Catmachine

As I’ve mentioned many times before, receiving my autism diagnosis about ten years ago was a real game changer. It may have come very late, but nevertheless it made me feel a lot better about myself. I came to realise that it wasn’t me being useless or crap at life. The reason I didn’t fit in was that in general the world wasn’t optimised for people like me. It was as if my mind rolled along on wheels, but there were a lot of mental staircases to negotiate and no lifts. Once I’d realised this it meant I could stop burning up so much energy trying to fit in and please others, right? In theory. I certainly no longer tried to hide my eccentricities, but the people pleasing part of the equation was more difficult to overcome. I rationalised it as avoiding emotional outbursts from others because my own disappointment was easier for me to cope with than their potential reaction to not getting what they wanted. (Far from being non-empathic, autistic people are in fact often overwhelmed by oth...

Most people would agree that supporting neurodiversity in the workplace is good practice from both DEI and accessibility viewpoints. An organisation with awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity – let alone policies in place – will undoubtedly be a positive nurturing environment for all employees; an example of the Curb Cut Effect in action.   Image by MissLunaRose12 via Wikimedia Commons In addition, neurodiverse people bring unique viewpoints and talent to the table. Many individuals have superb attention to detail and excel at both being able to see the big picture – which leads to unseen pattern recognition and problem identification – as well as being able to drill down into the minutiae of an issue, diagnosing and solving it. As an autistic person and neurodiversity advocate I’ve always been keen to highlight both the advantages and the challenges of maintaining a supportive environment for all employees whatever their neurotype. The flow and communication paradigms ...

There were many odd experiences and thoughts I had over the years which I either assumed everyone felt — or if I was feeling low that it was just me. I’d usually try and discount the latter because as one of eight billion people I was fully aware I was statistically insignificant and nothing special. Either positively or negatively. Of course since my diagnosis a third and more obvious explanation presented itself. If it wasn’t a common experience (which I could usually tell if I got odd looks when trying to talk about it) then it was probably an autistic thing. Some of these were textbook, things that might even be used as diagnostic criteria; others were not on any official list of indicators but nevertheless hauntingly familiar to almost everyone in the room when I was meeting up with other autistics. I’ve just thought of another one; something which has been bothering me for years. It’s only now that I realise that they were doing a neurotypical thing all along and that I’ve only j...

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...

For a long time I was conviced that I was simply rubbish at life. Throw me into a social situation with a whole bunch of humans and I didn't have the first idea how to even begin to attempt to join in. People would seem to collapse into these stable little groups of two or three leaving me floating around like a stray electron. Against my best instincts I often tried attaching myself to these groups but joining in with the conversation was impossible. Besides, I really felt like I was interrupting. It was rude . Even if I did dare to say something I'd get odd looks. I still consider my crowning achievement in this Biggest Outsider Challenge to be when I ended up spending time standing around on my own at the very bash being held for me leaving a job I'd been in for 16 years... Now that was impressive. Of course well-intentioned people kept telling me to try harder, giving me tips and tricks, but nothing really seemed to work. I'd hear variations of "We all feel aw...

Here's the thing. If they ever thought about it, most people who know me might say that because I'm quiet or reserved, shy, don't make a lot of noise in groups or anything  — aloof or secretive as the people who don't like me might put it – that I would also not want to stand up in front of a load of people and talk or perform. Oddly (they might think) the reverse is actually true. For example when I was working as part of the user facing section of a department at a university every autumn the Welcome Talks would come round where we'd have to take turns to deliver a "welcome to our services" talk to a large lecture hall full of freshers. My colleagues — who were as a rule all more social and gregarious than me (I still remember that brief moment when I ended up standing there with no-one talking to me while all around people were chatting in groups at my own leaving do ) — all dreaded it. I was absolutely fine. No, more than that, I actively looked forwar...

It turns out that there are a number of very real autistic traits which are not "textbook" at all – in other words recognised by mental health professionals in the official literature – but nevertheless are very familiar to anyone who has experienced them. None of these are official diagnostic criteria, but they are nonetheless real. When I was part of a group of autistic people who met regularly to share our experiences we discovered several of these that we all had in common but which hadn't even occurred to the group's NT facilitator. One was an aversion to the overuse of names in conversation. It's fine when there's a group of people as of course you need to be able to know who is being addressed but when it's one to one it just feels... unpleasant and sinister. No matter how illogical that may actually be. Another of these non-textbook traits is what I think of as the Selfishness Paradox. During our group discussions we all discovered that we had a te...

Self-help books as a genre tend not to have a good reputation as even before you open the cover of some of them there’s always a whiff of making a fast buck about it and once you get inside you find yourself flicking the pages over and over faster and faster. “Yep… knew that… yes, I know… yep… stating the bleedin’ obvious…” What a lot of them boil down to is writing common sense down and identifying the problem. That's all very well and good but most of the time I know full well what the problems I’m experiencing are, there’s nothing mysterious, no cathartic epiphanies to be had. I realise what the issue is but doing something about it is another matter (sometimes even if I kind of know what the solution is). This is why I've never found CBT particularly useful - it actually increases my anxiety. What to Do When You Can’t Move Chapter one: Check whether you’re trapped inside a collapsed building. If you are, then the reason you can’t move is because you’re trapped inside a coll...

This year was my twelfth year on Twitter. It's grown from one of many experimental social media platforms back then to something everyone has heard of. Despite its now corporate nature and the way it can be constantly abused and used as a channel for bile and hatred by the cowardly and the loud, there is still something about it I find compelling. Many of the important features that have come to define the platform (@-ing people, RTing a tweet) were first invented by early users of the system and it's partly these home-grown origins that I like ("...the street finds its own uses for things..." William Gibson, Burning Chrome) but what keeps me coming back is something else, something personal. I can of course see where the main criticisms are coming from but I disagree with them. "Oh it's just boring, who wants to read what someone had for breakfast every morning?" If that's all you're seeing then you're following the wrong people. ...

Following the post I made at the end of last year which discussed my reaction to having been officially diagnosed as having Autism Spectrum Condition (a.k.a. the Syndrome Previously Known as Aspergers ), I've noticed that there are a few misconceptions that have made their way into received wisdom about how I must behave. These are not true for many reasons. For a start not everyone with ASC is going to behave in the same manner. Everyone is different no matter where they sit on the spectrum. It is perfectly possible to have ASC and be an introvert or an extrovert. Some people might exhibit certain symptoms whilst others don't. One of the most common preconceptions that people seem to have is that I will take everything they say literally. That if they use an idiom or colloquialism I will think they actually   mean that someone has (say) eyes bigger than their stomach. Well no, of course not. That would be silly. I have enough of a sense of the real world and what...

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...