I'm doubling the dose!

 So, the past few weeks have been quite difficult for me, the last two in-particular. I've found my mood slipping into the dark depths a little bit and am finding my anxiety levels are higher than I would like them to be, I've been drinking too much and have been having difficulties focussing and starting on any new projects. On top of all of that I've started having some sleeping difficulties, on Thursday or Friday last week I was up past midnight, purely because my brain didn't want to shut down. All in all there's a lot of warning signs going on.

The bigger thing to confront is why have I been like this? I think now I've had my diagnosis I can be much more confident in stating 'it's work'. It's uncertainty, not knowing what precisely Im' meant to be doing from one day to the next. There's no order and no structure but I can't even really add that in as the lack of order and structure allows me time to do university stuff. I think rushing through the linear programming has meant that I felt I'd lost part of my routine and I had to start the much less structured project work there. On top of all this there's been the covid situation, I've got to start going back into the office from tomorrow. Part of me is glad as that'll give me a clearer focus and routine, part of me is apprehensive as I'll have to navigate people again. I think the routine would be good if only I can stick to a regular shift. Monday-Wednesday in, Thursday/Friday at home. I imagine the fear of change is gonna be worse than the actual change but we'll see.

As part of managing all this I've had a call with the doctor again this morning. I always find these things highly stressful, I used to think it was an authority figure/asking for help kind of thing but now I'm not so sure. It's because it's unstructured, I don't really know how to behave or what is expected of me, what script to use so it can be pretty tiring. In the end it went pretty well though, I explain the situation, he upped my Escitalopram from 10mg to 20mg so hopefully that will dull the edges just a little bit. Part of the problem is I no longer expect a miracle cure so won't get one but I know the Escitalopram worked somewhat so it should do something I reckon. Fingers crossed 

Work, the here and now, pt 125 of 5.

I'm not quite sure why I dislike work so much, it's ok, it pays me reasonable well, I'm technically working roughly in an area that interests me and yet it depresses the hell out of me, why? I'm sure autism has a big role to play and I think it's due to two key reasons, firstly it keeps me away from my true interests and secondly it makes me have to engage with people in a context that I'm not happy with.

I've never particularly enjoyed  MI or BI or whatever nonsense it wants to be called, basically report producing. It's dull, it's just presenting someone else's ideas back to them in a way they enjoy. That's not where the fun in any of this stuff is. Finding out what the questions are, examining the data, pricing it together and present new information back out is what's actually fun. Just running reporting is tedious, once you've got your head around the system that you're using for reporting there's nothing to really learn. I want to be back doing actual analytics, trying to solve problems. Even if it's not successful it's much more fun than building another bloody pointless report. Also the subject matter is pointless, I'm reporting on variables of a system outcome but with no real intelligence to say why they're doing something, just that they are, I'm also not overly happy with working in finance in general, especially not in this particular way. 

This brings me on to the second point. There probably are ways of making this better but I don't really know how to go about them. I spend all my time trying not to interact with people where I can help it as I find it generally a pretty stressful thing but then the only way to take this in a new direction would be to communicate with people and to share ideas. I just don't know how to do that so instead I need someone else to enable me first before I can start to do anything, and I don't think L is that sort of person unfortunately. That just leaves me in a bit of a bind, I feel like I'm atrophying in corner but I have no conception of how to arrest it. I know the solution would be 'just talk to L, I know you might not want to but..' thing is though it's not just not wanting to, I literally don't know how to. It's an unguided conversation that i have no idea how to start :( So being autistic sucks in this regards and is making my life much harder and then double whamming me as its stripped me of the tools i need to fix it and no one understands as the things I find hard other people find natural and the things they find hard I find natural. 

Your video has 89 views!

I guess I'm writing this on the internet because whilst I don't want to actively necessarily engage with anyone on any of this stuff it's quite nice thinking someone might read it and get some use out of it. One of the fractal videos I put up on youtube had 89 views today, most of them in the space of about 3 hours which makes me feel that i was probably promoted by the youtube algorithm for a short while. More excitingly I managed to get 7 positive and 1 negative vote so it seems overall people like it enough to click the thumbs up. Posting on youtube was a little more of an effort to share what I was doing than this, there's no way to find this blog I don't think and I imagine the 500+ page impressions are all either me or bots. Which is fine but I can't deny a little thrill in knowing something I did was received approvingly.

