some of my friends singing and playing music, but used earplugs against the applause and was deeply grateful to a friend who asked others to move away from me to give me some space during the performance.

By mid-evening I was able to drive home, where my husband had “the food” (whatever I’m currently eating we call “the food” – I have cyclic obsessions with food where I eat the same thing every day for months, and always have done) ready and waiting for me, and I spent the evening doing all the familiar routines and being with the animals and recharging properly ready for the next day.

But what should have been a day participating was basically lost to a massive shutdown, and there was nothing I could do about it. I would have liked to have been in the rehearsals that morning. I would have liked to go to tea that day. I would have liked to join in the celebratory feasting and dancing (although I knew that the feasting would have been a non-starter anyway and I’d have been eating alone somewhere quiet), but I couldn’t.

But at least I know what causes these times now, and I have a word for them, shutdown, which makes sense to me and enables me to understand what’s going on. At least I have people who are willing to understand it too and to bring me food and so on and to help me out when it happens. And I know that I’m not getting some sort of illness (as has been suspected on many occasions in the past) and that I will feel better in a few hours’ time – I just need to wait, to be on my own, and to have as little input into my system as possible.

Last year, when the same thing happened, all I knew was that I felt inexplicably awful and couldn’t even tell anyone how or why. I spent a night silently crying in my tent in the dark, without food or help, with nobody even knowing where I was because I’d lost all ability to communicate and wasn’t even able to type a message to my husband. And short of “something mental health related or maybe a virus”, I had no idea why I was like that.

This year wasn’t ideal. It’s not really how I want to live my life, missing out on good times, having to skip rehearsals, having to sit on my own because my system can’t cope with much social interaction or noise, and so on. But it is better than the distress of previous years, than the anguish of desperately trying to function, trying to make things work, having to call in with some “unknown illness”, making myself worse by continuing to try to speak or function as I “should”.

I don’t like having to live this “half life”, which is what it feels like. But knowing why these things happen means I’m much less self-blaming, much kinder to myself, gentler to myself. And simply allowing the inevitable shutdown to run its course and not trying to push myself out of it means that I actually recover more quickly and am generally healthier as a result. Maybe once I’m more fully recovered from the recent burnout I’ll be able to do a bit more – I do hope so.

It does still all feel very much like a work in progress still. I have my answer as to why these things happen to me, but I now have to work out the best way to live, which I haven’t quite managed yet.

Packing

To return to the place
Where my old life ended
And my old self
Disintegrated
Into a million tiny fragments.

I messaged a friend
A year ago
And said
“It seems like I might have
Some sort of autism”

I laugh now at the terminology
And ponder what “sort” it might be
I’d quite like it to be purple
With a side order of cheesy chips
And a glass of beer.
Maybe also a beard
And nice eyebrows!

I digress

A tweet set me thinking:
Do I have a love-hate relationship
With this place?
I’m not sure.
I’m not given to loving
Or hating
Anything much.
They always seem
A bit strong
And the words are loaded
With overwhelm.

But

I got it.

The paradox in my head
About this place
At this time of year
After the events of August 2016…

Two words
Describe it
Perfectly for me

Supportive
And
Traumatic

The support of good people
I know they are good
My brain tells me
But they are still people
And
As always
With a crowd of people
I get that sense of
Disbelonging
That I always have.
No matter how much I belong
I never do.
And if I feel I might start
To be part of something
I get uncomfortable
And withdraw.

The trauma of multiple meltdowns
My life falling apart
The eventual admission
Of just how disabled I really am
And that to return
I need adaptions
I can no longer be
“A normal customer”
And I know the truth
About my life.
The eventual comfort
Of knowing why I can’t
Do what most people can.

I have nearly cancelled this trip
So many times.
Decided I cannot go.
Too much.
The risk of meltdown.
The inevitability of speech loss
In a place where face to face interaction
Is valued.
At what point do I just give up?

Apparently not yet.
Because I have started packing.
To return to a place of

Unsettling support
And
Reassuring trauma.

Where all the feelings get intermingled.

And the routine
Is simultaneously
Comforting and constraining.

The discomfort of becoming
Part of a community
Of never quite knowing
What to do
Or how to be.

