Writing Fiction

I had a friend at university who told me I was better at writing theory than writing the creative stuff. I knew I was a good critic, and good at analysing things. I thought I could be equally good at writing creatively, of course I didn’t know I was autistic at the time. I wonder now if I could ever be a good creative writer. Maybe I just needed to find a style that suited me.

I think the key to writing good fiction, to writing anything, is to really love what you’re writing about. With me, I was always trying to write something I thought would impress my teacher, or at the very least she would like. But that’s how I behaved in all areas of my life, I’ve spent my life trying to fit in. The idea of sitting down and writing a story I really wanted to write is a bit strange. I think you need to drop any pretences and intellectualism and think, what would I write if I wasn’t concerned with what others thought about me and I could just write what I wanted.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I’ve lost my passion for fiction. I don’t feel I have time for it, what with the amount of reading and writing I do around autism and self-development I feel I would be putting the brakes on my commitment to my growth, i.e. finding out about autism and how best I can function in this world, which at the moment is my most urgent task. But I’m like that; I tend to throw myself into something whole heartedly and everything else is banished to the side lines. I think it’s an autistic trait.

My mind is constantly making hypotheses and theories about the world and myself. This is how I spend much of my time thinking, even before I was diagnosed I had this same obsession to find out everything I could about my behaviour and other people; it was almost a necessity. I will not deny I am pretty much socially inept, but if I hadn’t had this ability to analysis people’s behaviour and to theorise about the world and how it works, I don’t think I’d have achieved nearly as much as I have.

I suppose if you are a natural writer of fiction you would spend your time dreaming of plots and story lines and characters. I day dream a lot, and even though other people appear in my day dreams, they are either mute, or saying things I want them to - because I don’t know what they would think or say in the situation I’m imagining. Maybe this is a skill I can practice through writing. I wonder if there have ever been any autistic authors of creative fiction. I did used to write a lot of poetry, but this was mostly just about myself and how I felt. Maybe that’s why poetry came easier to me.

The only thing I did well in fiction that other people enjoyed was the descriptions I gave. I always tried to make my descriptions as accurate and clear as possible and I think I achieved this. People on my creative writing course always said how real my descriptions felt. I think this is because when I’m reading I find it very difficult to visualise the scene the author is describing, so I always put a lot of effort into my descriptions. To make an effective description of a scene you need to come up with unique metaphors. Metaphors make people go ‘Ahhh!’ that’s what it’s like. You take their experience of everyday life and use it in a description of an experience they haven’t had, this makes it real to them.

But a scene needs characters in it that interact with each other. I think I was okay at describing characters. They never felt very real to me though, unless I was basing them on someone I actually knew, I found it difficult to create characters from scratch. I don’t know what other people thought of my characters. But even if I had an endless stream of real characters to chose from I couldn’t predict how my characters would react to each other. At the time I didn’t even realise it was something I should be trying to do.

My plots therefore where guided by events, and people where usually victims of events rather than controllers of events. My plots weren’t people driven. I think this is why I was such a fan of Thomas Hardy. People describe his characters as victims of fate, there is always a sense of something larger outside of the character’s power that directs their life. Also I was a fan of Virginia Woolf, I love her descriptions of people and places, she takes a microscope to the world and can spend a whole novel just writing about one day. She is more focused on individual psychology than how the characters interact. When I first started writing I tried to copy her style, I wanted to write a novel like Mrs Dalloway. It was years ago now, when I was first at university.

I can’t remember when I stopped writing fiction or why. I used to dream when I was younger that I would be a published novelist, but now I’ve lost my enthusiasm and motivation, I guess because I tried for so long without getting anywhere. With what I know about autism, and the things I should be doing with characters I probably stand a better chance now of writing something that works. Maybe I will, when I’ve got my life on an even keel and I’m more relaxed and feel that I have the time. It would be nice to see if I could do it now with what I’ve learnt.

Thinking in Words and Pictures

Thoughts are ideas that our brain has to find words or pictures for. I don’t think my brain likes either medium particularly. But as I am so poor at visualisation, words are my only recourse. Occasionally (not often) my brain just gives up, especially if it is a complicated idea. I get the sensation of the thought in my mind, and I recognise ideas or feelings in it and then I try to work out what it was about. But thoughts are so fast, if you don’t get them straight away you lose the original sense it was trying to convey.

I did a degree in Visual Culture, one of the subjects we looked at was semiotics and at the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said that language (words and other systems of signs) was made up of the signified and the signifier. The signifier was the word or symbol and the signified was the object or idea the signifier referred to. He said the relationship between the two was arbitrary and the result of social consensus. Basically the idea exits in your mind first and then the mind has to find signifiers to communicate that idea.

The strange thing for me is that I can have these thoughts, that don’t have words or symbols and I don’t actually know what they mean. It’s my thought, surely I should know what it means with or without signifiers? It’s a shame, because these thoughts are usually about new ideas or ways of explaining the world and my experience of it. Maybe my conscious mind just doesn’t have the language to express them yet.

Not all autistic people think in the same way. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures, she can visualise complicated designs for farm equipment. I wish I had this ability. Instead I think in words. Not because I’m particularly good at it (I think I‘ve shown my language skills aren‘t very good already). I have to think in words because my visualisation skills are so poor. I find this strange, because I am a visual person. I like drawing and painting and I like watching films.

It means I’ve had to work really hard at getting to grips with language. My reading skills were below average for some of the time I was at primary school. I’d catch up, then fall behind then catch up again. I was doing well in all other areas. I don’t think I had any concept that they were measuring us, or that it was important to keep up with how others were doing. I never thought about how other people were doing. And as it was a lot of hard work for me, I wouldn’t always try very hard. Once you reach a certain level of competency though it ceases to have much impact on your work, so eventually it stopped being a problem.

It’s only now, when I’m trying to express new ideas that I begin to struggle with words again. My problem is that I form sentences mostly by recalling phrases. There are certain sentence structures that I repeat. I’m trying to put these phrases together in a way that conveys what I mean and that is also readable and flows and doesn’t sound like disconnected phrases that I have gathered from different places. Occasionally I get a sentence that I know I’ve created myself, I get a particular pleasure when I’ve achieved this and been able to convey an idea in my own original way.

When you’re talking to someone they don’t usually notice if you repeat words of phrases, but when you put it down in writing it becomes obvious. There is a lot of editing that goes on after I’ve drafted something; the thesaurus is my best friend at these moments. I’ve noticed that I also make jumps between ideas, assuming that the reader will understand how one sentence relates to another. Often in my writing sentences don’t follow very well. Getting the words to flow in a sentence is one thing, getting sentences to flow from one to the other is just as hard. I think my writing must sound very methodical.

One way that I practised my language skills when I was younger was by talking to myself. I can remember the exact moment I began doing this. I was sitting in the back of my parents car. We had been to visit my Nan, and I was talking to myself about what had happened. This monologue when over and over in my head till we reached home. I rephrased parts of it then started again. As I got older I would use this a way of working out how I might feel if an event turned out in a particular way, or how I should respond in certain situations.

All this is very essential stuff, but it did have a negative impact on me, in that my mind was doing overtime for much of my waking hours. And if I hadn’t been born a worrier, it’s probably why I’m one now. I over think everything. I also became very focused on me. Because I can’t imagine other people’s responses these monologues were always about just me and my feelings, of course I didn’t realise this until I was much older. Maybe that’s what causes the stubbornness. I’m inflexible to other people’s opinions because I grew up only ever being aware of my own, I wasn’t even aware that people had different opinions from my own until I was about seventeen. And even thought I’m now aware that other people have their own opinions it very hard to undo this way of thinking. I think all this mental activity while I was a child must have wired my brain in such a way that I now find it difficult to undo.

Reading Emotions

When I watch television, I’m always looking for clues and information about human interaction. I prefer sitcoms to soap operas. Soaps tend to be more about emotional tension and conflict and I don’t like conflict. I avoid it wherever I can. I think this is linked to my anxiety. Dr Amen says people who suffer from anxiety avoid conflict in order to keep their stress levels from rocketing.

Sometimes I can be watching a television programme, and I think I’ve got what’s going on and then I’ll watch the same episode a while later and see things I never noticed before. I suppose everyone gets this, even NT people don’t notice everything the first time. I think it’s the kind of things I don’t notice at first that’s different, like the emotional nuances and relationships between characters, and the fact that I go on not noticing for the first, second, third and fourth time - and beyond.

I like watching the Golden Girls. I have the first three episodes on DVD. I watch them over and over. The initial sparkle has gone but I still get enjoyment from watching them. The other day I watched the first episode from series one. I hadn’t seen it for about a month probably. When I watched it this time, I suddenly saw it, totally differently to how I’d seen it before. The actresses looked to be behaving differently with each other, I guess because they didn’t know each other as well. There were less pauses in the script, less non verbal interaction. It looked very different to the episodes that came after. And I wondered why I didn’t notice this before.

There is one scene from a later episode, that is another example of this. Blanche and Dorothy are playing cards, Dorothy’s mother (Sophia) is standing by Blanche giving her hints about which card she should put down. I know this because Dorothy objects to it. But if it had been a real situation I’m not sure if I would have noticed because it never clicked how Sophia was telling Blanche. I’ve seen the scene many times over two of three years, but it wasn’t till recently that I worked out how Sophia and Blanche were communicating with each other. Blanche would touch a card with her finger and look up at Sophia, who would either shake her head or nod. It sounds simple now I’ve got it, I wonder now why it didn’t click before.