Part of this cuts to the chase of what's autism, what's depression an how do they feed into each other. I dislike engaging with people as I always image it's either going to be a) Critical or b) Questioning. If it's b then I feel compelled to answer and i worry that my life will be sucked away in an exhausting responding mode. If it's a I think I'm more worried about that thought of it than it actually happening. I think that's the depression side more and probably comes from the stuff I worked through the psychologist last year. If you send all your life being criticised then it's not really suprising that you develop an aversion to sharing anything of yourself, just waiting not that dis-approval. 

I think for the time being I'm going to focus and getting some more fractal stuff up there as it's nice and neutral but quite fun and I've developed the algorithm a little bit further so it's slow but workable.

Putting the noodles straight into the kettle is not a life hack.

I've always admired the thought of cooking, I think it was mainly thanks to my Gran, I knew if I went there I would get a properly cooked meal that was unlikely to have been sitting in a tin can for a few years first. I always looked forward to it as homelife consisted of the culinary joys of microwaved pizza (and I mean regular pizza not ones meant to be microwaved) and pasta 'n' sauces. Anything that had actually been prepared was a treat.

I thought being able to cook a pasta and sauce made me a culinary genius. It didn't funny enough. I found out when I was drunk and cooking a meal for P,P and M that putting in whole cloves of garlic wasn't actually a thing that was done. Wankers. Anyway though realty dawned on me when I went to uni the second time. Donner kebab, portion of Fries, a can of coke and an extra pot of chilli sauce please... Yes this was my almost nightly diet. It doesn't sound that healthy in retrospect, but at £4.60 it was reasonably priced and it came right to my door. I didn't really know what else to do and I couldn't cope with using the kitchen as other people might come in and try and talk to me, that wasn't something I could deal with, I hated the sound of other people out of their rooms. 

I realised at some point after 2 years that constant takeaway probably isn't the healthiest diet in the world, that and I had absolutely no money, and that I should do something about it. So I started cooking some more. The fact I didn't burn myself, the house, or possibly the city of Leeds down is pretty impressive. A few of my great achievements:

• Putting the noodles straight into the kettle and boiling it. Two for one I thought. Funilly enough the heating element didn't work so well after that. Man I lived off those 8p Tom Yam noodles for another good year. That and some bread, 12p from Morrisons. 
• Guestimating a chip pin, I bunged a load of oil in the chip pan, stuck the heat on it then just through some chips in. Fishing them out when they looked like they were done. I remember they were actually ok on a few occasions but this seems like one of the stupider thing's I've done in retrospect.
• Spaghetti and margarine. A full meal. For about 10p a go. I remember I going to Morrisons and buying the stuff for this quite regularly. I think I got bored of it in the end.
• Chopping garlic; you mean deskinning the cloves surely?

I'm sure there's lots more, there was certainly lots more takeaway wrappers on my floor but man I'm glad i seem to have learned at least how to cook some basic things now!

Zoom fractal, zoom!

 New fractal upload today, this one is zooming in on the region z=1, you can see the point where the default python datatype is no longer suitable. I've got a few more ideas for messing around and then will decide on whether it's worth looking at a an unbounded float. I worry that the speed of processing anything more complex will render the activity too frustrating. 

Sometimes it's fun being creative for the sake of it, it excises demons and you have something nice to look at at the end. Even if no one else cares I can feel happy with myself :) 

This is from when I thought I was going to get into the t-shirt business..... 

Ticking the disabled box. pt 29 of 421.

I applied for a couple of jobs last week, one with Lloyds for a Senior Insight Analyst and one with Barclays for a Senior Data Analyst. I feel that I need some reasonable adjustments in my role and there's no chance of getting that where I'm currently working, it's just too small. I'd read that Lloyds had been awarded the Autism Friendly award from the National Autistic Society so it seemed a sensible thing to try and, alongside that, I thought now I had some experience with finance moving somewhere more reputable might be a good move. Plus some of that sweet corporate gravy.

