aspie

  • overload


    Long before I learned I'm aspie, I knew I had problems handling things.  I didn't know why.  I tried really hard to tough it out and could never understand or explain to people why I get crabby, or super introverted, or bizarre.  For a long time as a child I blamed it on other people being stupid, or places I went being boring.  As I got older I blamed it on culture molding the masses into something I felt rebellious against.  As I get older still I thought I'm the one to blame, but not because I'm a bad person.  I just figured I'm not a people person, or I'm not into whatever, or I don't have much in the way of patience.
     
    Turns out all that is completely wrong.
     
    I was born with my nervous system hard wired to be 'on' all the time.  No one ever knew this, of course.  I was obviously intelligent, but also obviously intolerant.  I was a difficult child, I was a difficult teen, and I am a difficult adult.  I ~try~ to enjoy things and have friends, but I fail miserably, and sooner or later I give in to the sinking feeling that I'm failing again, and I don't know what to do to fix it.
     
    Finding out I'm aspie was a relief and a half.  Well, it was also angsty, but it sure is nice to know the root of me being difficult.  It's all actually very simple.  It's not 'me' at all as a person that is the problem, it's the way my brain handles sensory input.
     
    From the moment I was born, lights, noises, odors, surprises, sudden change, new places, anything you can imagine, all went 100% into my brain.  Most people have a built in 'filter' that helps the brain switch tracks, or dull one function in favor of another.  For instance, ignoring a room full of people in order to have a conversation with a friend.
     
    I can't do that.  I can't turn off a room full of conversations.  I hear them all cutting in on the one I'm having and have to say "What?" many times.  I used to think I had a hearing problem, because I seemed unable to hear what a person next to me was saying, and then I learned it's more like an auditory processing problem.  If there is a lot going on, consonants get lost or jumbled up, and if someone talks too fast, I have to ask them to slow down and repeat themselves.  Some people react like I'm kinda dumb when I do that, but they don't know I have to focus really hard just to hear them over everything else going on in the background.  Given that I can speed read and retain technical info very easily, this seems backward, as if my brain is smart in one way and not in another.  But it has nothing to do with smart.  It's my nervous system pumping dozens of things into my brain all at once, and I don't have a shut off switch for what is irrelevant.
     
    I used to think I liked going to the mall, or to the movies, or shopping.  I also noticed other people used to really like my company until I became a real drag, and from there on I was unable to hide getting cranky or getting a headache.  Sometimes I'd be ok for awhile, other times it wouldn't take long for me to get a bad attitude.  And that's what we all thought it was, just a general bad attitude.  I would let my crankiness take me into griping about something, and then I got to be a drag.
     
    Over time I began to notice that simply being somewhere would make me sick.  Being in loud places full of people gives me migraines, and then I'd have to deal with the headache and nausea on top of trying to be social.  Driving at night wasn't really a problem as far as I could tell until I noticed that I got such bad tension headaches that I had to avoid night time driving.  Movie theaters became such a challenge that the only way I could get through a movie was by taking a muscle relaxer and a pain killer.  Having to stand in a long line at a store or sit for awhile in a hard chair in an office or school of any kind for meetings or events made me feel so bad that I almost wanted to get a hammer and smash things.
     
    After I learned I had Asperger's and that I go into what is called sensory overload, I started experimenting.  I went with Scott to a big home show, a huge room full of demonstration booths at the fairgrounds.  It was noisy and chaotic, wall to wall people, blaring lights from very high ceilings, and I think I lasted about 45 minutes before I got such a severe migraine that we had to leave.  It was that or I was ready to literally curl up into a ball and just lay on the floor.  Within an hour of leaving, the headache and nausea were nearly gone.  Since then I've noticed that I can do things to cut down on the overload.  I can wear dark glasses (which many people automatically assume means a black eye or being wasted), and I can put something in my ears to either muffle the noise or redirect it to something I can focus on, like familiar music that I can play over and over.  Certain rhythms automatically cut down on the overload immediately.
     
