Undiagnosed

Undiagnosed

Do I have Asperger Syndrome?

I’ve always been a quiet and shy person, some of my earliest memories are of my mother telling people “Don’t mind him he’s shy”. For the longest time I have just assumed that this was a quirk of my personality. Some people are born with brown hair some with blond; some are shy and some are bold but recently I have started to think that perhaps this is not a quirk of my personality but rather a symptom of Asperger Syndrome.

Of course people with AS are weird and you can tell just by looking at them that they are “on the spectrum”, there is absolutely no way I could have this, right? Some simple research tells me that I could be wrong. Late diagnoses of AS are fairly common with some people well into the their 60’s being diagnosed suggesting that it is wrong to assume that you can tell just by looking at someone that they have AS, and that this can very much be a silent or at least very quiet condition.

I’m 34 years old and have been considering, for about a year now, that I could have AS. Sometimes I am completely convinced that I have it and will not be told otherwise and at other times I feel like I’m being silly and perhaps trying to use the condition as an excuse for my failures in life. The waiting list for the NHS mental health services is ridiculously long so I’m not expecting a diagnostic assessment anytime soon although I am on the waiting list. A positive diagnosis would certainly explain a lot about my life so far, although seeking a diagnosis is scary, as I’m not sure how I would react if I was, in fact, told that I do not have AS. The one thing I do know is that I need to know one way or the other. Some people choose not to get a formal diagnosis which I do understand in some regards as there is no cure, there’s no magic pill, and therefore nothing’s going to change. But for me it’s not so much about the future as it is about understanding the past.

School

For 34 years now I have thought of myself as being just like everybody else, why would I assume otherwise? I got on well in early school, although quiet, I had friends and can’t really blame anybody for missing a potential diagnosis, as even looking back now I can’t think of any obvious signs of AS other than being quiet and shy. I’ve always been introverted though, I didn’t know what this was back then but looking back now I can remember that I was always thinking, all the time just in my own head, pondering. I was and still am a people watcher, in school I would watch the other kids and think about why they were acting the way they did, particularly the badly behaved kids. Why couldn’t they just do has they are told? When the teacher would tell them to stop talking, why did they continue to talk, it didn’t make sense, did they not understand? This was before the days of ADHD of course but my point is that so far I seem to be quiet, shy, introverted and studying my classmates to try to understand them. These symptoms alone of course are not enough for a diagnosis but from the little study I’ve done it seems that the signs of an AS sufferer can appear later in life. One particular thing happened when I was 11 years old which suggests some odd behaviour, a classmate of mine was killed in a car accident. I spent most of this school day watching my other classmates and trying to understand why they were showing so much emotion, many of them where crying uncontrollably. I started to feel like I was doing something wrong as I became acutely aware that I was not showing any emotion at all. I was more concerned with analysing everybody’s behaviour. It wasn't that I didn’t feel sad, I did, and I completely understood the gravity of the situation but I just wasn't reacting in the same way as the other kids. I also remember trying to feign tears so as not to seem callous but I couldn’t, I was clearly processing this situation differently, I was analysing it and not experiencing it. It was like I was on the outside looking in.

As I’ve already said I did fine in primary school, just mostly going unnoticed and this continued into high school. I was an average student and I had a small bunch of friends that I went through high school with but even within this group I was always on the fringes of it, just kind of a tag along, I generally didn’t speak unless I was spoken to and this way I wouldn’t be seen as anti-social and hopefully wouldn’t say or do anything stupid. I wasn’t bullied as I'm quite tall and was able to stand up for myself which I did on a few occasions. I do remember though that I was really only comfortable with my own group of friends. Whenever we, as a group, would interact with another group I remember thinking very strongly that I wished they would go away so we could be by ourselves. I hated interacting with people that I didn’t know, and still hate and fear it to this very day, I could never figure out if they were nice or not. I always saw them as a potential threat. I used to tell myself that these were just not my kind of people but now I think it could be because I just wasn't able to read the social gestures. Maybe they were nice people and I was the one not being particularly nice. Most of the guys in my small group of friends seemed to have other friends outside the group, I did not. I didn’t like it when things changed and throughout high school things and people do change, which is why every lunch hour instead of spending it with my friends I would routinely walk the 25 minutes home, grab something quick to eat, and walk the 25 minutes back to school, this way everyday would be the same, nothing bad would happen and I also just really liked being on my own for a while. Its things like this that I have never questioned, until now I would just put this down to my personality or perhaps adolescence.