When it came to the applications both had a box 'if people meet the minimum standards and are disabled we guarantee an interview'. I thought, you know I really want to try and be more honest so I'll tick it. It has a lot of connotations in my head I guess but ultimately I definitely qualify for that tick so I thought, you know I'll go for it. I've never really had many rejections for jobs, so it was a bit odd on Monday when lloyds gave me a straight no. Especially given that I'd basically worked that job title previously. It left me feeling a little dejected to be honest. I don't fully know how to take it, was it because I ticked the box? Was my CV poor? Is it just chance? For the Barclays one they've at least called me and I've gone though the basic psychometric stuff so that feels a bit better. As I said to T it's only one data point so doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it does leave a bit of a better taste. What would've happened if I didn't tick that box?

Work, part 1 of a 213 part series on money and graft.

It was always understood and accepted by myself that I should be working. For a long time it was one of my biggest stressors, I viewed it as that no one would pay me to do anything then I wasn't worth anything, very literally my self worth was tied into how much I was (or wasn't earning). It was probably this area that should've given me my biggest clue that something wasn't quite right with me, however I'd very much absorbed the idea that I was lazy and useless so it felt natural that I should have the problems I was having. 

I think I did a good half dozen bitty jobs before I was 25:

• McDonalds. This was my first ever job when I was 17, in a shopping center on Ancoats street in Manchester. I got it through PA as his mums friend worked there. I manage to last a whole 2 weeks before I quit. I remember the first week was ok but finding some of the staff a little difficult, half of them were wannabe gangster if memory serves me well and they were the types of people I'd never met before. I felt uneasy being there and didn't fit in at all. When it came to the third week I couldn't cope with going back in again, it was too much, so i concocted the excuse that my feet hurt from standing. I was shouted at a bit for being lazy and feckless by my dad but that was that.
• Andy's Friend, part of the shed world group!!! Fast forward to 2001; failed university attempts: 1; living arrangement: at home for the worst year of my life. 2001 was horrific so I'll cover that separately. However I got a job through the job center around October/November I think. It was making outbound sales calls for a new start up called Andy's Friends. It was made up nonsense. During the day I'd ring businesses up from a list and asked if they wanted to pay for a searchable web entry (£60). During the evening I'd ring up people form the auto trader and if they hadn't already sold their car I'd put them on another sale site. It was grubby, filthy shit that I loathed and was so Anathema to my soul both in the role and the ethics that I couldn't keep there. I lasted about 4 weeks I remember. My last day involved me being sold a paxil pill for £20 and then after saying I'd quit having to walk home. On the plus side I could smoke in the office. 4 stars, would recommend.
• Temping in 2004/5?. Failed university count: 2; living arrangement: 163 on my own! After being on JSA for a while I went to try and find anything so tried with a few recruitment firms. There was the job that promised me a role in a bank that I knew my CCJ would stop me from getting but I got duped into believing. Eventually office angels posted me to a law office. Where I did photocopying. Of accidents. Including the remnants of someone being crushed by a garage door. It was the night shift which I think was ok, I remember a dude was there who taught me the origins of techno music. I seem to think it was ok but only did a couple of nights for some reason. Next role was being posted to a receptionist at Mind. This one nearly killed me. There was a dude who walked in who told me about the torture he'd been subjected to by LGI, showed me the hole in his head where he'd had a need inserted into his brain and shocked and how he should have died but his brain breathed for itself?? Whole thing was mad and I felt massively underprepared for it. I lasted 2 or 3 days before I just couldn't hack the idea of it anymore and this was the last time I worked for a while. I still remember the layout of the office and the dude with a sunken head. Eughh.

Arresting the process of delearning life skills

One of the things that worrying me recently in the context of my diagnosis is how, by having a defined coat to wrap my problems in, I'll stop trying to improve myself, and maybe start regressing. I've been told that a lot of my problems are just down to the way my brain is connected, this has two sides, on the one hand it gives space and relief to be nicer to myself, I can't help being this way, it's not my fault so I should embrace, but on the other it kind of gives me an excuse to stop working on myself. T intimated she was jealous of the fact that I could almost say 'I can't learn on change that' as means I can almost stop the struggle. She's right and that is kind of how I've been viewing things. Is that the right solution though?

