Catmachine

Any regular readers of this blog ( even typing that sentence makes me cringe - as if there could possibly be such a thing as a "regular reader" what arrogance on my part etc ) will have noticed that I occasionally blog about autism . This actually started before my diagnosis when I merely suspected that I was autistic, but naturally accelerated once I had the validation of the letter from a psychology professional which meant that the nagging little voice of impostor syndrome in my head had to shut the fuck up just this once. I should have it framed like a degree certificate so I can look at it every time I'm plagued by self doubt. My posts on this subject so far have been about the experience from my perspective. What it's like from the inside. How little things that I thought were just me – or which I thought were common experiences – turned out to be autistic things. There are many aspects to neurodiversity in general and autism in particular. In general I'd sa...

Anyone who read this blog in May 2010 might have seen a post entitled Intellectromagnetic Spectrum in which I wondered - having read up on some of the symptoms for reasons which are not going to become readily apparent again at this juncture - whether I might in fact have Asperger Syndrome . From what I could see I considered it likely, but I couldn't quite silence that little nagging voice at the back of my mind. You are probably familiar with That Voice yourself. It's the one that constantly puts you down and emphasises your worthlessness. In this instance it was whispering Of course you don't have Asperger Syndrome! You're just saying that to make yourself seem interesting, you're using it as an excuse for your social failings. You don't have it at all. You're just shit at life and don't you forget it . Hardly the most cogent of arguments, but there's always been something convincing about That Voice. No matter how much you might try and dismis...

The introduction of the keyboard into my life - that is at first the typewriter and then the computer rather than the Yamaha Home Organ - I found to be The Great Enabler. Before that I was always hamstrung when it came to expressing myself on paper and I suspect the messiness of my writing and how slow I was were a contributory factor to the "disappointment" teachers expressed in my efforts. For some reason they equated writing neatly with trying hard and intelligence, despite no evidence to support this whatsoever. " Could try harder " OH FUCK OFF. At first I used to blame this on the fact that I'd effectively missed being taught joined up writing at school. I left Galliard Road Junior School in Edmonton the year before we learnt it, only to arrive at Tetherdown Junior School in Muswell Hill and discover that they'd learned it the year before. I ended up teaching myself and whenever possible would lapse back to printing.  Handwriting was just too ...

Back in the mid-nineties I read an interesting post to a Usenet group (remember them?) about a psychological condition that apparently more people suffered from than was generally thought. The gist of it was " Are you lonely? Are you this? Are you that? If so you may be suffering from the other..." This instantly started ringing bells. Could this be why I'd always felt that I was a bit, well, rubbish when it came to dealing with people and life? Why I rarely seemed to find myself in a successful relationship? However, as was so often the case on Usenet, this interesting post was immediately shouted down as being a load of old mumbo-jumbo dreamed up by inadequates to give themselves legitimacy. Amongst the more typical of the responses was: Will you kindly take your quack psychoanalysis, your novice Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques and your painfully inadequate hypnotherapeutic attempts and ram them where the sun don't shine? I forgot about it and if anything...