But I am drawn back

Simple to say it is the music that draws me
But it is more than that.
Observing people.
Intrigue.
Maybe even as close
As I come to being
Part of a community.
Skirting the edges,
Watching from the sidelines
Because throwing myself
Into the middle
Breaks me too badly.

I cannot keep up the acting
Or make so many conscious decisions
Or remember how to chat
Or cope with the noise
Or concentrate that hard
On doing the right thing
Or on explaining
Why I am not doing the right thing
For days on end.
It is too exhausting.

Adaptions are being arranged.
Separate eating.
People knowing I am autistic
And need time out
To recover.
Disclosure not optional
For me.
Essential.

It feels strange.
After so many years
Of “just work harder”
To realise that I can’t.
And the only way I can do anything
Is with adaptions
To enable me to cope.

I feel sad that I cannot join in
“Properly”
But I have tried this
For so many years
And always the result
Is disaster.

Prior to my mask disintegrating
I could do 3 days
Before meltdown or shutdown.
Now it is more like
24 hours
Before I need to be alone
To recover.

But I have still not cancelled.
I am still going.
Facing things that terrify me.
But going to a place
I want to be,
Even so.
I said, a couple of years ago,
That if I wasn’t ill,
It would be perfect.
(I only knew myself to be “ill”
Back then).

It’s a place where the old, “strong” me,
The heavily masked me of my early 20s,
Would have flourished
(Although collapsed upon return)
But the me of now can barely cope
Because I am so burned out and mentally ill
After so many years of masking.

And now the place is imbued
With heavy significance.

Had I never gone there
Would I still not know I was autistic?

The question hurts my brain.

I cannot cope with the notion
That something involving people
Is so significant.

That makes me too vulnerable.

Part of me wants to stay away,
Forget.
Part of me needs to go back,
Remember.

Because everything changed.
My entire perception
Of my whole life.

It is all too big.

So I shall focus only on practical survival.
Arrangements.
Food.
Packing.
Loading the car.

I shall count socks
And think about jumpers
And try to organise things
As best I can
Because I know
My executive dysfunctioning
Means I will struggle
With the most basic things
After a short time.

Even the packing is a challenge
Right now!

Summer School

One of the most striking things that happens to so many of us who are diagnosed or identified as autistic late or very late on in life is that as we learn about autism and what it actually means and how it affects our lives, there is this constant stream of “lightbulb moments” where events from the past suddenly make sense and can thus be reinterpreted very differently. Those of us who grew up oblivious to the fact we were autistic but just knew that life was very very difficult (and assumed, since it was all we knew, that that was the case for everyone but that they somehow coped with the difficulties better than we did) have a lot of reframing of our past to do and a lot of moments that we can now perceive completely differently as a result of knowing we’re autistic.

A couple of days ago I was looking through my “on this day” feature on facebook, as I do most morning, and this status from two years ago appeared:

It is so nice to be alone. Away from all the other people and “group work” (i.e. HELL). Just me, York Bowen viola music on the laptop, a bottle of wine, and a box of maltesers.

I was instantly struck by my relief at being alone and my assertion that group work was hell. I decided to have a look at some of the comments I’d made on the status and they made for further interesting reading:

I’m at Open University Summer School. There are people everywhere. They’re lovely people, but I’m just not good with lots of people all at once. They all have social skills that I just can’t do. The work itself is no probs, but then we’re told to “discuss this with the people sitting around you” and “work in groups” and all I hear is noise. I don’t have the filters for it. Everyone else chats and laughs and I feel lonely and isolated. I drove off campus this evening and found a Tesco to buy stuff then just drove, with music, on my own. It was the most soothing bit of the day.

I limit parties and things because I know they use so much energy and I often need a lot of time to recover. If I was an animal in the wild I’d be a polar bear or something that lived a largely solitary life.

Interacting with people all day is just exhausting. The maths is easy, and the people are nice, but there are so many of them, and it’s so tiring having to smile and pretend to be normal all day.

This is going to be a very very long week. People keep telling me I’ll love it. I’m not loving it. I arrived and broke down in tears and collapsed. If there was a way I could get out of it I would. I hate it.