I think to some degree it's going to have to be, I think a lot of my depressions and anxieties have come from my negative self-image. That I'm a failure and that if I just tried a bit harder to fit in, to do things in the expected way then I would be successful, that I wouldn't be so anxious and depressed. That's the connection I need to break the anxiety and depression is the result of me not fitting in mainstream society, it's the effect, not the cause. However, if I'm not careful I can start ossifying into this new role, thinking I can't improve myself so why try, why not just sit there only doing exactly what I want to do. I think this is dangerous thinking.

It's really easy to just sit around and only do exactly what I want all day, it would lead to less short term depression, but certainly not less long term, I need to earn money. So what i need to do is carry on trying to improve myself by finding the right place where i fit in. To be able to use my skills and abilities in a context and employment that doesn't also lead me to feel anxious and uncontrolled. I  need to work on what my actual parameters are. What can I do? What can I put up with? What's an acceptable level of short term mental ill health? 

I know where I'm at at the moment isn't it, it's too chaotic and has no real driving purpose so I start looking at trying out different things that maybe have a little more order. I think what I crave is to understand what I should be doing with a day, what is the output required of me on any one day. Completely withdrawing is definitely not going to help me find this answer :) 

I see patterns.

I knew that seeing patterns in things was viewed as on of the positive symptoms of ASD. I took it as being meant in a metaphorical way, I.e. you’ll look through a dataset and recognise that a lot of events x happened around date y, namely that your adherence to studying the detail gave you insights in a generally quicker way than someone without a diagnosis. I myself am quite good at this sort of thing, I’ve built myself a career around data analytics, finding meaning in some pretty dense and badly integrated data sources. So I assumed that’s what people meant. I don’t know why I assume that though when I also literally see patterns in things. 

It sometimes makes me feel like I have some strange and oddly low-key psychosis. Instead of demons jumping out of the shadows telling me to make a blood sacrifice I get parallel lines jumping slightly up, threading me with the darkened uniformity. I first noticed it when Around when I was 18. I remember a couple of individual instances. Firstly was the walk back from greenfield after the millennium. I remember it must’ve been maybe 3 or 4 am, maybe later and looking up at the sky and seeing clouds shrinking and growing at unusual speeds. It was a bit annoying I remember but didn’t shake me that much so must’ve been something I kind of recognised. Second to that I also remember standing at the train station at Birmingham university, looking up at the sky and seeing everything glowing a little weirdly and little very faint dots jumping around my vision in unison. It bothered me for ages before I kind of realised it wasn’t getting worse and it was never going to leave me. 

These days if I look at an object that that has any sort of pattern in it then geometric shapes will pop out, little circles or squares where my brain perceives there’s a local pattern. Reading can be the worst, my eyes will end up focusing in between the words and the gaps will all join to form shapes. Again not like an hallucination as such but just as my brain going, hey, here’s a pattern. We got a new rug today from Ikea . I really like it but it’s really busy so I am see loads of shapes in it and those shapes are constantly breathing in and out. It’s a little exhausting. It’s also a little odd that I can only see these sorts of thing in physical materials, a computer screen always looks flat to me and stable. It’s just so damned odd. 

For me, posting on the internet isn't that much easier than in real life.

It's odd to say but I find posting on the internet every bit as difficult as talking to people in real life, maybe more so in some ways as there's no real space for the default pleasantry list; 'how's the weather? Oh wow that sounds great, tell me more?' kind of thing. Instead I find it really hard to fathom what the focus of interactions should be. If you talk about the topic once then that's fine but then how do you take that any further? Should you take that further? How often do you reply? Should you reply to everyone who replied to you? How do you know which bits to reply to or not? When it's just one person your conversing with then it's not too bad, you can basically reply to everything and the time you sink into it isn't to bad. As soon as you get 2 or 3 people replying then those possible responses grow exponentially and it becomes really difficult to manage, and then other people reply to something you were going to reply to so do you reply to the original person or to the person who replied to them? It's all totally exhausting.

