working it out as I go along

Today is the last day of February. It has been a bit of a difficult month for me, because my organisation strategies seemed to fall apart. So for a while I felt very discouraged and began to think there was no hope for me to ever get organised, because I couldn’t stick at it. But then I analysed it logically, and realised that there was a simple explanation.

I analysed it as follows: December was a relatively easy month to be organised, because all I was concentrating on was organisational strategies. My whole focus was becoming organised, and I even had the external structure of Advent which I chose to use for this purpose. January was a bit harder, but still okay. In January I had started my Open University course, so I was working at applying my strategies to study. I had two things to concentrate on: organisational strategies and studying an OU course. Then in February I registered for a second OU course, and also started working several shifts a week. And thus I had four things to concentrate on: organisational strategies, first OU course, second OU course and work. Not to mention the new physical exercise thing I decided to do, where I walk to work and back (and which is quite tiring at first, since I’d been pretty inactive at first, so walking 4 miles to work and 4 miles home takes a bit of getting used to). So February had a steep increase in the number of things I had to focus on.

Well, once I’d realised that was the reason for February being a bit of a failure month, I felt better, because that this made sense, and in fact is the reason for me having a year out, so that I can deal with this very inability to multitask. So I realised my next task is to learn how to juggle these four things effectively. And then I remembered that Lent was about to start, which made me very happy, because that gives me an external structure again – a time frame in which I can devote myself to a particular goal.

I realise, by the way, that my reasons for observing Lent are not those of most Christians. I don’t like to say that I don’t do it for Christian reasons, because my way of viewing life is that God is in all I do and should be a motivating factor for everything in my life. For instance, I go to work and I seek to serve God at work. I study and I seek to serve God in study. I seek for God to be in all I do, because to me this is the point of being a Christian – being in constant union with God. I don’t really see a separation between ‘God activities’ and ’secular activities’. But I realise that many Christians do, and so for them, work or study would be secular activities, whereas Lent would be a God activity.  And they do Lent so that they may share in the sufferings of Christ. I don’t do Lent for this reason. I don’t understand that reason. How I see it is that Christ came to earth as a human that he may share in our sufferings. We already suffer – it’s part of the human condition. To purposely decide to suffer in a new way seems pointless. Besides, if Christ suffered in order to share in our sufferings, it seems to be a bit redundant if we then add extra sufferings in order to share his – and kind of like we’re competing in suffering. And his suffering was the ultimate suffering anyway, which none of us could share. So I don’t do Lent to suffer. I do it to help me focus my life and gain discipline. And I don’t see that as separate from God, because surely I am more effective in serving him if I am able to focus and be disciplined. So that is why I do Lent.

Anyway, here is what I have decided for Lent. I will devote it to trying to juggle these four areas of organisation skills, first OU course, second OU course and work. I thought at first that I’d better make that five, and add spiritual life, but then I realised that doesn’t really fit with my view that God is part of everything. I know that a lot of organisation books have mind maps of areas of your life, and they include many things that I haven’t included, such as spiritual, social, health, financial, etc. But I’m not adding those, because spiritual should underpin everything, social I am not particularly interested in doing regularly right now (and I am with people at work, so I’m not a complete hermit), and health seems to be taking care of itself in that I am walking to work and back, which is having a very good effect on me.  As for financial, well, that is very easy to do, because I simply just don’t spend money on anything unnecessary. If I don’t have the money, I don’t spend it. Actually, finances have become an interesting hobby for me, and I like to analyse it all as I walk to work, and work out the very smallest amount of money I can live off. I like being frugal, and this helps give me a sense of control over my life, which helps me feel more organised.

