My Life With Asperger's

As you can see from my photo above, I have trouble making eye contact (even in self portraits!) which many people can find unnerving. It's a common problem among people with Autistic Spectrum Disorders, one that's difficult to live with at times because people tend to read this as being shifty or hiding something. Often it's simply that I'm concentrating on what the person is saying, or it just doesn't occur to me to look at their face since I have trouble reading facial cues.

Another communication difficulty is that learning what tone of voice means was a much bigger struggle for me. So many times as a child a teacher would tell me "Don't take that tone of voice with me!" and I would ask, genuinely confused, "What tone?" and my response would be taken as rude or sassy. I wasn't trying to be a problem kid, I just didn't get any form of communication besides words. Just the words. Not the tone of the word, or the body language that went with it. To this day I struggle with nonverbal communication problems, but over the years I've trained myself to lean what comes naturally to most people over the course of the first few years of life.

While Asperger's Syndrome has made communication a challenge for me, it's a great example of how the human mind and heart tend to flourish in adversity. A challenge makes us stronger, more capable. A challenge makes us question, try harder, work for it. Those who know me in person know my wit and ability to articulate myself. Because I've fought every day of my life to perfect skills that most people learn naturally during their earliest years, it's become a habit to constantly refine every facial expression, each quirk of an eyebrow or pursing of my lips. Every facial expression I make is carefully practiced, and as a result, I find I often express my point or my mood much better than my non-Asperger's peers.

Don't Poke The Aspie! by webcarve
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Everyone's experience of Asperger's is different, and I say this as the middle child of three - all of whom have Asperger's. Growing up with my two siblings with their own personal blend of Asperger's symptoms (not to mention those of my late father) was quite a roller coaster ride at times. The example I always cite is that my little brother is sensory-seeking; which means he couldn't concentrate on his homework without repeatedly clicking his pen in an seemingly absent-minded way. While this would be annoying to almost anyone, to my sister and I - who are both sensory-avoidant - it was utterly maddening. Every click felt like fingernails on a chalkboard, jarring our concentration and sending a twitch down our spines.

Over the years I've tuned into exactly which sensory inputs are hardest for me to process, and the worst things are:

• Noise - in particular multiple ones overlapping, and or loud ones. Crowded restaurants can be quite exhausting for me, and you can forget inviting me out to a club for a night of dancing!
  
• Visual - specifically bright, moving lights. In day-to-day life this means that passing a car pulled over for speeding (and the subsequent swirling blue lights on the police car) taps my energy and mental processing ability.
  
• Scent - is generally only a problem when I'm already "overstimmed" (slang for over-stimulated) but once it's bad, it's BAD. Even pleasant smells like bacon frying or fresh-cut grass can be an assault.
  

Thankfully, my sensory-avoidance has lessened significantly over the years. In part, I believe this is just a natural mellowing with age. But I attribute most of the improvement to my time with South Shore Therapies, a local group of occupational therapists whose focus was on people (mostly children, but they worked with me in my early twenties) with Autism Spectrum Disorders and other sensory difficulties. The techniques used to improve my brains ability to process input seem strange, and even quaint at times - such as stroking a soft plastic surgical scrub brush along my arms and legs to improve my touch processing. But they work! My early twenties were spent struggling to get through a day, I had days when I was incapacitated by the hum of our admittedly-louder-than-most refrigerator. Even at the time, I felt ridiculous for suffering so much at something so little, but I couldn't help it. Occupational therapy changed all that. I still struggle, but I rarely experience what I call "sensory attacks" (similar to a panic attack, but very much sensory-overload induced) anymore, where once they were an agonizing daily experience.

One of the hallmarks of Autism Spectrum Disorders is hyperfocus or perseveration. In doing a bit of offhand research as I write these stories, I noticed that the term "hyperfocus" is associated with ADD and ADHD, while "perseveration" is associated more with autism spectrum disorders. Reading about the differences between the two, I realized that my own experience is something of a combination of the two, which I suppose lends to credence to my ADHD diagnosis despite the fact that it otherwise hasn't seemed to fit well since adolescence. In my own experiences, I tend to use two two terms interchangeably though I more often use the term hyperfocus since the term itself more accurately describes the experience for me. While I know they are not the same, for the purposes of simplicity I will stick to the work hyperfocus to describe my own experience.

For me, hyperfocus is - like many aspects of Asperger's Syndrome - a blessing and a curse. Hyperfocusing means I can get a lot done "when I put my mind to it" - but on the other hand, it's not something I especially have control over; it's more like "when my mind puts itself to something". To use a different colloquialism, it's more that I get a bee in my bonnet about something than putting my mind to it. When I'm hyperfocused on something, it's all I can think about. When I'm having a meal, or falling asleep at night, or conversing with some one on other topics, part of my mind is still pursuing the subject with a tenacity I just can't shake.

Getting obsessed with a subject means that I can become a relative expert quite quickly, that I can accomplish a lot in less time than I could otherwise. On the other hand, if I find myself hyperfocused on something, other aspects of my life can suffer as I fail to prioritize it rationally, and my insomnia can flare up when I can't even stop thinking and obsessing long enough to sleep. Thankfully it goes in cycles, and I don't stay hyperfocused on the same thing for typically more than a few weeks or months, and there are times when I'm not hyperfocusing on any one thing. At times like this I can still be somewhat obsessive, but when it's about multiple things at a time, I find that some balance is achieved.