The problem this causes though is it means that i never really interact with anyone and sometimes I would really like to, especially on stuff that i do have an interest it. I want other peoples recommendations for books on Autism for example, or how they've found their diagnosis but I don't want to feel like I'm using people but also don't know if I can manage the multiple conversations. What makes it a little odder is I used to manage a little bit more. Admittedly not as much as I maybe think but some none the less. I know around 1999-2000 I manage to do a bit of posting in various usenet news groups. I think to be fair most of it was individual topics I started rather than interacting with people. I remember once though from a computer game forum, I think, having an argument over whether marketing had any influence on people's behaviour. I mean of course it does or else it wouldn't exist but the other person (cloud cop or something like that they were called) just wouldn't see that and kept causing spats. The thing is I just can't cope with arguments in any form so  i didn't know how to deal with it. So I just stopped posting. Twenty years later I'm at the same point, I would like to discuss some things but I already feel swamped.

I posted on the national autistic societies boards about what everyones' process was in coming to terms with their diagnosis. People were very kind but now I have a load of replies and I feel honour bound to look through them all and reply. This then means I've got to keep a load of conversations in my head and start checking back regularly not to be rude. If I don't check back then I've not really made any connections. It's really difficult! I'll try replying now just to see what happens I think.

And then. After that. You've got to actually move.

We're looking at moving house in the next year but the whole thing seems to wrapped up in stress as to be unimaginable. You've got to both find somewhere that's affordable but also is in a nice area, has decent schools, is a good environment for the kids, has enough room to move around in, is close to transportation for T, has somewhere for the car, has working internet, isn't on a flood plane and god knows what else that hasn't just come into my mind. The whole thing is a bit of nightmare and then once you've somehow found that sweet spot then you've got to hope you can sell your own house in time and that it all synchs up. Argghhh. And then. After that. You've got to actually move. 

I've moved a few times in the past and it's never gone massively well, I've always done it very last minute and been driven by needing somewhere to inhabit rather than something I actually want and every time it's been a bit of a disaster in one way or another. I've lived in my current house for the longest time I can remember and I'll be honest in that i don't look forward to leaving the house itself. It's pretty spacious and enjoyable to inhabit and i know where things should go in the main.

T keeps sending me houses through and I worry I'm not good enough to be able to live in them. Something will go wrong and I'll be exposed to a massive debt that I can't do anything about. It takes all my existing anxieties and ramps them up to the max, and then I'll have to be calm for the children. We've been aiming to do it for a while now but with the kids finally starting school this year then I think it's finally time to start doing something about.

Hopefully it'll be good to document the process as this is the start of the first time we've been in a position to actually move with me heading for 6 months in the new job (though how much long I'll be here who knows). 

More Fractals

 I created a high res (2000x2000 grid, x,y in [-1.5,1.5]) for z^a, a in [1,5]. 

Hello darkness my old fiend...

I have a title and a theme but no idea where I need to start. Depression, it's a difficult one, its return is almost bitter sweet, like the onset of Autumn. You get to experience new colours, different smells and sounds but it's all underpinned by a sense of death and decay. 

I've suffered from depression for many, many years and I'm sure it's a theme I'll return to a lot as for a long time I thought depression was the cause of my problems and not just a symptom of them. I remember first experiencing a real sense of it when I had just turned 12 but then it continued, ebbing a flowing but ever present until I was 25 ish. I never understood it, never could see why it was there, what caused it, I had glimpses, I was lonely, I was useless but I couldn't understand the general pattern to it. If I could just beat it there would be a better future.

I kind of have beaten it off and on, 2006-2018ish were actually pretty good going. I was generally happy apart from the odd bit here and there but I did ok. It came back with the stuff with J around  2012 but then went away again as me and T got together and I understood real love. Unfortunately over the past few years it's come back again, not as strongly as it has been. I don't feel like regularly killing myself,  but it's definitely been much worse. It started with a complete blow out at work and just hasn't quite recovered since. I haven\'t really done very much work wise since September 2018, fortunately I've been employed and paid for the vast majority of that period but I haven't been in anyway productive. I think I have too much on, I think having kids, doing university stuff and working is too much for me, particularly the working and the unpredictability of my day. 

