Punctuality

There's a big issue in life with being on time for things; as a species we are more dominated by time constraints than any of our fellow earth-inhabitants (Alice's White Rabbit aside!)

I would always prefer to sit around having arrived somewhere ridiculously early than to be caught in a situation where time is slipping away from me and I run the risk of being late. This doesn't always go to plan and I have friends who will happily speak of many times I have dashed into a restaurant/bar/party a lot later than I was supposed to arrive - inevitably with words spilling out my lips trying to explain the latest round of Helen vs the world. Truthfully I am just very bad at judging how long things will take; I can massively overestimate how long a journey may take me yet think drying my hair will take just a few minutes despite years of experience telling me it takes at least 10!

The understanding of the passage of time is something that can be linked to executive functioning - something that research tells us Autistic people can struggle with. I find my problems are not so much with the planning part of the process, as a former scientist I still have the numerical brain that makes all plans into Gantt charts and plots the most efficient path to completion of tasks. The trouble arises when the time I assign to each subtask is incorrect wildly knocking my plan out of sync! Even though this happens more often than I would like I still struggle to compensate and can't quite make myself change the next stage of plans quickly enough to gain back the time lost, although this is often because I have trimmed the plans to the point of not being able to loose anything - even if I'm running late for work I can't skip brushing my teeth or putting my shoes on! The few times I have tried to hasten my leaving the house I will find on my return that I have left lights on or my lunch is still sat in the fridge.

As we are forced into tighter and tighter schedules it's not surprising that more and more of my generation are eschewing 'going out' for nights in on out own terms. I feel I spend half my life trying to meet time constraints set for me: work deadlines, train departures, match KOs, assignment hand ins, even trying to remember to return phone calls at appropriate times for other people schedules!

Maybe as a society we need to slow down a bit and realise that not everyone can always keep up with the manic pace that is being demanded. Maybe we need to realise that each and every one of us is a human being who operates on their own processing speed and allow people just a bit of breathing space sometimes. Maybe one day we'll realise that we've made this world just a bit too hard for some people and have lost our way as a progressive society.

Maybe.

Maybe next time I come into London I won't be sat around in a reception for over an hour because I'm ridiculously early for an appointment!

Taking time out to relax

Sometimes its easy to get so caught up in life and all the pressures unfolding around you that you stop taking care of yourself and listening to what your mind and body need.
I've spent the past 5 weeks living life at (for me) a fairly non-stop pace; trips to visit family, rugby games (home and away), postgraduate assignments and exams, autism research and advocacy work. All of this on top of my full-time job. No wonder I've been so damn tired recently!




So I decided this weekend I was going to take some time to myself, not the whole weekend as I'm going to the Diamond Wedding Anniversary of close family friends for some of tomorrow but for the most part this weekend has been about looking after me and getting some much needed rest.
Rest doesn't just mean sleep however, though I will admit it does play a large part for me (14 hours last night!), its about not having any social demands put on me. I watched the Saracens game on TV from my own living room rather than making the trip to Allianz Park to watch it with all the other fans who couldn't make the trip to Lyon. This was a choice I made very definitively earlier in the week when I realised just how exhausted I was getting and how close to breaking point I'd unintentionally let myself get. The fact of the matter is that as an Autistic person I have to be realistic about what I can manage and no matter how much I may want to do something I still have to consider all the ramifications and consequences before committing to a course of action. This is particularly true when I'm asked to take on/do something with little notice - I need to think through the ripple effect before giving a response; often saying 'no' is incredibly difficult for me.


I don't regret anything I've done recently and I know that certain parts of the stress I'm under are completely out of my control but I just wish that people could be a little bit more understanding of the concept of 'Autism Fatigue' and realise the implications that can have on me and my sociability - if I'm having a tough week please don't criticize me for not conforming to the social norm and saying 'good morning' to every Tom, Dick and Harry that I see first thing in the morning at work!!




I can already feel the change in my mental state just from a single day away from people and their subconscious pressures, hopefully the feel-good factor from todays win and the general relaxed approach to this weekend will be enough to see me through to half-term now!

Its a generation thing

I am so goddamn lucky to be the age I am - I grew up watching Will Carling, the Underwood boys and Jerry Guscott on my TV as a child, got to witness history in the making as a teenager watching Johnno, Wilkinson and the boys in Aus do the impossible thanks to ITV, and now as an adult venturing into actually being at the games in person I get to see the marvellous talent that is Itoje, Kruis, Farrell and co go from strength to strength.


Musically I wish I'd been born 20 years earlier, technologically I cant help feeling the next 50 years are going to be the place to live in, but sport wise I'm definitely in the exact generation I want to belong to!

Running on Empty

I can often predict when tough days are coming but even then the level to which they affect me still surprises me each time. Sat in a filling up stadium miles from home I can feel the affects starting to take hold; the vice grip headache tightening, the tiredness and poor concentration, the tightness in the neck, the need for sunglasses even though it's cloudy because it's still too bright for me.

