Yeah, yeah, spring is coming :-(

Yeah, yeah, I know: “Spring is fluttering its blue ribbon again” (a piece of poetry from German Poet Eduard Mörike). Spring is nice. Spring is pleasant. Spring is lovely.

But for me every March begins a time, when I feel the sunlight as particularly bright, as intrusive.
Do not get me wrong. I like to be in nature and I love to travel alone. Because I love silence.

 

When I have a day off during the week, I’m drawn “to the countryside”, as they say. And during the week there are hardly any people on the hiking trails.

 

I need protection from the sunlight. For many years nobody thought that my headache might have anything to do with the sunlight. When I “get” this glistening light into my eyes, I may not be able to get rid of the glaring, no matter where I look, no matter if I put a towel over my head – it stays there and is glaring in my head. Headaches are the result.

 

I don’t know how other people from the autism spectrum feel about the sun … I like the warm rays and it does my neck, my back good and it relaxes me to sit in the sun for a while. But I also have to be careful.

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Is it time for autistic people to change the world?

Is it time for autistic people to change the world?

You probably know Greta Thunberg.
A girl who hurries from conference to conference and advocates CO2 reduction.

She has also encouraged – directly or indirectly – school strikes in some cities.
Does that bring the change, a better world, we hoped for?

Greta is presented in the media as an icon of climate activists.
Greta is said to have “a variant of Aspgerer Syndrome”. (Whatever that means.)

Time to ask myself: Can we, Aspies over the world, be a kind of “role model”? (I don’t want to be presumptuous: I know we are a minority.)

Because what would be – besides avoiding inland flights or sharing a car, planting trees and and and … – really useful?

I believe that school strikes will not turn the tide. (Why should you strike the school? It doesn’t make any sense at all.)

Should students not stand up and speak up much more concretely in their everyday life and in their school environment for …

Not every student should own a smartphone, right??
Or change to a new model every year?
Spend your school trips at the youth hostel instead of going abroad, right?
Planting trees is certainly not wrong. Painting trees on protest posters won’t help.

The “Aspies”, which I know, they act almost without exception more than admirably:

They often live in a humble way in a small room or with their parents. They hold on to their beloved smartphone, do handicrafts, tinker, repair stuff by themselves … often until they ca not do anything and they have to buy a new one.

Many have neither a large Hi-Fi system nor a telly – or both are available, but rarely in operation.
They eat modestly. I don’t know gluttony from any of my Aspie friends.
They live modestly.

And they’re not going on a world tour.  😉

In the language of climate activists, they leave a very, very small “C02 footprint.”

Maybe this is not the time when Aspies change the world. But we can contribute our part. (If we don’t do it to a large extent anyway.) What do you think?

As an Aspie in the workplace …

The last four weeks were exhausting: the work started again. There were new colleagues, many face-to-face talks, conferences.

In the first two weeks there was no afternoon that I didn’t have to recover from working day. And by that I don’t mean a 20 minute power nap. Some days I’d collapse straight into bed at home.

Self-injurious behaviour

I hit myself when I was a teenager.

If, for example, I couldn’t get any further with my homework or an appointment came closer and closer, but I couldn’t get ahead with that damn paper, I hammer myself at the head, with my hands or even with my finger joints or fist.

As a child, when I was excited or really desperate, I hit the ground with my hands, my arms, my feet until I felt this feeling at the affected parts of my body, this warm tingling stream. I only noticed possible injuries later.

Today this only happens when I really can’t understand something, when there is something which doesn’t want “to go in my head”, when I am very, very stressed, when I am supposed to do something completely illogical, but I can’t do it, then I hit myself on the head again and again. It just happens. Even if I know that this is an absurd behaviour, because it can’t change my tricky situation, it “happens”.
If everything runs smoothly, this does not happen.

But when, when does life run smoothly?

Exhausting. Just exhausting.

My life as an autist is exhausting.
Hardly a day goes by without an event that drains my reserves of strength.

Be it the tram that breaks down and makes me play the routine for being late, or the oddly hazy sky that makes the sun shine brightly,

Whether it’s an annoying letter that requires me to send some documents within two weeks, or the doctor’s office that replies to my e-mail (!), that I should phone them to make an appointment.

Be it the reckless neighbour who thinks he has to play music on Sundays at 12:00 (!) with the window open or the goods in the supermarket, once again in another place.