Watching these programmes over and over probably wouldn’t be very interesting for most people, but I think I learn a lot from it. I saw a video on You Tube a while ago, of Temple Grandin giving a talk about autism. She showed the audience some research done on how autistic people watch films, and this explained for me why I miss so much information.

She showed a slide from the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. First she asked the audience to look at the slide for a few moments, then she superimposed two lines on it. One line showed where an autistic person’s eye would go to in the image, the other represented an NT person’s eye. It was very revealing. There were three figures in the image, Elizabeth Taylor was standing facing the camera, and then there were two men, one with his back to the camera and the other standing side on. The autistic line showed that the autistic person looked first at Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, wandered a little around that area and the moved in the direction of the man she was facing. I was really surprised, this was nearly exactly what I had done, I think my eye did wander around her face for a bit longer, and I think I glanced up at the third figure. But this was nothing in comparison to the NT individual whose eyes had been dashing between all three figures at what must have been breakneck speeds.

Well, I thought to myself, no wonder I don’t notice all these exchanges that go on between people. I’m not looking hard enough. Perhaps that’s the wrong way of putting it. I do look, very hard, but I’ve been looking in the wrong way. I’ve always thought if I looked hard enough at someone’s face I will eventually find what I need to know about what they’re thinking or feeling. This is wrong of course, I need to be looking at where their eyes go and the other people around them. I’m not sure I can do this though. If I start moving my eyes around like that NT person in the study Temple Grandin showed us, my sight would go all blurry and I‘d lose my balance. It might be easier watching television than real life, your eyes only have to move around a smaller area, the television screen.

I think I look at people’s mouths because it helps me to know what they’re saying as I sometimes have auditory problems, especially if there are other people talking at the same time. This problem with moving my eyes about though, I’m sure has a special name. I read about it once. Autistic people often move their heads rather than their eyes to look at an object. Children do this at first, but then they learn to move their eyes about instead. Eye movements are important for making facial expressions. This could be another reason why I sometimes look expressionless.

The Necessity of Stubbornness

A little stubbornness I think can be good for someone. I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to be totally without this trait, and I think it would create a lot of difficulties for me. The ability to stick to your guns, and stand up for what you believe in is essential, not for individual survival, sometimes it goes against our survival, but for our personal progress and the spiritual evolution of humanity.

Without any stubbornness, we would be susceptible to the whim of every person we meet. Indeed, I have meet people who are like this. They don’t seem to have an opinion that is their own, they agree with most everything their friends or partner says. Fitting in and pleasing people is their main aim, this they do for self preservation because they think they have to in order to keep other people on their side. I think this kind of person must have a less stable sense of self.

I like to think of stubbornness as an instinct, one of self-preservation. The stubborn individual and the individual without a low stubborn drive have different ideas about that self. The individual who has no stubbornness in their nature thinks of their self as embodied in the external world. They have to work hard to please people to ensure both their physical survival and that they get what they want to recreate the image they have of themselves in the external world. In the process they lose their inner sense of self because they are dependent on other people’s opinions. It becomes a vicious circle. They confuse the lose of this self with something other people can give them and so they continue their attempts to flatter and please the people around them, and neglect to act according to their own inner voice, thus causing more damage to their internal self.

I have a twin, we’re not identical. People often describe us as being like chalk and cheese. Whereas I am in the stubborn camp my sister is definitely in the opposite camp. I’m not sure there’s a word for the opposite of stubborn. Irresolute is the best word I can find, but it doesn’t seem to encapsulate everything, fickle might be another word but it has lots of other negative connotations. Although being stubborn also has lots of negative connotations as well, so perhaps it’s a fair deal.

Being stubborn can have it’s advantages. People who are stubborn are often strong and resilient in the face of opposition. They have grit and stamina when things go wrong. A stubborn person doesn’t give up on something dear to them unless they’ve given their absolute all. The advantages to being irresolute/fickle is that you are usually better at dealing with people, your less likely to offend people, and probably most importantly you are more open to ideas from other people and find it easier to accept being wrong. I think the correct about of stubbornness can keep you at a happy medium between these two extremes.

Stubbornness and the Cingulate System

I’ve read about a disorder called ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) in Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Dr D G Amen. I’ve heard of this disorder before, but I didn’t take it seriously. It sounded so bizarre. How could be obstinate be mental disorder, it’s just someone being awkward surely? After reading about half of the book, and seeing the links Dr Amen makes between behavioural patterns and brain activity, and how these can be changed through medication and cognitive behavioural therapy, I was able to accept this disorder as a serious medical condition.

He links ODD to problems in the cingulate system in the brain. This is a section of the brain that runs longitudinally through the middle of the brain. It connects the right and left hemispheres. Problems in this area relate to cognitive inflexibility which can cause; OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), addictions such as alcoholism, eating disorders, any behaviour that becomes repetitive and that the individual finds difficult to change.

But you don’t have to have a medical disorder to have problems in this area. Dr Amen describes people with cingulate problems and how it affects their personality and how to deal with them. These are the kinds of people whose response to most questions is usually a ‘no‘, they want things done their way, when they say, otherwise they become very anxious and argumentative. Thee people get stuck on an idea and can’t shift their attention onto anything else until what they want gets done. They are people who hold onto grudges, if a situation isn’t resolved to their satisfaction they are unable to let go.

I felt sad while I was reading this chapter on the cingulate system. Everything Dr Amen said reminded me of my mother, she died of breast cancer recently. These aspects of her personality caused lots of stress at times and disagreements between members of the family. I kept thinking, if only I’d read this book sooner, I could have shown it to her, and the others, and we would all have been a lot more patient and forgiving of each other.

It’s not just my mum who had problems in this area. Some of the descriptions also apply to my Dad, my Nan and myself. My mum used to complain how she would sit down with my dad and discuss things with him, and how afterwards he would go and do something different, usually something totally different to what they’d agreed. This caused lots of arguments at home. My Nan can be a frustrating person to try and have a conversation with. She tends to start her conversations with a scripted discourse and won’t let you speak until she’s said everything she wants to, even if you know the answer to her question, or if you want to point out an error. You have to let her get to the end of what she wants to say, even if this means listening to five minutes of extraneous information. I have seen myself do this on occasions.

I think we must be a stubborn family. I’m now wondering if the stubborn parts of my personality could also be due to over activity in the cingulate system. Besides techniques for altering and dealing with the behavioural aspects, Dr Amen talks about medications that can have a dramatic effect on some individuals. These are drugs that increase the level of serotonin in the brain, like Prozac. St John's wort has also been shown to have similar effects. In addition he says there is an amino acid called 1-tryptophan that the body uses to make serotonin which you can get from health food shops. Inositol (a B vitamin) can also help people who are over focused and have trouble stopping repetitive thoughts. I’m not saying anyone should go out and take these, just that there are ways of regulating cingulate activity. It would be interesting though to see if any of these had an effect on myself of members of my family!

Sensitivity to Hard and Soft Surfaces

(This was written in draft before I knew about the different receptors in the skin, including those for measuring pressure. I think that’s what this section is about, my sensitivity to pressure. This is different from the pressure I apply to myself in order to get that sense of internal awareness. This is how your skin tells a hard surface from a soft surface. In much the same way that I am sensitive to one side of the hot/cold dichotomy, I am also very sensitive to one side of the hard/soft dichotomy.

There are some places that look so uncomfortable I can‘t understand why anybody would sit there. Such as coffee shops, where the floor is hard, the chairs are hard, it‘s noisy and the lighting is artificial. I realise now of course that NT people experience their environment in a different way to autistic people. It‘s seems strange that I‘ve lived so long in the world being uncomfortable in it, never realising that other people where having a different experience.

What I found while revisiting this section was that my likes and dislikes, all these little quirky things I just thought were my personal preferences actually have their basis in my biological make-up.)

I love watching property shows, they’re the only things I watch on television these days. If I did buy my own property I would love to hire an interior designer to turn it into something I that would be truly a home for me. I love soft and fluffy things. I don’t like hard surfaces. I prefer carpets to tiled or laminated floors. This means I have favourite rooms in the house that I spend a lot of time in and rooms I don’t spend much time in. I would have to find a way of turning my least favourite rooms into something I would use.

I don’t like bathrooms. Bathrooms are the worst room in the house for me as not only are they covered with hard surfaces and hard objects they are usually cold as well. These may seem like minor irritations to NT people, but for someone with extreme sensitivity to temperature and surfaces they are enough to make me avoid going there unless I have to. It’s the reason I only shower once every two days, and part of the reason my bathroom hardly ever gets cleaned. It’s not so bad in the summer time, but in winter, the idea of stepping out of that nice warm shower into a cold atmosphere is a daunting prospect.

It’s also part of the reason I don’t like conservatories. Unless they are very well made and insulated they are still colder than the rest of the house. The floors are often tiled rather than carpeted, the walls are often left as open stone or brick work - not very nice if you fall or lean against it. And conservatory furniture is often wicker or metal, nothing very soft or comfortable. They just don’t look very cosy. And there is another reason to do with my fear of space, conservatories just look insubstantial to me. Maybe it’s all the glass, the thinness of the walls and the roof. The construction of the conservatory plus the furniture people put in them, none of it feels very substantial to me. I think this is to do with my inability to visualise space or to be aware of myself in it. When I’m walking down the street I try to stay close to the sides of buildings. When I sit down in a restaurant or a pub or anywhere, I much prefer to be sitting next to a wall. I hate being sat in the middle of the room. Conservatories never look like very permanent structures to me.