    I've had difficulties all my life with coworkers, sitting in church, driving long distances, walking into stores and restaurants...  I am extremely sensitive to perfumes and hair sprays, motion sickness and light flickering, food and chemical odors, fluorescent lighting, and most of all, a cacophony of noise.  If you combine any of these, such as walking into a noisy food place, I very quickly lose my sense of feeling grounded and float away into a blur of confusion.  Just having to stand in a line and quickly decide what to order off a menu under these conditions is so stressful that I generally just grab the first thing on the menu that catches my eye, unless I'm familiar with the menu and know what I want.  I can't describe how miserable I feel trying to focus through all that.
     
    Scott is a nice guy, extremely patient with me, but he did tease me one time in Walmart and said he felt like he was being followed by a retard.  I was flapping my long sleeves together and staring up at the light and nearly running into people while I chewed my tongue because I was so spaced out from the noise and light and overwhelming variety of things to see.
     
    When my kids were growing up, I HAD to stay focused.  I was able to shop and get them to school and hold a job, because I HAD to.  But I also had to medicate to be able to handle all these things.  I've noticed I need far less medication now that my kids are grown and I don't have to handle these things any more.  Scott and I go shopping together once a week, and since he does the driving and pushes the cart, and my list is already all in order, I am free to space out and be weird, which, I've gotta tell you, is such a relief.  I no longer get migraines and crabby just going shopping, simply because I can space out away from all the sensory overload.
     
    In the last couple of years since I've learned I'm aspie, I have run into a variety of people who feel bad about themselves because they seem to be intolerant of other people, and they have no patience for being places that other people enjoy.  I've noticed that this comes from not just aspies, but people with OCD, ADD, Tourette's, and other challenges.  I'm thinking that perhaps there are a number of us who experience sensory overload while we are dealing with our other challenges, and we mistake these things for flaws in our personalities.  Perhaps they aren't flaws after all so much as our nervous systems not being able to switch the load around so that we can focus on the fun things or what is being said.
     
    Perhaps we should take another look at crabby people who seem to have low tolerance levels.  I know from my own experiences it is really hard to be nice and chatty with a coworker when I'm dealing with stuff like overwhelming cologne or perfume smells, a radio or tv yapping in the background, bad or cheap lighting, uncomfortable furniture, a phone ringing somewhere, smelling someone's food or cigarettes down the hallway, or even just someone being too chatty and having to process it all.  Ah, but everyone has to go through that, you say.  Ah, but not everyone has to go through that with a nervous system that tailspins them into migraines, I say.
     
    I think there is a simple solution.  Instead of the crabby people constantly kicking themselves for not being up to par on keeping the smile firmly in place and making the correct eye contact and nodding in all the right places and risking a chain reaction of everyone in a workplace or school or party or meeting gossiping or griping about them behind their backs if they fail to socially perform to the satisfaction of others, all we have to do is say You know what?  I'm aspie, which means I'm crabby by nature without any warning, so once I go into overload, I apologize for whatever I do or say that offends you, because my nervous system really jerks me around and I feel like crap when it does.  Just let me know when I start to get annoying, and I'll see what I can do to fix it.
     
    How's that?  I like honesty.  I think it's only fair to warn the happy smiley people they are about to get eaten, at least in our thoughts.  And if they don't 'get it', well, they can run screaming later.  After all, they had fair warning.
     

  • mind blindness

     

    One of my favorite sayings that I made up used to be "Mark Hammill doesn't exist long ago in a galaxy far, far away."
     
    One of the drawbacks of being aspie, at least for me, is mind blindness.  Keep in mind that Asperger's is a spectrum disorder, not a black and white diagnostic tool to define the brain function of an entire group.  It's basically a description of a variety of problems that some people can have that 'normals' don't.
     
    Mind blindness in general means that I'm not supposed to be able to 'read' faces.  I miss little facial cues that indicate how the other person feels.  I might not notice someone is fantastically bored with me yapping on and on about something I'm obsessed with.  Very typical stuff you read about aspies.
     