Work Life

I decided to leave school at the first chance I got. I was 16 years old and my first job was working in an office, doing basic office type things, I won’t bore you with the details. You might be thinking why I would choose such a job if I don’t like being around people and have trouble socialising and you'd be right to do so. When I think back now it sounds crazy that I would ever choose such a job but at that age I still didn’t know myself very well and I was trying different things hoping to fit in somewhere. I had become obsessed with computers during high school and had a vague idea that I was gonna carve out a career in the tech industry. I lasted less that a year in this office, I could tell that my colleagues were nice people and I really wanted to fit in, but I never did. There was just too many people and personalities that I struggled to engage with. The friendly but sarcastic guy from accounts who would always be cracking jokes some of which I got and others that went over my head. Sarcastic people make me nervous, even though I can identify when someone is being sarcastic, or at least most of the time, I find it impossible to converse with them in any way other than nodding in agreement with what they have said and giving a small chuckle, actually this is my standard response to anybody when they chat to me. Or walking into the sales office with 20 people all looking up at me as I enter. I hate being the centre of attention. I could never figure out the office etiquette of entering an office either. Do you knock the door before entering the office? Do you knock the door and wait for a response before entering the office? I suspect this is wrong but if you don’t need to wait for a response then why knock at all, why not just enter, what difference does it make. I also lived in fear of the telephone, I can really only use the telephone if I know the person on the other end of the line, like a friend or family member, as I know the kind of things they would say and how to respond to them but in an office I was expected to answer the phone to whomever, as well as greet them with an announcement of my name. I know it’s weird but I have always felt awkward using my own name.

I never managed to hold a job for very long, a year to 18 months being the average, so as you can imagine I’ve had a lot of jobs and a few periods of unemployment. The most common reason I would leave a job was because of the stress. Now I know all jobs are stressful, stress is practically what defines work but I seemed to get stressed at all the wrong things. As a 17 year old I worked in retail and I would get stressed because I needed to speak to customers. I’ve always had a fear that people are going to shout at me if I cant understand what they mean when they ask me something. So I lasted about a year in there mostly working before the store opened and therefore avoiding the customers. It’s worth saying that, up until this point in my life, even with all the social issues I’ve been describing, I never once considered that there was anything wrong with me, I just assumed I wasn't very good at that sort of thing. I was envious of my peers who seemed to take socialising in there stride, even enjoying it. I thought my social confidence would grow as I got older and I would pick up the skills as I went along, but as the years went on my confidence dropped and it actually seemed to get more difficult.

I was still optimistic about my future, I just figured I hadn’t found anything I was good at yet, I had only just turned17 after all, so after that I applied to joined the Army. I wanted to train as a mechanic which was probably the first time I realised that I wanted a job I could do on my own and not have the need to work with customers but as you might have guessed the Army was not for me. I actually didn’t even make it into the Army, I made it half way through the training before I quit. I can’t blame my failure solely on AS of course, maybe I just wasn’t Army material. I almost never made it to basic training at all as I failed the pre-entry selection test which was a surprise as it had been described to me as being idiot proof. As far as I remember it was basic maths and logic questions, I tried to get the best score I could as it determined what type of job I could do, my mistake was taking to much time on the difficult questions, as time is a factor in the final score, I failed. After realising my mistake I retook the test and got a really good score. My memories of this time are mostly about the other recruits, it was like being back in school all over again. Instead of getting to know these guys, all I could do was watch and be utterly bemused by some of their behaviours. There were guys from all over the world who were trying to join the Army, most of them were from England, there were a few Scots and several from various Common Wealth countries – all of them full of youthful bravado. I’ve always seen bravado to be very transparent, it’s essentially a lie, and I’ve got no time for people who are not presenting themselves honestly. There was about 30 or 40 of us at the beginning all in one dorm which was miserable, thankfully there was a shortage of beds and we spilled over into a second dorm and I ended up sharing it with just 4 other people. If this hadn’t happened I don’t think I would have lasted a week. Most of our time was spent doing physical training but when we had some down time I struggled to have any meaningful conversations with anybody. I chose to study mechanics because I found the internal combustion engine to be fascinating, the timing of all the moving parts working in synchronicity was very interesting to me, and I would have been happy to talk about that but it seemed that most of these guys hadn’t put much thought into why they wanted to study mechanics other that the association with fast cars, which I wasn’t really interested in talking about. It was a very frustrating time, surrounded by people but feeling very much alone.