The kitchen isn’t as bad as the bathroom or conservatory. They can be warm, especially if you’ve been cooking. And normally I only go in there to work. That is to cook or clean, or do other physical work. I’m not sure it’s somewhere I’d chose to relax though. A carpeted kitchen would be nice, you could put some kind of protection over it around the units, some armchairs around a wood burner could work well.

My two favourite rooms in the house then are the lounge and the bedroom. They have lots of soft furnishings and are cosy places to sit. My favourite place to do anything is lying or sitting on my bed. I can watch DVDs, I can write, I can read, I even eat meals sitting on my bed, because it is the softest place in the house. My dream is to have a bedroom large enough to have a sofa and some armchairs and a coffee table in it.

Décor wise, I don’t really like the minimal modernist look, where everything is white and every surface is rendered smooth, and all the floors are laminated. I’d feel like I was in an art gallery or an open plan office. I don’t like open planned offices, and I don’t like open plan homes. It goes back to this thing to do with space. I like rooms to be big rather than small, but with a whole floor that is open plan? It just doesn’t seem very comfortable; noises travel further, you have less privacy and unless you have lots of furniture it’s a waste of space.

Well, that’s just how the whole hard/soft thing affects how I like to live and the type of home I’d like to live in. Generally in my day to day living, it can be a pain, literally. I am very uncomfortable sitting on a hard chair for any length of time. I always seemed to be wriggling about in my chair at school more than anyone else. They were just so uncomfortable. Thankfully office chairs are soft, so after leaving school this ceased to be a problem. It’s a problem when it comes to socialising, because friends want to go places that just don’t appeal to me and I usually end up toeing the line. My parents used to say this a lot to me, I was often being told I should just toe the line (this expression comes from running and means to keep your toe on the mark at the beginning of a race - I just checked it on the web to see whether it should be ‘toe’ or ‘tow’). Nobody realised though, how often I would toe the line and how exhausted it was making me.

I don’t know if this is related, but my skin is a bit strange. If you sat on your hands for five minutes then look at them, your hands would be red and there would be creases in your skin where the fabric from your clothes had made an indent. My skin does this a lot, or maybe it’s just the way I sit or lie. I notice it most on my hands. Because I feel cold most of the time, I do tend to sit in positions where I wrap my arms and legs around myself, so I’m probably putting myself into positions where this is likely to happen, still, I never notice this phenomenon on other people’s hands. Peculiar or what.

Argumentative

Argumentative

Like stubbornness, this isn’t a label I would have applied to myself at the time, but looking back at my youth I did get into a lot of heated debates with people. I used to get very upset when people said something I thought was wrong or inaccurate. I could be very vocal in a debate, I was the sort of person who always had an opinion and I can still be argumentative if it is a subject I care deeply about.

Being argumentative is like stubbornness, it comes from a belief that you are right and other people are wrong. But whereas stubbornness is a refusal to surrender your inner world to someone else’s opinion, being argumentative is turning that stubbornness onto the outer world. You can be silently stubborn, but not silently argumentative. I think stubbornness suits introverted people more, and being argumentative is more likely to affect extrovert people.

These days I’m more likely to let things pass for the sake of a quiet life. But when I was younger I definitely felt I was on a mission to set the world to rights. It was important for me not only to establish the truth for myself, but to establish the truth in the outside world as well. I think I probably came across as very arrogant. Now I recognise that people have to find their own truth. You can be an example to people, but you can’t make them change their ways.

As I became less argumentative with people in real life, I was still in turmoil inside. The arguments I avoided in real life would continue in my head. It just upset me too much that someone was walking around believing something I thought was wrong. Just thinking of the person was enough to set off a long conversation with them in my head detailing why they were wrong, which is a pointless exercise because they can’t hear me. Thankfully I don’t do this as much as I used to.

Part of the reason for these long monologues is that I can’t imagine how the other person would reply. It’s the same when I’m talking to someone in real life, I frequently say things that upset or offend people. I can always work out why afterwards but for some reason I can’t see this before I say what I’m thinking of saying.

Because NT people think differently to autistic people, if I could imagine what they might say it probably wouldn’t satisfy the kind of conversation I wanted to have with them. This would end my imaginary conversation fairly quickly, so it’s a shame I can’t do it.

My Nan was always telling me I had no diplomacy, and my Dad always told me I had no social grace. I was never sure what he meant by this, but I think he probably meant the same thing as my Nan, that I put my foot in it a lot, and offend people. I don’t intend to offend people. If I could avoid it I would. I think my Dad saw social grace as something a person can turn on and off at will, but if you haven’t got it you haven’t got it.

I think what it comes down to is not being able to understand or accept that people think differently and that this is okay. It took me a long time to realise that my family had different values and beliefs to me. It was a big revelation to me, and made sense of a lot of things. Such as why I didn’t get on with them very well. All the time I had been thinking they shared the same ideas as me, and I was saying things that I expected them to agree with and instead they would get upset.

The other day I found a good way to stop thee internal monologues. I imagined I was talking to someone. I wanted to see if I could think of something they might say, and I did manage to think of something. But it was something I disagreed with, this would normally send me off on a long monologue but instead I thought, ‘Oh, well. They’ll probably think something different tomorrow!’. This was a new thought for me. I was pretty surprised by it, but pleased too. It stopped me going ‘off on one‘.

You see, I had been approaching NT people as if they were autistic. So if they said something that was factually wrong I felt I had to show them they were wrong, otherwise they could on believing it till the day they died. But often NT people say things that are just off the cuff remarks without much conviction behind them, even more scary is the fact they sometimes say things they don‘t believe to try and bond with someone, whereas I never say anything on a subject unless I have a strong conviction. I think I come across as a very serious person. One man put it very nicely and said I was very soulful, because everything I said was so sincere.

This trait though has caused me a lot of pain in the past. Family know us better than most, and often I think they would say things they knew would ‘get me going’. Now I see that often they were just winding me up because they knew they could, which isn’t a very kind game to play with someone.

I think NT people find it much easier to change their minds about something than an autistic person, I guess that’s why they think of us as stubborn. But once something is labeled the truth in my mind it is very difficult to remove that label, truth is after all unchanging. Maybe NT people are just more comfortable with things being possibly true and possibly not. An autistic person though has to know which it is. We think beneath all the chaos is a bedrock of truth that can see you through life.

Living In My Skin - Pain

One thing I didn’t talk about much when I first spoke about propioception was pain. However, it is also one of the ‘body senses‘, like touch, and is processed in the same part of the brain. The skin has different receptors for detecting temperature and pain and pressure. I’m very sensitive to temperature, the cold is almost painful to me - which is another reason I walk around looking very tense, other people are walking about in t-shirts and I’m shivering in my jacket. Also I’m very sensitive to pressure. This sounds a bit odd but I’ll go into that another time.

I was shying away from the issue of pain because it makes me feel more like a weirdo than I usually do. But I do have issues with pain. The most obvious thing and least crazy sounding thing is when I don’t notice that I’ve hurt myself. Where as I have a hyper-sensitivity to temperature and pressure, I have the opposite problem with pain. It’s not a serious problem, I’ve heard of people breaking bones and not noticing, my problem isn’t as bad as that but I’m pretty sure I don’t feel pain the same way most NT people do.

Pain is essential because it tells us something is wrong and makes us act to fix it. I remember one time, I was carving a rabbit out of wood for my Nan for Christmas. I slipped with the chisel and it went into the lower joint of my left thumb. It sounds very painful, but at first it didn’t hurt. I just looked down and cursed myself. I should have gone to A&E, but I didn’t have a car or know anyone who could drive me. Later it did start hurting quite a lot. I couldn’t move my thumb for about a week and it was about a month before I got the grip back in my left hand and it’s still weaker than my right hand. If I’d felt more pain sooner I probably would have called a taxi.

Then there are other times when I can be sensitive to pain. One thing I do a lot is to pick at my skin, I pick my spots and I pick at my lips as well. I was a very spotty teenager and this continued into adulthood. I have less spots these days, but I still get a few sore spots when my period starts. For some reason I just can’t leave these alone, I just have this belief that I can remove the blemish if I just squeeze it hard enough, even though logic tells me it will take longer to heal if I pick.

This picking started from a very young age. When I was about six, I grazed my knee. Not an earth shattering life experience but I remember it because it took so long to heal. My parents became so concerned they took me to see the doctor. You see I couldn’t stop picking the scab, and it was slowly getting bigger and bigger. The doctor persuaded me that I had to leave it alone otherwise it would go green and I might get very sick.

I liked picking it because of the scabs. I would play with them; I liked their texture. Then I would squeeze my graze and watch a new scab forming, sometimes I‘d lick it clean. I don’t like describing this because it all sounds like very strange behaviour. But then I was a child and I was autistic. Also taking the scab off would hurt, not loads but it kept me fascinated. I don’t know why I liked it. Maybe for the same reason I stim, I think this has also contributed to the spot picking problem.

I wasn’t going to write about this subject, but then I had a dream, it wasn’t a very nice dream, and I thought if I don’t look at it I’m going to keep getting this dream. It was about people hurting themselves. I wonder if people who are into S&M have something different going on in their brain to other people, maybe their brain is interpreting pain signals as pleasure signals. I think it’s different to what is going on when people self-harm which seems to be a psychological issue. I know autistic people sometimes hurt themselves to create sensations and stimulation in their brain. Banging your head against something hard or soft is a way of doing this. Some autistic people like biting things. Neither of these are socially acceptable behaviour if you a high functioning adult.