I'll do what I always do and push through it because I want to be here doing what I'm doing and it's important to me that I don't let my Autism 'win'. But boy am I going to pay for this tomorrow

Inescapable difficult situations

A large problem I face regularly with being autistic is that people can tell when I'm not happy with something I've been asked to do. Currently I'm faced with a challenge about how to cope with the way my university has decided to do 'revision sessions' for my Masters course - I don't like doing group work and I certainly don't like to do 'talk and share'. I don't want to be here, I am not coping well with this situation and am finding it really hard just to keep myself in the room when all I want to do is bolt and hide.
I hate the way people feel the need to force others into their way of learning / revising / coping. I have my way, it works well for me, doesn't always give the best results in terms of academic achievements but it allows me to survive the process.
Coping with stressful environments is always difficult when you have anxiety issues but when it's an environment that you're trapped in, and particularly if you're in the spotlight, it's so hard to know how to cope. My standard coping method is to blend in, to survive, to stay in control. In an inescapable spotlight environment however blending in is a bit harder and thus surviving can become a real challenge. Hopefully I'll be okay with this soon, it's a classic example of me not knowing in advance what would be expected of me and so not coping with a scenario well.

Procrastination

Procrastination is a marvellous thing, I've been putting off writing this post about putting off my revision for ages now!
Trouble is my mind is quite easily distracted (and not just by shiny things!) and as such forcing it to concentrate outside of work hours can be difficult. Even in the middle of the night when there is no-one to call, no decent TV to watch, and the internet has got boring I can still find myself spending 10 minutes staring at a pattern on my ceiling instead of reading the article I'm supposed to be making notes on!
I've tried various techniques over the years to aid my concentration issues and some have had a measure of success - the issue now is I employ them during my working day in order to achieve everything I need to there, leaving me very little to work with once I get home in the evening. Luckily in some respects I'm very driven by pressure and fear - the closer to a deadline I get the more I can focus and churn out the workload, the trade off being (of course) that the more stressed and sleep deprived I get the more sloppy and mistake-strewn my work may become.
As seems to be the root of many of my posts (hence the title of the page!) the answer lies in balance - how to achieve a happy medium between the need for pressure to achieve high concentration levels and the need for a sharp mind to achieve accurate and worthwhile work.
I'll come back to this thought once my exams are over next Friday. Probably.

Isolation vs over-stimulation

I've come to realise recently just how isolated my life had become from what it used to be; I spend the whole working day with the same people, very rarely interacting with anyone new, before coming home to an empty flat where I spend my evenings alone with my TV and laptop for company, making the occasional phone calls to the same half dozen people. My weekends are often just me and my revision / housework / recovery processes, once in a whilst interspersed with a visit to/from a family member or a trip into London to do something Autism related.
Compare this to the almost manically busy life I used to have when I was a student - days filled with lectures, union meetings, social groups and endless nights out I barely remember (but know were good fun!) That life wasn't sustainable though and I often found myself suddenly having to spend periods retreating from my plans and hiding away in an almost hibernating state to restore some balance. Sometimes just coming down from an over-stimulation was a long slog on its own, the world didn't stop being noisy and bright and demanding just because I wanted a time-out and people weren't always very understanding when I tried to explain that it wasn't an alcohol hangover I had but a sensory or social one.
The tricky thing in life is finding the mid-way point between what's needed for recovery and isolation and then putting that on an even functioning keel with social activity (bearing in mind that work/going to the supermarket/filling the car with petrol all count as a form of social activity!)
I find now as I'm older and more knowledgeable about my own limitations and predictable reactions that I can start to formulate ways to 'have my cake and eat it' - by finding activities that fulfil my need for interactions whilst still allowing me enough down time to be ready to face whatever the next day may hold.
Throughout the Sunday-Thursday period I have to tread carefully to ensure that my working day the next day is not impacted upon by any lingering effects but come Friday/Saturday I have a lot more freedom to push my boundaries and go for the full-on 'social experience' and all the consequences that follow it. Its difficult to explain at times but even the smallest of things can add to a growing mountain of stimulation leading to overload; one too many announcements on a train, the overly strong perfume of the person in front at the cashpoint queue, multiple TV's showing different games/sports in pubs, too many new faces and names to remember at once, the list can be endless.
My latest excursion into London (and straight back out to Reading) for Saturday's Saracens vs Wasps semi-final was one of the more bizarre yet successful experiences I've had recently - a match I hadn't planned to attend yet found myself in possession of tickets for courtesy of a Twitter competition. All of a sudden not only did I now have plans for a previously free weekend but I had to work out a whole host of details, including who I was giving the other ticket to! Family and friends were all unavailable as due to the short notice (I found out I had tickets on the Tuesday) they were all booked up. Luckily social media came to my rescue and I was able to have a really wonderful time at the game with someone who not only appreciated the ticket but was able to give me a crash-course introduction to being a full-on member of the Sarries family!
I know not every experience I try will have such a happy ending (and most definitely wont involve that much wine being consumed afterwards!) and some will have potentially catastrophically bad results should my coping strategies fail me at the worst times, but I do know for sure that if I don't keep trying new things and pushing myself out there in the big wide world that the isolation I will be faced with will be horrible.
I don't like being on my own too long, I am, at heart, a people person who loves watching others enjoy life. I just have to weigh the balance of my need to indulge that side of my personality with what it will cost me without retreating into a fear-dominated mind-set of not doing anything 'in case' I can't cope.