All the above remarks in italics were written over a year before I knew I was autistic. As far as I knew at that time I just had mental health problems and, at the time I believed the only current issue I had was what I believed to be “normal” levels of anxiety. The disability officer from the course had even called me the previous week to check that I was OK (having read on my student record that I was listed as having bipolar disorder) and I’d assured him that I was between episodes and that everything was absolutely fine and I didn’t need any accommodations but thank you for asking etc etc. The only thing I did check was that I would have a bedroom on my own – I have known all my life that sharing sleeping space with anyone other than people close to me and selected by me is absolute anathema and on the occasions where I’ve been forced into that situation I’ve spent the night anxious and sleepless, desperately waiting for morning.

So I set off to Summer School without any adaptions in place. And I struggled from the outset. I arrived at registration in tears, desperate already to go home, but knowing that this was a compulsory course and I’d fail the degree without it. I sat through a lecture about group work and about how we were being assessed on our interactions with the other students (all of whom were complete strangers to me) and that we had to be actively participating and not looking at the ceiling or staring out of the window because we would otherwise be marked down. The fear started to rise. My anxiety levels started to skyrocket. I remember being desperate to get out and to go home. No degree was worth this amount of torture, surely?

And, as we moved into the group work session and I sat with three complete strangers trying to design some sort of mathematical modeling experiment, trying to look into these strangers’ eyes and to “look interested” and to do all the things we’d been told to do in the lecture, the tears started to roll down my face and then the crushing panic as the noise got louder and louder and the voices of the people around me started to blur into this horrendous and incomprehensible sound and then it felt like the walls of the lecture theatre were going to crush me to death, and the inevitable meltdown happened.

I sat in the corridor outside the lecture theatre rocking and crying until someone eventually found me. I can’t remember exactly what happened next, but it became obvious that I wasn’t going to cope with being a “normal” student. Some adaptions were made for me – I was moved to a different overall group with fewer people, and it was agreed that I would always have a seat near the door or on the end of a row, not in the middle of the room.

It helped a bit, but after a couple of days I was finished. I’d also pretty much stopped eating by this stage (the dining hall was another source of noisy clattering fear and social interaction, and any acquisition of food that required any input from me was impossible for me – I stood in front of a toasting machine one morning at breakfast and cried because I just couldn’t work out how to get toast – I would have gone hungry that morning had another student not made some toast for me and put it in front of me).

I was in touch, as usual, with friends and my husband via facebook. My husband offered to drop everything and come up on the train to see whether he could sort me out and calm me down and get me eating again. The course directors were initially reluctant – I wasn’t registered as needing a carer, and they were also suspicious that my husband would arrive and simply take me home. However, it was fast becoming obvious that I wasn’t going to last much longer on my own anyway so my husband was allowed to join me and he arrived and brought my “safe” foods and got me eating again and somewhat back on track and I managed to stay for the rest of the course.

I remained very stressed for the rest of the week, but as the end approached things did improve. I self-medicated heavily with alcohol and caffeine in order to cope, and landed up in a group with some very good people who helped me through the group work and seemed fine about having to sit near the door in every room (I’m still facebook friends with them, two years on). Perversely, one of the parts of the course that many people were worried about was the presentation to a room full of tutors and other students – for me it was the easiest and least stressful part of the whole experience! This seems to be the story of my life – I find things that others find so easy that they don’t even think about them really really challenging, and things that others find challenging I often find unproblematic!

And, it’s only now, two years after the event and eleven months after starting seriously to investigate the possibility that I might be autistic and what that even meant, that I can now understand just WHY Summer School was so difficult for me, and just how disabled I am and how much support I need at times in order simply to survive. Back then I didn’t have a clue about “sensory spoons” or that not having the ability to cope with multiple conversations in a room was the result of the way my brain was wired rather than me just being hopeless. I’d never heard the phrase “executive functioning” and couldn’t work out why an unfamiliar toaster might make me cry and I simply wouldn’t be able to work out how to use it. I didn’t know just how much energy I was using coping with eating whatever food they provided rather than my own routine “safe” foods that I usually had at home. I didn’t know why the lecture on group work made me so terrified, and I couldn’t begin to comprehend how the other students could spend all day in lectures and group work and chatting at coffee breaks and then go to the bar in the evening and STILL cope without crying and breaking and sobbing and rocking in the corridor – I just assumed they were geniuses of some sort with unlimited energy and resources and that I was broken and pathetic. I never even found the bar!

