Some random thoughts about neurodivergence.
In the spring of 2018 I was at sea in my little 22 foot centerboard cat ketch, in fact I was by this time mid English channel and it was bitterly cold and I was very seasick due to the brisk south easterly wind blowing directly against a strong, west flowing spring tide. It was one of the few times that iv’e been at sea sailing solo and been extremely tempted to either heave to and ‘park’ the little boat or turn tail and run home to Plymouth. Given that I was well past the halfway point to L.Aber-Wrach in north western France I somehow toughed it out and eventually got into the lee of the sticky-outy bit of Brittany where I would turn into the easy outer channel of the Wrach estuary, I don’t think iv’e been that cold, that sick and that utterly fed up ever at sea – but I was.
The random noise of an unquiet mind
One of my biggest problems that night wasn’t threading my way through the mass of ships going into or coming out of the Four channel that runs north-south up that coast but what was going on in my mind. Every few minutes I would hear the same music track playing in my mind and I thought for a while that it was an auditory hallucination that came about by being very tired and extremely cold even though at that time I was still well within my normal known maximum time of useful mental function. Iv’e done the same passage once before and it was such a light weather trip that the whole passage from Falmouth to L.Aber-Wrach took 36 hours until I finally anchored and got to sleep. I still don’t know why my mind kept replaying the same track over and over especially when it was one written by a rock band that I didn’t even like.
Although an extreme example and possibly a lot to do with the ambient conditions it was a good example of what my mind tends to do. It seems to get stuck in a repeat loop, for example when i’m trying to settle down at night if I have something on my mind that iv’e been working on and which needs further work I will often find that same thing repeatedly coming around in my mind and sometimes that gets into a repeat pattern of other similar things and the whole cycle is mentally exhausting.
Routine and order.
Running with the sailing theme again I want to mention something that I came across when I was doing my reading and research about mild Autism – the subject of routine and order. As many readers will be aware this blog always used to be based on the theme of sailing boats and the sea : my own boats and my own voyages although I did my major sailing miles long before then. For several years I worked in the sailing industry and my most successful time was when I worked as mate about an old and retired racing Maxi Yacht.
For my time as mate I spent a lot of my time running around getting done the many things that go to make up a safe and well run boat of almost any kind : it sounds very minor but keeping the boat clean inside made it a much more pleasant place to live for long periods and making it my job to move and stow more than a dozen heavy sails not only meant that the we could find the No 4 jib at night when it was blowing a hoolie but it also meant that it was much easier to move about down below as I re stowed everything on deck when we were in port. What seemed to work well was that my mind did routine and order very well – to a great extent that’s the main reason I enjoyed long ocean passages rather then vegging out as many guests tended to do.
In my reading about the autistic mind something I found is that autistic kids like creating order around themselves and, for example, it was mentioned that autistic kids like to have everything lined up in rows to create that order. When I read that I had a real belly laugh as I grew up with my toy soldiers which firstly I loved to paint as period accurate as I was able and I always liked to line them up in neat lines when it came to having mock battles. Even now I organize all of the glasses and coffee mugs on the mug shelf in a way that I find visually pleasing and is probably quite annoying to my partner.
At this point i’d like to share a story from my career as an intensive care nurse and it’s about another staff nurse whom I suspect was a bit on the spectrum.
This ICU was typical of it’s time in that it had a large open bay and a series of side rooms, each bed space being usually staffed by one nurse. I often got the first side room as I was senior and experienced enough not to need constant supervision. I was, in my own way, happy with that as it meant that I could go for hours having minimal contact with other people. This story isn’t much about me but rather about another staff nurse that had the same kind of temperament and experience – for this story lets give her a name – staff nurse Sheila it is then.
In your own side room you are of course responsible for the one critically ill patient and then, when needed, assist with other patients, for example when doing ‘turns’ or checking another nurse’s drugs. The other thing is that you are also responsible for is the physical space itself and it’s normal to start the shift, as soon as you’ve had a verbal handover, with a damp dust and tidy around. Often you would need to stock up your clinical consumables during the day and it was seen as good form to hand over a patient for whom everything was up to date and a room that was clean and tidy,
One of the funny things about taking over from Sheila at the end of her shift or even covering her for a break, was that her room was always immaculately tidy down to a microscopic level and her charts didn’t have a single recording out of place. One of the most detailed micro features of her organization was the lin bin containing the room disposables (Syringes, Needles and the like) : all the syringes were lined up in size order with the labels a particular way round and none out of place. One time when I was watching over her patient during her break, I cheekily moved one syringe such that it was upside down or facing backwards : she noticed of course as soon as she came back from break and the very first thing she did when glancing around the room was to put the syringe back in it’s correct position. After that she checked to make sure that I hadn’t gone and written on her table sized observations chart – her usual instructions being to write down anything that i’d done on a notepad and not on the main chart as she was obsessive about it’s neatness.
