working it out as I go along

Time to update this blog. It’s been a while, and have discovered various things regarding organisation and what works and doesn’t.

With the index cards, I decided to start again at the beginning of each week rather than make it ongoing. I like discrete segments of time. However, I noticed that, each time one week ended and the next began, it was difficult to make the mental switch from one week to the next, and the first couple of days went by in a disorganised blur. So I realised I need to do something to prepare for the transition. I have no idea what though.

I have been listening to free university lectures from iTunes U. At first I found this tiring, but I realised that was because I would listen to them in bed before going to sleep or upon waking, and I would invariably drift to sleep while listening. I’ve heard this is the best way to learn – but for me, it really isn’t. It gave me a horrible headache. However, if I listen during the day, it’s a completely different matter. And furthermore, listening while doing housework is great. I barely even notice the housework I’m doing, so I don’t have chance to dislike it or find it boring – I’m just so fascinated listening to the lectures (MIT ‘intro to psychology’ lectures by Jeremy Wolfe are brilliant – really entertaining, and incredibly interesting. I thoroughly recommend them! And they are free from iTunes U.). Anyway, I am delighted to have found a way to do housework without even noticing I’m doing it. And listening to the lectures gives me a kind of momentum. I also listen to them when I go out – whether I walk to the supermarket, or take the bus to the city centre – and I find they are great for giving me a focus. I find it very overwhelming to be in a supermarket or in the bus. So having a focus – a voice speaking out of my ipod and into my head, and saying interesting things – is very useful.

I decided that I needed to make more prompts. So I started writing and decorating a notebook, with two pages for each day, where I told myself what to do – like letters to myself, for myself to read each day. It sort of worked, for the first couple of days. Except there were some flaws. I’d vastly overestimated the amount I could get done in one day, so I felt very discouraged for not having done it all. Also, I rather unrealistically demanded that I should go to bed at 11pm and get up at 7am – when previously I’d been going to bed at 3am and getting up at 10am. That’s far too big a time jump – I wasn’t tired at all at 11pm, so I was lying in bed feeling like a failure for not falling asleep. Also, I didn’t have a plan B – I had demanded that I get up every morning at 7:00am and go swimming – and then I got athlete’s foot, so I couldn’t go swimming (well, I could, but it would be rather unfair on other swimmers!). I knew, logically, that all I needed to do was change it and go to the gym instead, but because the pages I’d written told me to go swimming, I couldn’t make that mental adjustment, and abandoned the notebook, feeling like a dreadful failure.

And then I got unwell – not properly unwell with an illness, but just incredibly tired and overwhelmed, due to it being ‘that time of month’, as they say (I know one is not supposed to mention such things in polite company, but I kind of need to in order to plan around how my body works) and I began to feel rather discouraged and frustrated that my body gets so tired and needs so much sleep at such times, and how disabling it can be. When it is this time of month, I become even more sensitive to sensory stimuli than normal – I am uncomfortable unless I have the lights dimmed in my house and have complete silence. Of course, normally, when I am working or attending college, I just force myself to do what I have to do, but that tends to have the effect of making me permanently overwhelmed and tired. Only now that I am at home controlling my environment and resting do I really notice the negative affect of certain things, because I am finally starting to feel well and relaxed and so I keenly notice anything that unbalances that. It is rather disconcerting – I thought it would be the opposite. I thought that with enough rest I’d be fine with buses and fluorescent lighting. But no, I simply notice now more acutely how unwell they make me feel.

So, I had a week of feeling unwell and not achieving much and feeling discouraged. And now I’m trying to get back into some kind of routine again. To recover the old strategies that were working and which I temporarily abandoned – the dividing of my days into 40 minute chunks, the index cards, the ‘daily thoughts’ writing, etc.

I found some interesting web pages about ‘intertia’ – which is a name given to the part of executive dysfunction that stops you doing stuff. First I read this: http://qw88nb88.wordpress.com/2006/10/15/coping-with-the-inertia-of-task-paralysis (and also several other of her blog entries – a lot I could relate to in there). I realised this person was describing very well the difficulty I have with organisation. She suggests some strategies – but the strategies themselves seem rather overwhelming! But maybe I could adopt one at a time and try.

Then I read this: http://www.autistics.org/library/inertia.html, which I found incredibly useful, in terms of defining the problem. Particularly the frustration the author describes at being told that if she hasn’t done something, she clearly doesn’t want to do it. I have been told this many times – including by a life coach whom I saw for a couple of sessions over the summer. Clearly, she said, the fact that I was so addicted to the internet and didn’t use willpower to make myself turn off my computer meant that I didn’t really want to change. Gosh, that was so frustrating – why on earth would I be working extra shifts, working 14 hours to pay for a one-hour session with her, if I didn’t really want to change? I want to be able to change so much that it makes me cry with frustration sometimes, because I have no idea how to and no one seems to know what to suggest. Grr. I also noted with interest that this author says ‘I tend not to notice my own emotions/desires without a careful conscious process of checking to see how I’m feeling’. This is exactly what I’ve noticed myself, and why I try to write my ‘daily thoughts’, in order to become aware. It is when writing them that I realise if I am hungry or tired or unwell or something like that – I don’t notice otherwise. Well, this webpage has a lot of strategies, particularly the idea of finding something external to prompt you, which is what I had been realising anyway, so it’s good to know that the discoveries I’ve been making have been also made by others and have been found to work.