Anyway, another thing I am doing for Lent is that I am restricting my internet time very strictly. I will only go online from 9:00pm to 11:00pm. A lot of days this works out that I can only go online for quarter of an hour, because if I finish my shift at 9:30pm and walk four miles home, then I get home beteween 10:30pm and 10:45pm. But I planned it this way on purpose, because I do not even want to be online for two hours a day. This is not a self-denial thing. I actually find myself feeling depressed and frustrated from spending too much time online, so this is very freeing for me. But it’s something I will only do with the external motivation of Lent. However, this internet restriction does not include writing of blog entries. I write my blog entries offline, when my laptop is not connected to the internet. I like writing blog entries and I do not see it as a waste of time, because it really helps me process and centre my thoughts, and sometimes it can be useful for those who read too.

Another thing I’m doing to help me organise my life is to use my diary more creatively. I have a page-a-day diary. At first I was simply dividing each day into forty-minute segments and then getting discouraged when I didn’t use each segment in a productive way. Now I write different things I do in different colours on the page, and draw boxes around them, so I can see what I’ve achieved. I also write down how much money I’ve spent, if I spend money, and how much money I have earnt, on the days when I get my payslip. And I write down my gas and electricity readings each day, to see how much I am using per day. I try to use less than £1 of each per day. One thing I want to buy is a digital camera, so I will work some extra shifts at some point to buy one, and then I will take a photo of a diary page and post it to show how I am organising my days.

Well, I wrote this earlier, and now I have returned home from work and it’s 10:45pm, and I’m about to post this. A frustration with my work and trying to be healthy is that sometimes they work against each other. My job can be very hard physical work and potentially harmful for your back. Had a very frustrating shift, where we were expected to move a couple of clients who can’t consistently weight-bear, which means they can at any minute put all their weight on a staff member and hurt them. Really, they needed a hoist to move them. But the manager wouldn’t let us use hoists – she insisted that these clients could walk because they had walked a few steps the other day. So she thought they were somehow being ‘bad’ – which is daft, because these clients have had strokes and are paralysed on one side of their body, which obviously makes walking really hard for them.  And naturally they are exhausted. Sometimes they can move a few steps very hesitantly and with lots of effort, but often it’s too exhausting for them. The manager told us to be ‘firm’ with these clients, because they were just ‘playing up’. In fact, with one woman, she went in and yelled at her, telling her that if she didn’t stand up then she’d have to stay in wet knickers all day. And this poor woman has a look of constant anxiety and sometimes terror on her face when we have to move her. I hate this – I do not believe in being firm to make her do something she’s too exhausted to do, and which scares her, because she knows she could fall, and scares me, because if she falls on me she’ll hurt me as well as herself. So I have decided I won’t work any more shifts in this care home while these clients are there. Which potentially means less work for me. But I will trust God for enough work. And now it’s 10:59, so I have to post this right now!

I wrote this earlier:

On Monday morning, the agency phoned to tell me my shift was cancelled. Which actually felt quite nice – it’s like unexpectedly being given a holiday. Sure, I don’t get the money, but I’d had so many shifts the week before, it didn’t matter so much.

However, there was then the dilemma of how to get in my regular habit of walking. While working a shift motivates me to walk, simply because I have to get to work, if I have nowhere to go, then it is hard to motivate myself to walk. But I really wanted to keep up the walking habit I’d started, so I decided to find somewhere to go. I would go to the city centre and hand in my time sheets, as I had to do that at some point anyway.

I initially decided I wouldn’t walk to the city centre, because it’s too far away. But I know that logically that is is not a real reason, because it’s only between five and six miles, so not much further than walking to various workplaces. But there were other reasons I didn’t want to walk – I find the walk to the city centre confusing. I’ve been a few times before with a friend from college, and every time I would try to memorise the way, and every time I would fail. I have absolutely no sense of direction. If I am looking on a map, I can find my way anywhere, but if I have no map I am not able to find my way from landmarks and things. I need to see the map first. I do have a map, but I wasn’t able to find the way to the city centre on it, because the direct way means walking by a very busy intersection with no pavement. So in my head, the only ‘correct’ way was the way I’d been with this college friend, and I had no idea which way this was on the map – I couldn’t remember whether we’d turned left or right at various points.

