!

A response from a few ‘blogs back:

Not sure whether this makes any sense, but from your posts, you seem to be trapped in self-defeating perceptions of your traits. Believe me, you’re not a loser or a defective. But you do need to turn around some of the ideas you’ve accepted about yourself and look at them from a different angle.

Posted 8/24/2002 at 10:03 am by Sylva – delete – block user

What I’ve been doing lately is exactly that. I can’t all the sudden be happy about parts of my life that now have rational explanations, whereas before all I could do is shrug. I live with a level of anxiety most people don’t, and understanding how that is, and how it works, and how it could be different, is quite a bit to deal with.

It’s like being a rock climber. If you stop and celebrate every hand-hold, you’ll never get to the top of the cliff face. The other reaction is to say that the next hand-hold is the one that will send you instantly where you want to go, so you spend all your time figuring out which magical incremental step to make.

I’ve played both games. The lesson I learned from them is that expectations yield either disappointment or further expectations. Either way they don’t teach you what actually works, and they don’t let you be creative enough to see the real solution.

My attitude toward ‘healing’ is the healthiest one I can find. I’m not sick and therefore don’t need to find the magic elixir. I’m just moving forward towards what I want.

Fear The World Part 2

Just wanted to update this ‘blog…

It’s a FUND-RAISER, people! The protesters were outside a Republican fund-raiser, and the cops came and kicked their asses.

Why the fear, George?

Fear The World

There’s always a moment in a good haunted house movie, where some person is walking down a hallway, and there’s no visible indication of anything at all bad about to happen, but the scene is created in such a way as to impose dread and fear and even frustration in the viewer. The reality of the situation (person walking down hallway) is lost in the implication (the undead walk among us, and there might be one at the end of that hallway).

The world can be a fearful place. It vibrates with implication, and you can easily resonate with dread and horror.

I’m thinking about this because I’m thinking about when I was a little kid. I’d always (that is… ALWAYS) watch horror and sci-fi movies on TV on Sunday afternoon. Always alone. I sometimes joke that I was raised by Roger Corman. And I still love those Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allen Poe flicks.

The point here is that something drew me to them. Certainly it wasn’t the writing or the acting. I think it had to do with that resonance I mentioned.

Being a little kid wasn’t easy for me. It could have been much, much worse, but it was hard for a number of reasons. The world was a big scary place. And I think also that autism played a role beyond the obvious psychological one; the way I sense the world is askew. Regular patterns (bold carpet patterns, venetian blinds, the endless array of raised bumps on a Lego base piece) ‘trap’ me, and hold my entranced attention. The pattern seems to shimmer in my perception. Staring at a blank wall, I can watch my nervous system try to impose a pattern on it. Stuff like that.

So to a 10-year-old, it’s all a little frightening. None of this registered on a conscious level. I think Roger Corman (as an archetypal stand-in for all the horror movie directors I watched during those formative years) gave my subconscious some kind of validation. Monsters just might lurk in the regular, symmetrical, high-contrast, narrow dark slit between the folding doors of the closet in my childhood bedroom… Not to mention the regular patterns of life – going to school every day at the same time, going through the ritual lunch line like clockwork, coming home just in time for the one TV show, playing for a certain amount of time, dinner, Star Trek at 6:30, and so forth. It’s no wonder I did everything I could to disrupt those patterns, while paradoxically needing them absolutely. As in the case of the Sunday afternoon horror movie ritual.

I don’t think the world of the neurologically-typical is all that different, either, in a general sense. The conflict between order and chaos in anyone’s life looms omnipresent. Both order and chaos are about relinquishing identity; chaos in an obvious way and order in a way where you become your boundaries.

Having spent the last month or so in either Houston or Austin, Texas, where the air does your sweating for you, it’s nice to be back in Seattle.

I’m up in my room, with the windows open, and the quiet small noises of the housemates, and some people outside riding a bike in circles on the street and talking to each other in the cool night.

Made it back to Seattle alive. Woop!

Too tired to ‘blog… Must… Go… Get… Espresso drinks!

So I’m sitting around waiting for someone to call me, and I’m taking web personality tests. This is the only interesting one:

The Autism Spectrum Quotient Test

80% of those diagnosed with autism score 32 or higher on this test, and I scored 34. Woop.

I started a new ‘blogring. Guess which one.

So a while back I mentioned that I went to see the rock-star autism doc, and that I felt like a corner had been rounded. Except I didn’t use those words because they seemed trite.

A few days ago I went for the actual testing. The unofficial word was that yes, Asperger’s syndrome was a likely diagnosis. The tester was going to have to talk to the rockstardoc so as to make it final, but it seemed obvious to him.

The testing was interesting. There were a lot of questions about early childhood… interests, social interaction, areas of obsessive interest. That was the interview section. There was also a ‘play’ section (for lack of a better term). The tests had been designed for little kids, so there I was, 34, in a room full of bean bags and toys.

Mostly we just continued the interview because I could easily describe what the tester was after. Little kids aren’t as articulate as I am.

The last test of this phase (and in fact the last test of the day) was the most revealing to me. The setup was that we both chose five items from a pile of small toys. I was to make up a radio newscast linking the objects together. The tester demonstrated, making up a silly story linking a playing card, a bit of string, a toy milk carton, etc. Then he immediately said, “Ok, your turn,” and stared at me, smiling.

I couldn’t do it. Regular readers of my ‘blog know that I’ve done tasks like this before. It was the social expectation that crippled me. If someone had demanded that I make up that story about the shower amenities, I might not have been able.

After watching me being trapped in emotional vapor-lock for a while, the tester finally said, “Is it too much for you?” And I had to answer yes. I told him that if he hadn’t been around I might have been able to do it. He said that he half expected me to have this reaction.

That’s my problem in a nutshell. He wasn’t even being threatening; his mere presence and rule-making turned my creative self off completely. Extrapolate this reaction outward to the vast majority of social interaction, and we end up with an under-achieving Homer.

If I’m a loser, it’s because I’m built this way.

I’m a fan of Rob Breszny’s Free Will Astrology column, which you already know if you know me at all.

But I’m also a fan of his Pronoia Therapy.