Now it’s all explained. And now I have to work out what to do when I go away from home on my own in the future. I still don’t have it worked out. I’m supposed to be going away in a few weeks’ time and I need to work out what accommodations might be possible and what I will need in order to get through the week. Then I need to communicate it to the people concerned, which is even harder. I’m struggling with it, even with the knowledge I now have, and when the confirmation e-mail arrived in my inbox the other day I went into a state of abject terror and nearly cancelled. I’m still trying to work out what to do so I don’t end up with a repeat of the Summer School scenario.

And although I now know why all these things have gone wrong, I’m still less than a year into the whole “knowing I’m autistic” thing. I have no problems with being autistic – it’s simply the way that I am – but asking for help has never been something I’ve found easy, and I’m still trying to work out exactly what “help” would actually be helpful, which is another huge job on its own! And after 4 decades of believing that when I couldn’t cope it was my fault and I just had to deal with it, the change in perspective is absolutely massive.

This is still, I keep reminding myself, a process. And, as I keep hearing from those who’ve been through the same process, it will take time.

I hope I’ll be able to work it out eventually!

Accumulation

There are usually two reasons why I might not update this blog for several days. One is that I’m too busy, doing too much out in the world and am therefore spending all my energy interacting with people out in the world and all my time simply doing whatever it is and therefore don’t have enough energy or time left over to write a blog post. The other is that I am simply unable to write at all because I cannot translate the thoughts in my head into sufficiently coherent words because I have run out of energy completely and it is all I can do simply to survive and get through the day.

Both of those situations have been the case this past week, which is why I’ve been absent. After a couple of really busy music events the previous week (and yes, I did leave two clear days between each for recovery), I then went out to lunch on Saturday, went running on Sunday, out to lunch again on Monday, and then had to drive over to the vet on Tuesday to collect a rat who’d had a operation.

It turned out that, when added to the musical activities of the previous week with bare minimum recovery time and no “well days” in between for me to gain energy, four consecutive days out of the house was too much for me (in fairness, I didn’t plan four days, because I’d forgotten about collecting the rat, and even when I did remember, just a drive to the surgery didn’t seem like it would be too much – but it was).

And then, on top of all this activity out in the world with noise, and interaction, and so on, there were other things going on. Several incoming messages to deal with, things I wanted to say and comment on, friends who needed support in various ways, a bit of family stuff (father starting chemo), a birthday, anticipation of the upcoming weekend (which is now happening as I type), and my spoon rations were stretched to their absolute limit. And last thing on Tuesday evening the very last spoon of my spoon overdraft was used and I went from “coping” to “not coping”.

With hindsight, the signs were there. Saturday lunch was the last “proper meal” I managed to eat, and my food intake got increasingly erratic over the next few days. I started to feel exhausted again. I gave up commenting on facebook posts I’d wanted to because I couldn’t find the words. Sunday I got wiped out by going for a run and lost speech again. And once I got to Tuesday night I managed about one hour of sleep in total.

I haven’t felt up to writing a blog post, not even a “poem style” one since then. I’ve tried on several occasions. I’ve lain in bed with the phone, sat on the sofa with the iPad, and at one point turned on the computer and managed to type a title before feeling so awful I had to go and lie down again. But that has been it. Today is the first day I’ve really felt anything other than absolutely dreadful.

And I finally figured out, yesterday, I think, WHY that is. Even if I had been wrecked on Tuesday evening I should have been OK by Friday if I’m thinking of the “two days for recovery” rule, which I’ve been applying and which has, on the whole, been reasonably successful.

But what I hadn’t figured on was the cumulative effect of stacking up many events on top of each other. I hadn’t figured that the two days are just what’s needed for recovery from doing something, but that they’re not enough for proper recuperation. If doing something takes me into spoon overdraft, then two days can usually get me back to a balance of zero, but if I don’t take MORE time alone with minimum sensory input then I never get chance to accrue any savings. I’m living on credit the whole time.

And now I’m paying the price. I was supposed to be going to the Air Tattoo yesterday with my friend. I was not well enough to go, not by a very long way. I wasn’t even well enough to e-mail him to tell him I wasn’t well enough to go, so my husband had to do it for me. It was left that there might be a possibility of going to park and view nearby tomorrow, but, as I type this, I don’t think I’m going to be well enough for that either. I’m still struggling to eat. My sleep is still really disturbed. And my mood is not, shall we say, at the top of its game.

