Tomorrow's just another day - Madness

I have friends. I've never had a lot of friends, but the ones I have... the ones I actually refer to as "friends, rather than "mates" or "pals" or any of those terms that have a bit less consequence... are the people who have accepted that I'm different and come to terms with that. But still... I'm never going to really fit in. Not completely. Not wholeheartedly. Not 100%.

I came to terms with that a long time ago. I still feel a bit frustrated by it sometimes and since my diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome I've actually understood why I'm like that. But I definitely came to terms with it.

This video almost seems to illustrate it for me. I must have watched it a thousand times. In it, Suggs is out of step with everybody else - he doesn't completely fit in. He's isolated, disconnected, alienated. On the surface the video looks cheerful and happy - like everything Madness ever produced - but there's still that slightly sinister undercurrent going on.

OK, so let's acknowledge the reality first. The song seems to be about mental health issues and that's not what Asperger's is. It's a neuro-developmental issue. That just means that I think differently from you, process information in a different way from you and respond to things differently from you. So not mental health. But still... there are parallels.

Anyway, it looks like Suggs has been very successful, risen to great heights and then fallen pretty far. At one point he's in a classroom while people are shouting at him - there's information he just can't seem to take in. At another point he's wearing clothes that once were expensive, but now are rags. Repeatedly there's a prison motif - like he's done time at some point or (more likely) that he's been down on his luck and spent the occasional night inside.

But it's the scene with the umbrellas that resonates with me the strongest. At first he's completely co-ordinated, confident and happy. He's in time, he's got all the moves and everything's going fine. Later, though, he appears to be ignored by the others and he can't even catch an umbrella. He's confused and upset by this. I don't get the impression that he's deliberately being ostracised by them - more like he's invisible to them.

I know it's easy to read too much into stuff like that. To identify with a theme and crowbar the rest of it into place. But I do empathise with some of the details in this video quite strongly at times.

The thing is... as I said... I have friends and I'm aware of the differences I have. I'll always be on the outside to an extent, but I'm not so far outside that I can't connect with anyone at all. I just have to work at it a bit stronger than a lot of other people.

AS is not a bad condition. I like a lot of the things that go along with it and the friends that I've made are friends because of my AS - not despite it. They're attracted to the fact that I'm different, that I'm out of step and that I don't follow the usual rules. It just... it has its challenges as well. This is one of them.

Apparently I write like...

I followed a link to a site that supposedly analyses blocks of text and makes comparisons to famous writers. Out of curiosity, I pasted in stuff I'd written myself to see what came up. I find it hard to comment, though, because I haven't read anything by most of these people.

Some of these are postings in this blog, by the way.

"Social anxieties" (On the subject of Asperger's Syndrome) gave me Jane Austen.
"I loathe, detest and despise Braveheart" (The title is pretty self-explanatory) gave me William Gibson.
"Internal OCDs" (Thoughts on the differences between standard OCDs and autistic thought processes) gave me Cory Doctorow.
"A dream of castration" (Another self-explanatory one) gave me Cory Doctorow again.
"Penthouse and the Spave VIxens" (A sci-fi comedy) gave me Edgar Allen Poe.

So... OK... Edgar Allen Poe? Seriously? He's the only writer I've read and I love the comparison, but of all the stories I've ever written, I'm sure "Penthouse and the Space Vixens" is about as far from him as it's possible to get. Certainly further than anything else I've written.

Anyway, if anyone's curious about making their own comparisons, then check out the site. It's at http://iwl.me/

Metabolism

I have a very active metabolism. And sometimes I wonder if that's related to the AS. I mean... people used to tell me I had lots of "nervous energy" and I never really contradicted that. It sounded plausible, after all. I have a mind that never... absolutely never... seems to shut down and take a rest. And that's definitely down to the AS.

So could the two - the AS and the metabolism - be connected? It seems plausible. At least... to my admittedly skewed perspective.

It's definitely got its benefits. I'm very skinny. In fact - for a man just a little shy of 6 feet, five inches tall, I'm actually underweight. My mum bought me a pair of jeans a couple of years ago for Christmas and when I tried them on, I realised that they were for someone with a fairly bigger waist than me. I laughed about that and asked if she thought I was fat or something. She said that she had automatically assumed I had put on some weight over the years. I realised at that point that I hadn't gained any weight or waist size since I was 13 years old. But it wasn't until a couple of days later that the significance of that caught up to me.

That's unusual, isn't it?

I have good abs, though. In fact, it's my greatest physical characteristic, I think. When I started studying massage therapy, I found the stance was difficult to maintain and it really burnt into my thighs. Then I studied acupressure therapy and had to adapt to a slightly different stance again, because with this therapy the client is sitting, rather than lying down. We uses specially designed chairs for people to lean forward in. A cushion supports the client's chest and leaves the back, neck and shoulders free for us to work.

The specific stance was in order to protect my back when I worked. I had to stand with my feet positioned a certain way so that I didn't bend over too much. I could use my elbows to put pressure into key areas of a person's back, by pushing my hips forward. As I went lower, the rear foot would twist and move backwards - further widening my stance - and I'd get to a lower point on the client's back.

And one day I noticed that my abs were very tight. And I wondered if they had always been that way and I had only just noticed, or if the stance had done that to me. Either way, it was a nice discovery and I just wished I had good pecs as well.

