working it out as I go along

On the twenty-fourth day of Advent, Christmas Eve, I decided to start re-reading Autism: An Inside Out Approach by Donna Williams. I realised that it said at the back of the book that she gives strategies to help people deal with ASD related difficulties. I hadn’t noticed that the first time I read it – it was more a ‘Gosh, she is describing what it is like to be me’ experience. So I decided to reread it to find strategies, and hopefully find something to help me be organised. There was one paragraph in the first chapter that I liked:

My ‘autism’-related difficulties took me on a journey where my physical health fell apart from a combination of inherited faults, bad management and the chronic stress of dealing with an incomprehending world which taught this camel to walk straight instead of taking the lorry-load of straws off its back for the thirty years before it realised there was a choice.

This is where I am at right now – why this year off has become necessary. So if I can learn some ways where it can be different, I will be very happy.

Then I decided in the evening to be a bit Christmassy. Even though in general I find Christmas pretty pointless, I do like Christmas carols. I like them because I learnt lots of them by heart when I was a kid. Every Christmas I would learn a different Christmas carol. For me, as a child who found Christmas confusing, this gave some meaning and consistency to Christmas. Once I’d learnt a carol, it was like I possessed it – I could sing it whenever I liked. I had no idea what they meant, in general – I remember learning ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ when I was seven, and being fascinated at the idea of Jesus being our childhood’s pattern. To me, a pattern was the kind of thing I saw on the wallpaper, or on the kitchen lino – lots of shapes repeating themselves. I liked them, and so I liked the idea of Jesus being one! I remember wondering what exactly was the difference between ’shareth in’ and ‘feeleth for’, and why the first went with gladness and the second went with sadness. Maybe Jesus was only allowed to share in gladness, not sadness, because gladness is good and sadness is bad. But I liked how they rhymed.

So, because I like carols, on Christmas Eve I decided to turn on my TV (which I very rarely do, as I don’t find it interesting) to see if there were any carol services. I then got distracted by a documentary about Paul Scofield. I normally have no interest in the lives of actors, but this captivated me. First because they played a bit from King Lear, and I’d seen that film when I was 15 and felt the connection of recognition. I remembered what a good film it had been (even though I’d been disappointed at the time because they changed it quite a bit from the original play, and made it a lot shorter). I thought I would change channel after they stopped playing the King Lear scene, but then I became fascinated by what they were saying about Paul Scofield. I felt I could relate to it. He sounded like me. People found him enigmatic and naive. He hated socialising and refused to go to parties. He had no interest in promoting himself. He had no interest in going to Hollywood. He just wanted to act, and act well – that was what he devoted his life to. And he couldn’t analyse it – he could just do it at the moment. And he would accept and reject parts on instinct, having to work out afterwards the reasons why. I found it very inspiring – it is so rare to hear about a famous person who makes sense to me and who I can relate to. It occurred to me that if I could find a something – one thing – to devote myself to doing, then I would be fulfilled. I would have no interest in promoting  myself either – just in doing what I did well. It’s interesting – I also decide things on instinct, and then have to work out afterwards why. This is because it is an autistic thing not to consciously process something right away, but you subconsciously process it. This is also how people are called savants. It is why when I was a child, I could work out mathematical problems and have no idea how I did it – which was very frustrating for my maths teachers, and also very frustrating for me when they insisted I wrote my ‘working’ – I had no idea what ‘working’ was.

Then, after I’d watched that programme, I watched a carol service that was at a children’s hospital. The singing wasn’t particuarly good – well, it wasn’t a choir, I don’t think, just a group of people, like you get in a church congregation. But I liked it, because they talked about the hospital and the people were real people who had a real connection with the hospital, and some of them had children who had died there, and it was moving that they had all come together to do a carol service. And I liked the Liverpool accents when they spoke and read things. And I also liked how the camera sometimes focused on people who weren’t singing. I liked that people didn’t feel they had to sing, but they could still be part of it.

And then I saw there was a eucharist service on another channel,  so I switched to look at that one. And that was a proper choir, all in harmony. I like the sound of such things – it feels like it envelops my body in softness – so I watched that one. I don’t know why I like songs that are in harmony so much. I remember the first time I heard a harmony. I was ten years old, and my school was doing a musical. It was a silly musical, but there was one song which was a duet in harmony. While the two girls sang it, I remember being utterly tranfixed, and wanting to cry, but in a good way. Then some kids started laughing at me because I had a funny expression on my face, and my mouth was hanging open, so I got embarrassed. I didn’t understand why the song had had such an effect on me. I still don’t – I just know that this is what songs in harmony do to me. When I was a teenager, The Marriage of Figaro (which I’d never heard of back then) was on TV, and my sisters and I were flicking channels, and suddenly there was this song (the one called Sull’aria, but it was in English) and I just had to listen to it. My sisters wanted to change channel and we had a huge argument about it, because I really wanted to listen, and they said it was boring. But later I got the tape from the library and I listened to the whole thing to find that song, and I listened to it over and over.

Incidentally, it also occurred to me yesterday that maybe the reason I don’t watch TV is because when I was growing up I rarely got to watch things I was interested in, because they were so different from what my sisters liked to wath. They liked the normal things that kids like to watch. I liked things that they declared were boring. So it is quite nice to realise that I have full control to watch whatever ‘boring’ thing I like now.

Today it is Christmas day and I am watching ‘Carols from Kings’, because my cable TV has a thing where you can watch things that were on TV in the past week, as well as what is on TV right now. So I am feeling very content listening to it and typing on my little Asus Eee laptop, and eating Belgian chocolate malt balls that I got from Asda, which are like maltesers but nicer. It’s odd – there is part of me that feels a bit naughty for spending Christmas alone. People are not supposed to spend Christmas alone – it either means you’re a bah humbug, or that you are a pitiable, lonely person to be prayed for in church. But it is so nice to be by myself. It is so very quiet outside – well, it’s always pretty quiet anyway, but even quieter today. I went in my garden and hung up my washing, and was aware that I’m probably the only person in my neighbourhood doing laundry on Christmas day, and it was a nice peaceful feeling.

Christmas does not have a religious significance to me. I like the carols purely for familiarity and because I like the sound. The words are silly, and they don’t help me worship God. I like my relationship with God to be constant. I don’t like it to have to be different on Christmas day, and I don’t think it has to be, because there is a bit in the Bible about how some people like to have certain days as special and set apart and other people like all days to be the same, and whatever you do, do for God. So I am the latter type of person.

I have a random question. Why do bishops wear those funny hats? I am really not used to such hats because I have never attended a church where anyone wore one. Yesterday when i was watching the eucharist carol service on TV, I saw this bishop was wearing a funny hat, and for a moment, when I wasn’t properly paying attention, I thought to myself that he was wearing a Christmas party hat that he had got out of a cracker. I thought it was part of the festive season. But then I paid attention and remembered they wear hats like that all the time, because I see the photos on the internet, so I am curious what it signifies.