    But sometimes it goes deeper than that.  I have a facial recognition deficit problem, kind of like people get with brain traumas.  Even when people are familiar to me, I don't see them in my head the way they really look.  In the past I have been mildly laughed at for describing someone and getting the hair color wrong, and I just saw them within the week.  I also do this with eye color, and if I were to get really detailed, I couldn't accurately describe someone's nose as pointy or round.  It's not so much I can't remember as I'm so easily able to switch pieces and parts around in my mind.  I can reconstruct faces much like computers do.  Aspies are notorious for thinking in pictures, which means I can construct extremely detailed scenes and symbols for everything I hear or read or think.
     
    The facial recognition problem gets a little amusing.  I worked a hotel desk for a couple of years and saw thousands of faces come through.  Some of the regulars got a little miffed if I didn't greet them like old friends or family members.  Some of them would stand around and talk to me and I wouldn't even remember I'd spoken with them previously until they asked about something I'd said before.  One older couple was truly hurt when I didn't remember them at all, even though, checking the computer records, I had checked them in myself not just the month before, but every month for six months.  I had to apologize and explain I have a deficit in facial recognition.
     
    Conversely, I'm a little creeped out when people walk up to me in Walmart or somewhere and start talking to me like they know me.  I carry on a conversation just fine, but I never remember who the heck they were.  One time I asked the person what their name was, and they were so put off that it spoiled the rest of the conversation, which was quite short, and oddly, I never got the name.
     
    I tend to lose people I'm with easily in public because I don't see them in a sea of faces, so I try to remember what they are wearing.  Sometimes this backfires, and I wind up following other people around, to no end of cracking up on Scott's part.  I can't tell you how many times I've surprised other people in Walmart thinking they were Scott when I was done absorbing myself in a label.  I have this thing about jars and labels, kinda distracts me.
     
    Likewise, I get tv personalities mixed up like crazy.  I never could keep Dan Rather straight from a couple of other news reporters.  There are a few actresses I can keep straight because I've seen their movies so often (usually scifi movies), and by now Harrison Ford is iconic in my head, but I had no idea Steve Carell, Dan Burns, Maxwell Smart, Evan Baxter, and the mayor of Whoville were all the same guy.  Do you know how many times I saw the complete Star Wars trilogy before I knew who Mark Hammill was?  Probably dozens.
     
    There are some faces I never forget, usually because the person has made a huge impression on me in some way.  This doesn't happen very often though.
     
    I didn't realize that being like this is considered so defective until I ran into a person last year that specializes in doing therapy with patients who have suffered brain injury.  I was at a fundraiser laughing with someone about meeting them all over again 5 minutes later, and this woman happened to be in a nearby chair.  She was very intrigued that I have this much difficulty with facial recognition and was still able to hold jobs for years.  She asked me how I identify people, and I said it's an overall thing.  One person is tall and has a certain voice, another person is round and has a certain chuckle, another person reminds me of a cartoon and cracks me up, stuff like that.  It's not that I'm completely unable to recognize a face, it's more like it doesn't get properly catalogued.  If I have to go by a face alone with no other identifying characteristics, I get confused.  I have found pictures of several celebrities that have Scott's eyes and nose, and for some reason he reminds me of an uncle when he's tense, and his hair is like this or that person, and pretty quick, it's all a jumble in there.  It's like I don't see the whole face and tag a name to it.  What I see are similarities that some parts have to dozens of other faces I've seen, and the rest kinda just blurs in my mind.
     
    So if you walk up to me to show me your new colored contacts, don't be surprised if I have no idea who the heck you are.   
     

  • our selves

     

    Sometimes I think about what 'self' is, and what it means.  I think our sense of self has changed over the millennia that humans have been developing civilization.  I mostly think our personal sense of self has been twisted and invaded, and we may not realize we have been encultured to see our personal selves in ways our ancestors may never thought have.
     
    Long before the barest of modern civilization, most people were unaware of their own faces.  We see faces all around us, but without mirrors, we don't see our own.  Can you imagine never having seen your own face?  This is true of all species on the planet.  Cats and dogs, chickens and horses, cattle and people, none of us are able to see our own faces.  For thousands of years most of the people on this planet had no idea what they looked like, excepting to assume they looked like the people around them, or when someone told them how they looked.  Back then faces were for more practical things, like seeing, eating, and smiling or frowning.  Faces are made to communicate how we feel to others.  We can show our disapproval or our glee at a joke.  Our sadness is evident on our faces, as well as our joy.
     