Next year, however, I plan to get back into hiking, camping, kayaking, climbing and all that fun stuff - the stuff I did a lot of when I was younger. I want to regain the upper body strength and flexibility that I once took for granted - before this bastard of a whiplash injury. I suspect that if I really start to work at it again, I'll hurt like hell for a while - but if I persevere at it, it'll all pay off.

There was a time when I took a bet that I couldn't do twenty chin-ups, back when I was 25 years old. I wasn't sure if I could, but I insisted that it was no bother, then did it. I won't say it was easy - but I did it. But back then, I was kayaking a lot, so that flexibility and strength was there. And the metabolism definitely helped. I couldn't do that today, though. But maybe... next summer... maybe I can do it again.

Something to work on, anyway.

Movin' out

The mood in this house has been getting exceptionally ugly, just lately.

I've been living here for nearly eighteen months, now. I moved back into my parents' home back in 2009. I'd been in a car accident and - in quick succession - lost my job, my home and even my career. Suddenly, whiplash made it impossible to work as a massage therapist any more, so suddenly I wasn't able to call myself a professional. This probably doesn't seem too bad to a lot of people, but I worked very hard to gain that profession in the first place, so it was something that provided me with a genuine sense of accomplishment. Even more so after I received my diagnosis and realised that I'd had to work much harder than the other students to gain it. Then there was a year working at Glasgow Airport, nurturing my skills, followed by three years at a clinic in Glasgow, working incredibly hard for incredibly long hours to try and create a successful business.

And six minutes on the motorway in a stationary vehicle destroyed the whole lot of it.

You think I'm bitter? Mostly, I tend to be philosophical about it. Shit like that happens. But yeah... I have to confess... sometimes I do get exceptionally bitter about it. I try not to, but I can't help it.

I was a good therapist. At the airport one day - and this isn't a breach of client confidentiality, because I won't name any names - a girl came in for a ten minute massage. It went fine, with nothing particularly exciting about it. She went away happy. The following day, she was returning through the airport and she returned to me. And everything was different. As I worked on her neck that second time, I realised there was something very different about how it felt. I explored it carefully and came to the conclusion that one of her vertebrae had rotated. Something that sounds dramatic, but is probably a lot more mundane than people might think. I mentioned it to her while I worked on the muscles surrounding it and gradually relaxed them. She told me she had fallen from a horse a long time ago and ever since, once of her vertebrae had a habit of shifting - and whenever it did, she got blinding, devastating migraines. Eventually it would shift back and the migraines would fade. While she spoke, I was fascinated to actually feel the muscles of her neck slowly pull it back into place as I relaxed them. I don't know if I worked on her early enough to prevent the migraines or if they were already on the way, but I was definitely on a high that day.

I still do work on people occasionally. But no longer as a career. Now, if I do too much massage in the space of a single day, it hurts me too much - it aggravates the whiplash.

So... anyway... back to the main topic of this particular instalment of my AS story.

About a fortnight ago, my dad asked me - point-blank - why I was still staying with him. I explained that it was because I couldn't afford to move out without a job. The income from the hen nights is lucrative, but too intermittent to be reliable and I had just gone through three months without a single contract. He accepted that grudgingly, but his comments over the following weeks have become more and more cutting. More and more barbed.

Then yesterday, my mum's dog growled at him. Molly - a beautiful and very intelligent dog - felt threatened by his attitude and warned him off. I won't describe how he was going to respond, but I will say that I stepped between them, saying - literally - "nonononono", then took Molly by her collar and led her away. At this point I was actually a bit scared that either Molly would bite me, or that he would turn his anger against me, but I sort of defused the situation. Sort of.

Today, he's been snubbing Molly all day. She's very confused and clearly doesn't know how to respond. She'll approach him and he'll snap at her and she'll back off, looking very bewildered. He says he no longer trusts her and admits no responsibility for his actions. And the mood has been bleak. For most of this evening, my mum, my dad and I have shared the living room and nobody has said anything at all. It's like - since he came home from work - he's brought this oppressive atmosphere with him and it's weighing us all down. He watched football on TV, my mum read a book, then went to the dining room to play games on her PC and I watched downloaded episodes of "Fringe" on my laptop with the headphones on. Grim.

Last weekend and the weekend before, I went through to my cousin's place for the weekend. Both times, on my way home, I wished I was going back to an empty flat rather than a home I shared with other people. Not merely because I'm anti-social (which I am) but because I wanted to go to a living space that was mine, rather than one I simply resided in.

My bedroom - the room I pay rent for - is shared with stuff that isn't mine, but which takes up half the available space. It's not somewhere I can go to relax. (Although it's been worse - when I was fifteen years old, my dad decided to build a trailer. He welded the frame together, then seemed to get bored of the job. For at least a year, that trailer was stored in my bedroom and I actually had to climb over it to get to and from my bed.)

I've set myself a deadline. I have to be out of this house by the end of March. Now, that's a realistic aim. In the first weekend of the month alone, I'll make enough money to at least pay the first month's rent on a place in the city centre. I just have to make sure I can make the deposit as well - and then find some way to get past the credit check. I'm approaching the people at the AS support centre to see if they can think of ways round that.

Sadly, even that's not good enough for my dad. He's become aware that if I lower my standards and accept a place in Craigmillar or Gracemount or Niddrie instead, then I'll get a place through the council almost immediately - and he's putting pressure on me to do that instead. Why hold out for a decent place when I can get a shit place tomorrow? That's his logic. And he's starting to wear me down.

If I accept the shit place, though... well, then I'm stuck with it. So fuck that. Right up the arse.