So, I decided to walk part of the way and then take the bus when I got stuck. But when I got to the part where I was stuck, I realised I didn’t want to take the bus. I hadn’t walked far enough. I was now on a roll and wanted to walk the whole way. So I decided to improvise, and go a way that seemed to make sense on the map, and if it turned out to be an impossible way, I would turn back.

I found a way to walk. I realised it was a bit different from the way I’d walked with my friend, but also at a certain point, I actually realised what the way was that I’d walked with her, because I met a certain road from one direction and then saw the bridge from which I’d walked with my friend meeting the road in the other direction. And then I realised how it was actually very easy and not at all scary to walk to the city centre, and I thought about why I’d thought it was so impossible and overwhelming.

This is what I realised. When other people teach me things, I get overwhelmed. I need to figure things out for myself. This friend, while she was showing me the landmarks and explaining that her way was better than the main road, had actually overwhelmed me because she was talking from some context that I didn’t share. It is the same with lectures at college – I don’t learn from being taught. I need to be told simply the target and then allowed to be free to find my own way to attain it. To be coached in the way is highly confusing for me. I simply need a clear target.

Well, this is quite discouraging in a way, because if I am to return to college or switch to another college, and finish my degree, I will need to attend lectures and continue to be confused. Unless, possibly, I were to attend a college that does problem-based learning, where they give you the problem and you have to go away and solve it. I like the idea of that. However, I believe that such courses also make you do it in groups, which I don’t like. I need to solve things all by myself.

Something else I’ve observed is that while I can walk five miles and not get exhausted from it, ten minutes under a fluorescent light will totally exhaust me. It seems silly, but that is how it is. Sensory overstimulation exhausts me.

Today it is Wednesday, and I realise that today I am exhausted. My first thought was that it must be from all that walking on Monday, but then I realised that actually that walk didn’t exhaust me at all. I’m exhausted because yesterday I went on ‘breakaway’ training. It is not a physically strenuous training, although it is physical. It involves learning how to break away from clients who attack you – if they grab your arm, for instance, or try to strangle you, or pull your hair. This is so that I can work in learning disabilities as well as with elderly. We did a few warm ups for the course, but it wasn’t tiring.

There were three things that were tiring about the course though.

One was the fluorescent lights. I didn’t realise they would have such an effect on me, because the natural light was so bright, but there came a point where I got really dizzy and I couldn’t think straight – I was aware I was zoning out. So I asked if I could turn off the fluorescent lights, and the guy said yes, and I did – and it actually made no difference to the brightness of the room, but made a huge difference to me.

The second thing that was tiring about the course was the physical coordination – trying to watch the moves that the instructor was making and then make them myself. I find such things very confusing – like learning to dance or doing step aerobics. I always do it wrong. My body doesn’t coordinate well, and it’s very hard to watch someone do something and then translate it to my own body.

The third thing that exhausted me about this course was the physical contact. It was too much. I don’t like my arm being grabbed, not even gently. I still can feel where people grabbed my arm, hours later. At work I don’t let the residents grab my arm or even hold my hand. I put one hand on their back and my other hand lightly holds their arm, and I’ll only do it that way. That is the safest way anyway, so I tell them that. Anyway, I don’t like having to be constantly paired up with another person and do physical stuff with them, like on this course, where they have to hold me or grab me and I have to hold them or grab them. I don’t like any of this stuff because it invades my space and I am too sensitive to it, and it makes me feel exhausted and boundary-less. I don’t mind someone occasionally touching me in a friendly way, but I don’t like all this physical pair-work.

And then I did an unwise thing after the training. I went to the sauna and steamroom, which normally I like, but yesterday it exhausted me even more, because that is more physical sensation and there comes a point where there is too much. For instance, I love massages, but right now I could not have a massage. It would be intrusive, because my body has had its fill of sensory stuff. I have to go to work in a minute because I have a shift today, and I am really not looking forward to it, because I am tired in this way. I do not feel like assisting anyone to the toilet or transferring them into their wheelchairs and lifting their legs and all that. I just feel like being all by myself. But anyway, then I don’t have a shift until Saturday, and I won’t take any more shifts this week, so I hope I will be rested by then.