    Things are very different now.  We go to great lengths sometimes to hide our real faces, to turn them into something that others can't see the real us through.  We look into mirrors and fix things we don't like, or practice our 'look'.  We create our faces to fit what we think they should look like.  We judge ourselves daily by the shortcomings we find in our own faces, now that we can see them.
     
    I think it's odd that being able to see our faces can make us hate ourselves more, or make us feel more vulnerable, or for some, to feel more powerful.  I think it's crap that a few people are becoming billionaires on industries that improve our facial looks.  I think it sucks that how our faces look has become such a top priority that we can no longer accept the natural flaws that come with this life, and we go out of our ways to either 'sell' ourselves or hurt ourselves, depending on how we feel about our self images.
     
    Can you imagine your dogs and cats acting like that?  We breed dogs to have different kinds of faces.  Can you imagine your dog being able to be mortified at finding out how ugly it is?  It wouldn't matter to the dog that you still love it and think it's the cutest ugly in the world, the dog's self image would be wrecked because it would never be satisfied now with its own face.  It would spend its life yearning for a different face and hating itself for looking so dumb.  Everything about its behavior would change on how it judged its own face.
     
    Some people are born with disfigured faces or big birthmarks on their faces.  Some people are born with the most beautiful faces in the world.  Most people are born with ordinary faces that get zits and hair and dry or oily skin, and the people in those faces wish they could change something about that, even though every human face in the whole world goes through the same thing.
     
    I never thought about my face as a child.  I wasn't self aware enough to realize my face was a big deal.  When I looked at other people's faces, I saw compassion, or anger, or sadness.  I didn't 'see' whether they were ugly or beautiful.  I didn't think about who was more pretty or whose teeth were straighter.  I went all the way through high school without one smear of makeup on my face.  I never dwelled on whether that was good or bad, and I didn't eat myself up with the idea that I might be ugly.
     
    I learned in college that a little makeup goes a long way, and I thought it odd that people would respond more politely to me depending on how my face looked, in spite of how polite I might already be myself.  I began to notice other people around me, either being treated ill for being uglier than others, or treating others ill for being uglier than themselves.  I wondered why it wasn't evident to other people around me that a beautiful face acting ugly looks ugly.  This goes for both men and women, any age.
     
    It's taken me many years to figure this out, because I'm autistic.  I think I may be deeper on the spectrum than some aspies because I was never self deprecating.  My sense of self is so far removed from associating it with social judgments that I guess I never 'got' that I was either ugly or pretty.  I can be both, actually, I've gotten pretty good at makeup and my hair and whatnot, or I can simply be me and not worry about it.  Sometimes I run into other aspies on other blogs who feel a sense of self loathing for not measuring up.  I myself felt anger most of my life for others being too stupid to understand *my* point of view, so I'm sure there is a wide range of how we see ourselves in light of others.
     
    I feel concerned that so much of a person's self worth nowadays seems to come from a cultural standard based on commercialism.  We are inundated with 'pretty people' and the products they either represent or endorse, and that has come to permeate our lives to the point of people obsessing with their looks not just daily, but hourly.  What was most shocking was how the emo movement was quickly revolutionized into this commercialism, and now the billionaires are capitalizing on cutting, crying, and starvation, holding it up as cool.  Self destruction has become another line of products to spend our money on.
     
    People have always felt some kind of shame or disgrace through the many years in many other ways in their cultures, but it's odd now that the notion of self worth is sweeping the world and utterly changing with a simple mirror.  Sometimes I think about that and wonder how much it is undermining the real treasure of self worth inside all of us.  If our looks are more important than our skills, that's not healthy for society.  If the way we judge others and have compassion boils down to how well we can 'sell' ourselves (just look at American Idol, but I boycott that show), then we are a sad human race.
     
    Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we could all look perfect.  Would we finally have peace and honest compassion and empathy for each other?  Would gossiping and snittiness disappear?  Would we all be content to just enjoy one another for who we are?  Would all our problems be solved?  Would we finally forgive ourselves?
     
     
    I really like this movie.
     
     
     
     
     
     

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