I think my spot problem is part psychological and part stimming. My parents were very strict with me. The amount of telling off and discipline administered to me would have been out of proportion had I been a high risk prisoner in Broadmoor. Punishment is a strange concept. Where did we get the idea that punishing someone will make them do what we want, or that punishment is a way of attaining justice? None of us are responsible for administering justice. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have the police or courts, I’m talking about the things you can’t legislate for. You can’t put someone in prison for having a different opinion to you, or for not loving you or for ignoring you.

Anyway, I read somewhere that when we grow up we continue to treat ourselves the way our parents treated us. So if you had very critical parents you will be very critical of yourself. If your parents were always punishing you, you will find ways to punish yourself. I grew up thinking I must be a bad person, why else did my parents disapprove so much of me? I see spots, and think they are the badness inside me coming out, hence the need to squeeze them. When I picked my scabs as a child though all I remember was that I liked doing it. To start with it was probably just that I liked the scabs and the pain was something new to me.

I am wondering now if a lack of pain receptors could be responsible for the daredevil antics some autistic children get up to. Maybe they don’t have as much awareness of pain, so they don’t anticipate it and they do things most other children would be scared of doing. I would often be climbing onto things and jumping from high places when I was a kid. My parents used to call me Action Man. If you experience pain less than other people it will take you longer to develop caution. It wasn’t till I fell down the stairs whilst swinging on the banisters on our landing, and nearly went through our glass front door, fracturing my skull in the process, that I learnt to be more careful. I would still climb on the banisters, I was just a bit more careful.

Stubbornness

Autistic people have a reputation for being stubborn. I have problems with this word. Firstly it a judgement one person makes on another person. Nobody ever describes themselves as stubborn. Secondly I have difficulty defining what it means exactly. I don’t know what a stubborn person is like, I can’t picture them in my mind and I don’t think I’ve ever described another person as being stubborn.

If I was pushed I would say someone is being stubborn if they refuse to change their mind about something when the evidence is that they are in the wrong. But it still seems like a bizarre idea. I only believe things I think are true, I’m not going to purposefully be obstructive and pretend to believe something I know isn’t true. Maybe being stubborn is simply having different beliefs to other people, and what’s wrong with that? We all have to find the truth for ourselves.

I’ve been told by my family I’m stubborn many times. Most of the occasions though, which they would describe as examples of me being stubborn, are in fact examples of their inability to see where I’m coming from. Being fussy about my food, not wanting to wear particular items of clothing, these were all times when they were misinterpreting my sensory problems. This wasn’t me being obstructive, this was me being misunderstood.

There were other occasions when I just wouldn’t believe my parents were telling me the truth. I believed something else and nobody was going to persuade me to think anything else. My arguments may have sounded very strange to an NT person, but their logic was faultless according to my autistic brain. However, I have come to accept that I live in a world created by NT people, a world that doesn’t abide by set of rules, and there will be times when logic can’t help you!

I remember one instance when I was about six. My Mum and Dad told me I had a middle name that was ‘Ann’. But I didn’t believe them. Up to that point in time I had thought I had two names; Victoria Beeching. So when they tried to tell me my name was Victoria Ann Beeching, I was very dubious. How could I have not known my name for so long? I was convinced that what my family was saying was my middle name, was in fact just the word ’and’. I thought they must have misheard someone who had said my names where Victoria and Beeching.

At the time I was having elocution lessons because of my speech problems; I missed the ends and beginnings off words. Most of my lessons where spent repeating words and being told off for missing the ends off them. If your autistic you learn things by repeating them many times, the downside to this way of learning is that once you’ve got it entrenched it’s very difficult to undo it. So when my parents told me I had a middle name that was ‘Ann’, I thought they’d missed the end off the word ‘And’. I’d spent so many lessons being told off for not saying that word correctly my brain found it difficult to get away from this.

This is best example I can think of my stubbornness, and yet I don’t really think I was being stubborn. I can still remember how I felt at the time, and the logic I applied still seems reasonable for my age and understanding. Stubbornness isn’t just about believing you’re right, it’s about trusting other people to tell you the truth. And in my black and white world, either you trust someone or you don’t. You can’t trust people some of the time, and not at other times. You have to make a choice. An autistic person doesn’t have the ability to tell the difference between a person who is lying and a person who is telling the truth. If my family had been consistent and understanding of me maybe I’d have had an easier time trusting them.

Living In My Skin

(I wrote the first half of this before I knew what propioception was. I’ve left it as it is though because it describes well how it feels to have poor propioception - and because it shows how close I was to describing a physiological mechanism I knew nothing about! Which is surely evidence enough that these symptoms and being autistic are not just something I‘ve made up or imagined.)

It’s been cold today. I’m running my foot along the radiator behind my chair. It begins to feel very nice, in a way it doesn’t normally. It’s like that nice relaxing feeling you get during a massage. Your skin is a sensory organ. As an autistic person, who sometimes has sensory issues, I think my skin is sometimes playing games with me.

I think we hold a lot of tension on the surface of our skin and deeper into our muscle tissue. Massage works through pressure and touch. How does our body measure pressure? Do we have nerve endings inside our body or is it through our skin? I can feel the hardness of my bones through my skin but my bones aren’t sensitive to touch, neither are my muscles. But I know when my muscles are relaxed and when they’re not. Maybe my brain can measure the blood flow to my muscles. Maybe my skin can measure pressure both inside and outside of the body, maybe it can measure hardness and softness inside and outside the body.

What I’m trying to figure out is how do we know what’s going on inside our bodies? I’m a very tense person. I find it difficult to let go of tension in my muscles. I remember when I was learning to drive my thighs would clench up, when I realised I was doing it I managed to relax myself. I noticed this in the autistic boy I looked after. Certain muscles in his body were very tense.

I know when my muscles are tense (sometimes) and when they are relaxed (sometimes). Maybe the body has a method for sensing blood flow to your muscles. If this mechanism isn’t working properly how do you know if you are tense? I think you are habitually tense this sense made fade into the back ground.

It makes me think of the question about knowing where you are space. Like when I’m in the supermarket and I think people are going to walk into me or walking into doors and furniture at home. Just this inability to sense my body and where it is in relation to everything else. Wouldn’t this be enough to make someone tense?

I love pressure being applied to my body, I love being squeezed. When I was at school people where often scared of going to the tuck shop. There was no queue, it was like a mosh pit. I used to hang around the tuck shop volunteering to go up for people. Or sometimes I’d just beg a penny off someone and then enter the crush until I got pushed to the front when I would buy my coca cola bottle. I think that’s why I liked scrapping when I was younger, I didn’t ever hurt anyone, I just liked the rough and tumble.

My sense of touch is also distorted. I often don’t notice things like cuts and bruises, but something like a crease in my sock will drive me crazy. Either I am hyper-sensitive or not sensitive at all. As a child I was very sensitive to different materials. I didn’t like man-made materials. I think it’s the electric static that comes off them and also they tend to be itchy and scratchy.

This isn’t a problem now I can choose my own clothes, but at the time it was a nightmare. A refusal to wear certain clothes was simply not acceptable, after a lot of shouting and threats of physical violence the biggest person won. I know they thought I was just being awkward or difficult. They often accused me of doing things just to be different. I was different, I didn’t want to be though.

I think my younger sister used to copy this behaviour. At the time I didn’t understand her strange behaviour or that she might be copying me. It used to annoy me a lot. I remember her walking into a lamppost once. She had seen it but she pretended to be looking somewhere else. I don’t think she expected to hurt herself so much. She got a big bruise on her forehead and I got told off for pointing out she had done it on purpose. Being an autistic child I didn’t understand that people copy each other’s behaviour and sometimes it is even a form of flattery.

My sensitivity to touch is not confined to clothes, I also used to have a problem with touching other people‘s skin. I remember one girl at school who always had cold clammy hands. I would do my best to avoid holding hands with her if we were playing a game like ring a ring a roses. Unfortunately my younger sister also became a victim to this. Something in me labelled her as different, physically she didn’t look like the rest of us (we were all blonde with blue eyes and she had chestnut hair and hazel eyes).

Sometimes I wouldn’t want to sit next to her in the car in case our skin touched. We were a large family and us four kids all sat in the back of the car. I would object if I had to sit next to my sister, I didn’t have the social imagination to realise how this made her feel. Of course I was told to stop being silly. And my other brother and sister returned the favour by complaining loudly if they ever had to sit next to me. Memories like this make me feel very sad. It didn’t have to be this way. Thankfully this skin on skin thing has diminished with age.

I have a phobia about jewellery. I’ve read a lot psychoanalytic literature. I think according to Freud the phobic object embodies the memory of something we have repressed, or feelings we are trying to deny. Which could be true, I don’t know because I’ve repressed it, but maybe it will be a good subject for me to investigate during an art therapy session. It was mostly my twins plastic jewellery that freaked me out. Her plastic beads were the worst, if we were having an argument she would sometimes throw them at me or threaten to if I didn’t shut up or go away.

My Nan was a ballroom dancer and she had lots of fake jewellery. I remember when we used to visit her, she used to make us go into her bedroom and choose a piece before going home. I would usually find a piece of furniture to hide behind at this point. I also remember my granddad yelling at her to ‘leave the poor child alone’. But she wouldn’t. She believed any mental issues could be overcome by force of will. So I would be dragged off to her bedroom and presented with her jewellery box. I would never put my hand in though, so she would chose something and put it into hand which would be held out dead flat and I would carry it to my mother who would put it in her handbag. I’m not sure if this is a phobia proper or whether this is another sensory issue.

