What feelings look like

I have never had a great handle on feelings. It is very difficult to articulate and I may have mentioned this earlier but I find emotions very confusing. Extreme emotions just feel like extreme emotions - I seem not to be able to separate them. And this means I am open to suggestion when it comes to these emotions. For example if I had a partner who said 'i love you' all the time. I would think 'ok, this is what love is'. My concept of love would be based on their words (the way they have labelled it) not on their behaviour. They could be quite mean or behave quite inappropriately and I would not read these situations as something other than love because they are saying 'I love you'.

I see this same confusion in kids and older people on the spectrum all the time. Just as I wouldn't necessarily know when I am being made fun of or when I am not, young children on the spectrum don't always understand these same concepts. Especially those that involve reciprocal social arrangements. When you combine this confusion with our innate capacity to tell the truth and live in the moment we can be quite hurtful to and hurt by those around us.

Once I had a mother ask me if I had any ideas how she could teach her son about love. "He says awful things to me... Like don't worry Mummy I won't let you get old I will throw you over a cliff and make you die first... or he tells me he hates me and wishes I wasn't his mother just because I want him to clean up his room, or because I won't buy him something he wants."

The advice I gave this mother is probably the only thing that has really ever worked for me. I told her to give up trying to teach him what love feels like because those feelings may never really make sense. Instead, try to teach him what love looks like and what it doesn't look like. For example love feels like a lot of different things, maybe to everyone, not just us aspies. However it doesn't look like someone hitting you and it doesn't look like you hitting someone. Likewise you can also learn about what feelings sound like. Love doesn't sound like shouting.

Now I guess some people would say that it is not that simple but you have to make it that simple for my people. We like rules and we like pictures. At least I do. Something I have learn't more recently (thanks to Jo Zeitz!) is how to take this idea of what feelings look like even further by drawing pictures. For example, when my people are dealing with an emotional situation that is overwhelming we do not always recognise the emotions at the time and we often find it difficult to articulate the emotions later. You can help us to work through difficult situations by literally drawing the situation thus allowing us to recognise these situations by how they look rather than how they feel. I think these drawings are often called social stories but they make more sense to me if I label them 'what feelings look like'.

I will use another example of a mother who asked some advice about how to help her son recognise when he is being teased and when he needs to remove himself from the situation. I told her to teach him what the feelings look like. At first she was confused... Then I led her to the white board and started drawing pictures... 'Here's max, what's he doing? he's crying. Why is crying? He's all by himself. Where are his best friend David (or) what happened before Max started crying by himself? His friend is over here. What is his friend doing? Laughing at Max. Where are max's other friends? They are with David, laughing at Max. So when it looks like this (ie max by himself crying while a group of so called friends are laughing / teasing him) what can Max do? Max can go to the library and read a book. (or whatever). If you draw this story out as you or max is telling it it will help max recognise this situation next time. If the aspie you are working with is very literal then you made need to draw provide a number of options (ie max could be crying, frowning, banging his head etc, David could be laughing, taunting, taking max's toy etc, Max could go to the library, play a computer game, pat the dog.) You will need to adjust the story for the situation.

That's all for now. I will write more about this stuff at some stage.

Untitled poem, a few years old

I wrote this poem a few years ago. I can't remember why or for whom I wrote it. My mum found it and without asking me she gave it to her friends to use as their wedding vows (luckily I am very fond of the friends in question!) Anyway I think I will, some years on, now dedicate it to my little niece who I have yet to meet. She had a bit of a rough entry into the world and since I have an awful flu I have yet to see her and she is already more than a week old. So this poem is for her.

May your truth be told
Your memories gold
May your path be guided by love

May you speak without fear
Your conscience remain clear
May you always believe in yourself

May your garden flourish
Your spirit be nourished
May you find your soul's true mate

May your journey enlighten you
Your friendships remain true
May your return always be safe

May nights darkness shroud you
From the ghosts that crowd you
May you not regret the past

May you cry when you need to
Let your passion feed you
May the stars make true your dreams

May the tides heartbeat still you
And peace dwell within you
May the sun not set too soon

May still waters calm you
And love disarm you
May you see the whole of the moon

Empty Head

Today my head is empty. Or too full. Perhaps that is the trick my mind plays on me. I wish I was one of those aspies who's response to anxiety is not to speak. I am the opposite. When my brain is full my words just spill out. Like a flood. I have noticed that about many girls on the spectrum. You can't get a word out of the boys but you can't shut the girls up. Not all of us. And not all the time. But when we get on a roll we don't seem to know when to stop. I think that is why I like to write. When I write I can edit myself much more effectively than when I speak. I've noticed also that words seem to be more important to most of us girls than to most of the boys I know.

