Heading to the mall with a Christmas shopping list isn’t a fun-filled, exciting time for all kids.

Loud talking, perfumed candles and lots of shoppers can be a nightmare for children with autism.

"There’s too many people. It’s too crowded. It’s too loud. It’s an unfamiliar environment. It’s too hot," (from The Standard via Mike Keller)

around 2005 i started to suspect that i have adhd. i was diagnosed with adult adhd in 2009. i was immediately put on adhd medication. then suddenly a bunch of symptoms and behaviors, which my wife and i had identified as asperger’s’ in regards to her (she was diagnosed 2010) popped up. who’d have thunk, right?

sensory overload.

i hate crowds. i hate malls and shopping districts – especially on a saturday in stockholm. i simply cannot do buses and trains during rush hour. concerts and huge parties, no way. it fills me with such rage and panic that i just have to GET OUT OF THERE – or remove the people with a Kalashnikov.

meltdown.

i thought this was all part of my adhd.

now i know differently.

so now i am waiting for a time for an appointment with a psychologist, to be tested for asperger’s.

you are not your diagnose!

no. i am not.  my diagnose is part of me. it is part of what makes me uniquely me. for better and for worse. one way or the other it is going to show when i express myself. some of it will be ‘strange’ and ‘weird’. fifty, seventy, hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago people with ‘strange’ and ‘weird’ traits in their personalities were incarcerated as criminals, unrepentant vagrants, or locked away in sanatoriums, insane asylums, mental hospitals or institutions for the mentally challenged. drugged to complacency, beyond recognition, incapacitated and chemically restrained so as to not disturb the good taste of the neurotypicals. as late as the 1970s children with adhd were routinely labeled ‘abnormally aggressive’ and ‘asocial’ and were institutionalized as ‘social deviants’, in Scandinavia. and what was done to the aspies were even worse.

these days there are accepted diagnoses/medical labels for the ‘strange’ and ‘weird’ of my kind. – adhd and asperger’s -but people still believe i am mentally deranged, mentally challenged and an anti-social half-criminal. so i still have to explain to people why i am ‘strange’ and ‘weird’. so i talk about my diagnose, i make pictures that relate to my diagnose and share about adhd and asperger’s. that does not mean i think i am my diagnose or that this is all that ever moves through my mind. it means that it moves there right now.

example: a few months after i had been diagnosed i saw a t-shirt with this image on it:

i loved it. i wanted one of those t-shirts – because above all i am PROUD of being an addie.

so when i saw the image there to the left on-line, i made an avatar and uploaded it to Facebook. and was yelled at, by a ‘friend’ because i was ‘wearing’ my diagnose. uhu. yes. that was BAD. should not have done that. bad, bad addie. someone might get upset and say bad things to me, and then it would all be my own fault, because i had my diagnose ‘up there as an avatar’.

uhu. (“if the Jews stopped being Jews, no one would harass them”.)

other entries on this topic: don’t ask, don’t tell

which is not a good idea. has ended me in a world of trouble more than once.

what can i do? asking for help is one thing. yes, but what kind of help? picking the task apart. sorting the parts and make them single goals. i can do the dishes. yes. i can wash the floor. yes. i can wipe cupboard doors. etc. yes. but i cannot ‘clean the kitchen’. or just ‘clean’.

so if someone gives me a list of tasks that together make up the concept of ‘cleaning the kitchen’, i can do it. with a little help in keeping focused

so i simply call it as i see it and walk away. let them think i am a coward or an idiot. i know i am not, and that is enough.

i do not do pissing contests. especially not with the ones that just must point out that their house, car, stereo, computer, video camera education, ancestry etc. is better, bigger and newer than mine. big deal. how is anything of all that going to grow them a pair of balls? it is not. it never will.

i meet one of those and i simply walk away. it is going to be too much of a bother to try and get inside all that bluster and know the person. chances are i will not find very much underneath and that it will hurt a whole lot trying. so i do not engage.

I love your blue coat—

Sorry, what were we saying?

I don’t remember. (from ellisinwonderland)

and the NT thinks i am not interested in what they are saying. i am. very. it is just that i am also very interested in everything else within eyesight and earshot. and i think about those too. along with what they are saying. and all the associations that calls up in my mind. it is not that i am inattentive, it is that i am hyper-attentive – to everything around me. my brain runs a gazillion parallel tracks, exploring every possible input. and it does not know which of all the tracks is the most important. to me they all make the same kind of noise. the NT speaking, my dog playing, the faucet dripping, the color of their shirt, the comic strip their words create in my mind, the time display on my phone, my phone, the taste of the coffee, the ‘background noise’ of the yard out-side. in an endless rollercoaster of impressions, smells, images, sounds and emotions. and i treat them all as equally important.

this was a great mystery to me. the truth is that there are two sets of rules – one set that is basically ‘on paper’ (though they have never been written down) which they demand we NDs follow and one set which changes from day to day, situation to situation, person to person, all at the discretion of the NTs.

they demand that we admit to being wrong, but rarely or never do so themselves. and then accuse us of being weak and cowardly for admitting to be wrong and apologize.

they demand we be courteous and civil, but rarely or never are so themselves. and then accuse us of being ass-lickers and manipulative when we are courteous and civil.

they demand that we ‘read between the lines’, but rarely or never do so themselves. and then accuse us of assuming things when we ‘read between the lines’.

they demand that we be consistent, but rarely or never are so themselves. and then accuse us of being rigid and inflexible when we are consistent.

they demand that we adapt and adjust to their society, but have no problem excluding us as ‘mentally deranged’ on a daily basis. and then they accuse us of not wanting to ‘assimilate’.

they demand that we accept their excuses for not complying with the social rules, but they rarely or never do so themselves. and then they berate us for using our disability as an excuse for not complying with their social rules.

the more i read and learn about adhd and as, the more i agree with people in the deaf community about segregating and creating a culture apart from ‘normals’.

