It’s been a while I know, aside from working and training for the charity trek in April, I’ve been hammering away on the poor keyboard and using my best coping mechanism in life...writing! Having always succumbed to self-doubt and the underdog theory (seeing myself as just another normal person who doesn’t have the right connections to make an impact) I broke out of that a little and invest in myself. Instead of playing at marketing and pushing myself, I’ve paid into a training regimen and am moving up from the deep shadows to the slightly less deep shadows!
But I digress, this blog isn’t about my writing and my desire to make a living writing kick-ass books. It’s about the journey us genetic anomalies are on. I suppose, perhaps, that the writing is part of it too. After all, with an autistic brain it’s one of my seriously important coping strategies at the moment. Alongside my irrational obsession with trying to be fit (although my food and drink are abysmally unimportant, hence never achieving the Chris Hemsworth or Hugh Jackman type body). When I say unimportant, I mean just that. Even as a kid I remember my mum telling me off for not drinking, even at college (UK college that is and not older US college) I remember being told off as I could go a full day on just a glass of orange juice in the morning!
Not much has changed, you can often find me at work running a vigorous training day having only eaten a protein bar and drunk half a glass of water during circuit training at 0545! I’ve mentioned it to colleagues around me who will occasionally remind me to drink. Food is the same. It’s a huge song and dance if I remember to prepare a batch of meals at a weekend for a few days of work. Even more when I damn well remember to eat them which, when I am out and about, I tend to forget then talk myself out of it having “missed the chance” so again see it as unimportant.
For years I put that down to me being me, seeing it as a way of staying thinner but it’s not. I just forget and don’t see it as important as I realise it is. What made me post that was the fact I’ve been seeing a lot of similarities with T (youngest boy) and me lately with this element being mirrored in him. Stick with me, this is going somewhere!
Although you could say it’s a learned behaviour I’d argue otherwise as he doesn’t see me at work so fails to see the forgetful food and drink. At home there is a routine of food so it’s done as a matter of course, left to my own devices though it suddenly falls to the wayside. I recall when I was on shifts I’d suddenly realise I’m supposed to be starting work mid-afternoon and with less than two hours to go I hadn’t thought of dinner. I’d then wonder what to defrost (waste more time) and then realise I was programmed in my head to be at the gym for a certain time so end up rushing some pathetic food or a tuna sandwich to last me the next 10 hours!) And I wonder why my body never displays the seriously hard work I out in with physical training!?! Maybe because it’s got the bare amount of fuel to keep going!?!
Still, I realise it but only get a handful of days before I revert to type!
Where was I going with that? Ah! Yes.
It was looking back and being introspective about my own development both physically and mentally where I realised the red flags along the way that I see in T (and sometimes C my little girl) with behaviour. You do not understand how annoying I was as a kid with films (I’m not much better now – only yesterday in the car travelling to a training venue the radio played a snippet of a movie soundtrack and in seconds I guessed the film and year. The competition later asked exactly that and the other guys in the car looked at me like I was mad having recited the year, director, actor, soundtrack and character before the snippet had finished).
My mum and dad will attest to the fact I was a pain with identity growing up. We’ve all played films, re-enacted favourite scenes etc. I lived them. I became obsessed with films as a kid and still am. I remember watching Nicolas Cages’ The Rock on repeat as a teenager. Hell, I watched Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom so many times as a kid I could (and still can I expect) recite the script. In 1999 I did the same with Star Wars Episode One! Marketing companies must love people like me buying into merchandise (you’d think I’d be able to exploit that towards my own books and getting seen wouldn’t you but overall it comes up against one huge hurdle...I don’t believe I’m good enough!)
Here in lies the problem with writing a blog post over a couple of days. What was in my head yesterday when I started has now been replaced with new frustrations or thoughts. I’m fighting going into an expression of how much Aspergers/ASD has an impact in the organisational world I work in where the social element seems to be a huge part of making progress. I have noticed a huge amount of take, knowing how much I devote to tasks and how far I will push myself base don my personality (a trait the “gaffers” love by the way) and yet on the other hand, because I can’t socialise and don’t go spending all my hours socialising with the same people, I can’t be validated. For me, the more I look at things (with a risk of feeling like the woe is me victim which I’m not) it is very much about appearances of acceptance but beyond that does their unconscious bias (a phrase I’m becoming more familiar with) comes into play? How can a social world ever fully trust a person who doesn’t socialise and while some may enjoy reaping the benefits of diligence, commitment and delivery of a product that means nothing if you can’t share a “pint” or else share your private life to show you’re human!?!
Sorry I risk going off on a huge rant there so I will refrain from doing that. Hopefully, you can see now some internal mechanisms that lie behind a mask of so-called normality and you can, I hope, appreciate where I come from when I say I worry about my Littlest Man as he works to figure out where he sits in the world and what masks he will need.
I know at some point this element of personal exposure/blogging will be used against me however this is an outlet for me. A way of almost anonymously venting the inner workings of someone “on the spectrum.” On that note I’ve been quizzed recently by people who want to understand more, people I perhaps would not have expected to be so accepting and willing to acknowledge so I know there are cultural and personal changes happening. I just feel fearful for Littlest Man in a world where “important people” will talk the talk, and yet really all they offer are hollow words. For fear of being the doom and gloom man/boy, I’m aware this is a unique perspective from my position in life and doesn’t apply to everyone. I’ve met people who have a genuine motivation and meaning behind their words, it’s sometimes just harder to see when you start to notice the falseness and box-ticking from other aspects.
Right, I think I’ve zoomed around a million tangents as normal so I’ll stop myself there. On an amusing note it would appear me and Little Man will be worms! By that I mean research is happening (from what I understand) into the Timothy Syndrome deletion by creating little teeny tiny worms with our genetic codes to see how it mutates and such. Now I have an image of the old PC games worms...Geronimo!