Another useful webpage I read was this: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.autism/msg/4e17b031c6858372?pli=1. This person is also describing my problem exactly – the whole experience of doing nothing until forced, and then once I’ve started doing something, carrying on and not stopping. What is interesting is that this person defines inertia as a physics term, as follows:

In physics, the term “inertia” is defined as:
1. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless stopped or changed
by a force;
2. An object at rest tends to stay at rest unless changed (moved) by a
force.

It had never occurred to me to see both of these issues as one and the same, or to label them ‘inertia’ (an inertia of thought rather than of literal motion of an object, as the writer points out), but it makes total sense and helps me see the problem from a new perspective. And as this writer says, the first type of inertia can be used in a positive way if you are able to get yourself started on something you need to do. If I could apply that ’staying in motion’ to my studying (which I actually have done in the past, when I was studying English literature) I’d be really happy. The difficult thing with my course, though, is that each element of study seems so different and the lecturers don’t link them in a coherent way. But now I’m taking a year out, I can organise my own study to make it coherent.

Anyway, reading those articles actually made me feel more positive. Seeing the difficulty objectified and shared by others on the autistic spectrum, and being reassured that it really isn’t a case that I subconsciously ‘don’t want to’ change, has made me feel less inclined to blame myself for this. It is something that people do tend to see as a sort of moral/deliberate failing in me – that I am being lazy, that I couldn’t be bothered, that I am rebelling, that I am sabotaging myself due to some hidden self-hatred, etc. I had got so tired of looking deep within to find some self-hatred or issue that was making me self-sabotage, or some hidden anger that was making me rebel! But I suppose it makes sense that people see it that way. If they haven’t experienced it, they don’t understand it. If they were in my position, not doing something, then it would really be a choice. My dad often gets annoyed with me and thinks I’m being lazy or giving in or getting depressed (the number of people who’ve told me I must be depressed – gosh, I was starting to believe it! Apparently, in the normal scheme of things, lack of motivation = depression) and that I need to ‘pull myself together’. It was so frustrating, because any depression I might have felt was as a result of the fact that I couldn’t self-motivate – not the cause of it.

So, this is actually a weight off my mind – but also still very much a beginning rather than an end. I do need to find ways to set myself in motion. I like the physics explanation – I think it will be easier to find solutions when it is like a mathematical equation. I think it must be a question of, knowing that I can’t deliberately induce changes in what I am doing without some kind of external force, creating ways of getting myself to do things automatically (what that second article said about Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings was very interesting – the difference between on-purpose and automatic movement, where the catatonic person couldn’t move to pick up a ball, but would automatically catch one if thrown at her) rather than trying to be deliberate about it.

Actually, I think this may be where my main problem has come. Up until the age of 19, I did things automatically. Then things happened in my life where I was forced to look at myself and analyse myself deliberately, and become aware of my feelings and thoughts and work through them – and suddenly my ability to organise my study drastically deteriorated. I was no longer able to complete assignments on time. Before that, I’d studied on autopilot. I’d lived on autopilot. But also there is the difficulty that I don’t want to live on autopilot. I like being aware. I liked the newfound awareness I got at 19 – I didn’t (and don’t) want to lose it.

Interestingly, about four years ago, when my Granny died and I was very upset and didn’t deal with it very well, I had that experience of autopilot again, temporarily. I remember I was doing an Open University course (I was always doing OU courses back then, and never completing assignments on time), and for the first time ever, I sat down to do an assignment and worked on it with ease and got it completed easily and sent off on time. I remember being quite amazed. I’d assumed that because I was upset about my Granny it would be even harder to get down to studying, but somehow it made it easier. But only for that one assignment. I thought the same might happen last year when my Grandad died, but it didn’t. I continued to be as unorganised in my study as ever. But I think that is also because I dealt with my Grandad’s death better – I had learnt techniques of how to deal with grief. I wrote about my feelings every day, to work through them (which no doubt made me self-aware and not on autopilot). Gosh, it is like a catch-22. Being on autopilot is not healthy. It’s when you switch off from all the shit and pain and stuff and just function as a robot. Being self-aware and deliberate is healthy – but it stops me being able to organise my life and get things done. Of course, the ideal would be to switch to and from autopilot and self-aware at will – but it is the very switching that I can’t do.

Well, I had no idea that writing this blog entry would bring me to this dilemma – I hadn’t thought of it until I was writing (again, proving the necessity of writing to process my thoughts and make me self-aware). Well, I suppose I will have to think on it and try to come up with something.