After I was finished with the Army, I did many part time and full time jobs, with all the same issues arising at some point. After about a year in any one job, I would start looking for excuses to quit, it was just exhausting dealing with the stress and anxiety 5 days a week, and looking into the future would make me depressed. The easiest thing for me to do was always to enrol in a college course, this was the only acceptable reason to give to my parents to quit a job. I found college courses easier than school for some reason, it just seemed easier to keep to my self and do my work. But college is expensive and inevitability I would need to find a full time job at the end of each year. I knew that I needed to find a job that didn’t require much social interaction and that’s why I eventually became a truck driver. Truck driving seemed at first to be the answer to all my problems, I would spend most of my days behind the wheel and so I didn’t need to worry much about talking with and getting to know people but this is when other problems started to arise, problems that I hadn’t noticed before.

Generally I like to have well defined rules and boundaries, I like to know what my job is and what my responsibilities are; I like for every day to be the same. I dislike it when these things change, it’s just very annoying, in-fact it’s more than annoying, it’s scary, I feel lost and powerless. Truck driving seemed to offer this stability and repetitiveness as there are legally only so many hours you can drive on the roads and there are only so many hours you can work in a day and there is only so much weight you can carry on the back of the trailer. I however, found driving so very stressful because what I hadn’t considered was that most companies like to push these boundaries. If the maximum amount of driving I’m aloud to do in any one day is 9 hours, then being asked to push beyond 9 hours, even by a few minutes, is very annoying. I really don’t like breaking rules. I keep using the word annoying, but this is only because I don’t really have the proper word for how I feel in these situations but it’s much more that just being annoyed. I’m a stickler for rules and when I'm asked to break them, it hurts. I also remember a few times when I would get very frustrated at road signs as they made no sense to me. I would follow the instructions on the signs very literally and they would take me in circles before i realised my mistake. One time when following directions I had received on the telephone, I was asked to take the first turn off a roundabout, which was just a farm road, needless to say my boss was annoyed as I drove up the farm road instead of taking what apparently was the obvious road. It wasn’t obvious to me, the direction was to take the first turn off the round about. Why say take the first turn when it was actually the second turn I was supposed to take? I used to have an almost perfect truck driving job, I would do the same deliveries everyday. But every now and then I would be told things have changed and I would need to cover a different area and do deliveries that I had never done before. I lived in fear of this on a daily basis, it would destroy my whole day because I would never know if the next delivery was going to go smoothly or if it was going to be a nightmare.

Job Interviews

Up until this point most of the job interviews that I’ve had have been very informal probably because they have been low skilled positions but job interviews are something I really struggle with. I’m just not comfortable talking about myself, I hate it. When asked to talk about my skills I’m always far too honest, I always tell the truth which is of course that my skills are limited, that I have zero real world experience and that I take a long time to feel comfortable in new surroundings and get stressed easily. I know this is the wrong way to do an interview but I can’t help but tell the truth, I wouldn’t want to sit there and lie just to get the job and be found to be a liar on my first day. Sometimes just getting an interview can be a hard thing not least because I refuse to apply for many positions because the job advertisement is worded in such a way that I feel it would be dishonest to apply. They often say things like “You must be able to work confidently as a member of a team” or “You will have a degree in computer science” or “You will have no less than two years experience”, if I don’t meet the requirements then I shouldn’t apply, right? I’ve been told that I am being naive and that I should apply for any job regardless but I just can’t do it.

