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.