Another phobia thing I have, is I don’t like being naked. I used to think this was just embarrassment. But I’ve realised my embarrassment and discomfort goes beyond what is normal. I just don’t feel safe or secure without my clothes on. I used to think this was purely a psychology reason for this. But now I’m wondering if there is also a physiological reason. I don’t like wearing loose clothing, or if I do I have to wear something clingy underneath like a lycra t-shirt or vest.

I think sensory issues are a bigger problem when you’re a child because everything is new. New sights and sounds and new tastes and textures, which is all very distressing when you’re autistic and like familiarity. If today, someone produced an object I had never seen or touched before, I would probably react the same way I did as a child.

Another thing that comes under the sensory issue of touch would be food and what we put in our mouths. My Dad used to call me ‘The Bit Queen’, because I didn’t like food with bits in it. I remember the first time I went strawberry picking. Me and my twin sat in front of the television when we got home and ate our strawberries. I only managed one strawberry though because I had to pick all the seeds out of it first. There was only one brand of yoghurt I would eat, Mr Men yoghurts, because all the others had bits in them.

I think one thing I do which people find strange is the way I touch and rub my skin. I do this with my face and hands a lot. I now think this is a form stimming. As is sitting on a radiator when it’s not cold and squeezing and rubbing my arms. They are all forms of self-stimulation. I read on The National Autistic Society’s webpage that stimming (also called stereotypy behaviour) is usually associated with people who have severe learning difficulties. I think all autistic people stim, they are just more aware of what is socially acceptable and what isn’t. Temple Grandin’s squeeze machine could be described as a way of stimming.

I think the reason these self-stimulating actions have got a bad press is because NT people misunderstand the purpose and reasons for these actions. They approach the behaviour from an NT perspective rather than an autistic perspective. Stereotypy behaviour is defined on The National Autistic Society website as ‘repetitive actions lacking curiosity and creativity’. They lack curiosity and creativity because that is not their purpose, their purpose is to give pleasure and assist relaxation. I’m sure there are actions NT people indulge in, in private, that have a repetitive element that also give pleasure and relaxation. Just because we don’t understand the pleasures of another doesn’t mean we should label the action as pointless or meaningless.

I’ve read that people stim in order to stimulate, under stimulated senses. My hearing and sight are senses that are often overwhelmed but I think my senses to do with touch are very under simulated. These are the senses I’m often trying to stimulate. I don’t get a normal level of stimulation from my everyday interaction. I guess, even though my sense of touch isn’t conveying all the information it should, my brain is still wanting or missing this input. This input seems to be necessary to the brain for it to be happy. Maybe there is a mechanism in the brain that is asking for this input, and stimming is the only way I can provide it because my sensory receptors are not efficient enough to gather the input on their own.

My Career Choices

My first career choice, that I remember, was to be a writer. I remember reading a book when I was about eight, it was a diary of a working class girl. What I remember most is that she got shingles and was sent away to a special boarding school and was feed lots of fruit. This girl always dreamed of being a writer. Her mother bought her an enormous pile of foolscap and she had kept a diary from that day on. (I’m not sure if the book I was reading was a fictional diary or a real one). Today I can’t remember the title of the book or the name of the author. Reading it though was the first time I realised that being a writer was a career option.

I always fantasised about that large wad of paper and filling it with my stories. And nearly thirty years later that fantasy has sort of come true. I spend most of my time at the moment writing, and I have notebooks full of my thoughts and dreams. I’m not writing fiction, even though that’s what I wanted to write, but I have found something I can write about, myself! I am the ultimate introvert, I am my own subject matter. Whilst it’s fulfilling, learning about myself and my condition (autism), I sometimes wonder what kind of writer I’d have been if I hadn’t been autistic.

After my ‘A’ Levels I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was in crisis. My home life was difficult and I was very confused about who I was and where I was going. If I’d known I was autistic I would not have felt such alarm at going out into the world. I’d have known my strengths and weaknesses and made decisions based on this knowledge. But I was in the dark, and was desperate to leave home. My English teacher tried to convince my mother that English was what I should be studying at university, but my mum thought Art was a better subject for me.

So I did a foundation course in Art and Design, because I trusted my mum was right, even though I’d never had desires in that direction until she talked about it. Looking back I don’t think I’d have been happy whatever I had chosen. Without a diagnosis I wasn’t in a position to make any informed decisions and I was also deeply unhappy without knowing why.

The first degree I did was in Visual Culture. There is really only one career path from this, which would be in academia and I simply wasn’t committed enough to the subject. I did start out on the Fine Art course but transferred after my first year. I was having a lot of difficulty finding suitable subject matter and a style I could paint in. I love landscapes but I can’t do them. I have visual perception problems that make it difficult for me to generalise what I see, rather than painting my impressions I would always try to paint every leaf and every blade of grass. If someone had taught me to paint like the Pre-Raphaelites I might have stayed! I always tended towards realism because copying detail is something I’m good at. So I tended to draw people or man made environments even though I really wanted to do landscape. I couldn’t find a subject matter that matched both my enthusiasm and my technical abilities.

I think if I went back to it now I would be able to find my way round these issues knowing what I do about autism. On the fine art course I was doing the teachers were very hot on us finding other painters whose work we connected with and using them as influences in our own work. Being autistic in an NT world though, I didn’t have this connection and it just became another aspect of my work I had to fake.

My next career move was to study accountancy. People always said how strange it seemed that considering my creative credentials. It was a purely practical decision. I had moved back home, and things were still difficult. I wanted my own place and a decent job to support myself. Accountancy was something I thought I’d be good at and would provide a decent income. And it did enable me to live independently without support. But I was desperately unhappy. I still didn’t know why I felt so different from the people around me. I was though, beginning to realise where my weaknesses and strengths lay. I liked accountancy because I was good at detail and because I was dealing with numbers rather than unpredictable people. My autism leant itself to a job in accountancy where details and repetitive tasks were plentiful but my soul was crying out something more fulfilling.

I left accountancy and did a degree in writing and film studies. I had been doing a part time course in creative writing for a few years and I spent a lot of time writing poetry in private and even sent some of them off to competitions and magazines. I think I had one poem published in a poetry journal and I once was a runner up in a competition. I wanted to see if I would be able to earn a living as a freelance writer. My plan didn’t really work out though. What this course taught me was what I wasn’t good at; journalism, short stories, dialogue, grammar and a few other things. I can trace most of my difficulty in these areas to autism. In journalism you have to have the audience in mind and I can’t imagine myself in someone else’s shoes, I can’t imagine myself as one of the common people, in short stories I’m not able to describe the relationships between people, for my problems with dialogue I refer you to what I’ve written about conversation and for my problems with grammar see what I’ve written about language. I took film studies because at that time at the university I chose you couldn’t do writing as a single honours degree. Although I enjoyed film making, I don’t feel I have the social skills to make it in the film industry.

After I finished my second degree I didn’t have any firm ideas about what I wanted to do next, I was till lost and still looking for my niche. I had always had an interest in spiritual matters, and I was reading a lot of new age literature looking for a solution to my problems. I did lots of meditation exercises looking for some direction. I thought maybe my problem was that all my career choices had been based on what I wanted and maybe I should be thinking of work that involved helping others. In one meditation I saw myself with a pink feather duster walking towards a large manor house. Later I saw an advert for a tutor to an autistic boy, the post was live in and also involved some house work. When I looked up on the internet the village where they lived I saw a drawing of the manor house I had seen in my meditation. I thought, this is where I am supposed to go next.

It was a difficult job and I’m no longer an ABA tutor. But it was definitely a good move. If I hadn’t done it, I would never have found out I was on the spectrum and discovering I’m autistic has been the biggest life changing event so far. I am slowly becoming comfortable in my own skin. I don’t criticise myself like I used to because I know why I do the things I do and why I can’t do the things I wish I could. And I can finally begin to think about what work I could do that will make me happy and that matches my abilities.

Being Too Nice

My lack of ability to read emotions and respond to them has lead me to develop what I call the ‘too nice syndrome’. It means that whenever someone is horrible to me I am nice back. It’s not that I’m a nicer person (although sometimes I think I am), it’s just that the other person has said something with an unpleasant undertone which has confused me and I don‘t have the time to think of what I want to say.

Saying something unkind requires the ability, to know something about the other person which you can use to make them feel bad about themselves. There are just too many processes going on here for my brain to cope with. If I was unkind to someone it would be in a very blatant way, I can’t think of any examples though. Usually I offend people unintentionally simply by stating the truth.

But back to my first condition of bewildered confusion. I know that I need to respond, and I only have seconds to do it within, so I say something that seems appropriate to the situation and because I haven’t understood the persons true intentions it usually something pretty bland and polite. Of course then the person walks away smiling to themselves feeling superior no doubt, and I work out what’s just happened and feel stupid.

It’s not just having a reply that’s the problem, it’s also being able (or rather not being able) to put some expression into my face and my words to show my displeasure with the other person. Even though I may have been hurt by what they did, that feeling doesn’t set off the next feeling of wanting to say something hurtful back. The emotion I do experience doesn’t lead me into any reaction.