  Asperger Traits that I can relate to.

Sensory overload

This is something that I have experienced on a few occasions, mostly it’s auditory overload. There has been times when I’ve had to ask somebody “is it loud in here”? Which is confusing because you would think that somebody would know if it’s loud or not. The problem I have doesn’t seem to be with the volume but more to do with there being too many different noises at the same time. So for example being at home when I was younger I remember that I was experiencing auditory overload because the television was on, somebody was talking, the dog was panting, my niece was playing with her toys and I could hear somebody cooking dinner in the kitchen, everything individually was happening at an acceptable volume. I knew I was feeling horrible and I knew nobody else was feeling the same way because they all seemed to be comfortable and so I asked “why is it so loud in here”? To which the reply was “it isn’t”. I felt like screaming and telling everybody to just stop talking but obviously I didn’t do that, instead I had to walk out of the room and just go stand in a bedroom where it was quiet. The same thing happens whenever I go to a pub, with my friend, for a drink or to a restaurant which I never do. When in a pub, depending on how busy it is and some times where I am sitting, I can feel very anxious and I find it very difficult to have a conversation because I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on the person I'm supposed to talking with because I can hear absolutely everything that is going on in that pub. I can hear every glass clink, I can hear everybody else's conversation around me, I can hear every chair squeak, every door that opens, everybody shouting at the bar for drinks and of course all of this could be happening over the sound of loud music. In this environment I tend to shutdown, I lose interest in whatever someone is talking to me about and I absolutely don’t want to speak, all my energy is going into just keeping it together. It was in a situation like this that started to realise that I’m not great at eye contact, I think that because I'm experiencing auditory overload I find myself focusing on peoples mouth’s so as to try understand what they are saying even if I cant hear them properly.

Avoidance

I avoid everything, I avoid going outside a lot which means I’m basically a shut-in. I’m not quite an agoraphobic but I definitely feel safe indoors in a way that I don’t when I’m outside. I’ll go outside only when absolutely necessary i.e. for work but as soon as work is over all I want to do is come home and lock the door behind me. This probably gives you the impression that I am depressed but I’m really not. I thought I was at one point because I just couldn’t make sense of my life, I was so confused about why everybody seemed to be able to handle life in a way that I haven't been able to, but that passed. I’m not particularly happy either though I’ve just kind of accepted that this is how my life is. I’m lucky in so many other ways, I was raised in a good home with a good family, I have a job that allows me to rent my own place without claiming benefits but growing old alone is a scary thing to contemplate but I will because, as I say, I avoid everything and this has left me alone.

I panic even if somebody knocks on my door, who on earth could be knocking on my door, what do they want, I don’t want to talk to strangers. I desperately try to avoid my neighbours too, they probably think I'm ignorant but the reason I avoid them isn't because I don’t like them it’s because we live in the same building and if I say hello to them once then I’m going to have to say hello every time I see them and this just increases the chance that I will say something stupid or weird or nonsensical out of sheer panic.

I have hobbies that I avoid doing also, I used to love fishing as it’s a solitary pass time and I found relaxing but I never go any more as it’s not really all that solitary as the places near me are usually quite busy and there is always the risk that I’ll end up in a conversation that I don’t want to be in and wont know how to get out of it.

When I need to walk anywhere I have a fear of bumping into somebody I know or used to know in case they want to have a casual chat. I can’t do casual chatting, I can have an in depth conversation about certain topics, so long as it’s something meaningful in which I have opinions but I can’t do casual pointless chatting mostly because I don’t know how to end the chat. I bumped into an old school mate in a shop one time and he was a very friendly person who I liked a lot even though we weren’t actually friends, he was more like a friend of a friend. He chatted away thankfully he controlled the conversation but all the while he was talking, all I could think about was how do I get myself into these situations and how do I get myself out of this one without being rude. I made some efforts to chat with him but I was struggling and panicking and in the end I made my way to the counter to pay for my stuff and left without saying goodbye. I knew I had made a mistake as I caught him, out the corner of my eye, giving me a weird look as if to say why have you just walked away in the middle of our conversation which left me feeling completely dejected.