Definitely need to kick this current bad patch though! 

 I really like fractals so I thought it'd be fun to explore some over time; starting with some simple mandelbrot experiments, messing with the exponential of z. 

Actually, sleeping on a book doesn't imbue with it's knowledge...

When I was a teenager I was very gullible. I didn't know this at the time, I thought I was a hard-edged critical thinker eschewing the conventions of dusty academia, I was wrong. In my mad attempt to try and fit in and understand the world I decided the only logical explanation could be the world as presented was wrong and it was almost everyone else who didn't understand it. 

I was really into the X-files for quite a while; videos, comics, magazines, anything I could get my hands upon. Except I believed most of it was based on fact. To help fill out that i started reading what I would now refer to as 'fringe' books but at the time I thought was the actual truth that would help me to unlock and understand my differences. 'Why are these in the health, mind & spirituality section I would wonder and not the history section'. 

I believed it all, specifically Atlantis a lost civilisation based on civility and learning! That had to be true right? Probably somewhere I'd fit right in but the knowledge of it was lost and what little bits had remained were being purposely suppressed by obscure Egyptian archaeologists to keep that sweet archaeology gravy train rocking. Alongside this were other useful facts I picked up; self-hypnotism, crop circles, religious prophecy; I was utterly convinced if I concentrated hard enough I could pull my consciousness out of my body by an imagine piece of string and fly about the place. Convinced the only reason it wasn't happening was because I wasn't trying hard enough. 

One of the funnest one's I picked up though was that there were people who could absorb the knowledge of books by sleeping on them. I had my A-levels in a few days and due to the onslaught of depression and uncertainty had done nothing for any of them. I needed a solution. I could've tried studying but as I'd spent the past year not doing anything it was a bit late to learn an entire a course. So I slept on my books. Everynight. For a good week. Funnily enough I didn't learn anything, I just assumed by sleep self was too lazy to pick them up. 

In hindsight it all seems insane how I could believe this stuff, and not just as some 6 year old child but as a technically 18 year old adult. But I completely did. Non of it did make any sense to me until recently when I've realised that my driving though for all this was it was an untapped world I couldn't quite see and if I could reach into and be part of it then I would have a world I belonged in. It wouldn't just be me who didn't understand stuff but in fact the rest of the world would be the ignorant. 

Also, why would anyone lie in print that this stuff is true? I couldn't comprehend that someone wouldn't be writing the truth, it didn't even enter my head. Sadly it now means i Just automatically don't believe anything but it's probably the lesser of two evils. 

Living in a field isn't a normal response

I remember when I was 19 I got chucked  out of home. It had been a very difficult time for me, lots of issues at the university that I'll save for another time. I'd been given an ultimatum, either get a job to support myself or go back to somewhere I hated. I was already at breaking point, I couldn't cope with the thought of a job and I couldn't handle going back so I took what I thought was there only rational option, I chose homelessness.

It wasn't made that much easier by the fact I only had ~£100 in the bank. I remember leaving home with nothing but my wallet and the clothes I was wearing and having exactly no idea what to do. Who could I talk to? Could I talk to anyone? If I talked ot anyone I would have to explain what was going on but I didn't know how to do that, I didn't know myself. So I was trapped with indecision, I couldn't tell anyone, they'd no I was a loser an I could explain myself, I couldn't stay at home, I had nowhere to go and not enough money to waste on a hotel. So, I walked up to the fields near my grandparents, and spent the night sleeping next to a dry stone wall. It got cold. Very, very cold. I was lucky it was April so it could've been worse but it was still border line unbearable. I remember my penis had shrivelled to this size of a walnut. I remember contemplating pissing myself to keep myself warm. What would I do if I needed a poo? All sorts of questions. That night was one of the longest of my life as i sat cold, dark and alone against that dry stone wall. 

A smarter person would've gone into town and at least been able to find some warmth. A normal person might even have talked to someone. Not me. I choose to sleep in a field in the middle of nowhere. The next day I made the long walk into Ashton. I knew I couldn't do that again, something had to give. So I bought a tent and a sleeping bag and set it up in the same field. At least I was moderately warm that night, I had a newspaper, a torch, a box (Why I got a box and not a bag is beyond me) and was inside. It was fortunate as I think it rained a little that evening. It wasn't perfect but it was a bit better. I was preparing to bed in but got chased off by a farmer in the morning. Apparently you can't just sleep in a field on the side of a hill. It was a bit of a blow. So I swallowed the last remaining bit of self-respect i had and phoned home.