I have learnt over the years though that if I don’t show the other person a bit of anger, they will take this as an indication of weakness and feel safe in doing it again, and again. It feels a bit fake and a bit acted but it is necessary. I have an example in this case, I was at the library recently and I had taken back an overdue book, so I had to pay a fine. I had another book at home which I hadn’t brought with me but which I knew I had had for a while. So I went on a computer and checked my account. That’s when I saw that it too was late and had a fine on it. The librarian would have seen this on my account but hadn’t said anything. If I had been in her job I would have mentioned it.

I don’t know what inspirers people to do things that eventually hurt someone else, maybe they get some small pleasure in it, maybe it makes them feel powerful. I thought back to this librarian’s wry smile and thought the error was almost certainly intentional. I walked home to get the book and she was still on the desk when I came back to pay the fine. I tried to look as annoyed as possible and was as curt with her as I could be. Her attitude changed instantly, suddenly she was very helpful and offering to check my other books. Later on, still in the library I received some good news while on the internet and I was walking out with a big grin on my face, unfortunately she caught my eye and smiled back. I didn’t think to drop my smile, thereby undoing the work I’d just done. She now thought we were friends again.

Talking Emotions

Generally I find it hard to think of replies to other people’s comments in a conversation. It is the main reason I don’t like talking to people. Most of the time I am trying to think of something I could say, and worrying if we will run out of things to talk about. This makes me very anxious. I suppose most people feel this to some degree. I used to be talking to someone and at the same time searching for other topics in my head. (I am aware that I can talk about the same thing for too long, which is dull for other people).

I prefer the conversation to stick to factual topics, this is easier for me. But what most people want to talk about, if they are friends rather than work colleagues or fellow students, is things like gossip, relationships, television, events in their life; things which are mostly emotional experiences. In these situations it is especially difficult for me to reply because often I don’t have any response to this information. If I don’t have an emotional reaction to what I’m being told, I have no basis for a response.

It’s is easier to have this kind of conversation by text or email because then I have time to think of a reply. I do this by repeating the person’s words to myself and gradually phrases come to mind that I could use in my reply. If nothing is coming then I will start with something I know is an appropriate response although perhaps a bit cliché and keep repeating this until something flows after it, which is a more genuine response. With this process, even my short emails to friends can take a long time to write.

I wasn’t always aware of this process. I think it is a process even NT people go through sometimes, if they have experienced a very high level of emotion they haven‘t been able to process and they are feeling very sad or very happy. They might play a piece of music that resonates with how they are feeling, as a way of encouraging and exploring how they feel. It’s the same as I am trying to do above, but on a more mundane level.

Sharing Conversation

I went out with a small group of friends recently. There were four of us. We hadn’t seen each other for a while so we had plenty of news to share. I did quite a lot talking. It went quite well really. I was more relaxed than I normally am, now they know I’m autistic they are more forgiving of my little idiosyncrasies and I’m not so anxious about keeping up my normal act.

I hadn’t seen one girl for nearly four years so I had a lot to share and I became conscious I was doing a lot fo the talking. The thing is, it’s thin line for an autistic person; saying too much or saying too little. I think for NT people it’s a very wide line, saying a few lines three or four times maybe okay in some situations, talking for half an hour maybe okay in others. Each situation is unique and there are very few rules which can guide you.

I used to see conversation as a bit like tennis; you say something and the other person returns it to you with a different take on it. The only difference I guess is that you want the other person to be able to hit the ball so you don‘t say anything too obtuse. I knew conversation should be a two way process, so I imagined a process where one person says something, then the other person takes that idea and sees what ideas this gives them. And so the original idea grows and changes until there is some kind of satisfactory conclusion and the subject can change.

I began to realise how inadequate this model was when I took some screenwriting modules at university. My tutor told me my dialogue was very ’back and forth’. I knew then, for the first time, that I was doing something wrong. But I didn’t know what and my NT friends were too polite to point it out (I didn’t know at that point that I was autistic).

The thing I liked about my model was that both people spoke for roughly the same amount of time so you didn’t have that dilemma of deciding how long you should speak for. I never managed to figure out a model that worked for groups. Probably this is why I preferred to deal with people on a one to one basis. I get very anxious in groups.

Despite my best efforts I could never make my model of conversation work in reality, and somehow this didn't make me realise my model was wrong. NT people don’t work to a set of defined rules. So whenever I would start talking about a subject (which I may or may not have introduced), people either disagreed or said something I disagreed with or they would say nothing and I’d end up talking until I stopped myself or someone butted in.

I can see now that the model I had built was actually just a replica of the kind of conversations I have with myself. Whenever I was writing a script or a short story, the conversations I created between characters were really conversations with myself. What I wasn’t doing was imaging two different people, and what their agendas might be, their interests, their personalities. I wasn’t imagining what their emotional reactions might be. I wasn’t, not doing it because I didn’t want to but because I couldn’t.

For an autistic person conversation is either about being a listener or a talker. As the subject changes you change roles. Conversation is usually about communication of information rather than two people interacting emotionally. Because you I'm not very good at the emotional thing I rely very heavily on having a good store of knowledge and funny stories to entertain people with. But this over compensation can get you into trouble.

Talking too much is misinterpreted by my NT friends as a lack of interest in what they think. This isn’t true, because I spend most of my time studying my friends and trying to act like them. I’m talking because I know they want me to talk. If I don't talk they think I'm ignoring them. My lectures are really intended as a gift. It’s the only gift I have to give them. It’s the only way I know how to talk to them. And I want to give them a lot, because I know I can’t bond with them in the way they want me to.

Fine Motor Skills

Difficulty with fine motor tasks is commonly associated with autism. I think it’s another one of those things that isn’t caused by autism itself, but something that tends to appear along side it. When I first started working with my autistic boy, I was not able to see just by watching him that he had fine motor difficulties. He couldn’t tie show laces and he preferred to eat with his fingers, but then he was only four. If someone’s arm is bandaged making movement difficult, you can see it and make allowances. But like other aspects of autism, fine motor problems are something felt on the inside and are not obvious to others.

I began to think about fine motor issues when I began taking more notice of how I used my hands. My handwriting is pretty much illegible unless I write in capitals. I could write fairly neatly when I learnt at school, although I could never achieve the nice, evenly spaced, rounded letters my friends did. It was still readable. I have since lost this skill.

It’s a bit like speech in that respect, while I was having the elocution lessons my pronunciation improved drastically. But slowly over the years I’ve lost some of what I learnt. My speech can be broken and garbled especially when I‘m tired or not paying enough attention to it.

The mother of my autistic boy told me he might be orally dyspraxic. Because I find speech difficult, particularly pronouncing consonants, I thought maybe I had this problem. But thinking about it now, I wonder if it isn’t just a fine motor problem. Dyspraxic is when you can’t co-ordinate your movements, my problem is actually producing movement.

Poor handwriting on it’s own doesn’t indicate a fine motor problem, or dyspraxia. I think most of my teachers had very poor handwriting, I know we struggled to read their comments on our work. Strangely though if they wrote on the blackboard their handwriting was always neat. It’s like they had two styles of writing. When I was at school we always thought of messy writing as an indication of cleverness. Because older people and clever people had messy writing.

Now I have a laptop, so I write much less with a pen than I used to. Using a laptop with a shallow keyboard is much easier than writing with a pen as most of the action to hit the keys comes from my knuckles and I don’t have to bend my fingers as much. I’m quite fast on a keyboard.

It’s not just writing though that I have problems with. I’m always a bit self conscious of my hands, I never know where to put them because I don’t know how to hold them. When I‘m walking I don‘t like having them by my sides, you have to take up a posture of some sort. I prefer to put them in my pockets, so I like to have jackets with pockets. If I don’t have any pockets I will probably cross my arms. I like having a bag to hold, even if it’s one I carry over my shoulder, because I’ve at least got a strap to hold onto to. Wearing gloves is nice because it’s less obvious what your doing with your hands. I think part of the problem is the movement in my fingers. They feel a bit numb, it’s similar to the sensation in my lips when I’m struggling with pronunciation (which is why I think this might also be a fine motor thing).

When I’m sitting with someone I tend to find a hand position and to keep it. I’ve copied most of these off my Nan (not consciously). My Nan is very conservative, she sounds a bit posh when you speak to her. The way she holds herself, including her hands is quite stiff and formal. I’ve picked up her mannerisms because they are easy to imitate. The only downside is that this makes me appear stiff and formal too.

I’ve notice since my diagnosis that the problems with my hands have got a bit worse. I think the reason for this can be demonstrated by a simple analogy. Imagine you’ve had a very demanding job, working 40 hours a week without a holiday for more than ten years. It‘s a job you‘re pretty bad at and you never seem to get any better. Then someone tells you there has been an error and this isn’t your job you were meant to be something else, so they are going to change your job to something more suitable. Wouldn’t you feel like I’m never going to that work again! I think that’s how my fingers feel.

I find myself grabbing at things rather than taking the time to think and pick them up properly. It’s like my brain is trying to figure out new ways of doing things that will take less effort. It’s like all my life I’ve existed in this over tired, over stressed, really tense state without knowing why and now I’m learning to relax and not trying to keep up with everyone else.

When I worked with my autistic boy I saw he used to drop things a lot. Sometimes he would throw them. Most of the times this wasn’t in anger. He would pick up a toy, play with it for a bit then drop it and pick up something else. The floor of his session room would quickly become littered with toys and I would be constantly tidying up. One of things we taught him was what ‘tidy up’ meant. And we did go through a period of trying to get him to put stuff away after he had dropped it, although I wasn’t very strict with this. I sympathise with him now, think most of this was down to his fine motor issues and he had much greater difficulties in this area than I do. I’m able to tie shoelaces and hold a pen. No one notices my difficulty, except probably that I’m a bit stiff.