Pattern Finder

I remember counting the stripes on the wallpaper on my walls, but not just counting them, I would see the pattern of three thick stripes followed by one thin stripe and then it would be repeated. It would frustrate me if I got to the end of the wall and it ended in way which spoiled the pattern.

I would randomly choose a small number and just count until I got to a round number, I wasn’t able to stop until I got to an acceptable round number. If I was counting in 3’s then 30 was an acceptable number to stop at, but then I would think 3 * 30 is 90 so I would count up to 90 but then I’d think 90 is only 10 away from a hundred so I’ll just count to 100.

I work as a taxi driver in a taxi rank of about 100 cars so I’m surrounded by licence plates all day long and I can’t help but read them, not the whole licence number just the last three characters. LNT, DSV, GNT and so on, I never remember them I just read them.

Friendships / Boundaries

It seems the one thing all Aspy’s have in common is complete ineptitude when making and keeping friends and I am no different. I’m lucky in a sense though because I do have one friend that I seem to have kept over the years although sometimes I think the reason we have stayed friends is that I mostly let him dictate out friendship as I really fear being overbearing. It’s for this reason that I don’t like to be the one to arrange meeting up, most people would probably interpret as being rude and would eventually break contact with me but this is somebody I’ve know for 18 years so he knows my quirks. He himself is a very social person with many friends some of which I’ve met and although I tried hard to be a part of his larger circle of friends I could never seem to do it and eventually I just stopped getting invited along to things. I see him once every month or so and we have a few beers and a laugh, and I’m glad to have him. I’ve always told myself that I like my own company and that I don’t mind being alone which is true but there are times when I don’t see or speak to anybody for days and I wish that I could just sit with other people and be ignored, this was easier when I was younger as an adult this is impossible.

Social Touch

I don’t like touching people and I don’t like people touching me. It’s not like I’ll have a meltdown if it happens but I will avoid it at all costs. The worst time of the year is new-years because everybody is shaking hands and I hate that and I particularly hate the new-years hug. I don’t know who to hug and who to shake hands with, I shook my female boss’s hand one time and I’m not sure if she was expecting a hug but to hug my boss was just to weird, far to intimate. Then there is the question of how long to hold the hug and how firm.

Empty Head

Empty headedness is something that happens to me whenever somebody attempts to engage me in a social conversation. I can get passed the initial “hello” and “how are you” but then it’s like my brain just freezes and there seems to be nothing in my head, absolutely nothing. The conversation has no flow to it, it’s particularly difficult if the person themselves is not particularly good at chatting and expect me to do the hard work. It is for this reason that I tend to keep my head down and try not to make eye contact. I’ve always walked with my head down looking at the ground. I don’t want to bump into somebody I used to know but now have absolutely nothing to talk to them about, it can be awkward and I’m sure people already know me as the person that can’t hold a conversation and so avoid me. I remember after high school, at various house party's which I felt obligated to attend in order to keep up appearances, on several occasions I was left alone in a room that had gone from being full of people chatting and drinking to being just me and a few other people. When you’re in a busy room it’s easy to go unnoticed if your just drinking a beer listening to the music but when the crowd starts to thin you’re just the weird guy standing in the corner not talking to anybody. Those last few people would make a quick exit leaving me alone and wondering what the hell is wrong with me. If this happens once, it can be forgotten about but this was a regular occurrence.

Stimming

There was a time when I would have said that I do not have any self-stimulatory behaviours but ever since researching AS I have come to realise that I have many of them. It was my understanding that people with AS were not able to control there stimming, and that may well be the case for most people, but I seem to be able to control my stims, mostly because I’m extremely self-aware and I’m desperate not to look out of place. My earliest memory of self-stimulatory behaviour is when I was in school, I had a tendency to hit myself on the back of my head with my ruler or my pencil – the harder the better. When I’m nervous, depending on the situation, I will tap my fingers against my leg inside my pocket which I'm sure most people do when they’re nervous but that’s just the beginning, I also tap my thumb and ring finger against my leg or the steering wheel or anything really when I’m nervous or stressed. I also rock back and forward when I’m alone, in front of the computer, reading a book or writing. When I'm deep in thought I tend to rock and sometimes find myself pulling the hair on the back of my head when talking to people.