I was dirty, hungry and cold when I met my mum. She then spent 30 minutes shouting at me and saying 'oh I thought you'd stay a Peters' no alarm or care that I spent it in a field, not when they can just fuck me off again to go to a place I hate. Turns out when every option is destroyingly shit you just lose a bit of yourself. If I'd been able to just stay at someones I wouldn't have gone back to Birmingham would I? If I could talk to people I wouldn't've been in the situation that I was. I realised on this day that I was totally alone in the world. 

Buying a bowl

I remember around Christmas 2012 I had recourse to by a new cereal bowl, I seem to remember that I'd broken my previous one, a little upsettingly, and that the other bowls I had where either too small (the Homer Simpson one) or too thin (china style one).

I seem to think this was my first indication that J was a bit of a knob head to me, I think it was before our big falling out at Christmas when I didn't rush instantly down to her grans house so I feel things were probably ok (in my head) at this point. 

I remember I was in Sainsbury's in Leeds somewhere just stood at the end of an aisle looking over the various different options they had. There was at least 4 different styles and I was completely and utterly lost. I couldn't pick at all. I perform my absolutely worse when left with such decisions about things where i don't know what criteria to judge on. Should I pick size, style, cost or longevity? What do I optimize for, I never really have a clue and don't know how to make up my mind on things. So I stare. I just stare for a really long time, sometimes picking one up then thinking I'm being a bit bold and putting it right back down again. It's a nightmare.

I remember after 20 minutes J had finished the rest of the shopping and I was still there, near the start, trying to pick up this bloody cereal bowl. She started making fun of me for being so slow and indecisive over it, it was to become a common theme, the making fun. The whole thing just made it even harder for me to pick, I know felt i had to factor in how other people would feel about it as well, turning an impossible task into an impossible task with a larger failure penalty. Eventually I went with a nice smooth, black matted finished bowl on the outside with a beige glazed internals. It's a really good bowl and has served me well since so I might've been slow but I was ultimately vindicated :) 

The real morale though is that this is 9 years before I got a diagnosis yet in retrospect though it's only a small thing it really highlights the problems I have with open questions about things I don't know enough about. I just go blank and wonder how everyone else really gets up each day. 

Understanding the Past

 Tapping into the past can be quite a difficult thing to do. I know i had thoughts and feelings, I remember and can read them, but I can't be them or feel them properly again. It's like a transparent but strong bubble in my mind, it occasionally bobs up to the surface so I can almost touch it but it's never quite penetrable. I guess I want to access my past to help secure it on its new scaffolding. 

It's 16:07 on 01/12/2021

    I have an appointment to catch up on  the results of my Autism diagnosis that I'd completed over the past couple of weeks. I was anxious, I always am when I have an unscripted, unknowable interaction due to take place. I'd expected I was going to be told I didn't meet the criteria to have a diagnosis, purely on the basis that it would be to helpful for me to be given one and I figured with the way my life went that I wouldn't even fit in with being different. 

    Turns out I was wrong. I got told I met all the criteria. A couple of choice quotes were around the fact that apparently only wanting one or two friends is an autistic point of view and the fact I never asked the examiners for their points of view (I mean why would I it was an assessment about me?) There were lots of other things that I'm sure I'll go over in more detail as I digest it but the nub of it was I finally had an explanation.

    The fact it's taken me 6 weeks to begin  to write this and process that diagnosis is probably telling in of itself, bar the initial shock it bounced off me at first it's started bubbling up more and more these past couple of weeks since Christmas. Things that now make sense in context. Lots and lots of things.  Like loads of them. Infinite things. I've been going through some of my older journalling, specifically stuff from before I suspected i might be on the spectrum and it's all laid out there.

    The point of this blog is to help organise my thoughts and to go through how I want it to impact on me and maybe help share a coherent narrative when I'm done.