Month: August 2018

Being a little different

I am autistic.

My brain is wired a little differently to the majority of the population, I hide it as much as I can and over the years I have got better and better at hiding it, but there is no getting away from it, my brain is wired a little oddly compare to a ‘regular’ person.

This is not a sympathy post. It is far from it – I do not want your sympathy, autism has given me a lot of advantages and has made me who I am today. I really quite like who I am too, so no sympathy please. I am happy.

What autism means in my case is a variety of things;

  • I can, and often do, retreat from everyone around me, disappear into ‘my own world’, which despite what people may think, is far from ‘little’ in order to work things through.
  • I lack empathy. Or perhaps more accurately, I lack intuitive empathy, I understand it and I use it, but it is not natural for me to use it or display it.
  • I am stupidly good at some tasks and laughably bad at others.
  • I have both infinite patience and zero patience. Very little in between.
  • I used to struggle to read people pretty much all the time. Now I can read them deliberately.
  • I can get incredibly emotional about some things and can be entirely cold about others.
  • Being the centre of attention is torture.
  • Big, Loud, Crowds disorient me.
  • I have had quite the career in the computing industry.
  • I can break exceptionally complex things into simple tasks in my head.
  • Explaining some of this stuff is very difficult.

…and quite a few things that are often inconsistent to a casual observer.

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The Thing

Many years ago I worked with an extremely sharp, but rather odd, systems analyst. He was a very, very intelligent person, but he drove me utterly crazy.

On numerous occasions, he would sit, silently in a meeting, listening and thinking and then, usually about five minutes from the end, when a general consensus was just about to be reached, he would say ‘Here’s the thing….’.

Every single time he did this, he would throw the meeting into chaos, because his ‘thing’ was nearly always something that we had not considered, or had considered and assumed it was not important and he would weigh in with ‘the thing’, which would mean that we invariably needed to have another meeting to discuss ‘the thing’, which meant that we had just wasted an hour or more of our lives.

He was a brilliant analyst, but I just hated working with him. Most of the time his ‘thing’ would be a seriously edgy edge-case that had no huge consequence, but delivered the way it was, with gravitas, it nearly always meant that the meeting would fail and we would have to consider his point in the next one before we could be productive.

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Four Years since my crash.

Four years ago a ‘driver’ crashed into me and my bicycle, rather than slow down marginally and avoid me. That decision slowed him down a great deal, he had to deal with a battered and bloody version of me for a while, then he had to deal with his insurance company and the courts and eventually the headache of a fine and points.

Which on the whole is not a lot compared to me.

In the last four years I’ve had…..

  • Three surgeries to fix my broken collarbone
  • Mostly recovered from many bruises and lacerations – although I have some scars
  • Gone through a lot of Physical Therapy
  • Not regained full use of my shoulder
  • Spent a lot of money on pain killers

Currently my shoulder is aching, I know that a nice hot shower and some ibuprofen will fix it, but that is not the point, my other shoulder does not hurt.

I have restricted mobility in my shoulder.

I went to see the medical examiner today, this should be my final visit.

We are in court in November, unless the drivers’ insurance company decided to try and settle it out of court and make us a really good offer.

It has been a very long road. The journey to compensation is probably nearing the end, but the pain and suffering will probably continue for a very long time.