One of the more strange things that I do is I pace around my flat. I will pace from the living room through the hallway and into my bedroom just completely lost in thought, sometimes having full blown conversations in my head and sometimes even audibly, at worst this can go on for an hour or two before I snap out of it.

The last thing I do which I’m not sure if it is a stim or maybe some sort of OCD is that I touch the four points on my lips, the corners of the mouth and both points of the philtrum and repetitively count to four.

Sarcasm

I can often recognise when people are being sarcastic and my main issues are in my inability to respond appropriately to sarcastic comments. However this does not mean that I always recognise it, I can think of a couple of examples of when I got confused. The first is a comment that was made to me while I had a passenger in my taxi – a woman sitting next to me pointed at a book I had on my dashboard and said “you must be busy”. This caused me some initial confusion as I couldn’t understand why me having a book was in anyway related to how busy my day was. I recognised it as mild sarcasm though and gave the typical head-nod and chuckle response, which seemed to satisfy her. Although it didn’t take me long to figure out the logic behind this sarcasm, my initial confusion is quite common. Incidently, I have recognised in myself a tendency to ask people to repeat themselves even if I have heard them correctly in order to give myself some time to process what they have said. The second example is quite rude but I’ll describe it anyway. I showed up early for work one day and a colleague asked “Did you piss the bed this morning”? I thought what a strange and rude thing to say and could only answer the question literally. “No I didn’t”. I knew he was making a sarcastic joke so I laughed it off.

Memory problems

I’ve had a very poor memory for as long as I can remember, no pun intended. I’m particularly bad at remembering peoples names. I’m always very nervous when I’m meeting new people and so perhaps it’s no surprise that I don’t remember their names. But my memory is far worse than just that, I struggle to remember most things actually. I can’t remember the name of bands or singers or songs that I like and I can’t remember film titles or the actors that are in them and I don’t remember birthdays / dates either. It became a running joke that when I would visit my friend I would need to call him on the phone to let him know that I had arrived because I could never remember which buzzer number to press. I also really struggle to remember street names which is particularly annoying as I am a taxi driver. I’ve been driving a taxi for about 4 or 5 years and there is still streets that I’ve been to dozens of times, time and time again, and I will still need to use the satnav to get me their. It’s the same with hotels, I might have been there hundreds of times but for some reason I just don’t seem to remember them. Also when driving from A to B people have often told me that I take strange routes sometimes accusing me of trying to over charge them, but the truth is that I struggle to know which is the best route to take because I can’t seem to visualise it in my head and so I just tend to drive in the general direction and constantly reassess whether I’m going the right way or not. Sometimes it helps to think about it backwards from B to A. I’ve often wondered if my memory is different to other people’s, I don’t think I'm a very visual thinker. When people say they are picturing something in there head I’m not sure if they actually see something or are they just thinking about the thing they say they are picturing. When I was at University I constantly needed to draw things out on a board in order to learn them, simply reading about something abstract was very difficult. I wanted to learn computer programming at one point but I didn’t get very far with it as it became obvious that I wasn’t very good at abstract thought and I feel that this is very closely related to having a poor memory. My mental arithmetic is also very poor, although, I always enjoyed maths in high school so long as it was something I could draw out and find the answers with a calculator.

It’s not to say that I don’t have any memory at all, I do remember things of course but it tends to be very random things like a post code from when I lived in Ipswich for 6 months when I was seventeen, IP3-8DH and the area code 01473. I think the reason I remember these is that they are sequences. I said earlier that I don’t remember birthdays but that's not quite true, I can remember them so long as I think of them as sequences of numbers as opposed to dates. 2,12,61 instead of the second of December 1961, my dads birthday. I’m also very good at remembering dialogue from films, maybe simply because I've seen them hundreds of times, but there are some films I’m pretty sure I could tell you every line of dialogue. I’ve heard that some people with AS get obsessed with quotes from films, I can fully relate to this I’m always thinking about movie quotes and I’m always referencing movies and TV shows. Sometimes when wake up in the morning I have a line from a film in my head and I’ll just be repeating it over and over again for no reason. My memory is definitely weird, I can remember the most pointless facts and trivia but I can’t tell you the name of my local pub.