It’s not just my hands that are a problem, my feet too can trip me up. I was always being told as a child not to drag my feet. Of course, now I’m an adult I can drag my feet as much as I like! Don’t think though this is something I do out of laziness. My Mum told me once I had talipes when I was born. It wasn’t very severe and as the only way they can fix it is to break the bones in your legs and put you in plaster my Mum decided not to have anything done. She told me when we saw a child on a bus who was in plaster like this. I think she thought I would pleased that she told the doctors not to do anything She had an old fashioned view of doctors, that you shouldn’t go unless you were dying. Actually I was gutted, okay so I can walk okay and I don’t fall over, but I might not have this strange walk I have.

I mention this here because I was wondering if motor skills might be responsible for me having two left feet. It’s very difficult to determine the reason for things when there are so many possible causes. When it comes to walking you have to have good spatial awareness, good balance and be able to co-ordinate and move the muscles in your body in the way you want. I think it’s a possibility.

Personal Relationships

I had been thinking that I was getting good at working out what was going on in social situations. That I had mastered what I needed to, or got as good at it as I thought I would or needed to. Then I had a recent experience that made me realise I hadn’t at all. All I had learnt (and the results are still inconsistent), was to recognise some of the games people play and to analysis peoples behaviour using theories I have gained by reading books on popular psychology.

I think this is because I’ve been focused on social situations as the main area were the autistic person’s lack of people skills becomes most obvious, assuming this is were they are most important. I haven’t really looked at the impact of autism on my close personal relationships.

In personal relationships I only manage by keeping people at a distance. So I have friends, but I don’t see them very often. There isn’t very much emotional investment. I think this is the big difference between social and personal relations. Personal relationships involve a greater emotional investment.

Emotions are difficult for me. It all started to go wrong when I reached puberty. Before then, I was just thought of as an odd, but bright child. Then puberty came along and I became an odd, but bright, unhappy teenager. Puberty is a difficult time, not just emotionally, but because we are maturing socially. Making friends is no longer as simple as running up to someone in the playground and asking them to play tag with you. Being autistic puts you at a disadvantage to your NT peers.

So puberty is difficult for two reasons. You are dealing with lots of new emotions and having to navigate an increasingly complicated social world. Being autistic and undiagnosed there was no way I was ever going to cope even reasonably well. This was a very difficult and dark time for me. I’m still amazed I held it together without doing something silly.

I have matured emotionally, to some extent since then, but in stressful situations I often feel as did when I was a teenager. I used to think this was my fault, that it was something I was doing that had meant I hadn’t grown up like other people. This was reinforced by my families treatment of me, e.g. not being given responsibilities, not being included in decision making, not being kept informed of events. (Although this did change for a brief period after my mother died).

The problem was also the lack of initiation on my part, which is autism related. So I am caught in a situation with no exits. I won’t be treated as I want unless I stop being autistic, which without a brain transplant isn’t going to happen.

I think the reason I’ve been focused on social situations rather than personal relationships is that the personal side of things often feels just to painful to be worth risking. This was an unconscious decision, but when I look at how I have led my life this is definitely what I have been doing.

I have also to some extent excluded emotions from my study of social situations and also from my own behaviour in social situations. The reason for this being that I don’t handle emotions very well, I often don’t know how I’m feeling and I’m also confused about how much emotion is appropriate.

I recently went to see a lawyer who wrote a letter of complain to my healthcare trust because my mental health team had refused to see me. When I read the letter she’d written there were several references to the emotional impact the situation was having on me. I thought this was a bit odd at the time. But I trust this woman was doing a good job and that this is how people do and should behave. I see now that this is something I need to bring back into my interactions with people. I think I have been focused more on the other person and understanding them than looking at myself and working on how I behave. Probably because this is harder to do.

Social Boundaries

I feel about social situations the same way I fell about physical spaces. In space, I have to trust that I am occupying it and these objects are solid and I’m not about to fall over or walk into someone. Most of the time I don’t look relaxed, this is because I’m not, if I look stiff it’s because I am holding myself ready in case that’s not the floor and this chair isn’t where I think it is. It’s to do with spatial-visual perception which is often affected in autism.

In a social situation, if I don’t know what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t, I can’t construct any boundaries in my mind. I think autistic people have far stricter ideas about what is and what isn’t acceptable behaviour. Such as our position on honesty. We want and need these boundaries as they are essential to us understanding each other, we can’t read all the hidden meanings NT people pass between themselves.

Autistic boundaries are constantly being broken by NT people. It’s no wonder we feel anxious around NT people. NT people often speak of autistic people breaking their boundaries, obvious things include stripping off, or inappropriate sexual behaviour. But for high functioning autistics the problem is usually the other way round. Autistic people have a very strict code of ethics that most NT people would view as puritanical, and these codes are constantly being broken, much to the pain and distress of the autistic person.

In any social situation boundaries are being created and taken down and rebuilt. If a controversial subject comes up, the potential for disagreements and broken boundaries intensifies. I can’t position myself in relation to others because I don’t know what position other people will have. This is hard for me, because I have been blessed with lots of non-mainstream ideas. As a child I often offended my parents with my views on women, race and sexuality. This puts me in a more precarious position than if my views were more in line with the rest of society. For an autistic person though, pretending to have the same values as someone else to fit in would be very difficult, it would mean breaking that code of ethics.

Sometimes I think these difficulties also stem from my past experiences. If the people around you have been supportive in the past then you won’t worry what people’s reactions are going to be in the future. If however, your past experience was negative this is how you will expect future interactions to be. If you’re autistic your view of events may be skewed anyway, but it doesn’t change how the situation felt for you. An NT person will have the skills to assess a new situation using their social skills, an autistic person doesn’t.

When NT people go into a social situation, they are protected to some extent by the social barrier that they can create to manipulate how people see them or even to deceive people as to their intentions. Autistic people don’t have this, they operate on a policy of honesty because they can’t do all the complicated things NT people do when they communicate. Autistic people are like windows, you can see straight through them. Whether you are aware of it or not, going into a social situation without a disguise or the ability to disguise your feelings is a very stressful experience.

When I feel insecure in space I sometimes like to think how nice it would be to be held, the way a parent holds a baby who can’t sit upright or hold it’s head up. I would feel safe with someone holding me so that I could feel where I was. I wish there was a similar way of being held in social situations. It seems impossible, unless the NT people present could be persuaded to drop their social costumes. Then everyone would know where they stood, we would know where the boundaries were and people would have to stick to those positions and not keep changing their minds because of self-interest.

You know how you feel when you are doing something for the first time; a new job, starting university, or joining a group. That’s how I feel for most of the time. I rarely feel at ease, even in places I go to a lot. It’s as if people are new to me no matter how often I meet them. I guess because no matter how long I know them, I’m still never sure of how they will behave.

Getting to Know You

Normally when two people meet they will make some very quick judgements about the other person. These judgements will be based on how nice the other person is (i.e. how good they are with the social chit chat thing), how well they look after their appearance, how attractive they are… generally how well they present themselves and how good their social skills are.

However, good social skills aren’t always an indication of an honest and trustworthy character. In many cases I have observed the opposite to be true. Conmen have very good social skills, or they couldn’t do what they do.

I sometimes make judgements on people’s appearance, i.e. whether I like it or not, but I don’t make judgements on a person’s character this way. Having poor social skills myself who am I to judge someone who doesn’t mix well? For a while I couldn’t understand why NT people valued these skills so highly. Then I realised, most of the time this isn’t a conscious action on their part. Greater social skills means a greater ability to charm people, and this is what NT people are responding too.

On the other hand, an NT person may make a conscious negative judgement against someone who lacks social skills and they probably wouldn’t want to be seen around with that person in case other people made the same judgement against them. People enjoy being popular and being popular requires good social skills. Neither of these response is a reliable way to assess someone’s character.

When I meet someone I am generally quite nosey and I ask a lot of questions. This doesn’t normally go against me, people usually like talking about themselves, unless they have something to hide. Also it is a genuine interest, I love popular psychology books and programmes, I observe people all the time. It started out as something I had to do in order to fit in, now it’s become a bit of a hobby.

I’m quite good at it now. I can usually tell after some basic background information what type of person they are. Through working out their psychological profile I am better able to read between the lines of what they are saying. This is a different reading between the lines than what NT people do. When NT people read between the lines they are picking up on messages that have been imbedded purposefully. I am very poor at this, I don’t normally get it till I’ve gone home and had a chance to go over the conversation. When I read between the lines I am searching for what that person doesn’t want me to know. This makes me a better judge of character if not a very good conversationalist.

It seems strange to me that NT people aren’t interested in each other in this way. They are quite happy taking each other at face value. But then the NT world exists as a set of unspoken rules and NT people accept secrecy as one of these rules. Secrecy is almost essential if social etiquette is to be followed. A lot of social interaction is about disguising rather than revealing. Secrecy is a way of life, something they don’t even question.

I used to be very enthusiastic when I met people. What would their likes and dislikes be? What personality traits would they have? How would we get on? I was always hopefully this new person was going to redeem all others and turn out to be a friend. And when I did meet the person, I was like a puppy, bounding all over them. Over the years I’ve toned this down a lot. I’ve got burnt so many times! My naivety left me open to a lot of cruel tricks. Also, what I didn’t realise was that in the NT world, kindness is often taken as a weakness. If I’d met people wearing a tough, mean looking exterior I wouldn’t have encountered half the trouble I did. (But then, I also wouldn’t have grown very much as a person).