And my husband isn’t here to do the communicating for me either because he’s out for the next two days running the 100K ultramarathon that I am missing terribly and want to be doing too, but am not well enough. I’ve been dreading this weekend for a few weeks now, knowing what sort of weekend I wanted it to be, what I wanted to be doing, and what I wouldn’t be doing, because of stupid burnout and being not well enough to have done enough training or anything.

And it’s turned out that I’m not even well enough to go and watch aeroplanes either. I’ve run through, in my head, the potential scenarios for tomorrow, and I can’t imagine how I’ll cope. There will be people, there will be noise, there will be nowhere to hide, nowhere dark to go. It will be a long day that will use spoons fast. Even in past years, before I knew I was autistic and before this particular burnout, it’s taken me several days to feel well again after going to an airshow – I now understand why. My husband has made sandwiches and has left them in case I go and need them, but my head just can’t make it work right now. I’ve been trying to get out of the flat for the last day and a half in order to do a few jobs – I need to go to the bank, my phone has run out of credit, and so on, but even that feels too much for another few days. I need more time, more space, more recovery.

All this makes me sad. Things that I want to do, things that I love doing, I just can’t. It also makes me afraid, afraid that people will stop asking, that they’ll think it might be “too much” for me and that decisions about what I do will get taken out of my hands because people will think they’re protecting me by not inviting me to play music or have lunch or go running or go to airshows or whatever. And I’ll miss out on opportunities that I COULD have taken (my functioning abilities are so variable that I can often do something one day that I have not a hope of doing the next, and vice versa) and on things I enjoy. I also worry that they’ll stop being genuine with me, thinking that I won’t be able to cope with difficult stuff, and I’ll end up with a confused “half-reality” which I absolutely don’t want, even if I can’t always help with that particular thing at that particular time.

I have to learn this stuff for myself, and I have to discover just what abilities I’ve been left with following the burnout of the last year, just how far I can push before I break, and what I can do to mitigate against the effects of going out into the world and doing things. I have to learn how the cumulative use of energy stacks up and what I can do about it. Even realising, this week, the difference that “accumulation” of spoon debt makes to me, it has become obvious why I’ve struggled so badly to hold down even part-time jobs. Even if I can get through the first week, the damage to my energy levels stacks up so I’m incapable of doing the same in the second week, and I eventually fall apart. Looking back now, it’s easy to see the patterns. And in a strange way, being able to see those patterns and understand why I lost the jobs is at least satisfying and persuades me, just a little more, to stop blaming myself (as I have done for years) for my many failures in the workplace.

Before my husband headed off to go running around the countryside we were able to discuss some of this. He reminded me that it’s still less than a year since the huge discovery that I was autistic (which is possibly the most life-changing thing that will ever happen to me), and it’s still less than 5 months since my diagnosis, and that I’ve actually come a very very long way from where I was back in December. I’ve recently done things that I could hardly have dreamed of back then, so it really is progress overall.

However, progress takes work and energy and costs spoons. Even if the general direction is upwards, sometimes things will go downwards. While I continue to be the sort of person who wants to go out into the world and do things and to push myself to my limits (or, let’s be honest, to test the outer reaches of those limits and to keep pushing until I break, which is probably going to continue to happen quite a lot because living a “quiet life” is so counter to my personality that in its own way it’s even harder than doing the pushing because pulling back also takes a lot of effort), I will, inevitably, break from time to time.

Today, however, just doing what I really need to do will test my limits. I need to pay the council tax, I need to contact my friend about watching aeroplanes, and I need to eat. All of those feel like really really big tasks right now, but they’re what I’m aiming for. Anything else will be a bonus.

Going Back

I returned
To the place
Where life
Fell apart
Last year.

To the scene
Of so many
Meltdowns
And tears
And disasters.

To the memories
Of fear
And difficulty
And wondering
Why
I couldn’t
Just get on with life
Like most others
Could.

A whole day
To pack.
The journey there
Dissociated.

Focusing on
The practical.
Doing the most
Essential bits.
Taking as much
Time out
Alone
As possible.

Starting to learn
To accept
Help
Even though
It is counter
To everything
I have ever
Worked for.
Having to change
My mindset.