Special Interests

I guess one of the main reasons I have some doubts about having AS is that I don’t seem to have a special interest. I would love to have one actually but I don’t have the attention to stick to any one thing. When I was younger I was really interested in computers, I used to get books from the library and try to learn as much as I could about them, this was when I was 13 or 14 when most of my friends were doing more typical things teenage boys do. I loved the acronyms, learning about computers was really about memorizing acronyms and there are plenty of them to learn. CPU, ROM, RAM, HDD, FDD, SIMM’s, DIMM’s, DDR and the list is really endless. I spent my teenage years and most of my twenties in front of a computer screen trying to learn new things like web design, programming and networking. It was fun, I loved it actually but I don’t think I would call it a special interest because as the years went on my interest waned and now, although I still spend a huge amount of time at my computer, I mostly use it for entertainment.

Over the years I’ve had many different interests and hobbies and the pattern is that I get intensely interested for a short amount of time and then, almost like a flicked switch, my interest is gone and I’m onto something new, usually having wasted a lot of money. Every now and again I become interested in fishing, it’s a fun, quiet, solitary hobby but usually after a few months of fishing as much as I possibly can I just become bored and want to do something else. I’ve done the same thing time and time again. I wanted to learn guitar so for a bout 6 months to a year all I did was read about guitars online, watch videos online, look at guitars online and eventually spent a small fortune on several guitars. I learned a few chords but I was finished with it inside a year. I did the exact same thing for mountain biking, became obsessed with it for about a year, spent a small fortune and I was done. Sometimes it’s music, I have a love hate relationship with music as most of it is generic rubbish but every now and again I’ll find a singer or band that I like and I’ll just listen to them over and over again. When I discovered I liked Johnny Cash I listened to him constantly, I just wasn’t interested in listening to anything else. And then of course I’d need to buy books about Johnny Cash and read them too. One of the reasons I wanted to learn guitar so much is that I became obsessed with Guns ‘n Roses, I would listen to their albums on repeat it didn’t bother me at all to listen to the same songs over and over again.

Repetition has played a big part in my life, I listen to the same music over and over again, I watch the same TV shows and films over and over again and I even read the same books, I find it really hard to try new things which is why when I do find something new that I like I tend to become obsessed with it even if it is only for a short period of time. Even my eating habits tend to follow this pattern, when I find something that I like to eat I try to eat it everyday and I probably would but of course I just get bored of it eventually.

Some smaller traits.

• I’ve just never been very good with my hair. When I was younger I was always styling my hair a certain way to fit in with everybody else that was doing it but as I got older I just got fed up with it. It was unpredictable, everyday it would look different, it wouldn't sit right so I eventually just shaved it off. I know this seems silly but I’ve read that people with AS typically complain that they just can’t seem to manage there hair.

• I also think I speak with a monotone voice which is an AS thing, several people have made comments about the way I speak.

• I used to make throat noises when I was younger but I grew out of it eventually.
  
  
• I hate tight clothes, I’ve quit jobs before over the uniforms I was required to wear. They were either to tight or I didn’t like the feel of it on my skin. I only like to wear certain colours and usually only loose clothes. I need to wear a shirt and tie to my current job and I'm miserable all day long I sometimes don’t know why I’m so miserable as in many ways my job is great so I wonder if is actually the clothes that are making me feel so bad.
  
  
• When I’m in a comfortable setting, I can be a complete open book, I’ll tell you anything about me. The comfortable settings are rare though.
  
  
• When I’m extremely stressed my instinct is to revert to silence, I get to a point where it seems impossible to even speak. I think this is called a silent shutdown.

Conclusion

So do I have Asperger Syndrome? I still can’t really decide whether I have it or not. I did the Autism Spectrum Quotient Test and scored a 37 out of 50 which apparently indicates that I have significant autistic traits. Hopefully I can get some feedback from somebody who reads this.