It got even worse when you had to join her at lunch , she ate the same thing at every lunch : just so many sticks of carrot, just so many pieces of celery or whatever and she always ate them in the same order every day. I thought at the time that she simply needed to get out and meet people although today I have to wonder if there were aspects of mild autism in her personality.
Becoming overwhelmed easily.
Recently, I had cause to call out our plumber when the bathroom sink had become blocked and I had made the situation worse by trying to unblock it myself : while trying to put the waste pipe back together i’d ended up with a continuously leaking waste and ended up kneeling in a puddle of scummy water. When he arrived and I explained that he said “welcome to my usual day !”. Anyway, he quickly sorted out that problem and while we were talking he asked why I was using a stick – assuming that it might be a knee problem – as he has. When I told him about my strokes he kindly invited me to the brain injury support group that his wife runs after having had a bad fall onto the back of her head and getting a brain injury in the process, For some reason we also got around to talking about autism as it was that very week that I had discovered that i’m slightly but definitely on the autistic spectrum.
Surprisingly, our plumber then told me that his son, whom i’d met several years before, was also mildly autistic and was now living in a cabin in the woods with his partner. As he described it the problem had come about when they’d worked together and didn’t understand each other. As he says he can come across as being 100% and full on and his son was frequently overwhelmed by that. One of the biggest problems in that father and son relationship was that of communication and I can share that view in that I am and always have been a poor verbal communicator so :
The communication problem.
Early on, after the team that I was to be part of, was formed and we had an early team meeting with both our clinical boss, the Matron and business manager we had the first of many (to me) endlessly tiresome and wordy meetings that seemed to me to go nowhere in particular but were just a part of the usual dreck of functioning in the NHS. Just one of the problems I had with any team meetings in the NHS is that it was always the loudest and most opinionated voices that held sway : even in our team there were those that seemed to need being heard, on any and all subjects, and then there was me sitting at the back, listening and taking notes.
What would frequently happen is that team problems were being discussed, argued about (round and round it went) and then a couple of days later I would have a quick one on one with our boss and usually make a heap of suggestions about solutions. As you can imagine my boss got a little frustrated with that and early on stated that she was a more than a bit frustrated that I didn’t say much at meetings : my rather tart reply was that I often didn’t speak because I couldn’t get a word in sideways !
I was often a poor, or absent, verbal communicator until my job involved a lot of patient handovers and I was OK when it came to that because it needs a set pattern of factual information. As a child I could happily not talk for hours – losing myself for hours with whatever thing was going on in my own mind. My best childhood friend was the husband of my late mother’s shop assistant and I would talk to him non stop but then it was he that took me on a yearly trip to London, usually one of the major museums – both then and now I loved the science museum – normally we would finish the day at Earls Court and the then model engineer exhibition.
Sociability – or not in my case.
Up until 2018 – the year that I took an online ‘Big 5’ personality traits test – I thought that I was merely an introvert and a bit of a lone wolf. That one test revealed how deep an introvert I was when it was given as a percentage score. I already knew it but it was still a bit of a surprise to have done the test as honestly as I could. Social situations have long been a problem for me and it would be fair to say that i’m not a party animal and I would much rather be on my own or with a small group of friends. When one of our close friends got married there was a big party to celebrate and I handled that by joining a table of former colleagues that all knew and worked with each other : that was fine because it was mainly a lot of catching up with their news. After a couple of hours I made my excuses and slipped out : job done without too much pain in my book.
Nowadays i’m best described as introverted to the point of being asocial although I was never a great one for making friends. One example from my childhood is that I somehow managed to pass the 11+ exam when all of my few friends : what that meant is that I went to the county Grammar school while all of my friends went to the secondary-modern. What that meant was that I suddenly had little or no contact with my old friends and didn’t make new friendships at the grammar school. Frankly it came as a relief when we moved from quirky house in an old market town to achingly dull and austere bungalow on a modern housing estate on the edge of a quite horrible city. That I hated my new school is a given especially when I was the new boy joining after two terms – I was bullied of course and that’s one of the themes in my reading and research about autism/neurodivergence.
I could go on but chose not to : if it helps then have a read of the wikipedia article below…..bye for now.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 