Struggling sometimes
Someone talking
To me
When I wasn’t able
To process speech.
Conflicting instructions.
Near meltdown
But not quite.
Speech gone
For just over
Five hours.

Consciously being
With other people
When I couldn’t speak.
Instead of texting in
“Sick”
And staying away
As I would have done
Previously.

Senses on overload
Lights too bright
Music distorted
I knew it sounded
Wrong
As if being played
Through a
Faulty
Amplifier.
Not what Mahler
Intended!

Knowing
Some things
Would help
But lacking
The ability
To do them.
Inertia.
Energy.

Living away from home
Minus usual care
And routines.
A few meals
Missed,
Some medication
Missed.
Executive functioning
Declining
Sensory spoons
Depleted
Social spoons
Deficit.

Feeling guilty
Because
I wasn’t able
To contribute fully
To everything.

But

People helped.
No rehearsals missed.
Near constant
Low level stimming
Was fine.

And mostly
The music
Was wonderful,
Not distorted,
And I can
Still
Play
The viola.

Learnt so much.
Started to understand
Just WHY
So much of
This stuff
Has always been
So hard.
Now I understand.

Beginning to adapt
To the new life
With the new knowledge.
Starting to accept
That I need
To do things
A bit
Differently.
Consciously
Saving energy
Where possible
Now I know
What uses it.

There is more needed.
It isn’t all solved
Yet.
I still find
Asking
For adaptions
Really hard.
Partly because
It is so new
And partly
Because
I don’t yet know
What is possible
Or what I need.

But I am starting
To realise
Why some things
Feel bad.
And always have.
And even though
They still do
Understanding WHY
Helps.
And I can start
To notice
How things
Drain my energy.
And why being
Near to other people
Is tiring
And why “washing”
With vile slimy wipes
Makes me feel
Even worse
Than I already did
Without my bath.
Sensory hell.

It is still
Very much
A work in progress
This new life.

And I need
So much
Recovery time.

But it is possible
To enjoy
Something
I had thought
Might
Be beyond me
And so
Lost for ever.

There are
So many
Good things
I don’t want
To lose.

Maybe
I can keep
This one.

I went back.

I survived.

Not That Autistic?

I needed to go out this morning to do a few jobs. Go to the bank, bit of shopping for the next couple of days and for the weekend when I’m doing stuff (“stuff” needs a bit of preparation), petrol in the car, and so on.

So I left the flat feeling pretty much as normal as I ever feel. I got in the car, drove to the first car park, found a spot, parked, got out, and walked, briskly as always, through town to the bank.

And as I went, I thought “I’m out now, and, really, actually, seem pretty much like a normal person. Maybe I’m not that autistic after all?”

Then I got to the bank. There was a queue. And the lights were bright even through my darkest glasses. I stood in the queue moving from foot to foot, chewing my fingers, scratching my head, and occasionally twirling my hands.

Then I went to look at coffee shop number one. It was full. There was a queue. I decided to give it a miss.

Then I went to supermarket number one. Where I bought the same food that I’ve been buying for several weeks now, even though I’m really rather bored of it. But somehow buying and eating anything else during the normal daily routine seems so desperately desperately WRONG. So I bought the same stuff as I usually do.

Then I went to look at coffee shop number two. It was also deemed too full with a queue. I decided that it wasn’t for me.

Then I went to supermarket number two. Where I bought yet more of the same things I buy every time. Where I once again went to the auto checkouts. Where I flapped my hands at the nuts because I couldn’t see some the same as I’d had last time and had to get the closest but they were different (of course they were, it was a different supermarket, but I had to convince my brain, actively, that these nuts would be OK, even though they weren’t those nuts).

Then I went to get petrol. There was a woman in the petrol station proclaiming she’d lost her pen in a very loud screechy voice. I wanted to put my ear plugs in because the screeching was so painful.

Then I got home. And a workman had parked in our private, numbered, parking spot. The notion of not being able to put the car back in the right place sent my anxiety spiralling. I asked him politely to move and instead of simply doing so, he argued back with me and I was forced to debate with him to get my own parking spot. I finally did manage to park my car in my own spot, but by that time the spoons had run out.

Then I had a complete meltdown in the car – screaming, bashing, tears, and so on.

Eventually I calmed down sufficiently to get the shopping from the car to the flat and to rant somewhat on facebook where I got support from an ever-patient bunch of friends.