Little Person

A little person is on its way into my world. No I'm not about to give birth. My brother and his partner are having their first child as I type this. It feels a little surreal. I have always known that I would never produce a child and it was looking like my brother wasn't going to produce one either ... then suddenly ... something shifted and a baby has found its way into my world. Is it possible to love someone you haven't even met yet? Yes of course. It is rare for me to feel an emotion and be absolutely certain that the label I am using to describe it is the correct label. But I know that I am feeling overwhelmed by love and excitement and anticipation. It feels good to be so sure. Emotions are very very confusing. I can't always tell the difference between extreme emotions. For example love and hate and rage and jealousy and ecstasy can all feel a bit the same in some ways... they are all just extreme emotions (it is sometimes easier to say I hate you rather than I love you, even if I don't hate you and I do love you... but if I have ever loved you then you would know this already). Its not like that with me and children. I never feel confused about them. They never seem to feel confused about me. I am always the most popular person in a room full of kids. I think thats why Im so excited about this baby. I know without a doubt that we will have a special bond and I will no longer be the baby of the family. This baby will (at least for a while) be less capable than me. It will cry more and make more mistakes (at least for a while). 40 years is a long time to wait for that! This baby will make me seem like a grown up ...  until it grows up and sees that I never did ... but that's a long way off ... so bring on the baby!

Collections

I seem to collect things wether I want to or not. Some of my collections make sense to me and to other people. Some of my collections make sense to me, but not to other people. Some of my collections don't really make sense, even to me! For example, I collect books. I have always collected books. Most people seem to think that this is perfectly reasonable. I like to own my books rather than borrow them from the library.

I have always collected artefacts from nature like interesting rocks, feathers and sticks, shells and crystals etc. Some people don't think this collection makes much sense (what's so special about a stick?). I have a dead tree in my front yard that I have had for nearly 15 years and have moved from house to house with me. At least they live outside now.  Unlike the chicken!                                                                                      



left: an old tree I have
carted around for 15 years or so.





below: a piece of wood and some rusty stuff (another collection) that came from my friends station north east of Broken Hill.

Strangely I have always had a fascination with self adhesive products. This began as a sticker collection but is so much more than that now! This collection made more sense when I was a kid because lots of kids collected stickers and my dad was a printer so he got some pretty amazing stickers from coke ads and the sides of buses etc. It probably makes less sense now that I am 'a grown up'. Even Im not sure why the self adhesive stuff matters to me but it does. The 'magic' element of things that stick together is something I find quite satisfying. I have always collected art and craft supplies and in some ways the self adhesive collection could be seen as a sub set of the art and craft collection. Most of my collections have collections within them.

   

The most important collection in my life right now is my collection of invertebrates... because I have to maintain them daily and because I like them and as far as I can tell they like me.

Some of my collections appear to be highly organised and some of them appear to be highly disorganised. It think it is somewhat unfortunate that my order is in chaos - as long as I can see it and I am the one who created it, I tend to know where things are. It is highly disturbing to me when someone else messes with my order. Many a meltdown has occurred in my life when someone has imposed a last minute or unwanted change to my order. This can happen in several ways. It can be a physical change like someone coming in and moving my stuff (awful scenarios spring to mind of my Mum coming in and cleaning up my room when I was still living at home). Things not being where I think they should be is terrifying.


Timetable changes or changes in my schedule can also be quite difficult to adjust to. Last semester at Uni, my time table was changed unexpectedly and adjusting to this pretty much caused a major breakdown in my ability to function. I wasn't able to complete the semester.

Two things have occurred to me in terms of my relationship with the things I collect and the order they are in. The first thing is this... (I won't go into the reasons here but I will try to write about it later)... Im not sure that I fully understand that inanimate objects don't have feelings. I find it very hard to throw things out in case I cause affront to that thing. This is especially true of things that belonged to other people or things that were given to me by other people. This is not the entire reason behind my collection but it is definitely a part of the reason I find it soooo hard to let go of stuff. I have strange attachments to things. It is as though they are physical markers along my emotional path.

The second thing is that I do seem to have an attachment to spatial distribution - I have a picture in my head of where things are. If I want to find something I examine the picture in my head of where I last had / saw that thing and it is easy then to find it. If I have moved the thing in question then the picture in my head will adjust accordingly. If YOU move that thing without me seeing you do it then my picture has not been adjusted. When I walk into a room where someone else has moved things without me being there to see them do it, sometimes this can have the effect that very suddenly and frighteningly NOTHING makes sense anymore. It doesn't just become a picture with a hole in it where the thing that has moved is missing (although sometimes it does). It becomes a picture that has been scrambled.

In order to make the picture make sense to you, you have ruined the picture for me.



This is hard to explain because I am aware that not everyone experiences their world in this way. I don't understand how other people create their order so I don't understand what it is like not to rely so heavily on visual/spatial distribution. This might not make any sense to some people but it may help teachers, parents, friends understand the importance of order to my people. It may explain why the aspie in your life has a meltdown when you touch their stuff or clean up their room. One thing I have found that helps a bit is this... If you really want to help an aspie clean up a room, and you know they struggle to make choices themselves about where things go etc. Then let them sit on a chair or on a bed while you talk them through where you are putting things. "Im putting these socks in this drawer". Better still label the drawer "socks". I will talk more about this later but I have to go now.