This is because people think they can harm you without any fear of a reprisal. They may think to themselves, this girl likes me, she wants to be my friend, she’s naïve and doesn’t know when I’m making fun of her, this is a good opportunity to show everyone how clever I am. Or a man might think, this girl likes me, I already have a girlfriend but I’m enjoying the attention I think I’ll lead her on. Those are just two examples of situations I have found myself in. Hopefully if you have ever tried thee tricks on someone I will have aroused your conscience.

Hints and Innuendos

What I find frustrating about NT people is that they never want to tell you things directly, it’s always through hints and innuendos. I think they do this mostly to save your feelings if they’re saying something unpleasant, or because they’re a bit shy about talking of their feelings, or sometimes I think they’re just showing off their superior skills in this area.

I tell people about my autism and how they need to be direct and talk in a straightforward manner with me, but I think they forget. Their minds are zapping ahead and they don’t remember to pause for me. But it causes so many complications. There have been so many arguments in my family because people think I’ve said or agreed to things I haven’t.

This tends to happen mostly between me and my younger sister. Not all NT people use the hints and innuendos technique equally. My sister does it a lot though, which can create havoc for me. She will say something which contains an unsaid meaning which she thinks should clear; I don’t get it, but because I don’t disagree, she assumes an agreement has been reached and all the while I am ignorant.

Taking the direct and straightforward approach with an autistic person can mean having to changing old, sometimes negative behaviour patterns, and this can be very challenging. People don’t always have the other persons wishes in mind when they decide what they want and if that person is autistic the temptations to exploit their social naivety can be great. Being around an autistic person is a lesson in behaving well. If you behave well, the autistic person behaves well; you both understand each other clearly and there is no game playing.

Now that I am wise to the games people play (it’s taken me up to this point in my life to get there) I am constantly on the look out for them. I have been naïve and innocent so people have used these tricks on me many times. But now I have caught on! And I do my best to stop them. . Before I had a tendency to go along with what others wanted because it was easier than trying to figure out what was going on in the first place. But I am not as malleable and compliant as I used to be. My growing awareness has lead to some conflict, I think my family sometimes prefer me the way I was before.

There was this one time when I was planning to go away with my family. I was going to get a lift back with my sister. I absolutely had to back for work Monday afternoon. I checked with my sister when we would be coming back and she said Sunday, though it might end up being Monday. What she really meant was Monday afternoon, but she didn’t tell me this because she knew I would try and get a lift with someone else and for her own reason this was not what she wanted.

As the weekend was approaching I was getting more and more edgy. I couldn‘t get a straight answer out of my sister and I smelt a rat. Eventually, after some pestering she conceded that they were planning to come back Monday afternoon, I then told her I couldn‘t go. She was very cross saying I could easily miss work. I was cross because I felt someone had tried to pull the wool over my eyes. I think you have to be autistic before you realise how much that sensation can hurt.

Unconscious and Conscious Thinking

Before I began learning about autism I didn’t know anything about the many functions the brain performs. Like most people I had some hazy idea that the mind was contained within the brain, but I had no idea how the structure of the brain controlled the way I thought. The mind I thought was controlled by me, isn’t in fact. I think a lot of people have trouble accepting this fact.

I read about the conscious and unconscious when I became interested in psychoanalysis as a teenager. I wanted to figure out how my mind worked so I could fix whatever it was that was wrong with me. I also began reading lots of self-help books and spiritual literature. It took me a long time to realise what my problem was; that I had an autistic spectrum disorder.

Although I’d read a lot about the conscious and the unconscious I never felt I had fully grasped what these terms referred to. I couldn’t picture them as real things. They didn’t seem real to me. They seemed very vague, nebulous terms to me.

The whole time I’ve been reading about autism and how the autistic brain works I’ve been looking for a definition of these terms and now I think I’ve got there. This may be obvious stuff to some, but for me it was a eureka moment, because I could finally attach these terms to parts of my brain.

My unconscious mind, I believe, contains my memory (naturally) and my feelings. I‘m still a little unsure of pairing my feelings with the unconscious, as I only have my experience as an autistic person to go on. I used to think that emotions began in the conscious mind, but my personal experience contradicts this.

If my emotions arose within the conscious mind I would be aware of them the moment they happen. But I’m not. The physical sensations of an emotion are obvious; blushing, increased heart rate, tears, etc… all of which tells me I’m having an emotional experience.

Subtle emotions though are more difficult to pick up on. Maybe it’s different for NT people. If I am having trouble telling when I have an emotion this is because it is still in my unconscious. It seems to me that the unconscious is determining which emotions are released and which aren’t which would suggest that this is where they are first felt.

The conscious mind though, is my awareness. It is a logical thinker and the knowledge it acquires is passed onto the unconscious to be stored. Our conscious mind must be able to contain a number of thoughts at the same time to be able to think. This is our working memory. It’s like a very think slice of memory, just enough to allow the thinking process to occur.

You could say the main role of the unconscious is to store, and the main role of the conscious is to think. These would be neat definitions, but not strictly true. The unconscious is also a thinker. When we can’t figure something out using our conscious mind we often wait for our unconscious to come up with something.

Lastly I would just like to say something else I noticed about memory. Our memory contains both events that have happened to us and knowledge we acquire. We acquire our memory of events without any conscious effort, but knowledge requires more effort before it becomes part of our memory. I think there are two different mechanisms at work here.

When we remember past events, these are usually things our unconscious has chosen to remember, when we are learning new knowledge these are things that our conscious mind has chosen to remember. Knowledge I think can be divided into facts and wisdom/lessons. Facts, if they don’t get used can be forgotten, or rather the link between the fact and our conscious mind gets lost. This happens to me a lot. Wisdom though, permanently alters our personality, and stays with us forever.

Word Retrieval

I have poor word retrieval. My sister (the one who maybe dyslexic) has the same problem. What happens when you can’t retrieve the word you want is that you either say nothing, or instead a different word is substituted. The substitute word, though associated with the word you wanted, it is not a synonym but instead is associated in some weird Freudian way, because that’s how the unconscious works. So the substitute word is in most cases inappropriate and leads you to say some strange things, which might not be rude but are still funny to your listeners and embarrassing to you.

Personally I prefer saying nothing to saying something daft. Most times I can tell the word I want isn’t coming and there is another word that I can use if I want. It’s a bit like playing Deal or no Deal. Shall I choose this word or not. It might make sense and end this awkward pause, or it might not. Sometimes you might be half way through a sentence in which case you it is better to just start the sentence again and choose slightly different words. So you would pause, then say ’What I mean is….’ and try saying it in a different way.

Sometimes you might be near the end of the sentence. If I’m near the end of my sentence and I think people have got my meaning then I will leave the sentence unfinished. Sometimes I do this even if I don’t think I’m going to get the words wrong, it saves me the mental effort of looking for them. This sounds really lazy, but the mental effort required for me to talk and look for words at the same time is harder than you know. I think this is why I come across as a serious person, because I’m concentrating so hard on what I’m saying all the time. I can understand why some autistic people don’t speak even though they can. The rewards simply don’t outweigh the work involved, for them that is, and as they can’t see your point of view, you feelings don’t get factored in.

Sometimes, if you have very bad luck, a substitute word will stick. My sister says she often calls the kitchen the bathroom. It really embarrasses her. I told her this sounded logical to me. Both rooms have a sink, they are the only two rooms in the house where you meet water. For some reason they seem to be the coldest rooms in the house and the only ones without carpet; the only ones to be tiled rather than wallpapered or painted. There are lots of similarities.

Recently I was writing a story and I put down the word wave instead of flag. I actually had in mind a small flag to go on the bonnet of a government car and for some reason I put down wave instead of flag. I can see there are associations between the words; flags move in a similar way to waves when it’s windy and waving is also what you do with a flag.

Before we can think of a word the conscious mind must first have an idea it wants to express. Then it makes a request to the unconscious mind for the word that represents that idea. For instance you might be looking for the word ‘kitchen‘ or ‘flag’. Before you can say the word you must first think of the idea. I don’t know how the unconscious finds the correct word, there must be links then between ideas and the words we use for them. Maybe in autism these links are weaker. Hence the need for repetition when I am learning new words. These links can come and go, or maybe they become blocked, because sometimes I can think of a word and other times I can’t.

I find things drop out of my memory quickly if I don’t use them. After doing my French and German GCSEs, I’d say I lost most of what I’d learnt after a year. The same is true for numbers as well, I have forgotten my pin number numerous times because I didn’t use my card for a week. We have so many passwords for everything these days; bank accounts, email accounts, website accounts, etc… the only way I can cope is to use the same password for everything. Before then I was having to create a new password every time I wanted too buy something off Amazon.

Poor word retrieval I think explains some of the language difficulties I had when I was younger. Reading was hard for me. On the other hand I was good at maths, or rather I had a good memory for numbers. I could remember my times table up to twelve before anyone else in my class. Numbers are easier to remember because they have no associations. They mean one thing and one thing only and there aren’t so many to learn. Once you understand decimalisation, and you can count to ten you’re there. A word though is much more complex. Words can be nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctives and other things besides. Plus your memory isn’t just linking one idea to one symbol when you learn a new word, it must be creating a whole host of connections with other associated words. However, if I don’t continue using words or numbers (like the answers to my multiple times tables), both can drop out of my memory.