Then I realised I’d lost my ability to speak. It’ll probably be back later – it usually is.

I set off this morning thinking I was “not that autistic”!

Hmmm!

Coffee Please!

Yesterday I shared an article on my facebook page, along with a few of my thoughts and a few of my husband’s thoughts. Several of my friends made comments, and what struck me was the difference between the comments from my autistic and introvert friends and my non-autistic and extrovert friends. I was going to reply to a couple of the comments on the thread, but, as the reply formed in my head, I realised it was really much too long for a facebook comment, so I’m now turning it into a blog post instead!

The original article had started with a picture of a board outside a coffee shop, stating that customers who went in and said “Small coffee” would be charged $5, those who said “Small coffee please” would be charged $3, and those who said “Good morning, how are you, please could I have a small coffee” would be charged $1 (or something like that – the values and exact statements might have been different, but the sentiment is the same). The point of the article was that baristas work damn hard for very little money and that they are, apparently, grateful for recognition in the form of people saying please and exchanging the kind of small talk pleasantries that strike terror into the souls of those of us who are neurodivergent.

And so, of course, the article had been picked up in a number of neurodivergent groups and cited as “ableism”, and I eventually decided to share it on my wall despite the potential for triggering and using up valuable spoons and energy dealing with the fallout of all those who might accuse me of being rude and having no manners. I shared it with my own short commentary added to that of my husband, who had also shared it. The gist of what I said was “This is the sort of thing that would seriously put me off even going for coffee on days when I’m struggling to cope. The message I receive from it is that the world is not for me. I should stay home because people think I’m rude. It makes me feel like giving up on life” and the gist of what my husband said was “This is why the neurodivergent and those disabled by mental ill health can’t have nice things. When we have dismantled every barrier, “manners” will remain as the last bastion of exclusionary entitlement. How’s about this – everyone with the neurological privilege to demand good manners start campaigning for baristas to be paid the wage they deserve for being the life-giving superstars they are; and for coffee shops to be accessible to those for whom eye contact or social interaction are as draining as thinking.”

Several of my friends had shared the article without any sort of commentary. And a couple said so on my thread and said that the difficulties autistic or very introverted people might have with such things hadn’t even occurred to them. This was not unexpected – if you are able to speak without rehearsal and remembering to use words such as “please” is something you don’t have to do consciously, with effort, every single time you do it, because you know, for some reason, that people like that sort of thing, then it wouldn’t occur to you that a sign outside a coffee shop telling you that you have to pay more for coffee because you struggle with social codes and so on, would be, on some days, sufficient to make you burst into tears and vow to give up coffee for ever because the whole business of trying to get it was just so stressful and you were so frightened of getting it wrong (and, of course, because you can’t hold down a job because of the same issues that cause such stress over buying a coffee, you don’t have enough money to pay the expensive rate if you screw up and get it wrong, which, given that your anxiety levels are by now through the roof, having read the noticeboard and realized that this is going to be a difficult experience on which you will be judged, you probably will).

So, I got to thinking about this, ironically, on the way home from having a coffee at my usual coffee shop (where, thankfully, I know the protocols and I had enough energy to ask for coffee in an appropriate way and because the place is familiar and I always eat the same things for breakfast there were no decisions to be made or other problems to be dealt with (I have, over the years, frequently gone somewhere to try to access food and gone away still unfed because simply asking for food or deciding what to have was too difficult)). I tried to imagine what it might be like to go out for coffee and to be able to just ask for the coffee with a load of fancy language that you hadn’t rehearsed several hundred times in your head during the drive to the place. I couldn’t, of course. Improvised speech seems like an extraordinary concept to me (and I assumed, until last year, that it simply wasn’t something that anyone did – only when I started questioning non-autistic people about their speech rehearsals on the way to social events and when they looked blankly at me and didn’t seem to understand what I was on about, did I realise that there are people who are able to improvise conversations on the spot without getting utterly shattered by it and having to go home and sleep for hours to recover)!