Indeed it reminded me that I love ADHDers for their sparkle and the way the everyday world goes into their brain, gets all mashed up like a play-doh fun factory and then comes out of their mouths in weird and unpredictable arrays of colour. (from i won’t forget a single day)

it is so easy to look at my adhd and only think about the negative stuff it brings to my life. all is not negative. my mind is amazing. the way it takes a little from this piece of understanding and little from that piece of information and makes something new and shiny of it. how it constantly invents new stuff, comes up with solutions and improvements of stuff (not necessarily very practical ones, but definitely innovative ) or how it plays with words so that boring stuff becomes shiny and humorous – and all seemingly effortless. my mind’s ability to see the world from a play-full and child-like perspective. yes. on a good day i really do sparkle, and that is a good thing. that is something to be proud of and cherish.

When a bottle of shampoo runs out in my apartment, generally it remains in the shower for any number of weeks or months until it has multiplied and taken over the sacred altar of cleansing, until it becomes hazardous for an ADD kid to step into the tub (without looking or remembering that he himself had neglected to take every single one of those shampoo bottles out).

So, still writhing in pain and crying out with rage at my most recent Tony Hawk Dove-boarding Extreme incident, I hurled the culprits over the shower curtain onto the bathroom floor. And as you can imagine, I’m now faced with a choice…

Either I let shampoo bottles accumulate to dangerous levels, or I hurl them over the shower curtain as soon as I run out. Granted, later on I generally put the bottles in the recycling — the trash turnaround rate of floor-dwelling Dove bottles is astonishingly speedy. So my question is this: am I alone in chucking my empty Lethal Luges out of the shower? Or are there fellow irrational beings who face this same problem? (from themacroscope)

i was evicted from an apartment 16 years ago because over the course of ten years i accumulated trash and belongings to a point where i could literally not see the floor anymore, use the kitchen or move around without crunching something under my feet. the stink was detectable in the stairwell and my neighbors called the landlord.

see i do know how to clean – but i get stumped by an inability to 1. see where to begin 2. cut the task into parts. 3. a fear of getting stuck in the middle doing something crazy like scrubbing the floor with a tooth brush or obsessively doing the same counter top again and again because no matter what i do it will not be clean enough. so i never start.

“you have to grow a thicker skin!”

yeah right. from what? i am not G-d so i can create from nothing.  i live without a skin. so how can i grow a thicker skin? truth is i cannot. i can only train myself to recognize the people and situations that will cause me to be hurt and bleed. i can learn to pick my fights. i can learn when it is futile to argue my point and withdraw gracefully before i get hurt.

people who use logical fallacies such as ad hominem are really not worth spending time on. people who keep arguing in circles or throw about straw men are not going to suddenly ‘see the light’ however much you argue with them. stay away from them.

fanatics of any stripe – let them go, they have no interest in being educated. really.

expose their fallacies, their fanaticism, if you must and then withdraw from the discussion. nothing can be gained from interacting with such people, except obsessive thinking, loss of focus, loss of self-esteem and good faith. really.

do not listen to those who say that if you leave a discussion or a forum or a friendship you let the ‘bad’ guys win. they are wrong. the bad guys win if you lose focus, self-esteem and good faith and end up obsessing about them and how wrong they are – that is what they want. and you will if you engage them. take my word for it.

pick your fights. and for us with ADHD and Asperger’s the fight is to stay away from situations that hurt us, make us obsess, and feel bad about ourselves.

i am not sure exactly what Christopher Hitchens actually concludes about Nietzsche’s famous saying.

i know that i disagree with Nietzsche.

the saying lands up there with “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.” what does not kill me makes me bitter, cynical, resentful, sad, depressed, loathe of people – unless i find some way to deal with the pain and suffering. ‘stronger’ for the most part means ‘having created a shell around oneself as protection against pain’. people who claim that they are not hurt by what others say to them, however vicious are lying to you and to themselves. they have adopted an attitude of arrogance, a brave face behind which they are smarting from the stings of insults and put-downs just as much as you and me. however, they are too weak to admit to the imagined ‘weakness’ of feeling hurt and harmed, and therefore declare their ‘strength’. their ‘strength’ is just a pretense.

words do hurt. hurtful words delivered with physical violence are doubly hurtful and harmful. they kill the soul. not as quickly and cleanly as drunk driver or an armed robber might. they kill slowly, insidiously and horribly. it works like the poison hemlock Socrates was sentenced to drink.

as we are ‘raised’ on the idea of  “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.”  and “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” we are raised to deny  and feel bad about being hurt by what others say. so we sign our own emotional and spiritual death-warrants and cover ourselves in layer upon layers of imagined strength that is nothing but window-dressing for a bleeding heart and soul, slowly growing cold and rigid.