So I translated it to the area in which I am, rather seriously, privileged. My mental health is poor, my executive functioning is shockingly terrible, and my social skills are either lacking (if I’m saving spoons) or practised and exhausting (if I’m masking and doing what I have learnt over the last 40 years is the “correct” thing to do). BUT, I’m physically robust, and fairly fit, and probably of more than average strength for my age. I constantly use the huge privilege of a robust physical body to compensate for my social and mental deficits – at the autism conference I was able to go all day without eating or drinking properly or going to the toilet (If I’d been diabetic or had continence issues that wouldn’t have been the case). I think nothing of walking or jogging several kilometers which means that I can basically avoid using public transport in everyday life – if I have to park the car several miles away from where I’m going then it’s no big deal – I’m great with maps and I can walk a long way (I can even climb over gates having done 90km in an ultramarathon when I’m at my fittest). If I see a big flight of stairs then my first thought is “Wahey, hill training”. This is all because I am massively privileged as far as physical ability is concerned.

And so, just as my non-autistic extrovert friends don’t notice how intimidating signs about “how to ask for coffee” are to me, I skip around town and bumps in the pavement or kerbs or steps or flights of stairs or any of those things don’t even register on my radar unless I consciously think about them. BUT, I constantly remind myself, and am reminded by my friends with physical disabilities (whether they be things such as heart conditions or whether they require wheelchairs just to get around), that these things can be huge obstacles. Maybe I’m at an advantage here, because it’s easy to visualise how difficult it must be for someone in a wheelchair to deal with a step, but much less easy to imagine how difficult it might be to deviate from your usual script when faced with a sign outside a coffee shop?

I absolutely don’t blame those to whom it has never occurred, because for many of them, how could it have – I know it from the inside so it’s easy for me to understand, and one of the reasons I write this blog is to try to explain to others what it’s actually like and to assist with understanding. I’m also all in favour of people not ACTUALLY being rude to other people. The notion of being rude to someone who’s making coffee for me is abhorrent to me – I’m deeply grateful to them for doing something for me that I can’t do myself and for making my day better with a cup of something delicious. Maybe I’m just not always able to express that gratitude as perfectly as I should, according to the original article, be able to? Maybe this is where my natural language differs from that of many other people – my husband brought me an unexpected kebab last night and I didn’t thank him in words – I flapped my hands at him, because that’s the language we use at home, not the conventional language of society that we use consciously when we step out of the door!

I’m running out of words at this point and have now backed myself into a corner and am also desperately worried that I might have offended somebody because I’m not well enough versed in the language of disability to be sure that I haven’t screwed up. If I have, then I apologise profusely, because, contrary to the implications of the original article, if I get it wrong, I really don’t mean to. My lack of eye contact and social interaction with strangers is, at the moment, the only way I can actually manage to get out into the world at all and do anything – it’s a protection mechanism to prevent my mental health disintegrating further than it already has.

The last thoughts I had on my drive home from coffee this morning were of two of the “risk factors” that have been identified on my report following my autism assessment. One stated that I was at significant risk of being misunderstood and thought badly of because my levels of social interaction might cause me to appear rude, and the other stated that in order not to appear rude I was inclined to make huge efforts to follow social codes consciously and that doing so was seriously damaging to my mental health! Over the years I have, of course, tried so hard to get it right that it has left me burnt out and hardly able to function at all.

Anyway, whatever I might have got wrong here, I got one thing right – this really was a bit too long for a comment on a facebook thread!!!

Autistic Haikus

So this morning my
Executive functioning
Is rather broken

Yesterday speech was
Not coming so easily
As it sometimes does

I forget to eat
And I am very rubbish
At preparing food

Looking at eyes of
Most people is not helpful
And feels pretty weird

If I try to be
A non-autistic person
I get exhausted

Sometimes my head can
Have a disaster and ex-
Plode into meltdown

Strip lights are evil
And should be banished from the
Surface of the Earth

I remember things
With patterns and pictures and
Short films in my head

I am not good at
Sitting still or on a chair
Movement is better

My fidget spinner
Is one that glows in the dark
It is very cool

The fridge is sounding
Very very very loud
To my good hearing

Not knowing for years
I was autistic has bro-
Ken my mental health

Learning stuff is cool
I get interested in
Things rather strongly

As a kid I chewed
My school tie but now I have
Proper chewy things

Conversations are
Often rather hard for me
To initiate

I flap my hands and
Flick and twirl my fingers when
I’m stressed or happy

Being diagnosed
Autistic at forty five
Is a big relief