Right now I am feeling a fragmentedness in my life. There is no sense of continuity, because I’ve been doing different things on different days, and I haven’t been doing my organisation strategies lately, because it’s hard to switch between work mode and strategy mode, and I don’t have the energy at the moment. But it is good that I’m aware of this, and it’s something I need to find a strategy to fix, because this is of course what life is like, and what it will be like if I return to college, so I need to find a way of dealing with it. I did have an idea of having a physical prompt – something to always have in my pocket to grasp regularly to give me a sense of continuity and remind me to work on strategies and to see the big picture. I will try this and see if it works.

(Am back from work now and very much looking forward to two days off!)

After five days of shift work, I now have a day off and can continue what I was writing here.

I wrote a while back about my night shift, two Mondays ago. Well, the Thursday of that week, I had accepted a PM shift in a different care home. But when it came to the Thursday, I was feeling very unwell, and my abdomen was in a lot of pain. I get this every month – for about two weeks of each month, I get a lot of pain, intermittently each day. Sometimes so bad that I throw up, or I black out, and I often have to lie down, and it is very frustrating because it can be quite disabling. I also get extreme exhaustion. Well, normally when doing agency work, I take time off when I am feeling like this. However, because I’ve returned to agency work after a break of being at college, and they are therefore not yet giving me regular shifts, I decided that phoning to cancel the shift would not be wise. So I decided to go to work, feeling unwell.

Now, normally when I take a shift when I’m feeling unwell, I will take the bus to work, because I feel too tired to walk, but lately I have been more and more aware of how the motion of taking the bus makes me feel very dizzy and out of sorts. So I decided to walk. It was a four-mile walk, and it’s very hilly where I live, so the walk can be tiring because of the climbing of hills. Well, the walk starts with an especially steep hill, and I realised when I was walking up this hill that I was feeling even more unwell, and I felt like I was going to pass out. I contemplated phoning to cancel the shift, but I get quite determined once I’ve started something (or possibly it’s the inertia thing – once I’ve started, it’s easier to keep going than to stop), so I decided to carry on, and figured that if I was really ill when I got to work, they’d just send me home.

Well, I kept walking, and then a strange thing happened. After I’d walked about a mile, the pain started to subside. And then, after a while, i found I was feeling great. No more faintness, no more pain, no more exhaustion. By the time I arrived at work, I felt full of energy. I worked the shift, and then decided to walk home too (normally, I will take the bus home if I walk to work, because I decide that walking both ways is too much). I walked home, and felt full of energy.

The next day, when I woke up, I felt great. No pain at all. I also felt a sort of momentum. As if the act of walking had somehow put me into some kind of momentum for other things. It was easier to get down to doing things like study and housework.

Well, I thought about this and made some connections in my head. I’ve had these monthly pains for about 8 years, but there was one month when I didn’t have them – and that was when I went hiking in Scotland with a Canadian friend, several years ago. I’m not a particularly active outdoorsy person, but my Canadian friend is, and she wanted to go hiking in Scotland, and since she was my guest, and I’d always fancied going to Scotland, I agreed to it. I remember finding it very tiring, as I wasn’t used to hills at all, but I also remember noting with a mix of astonishment and satisfaction that I had no pains or faintness or unwell feelings.

Now, I assume the hills must have something to do with this, because where I used to live, where it wasn’t hilly, I walked quite a bit, and I still got the pains every month. I imagine it is something to do with moving one’s legs up and down as well as forwards – it must get the womb moving or something. I also imagine it must be necessary to walk more than just a couple of miles, and to walk regularly. So this was a good thing to realise – I was able to formulate a simple plan as to how not to get pains and exhaustion and unwellness every month.

However, when I didn’t have shifts to work, I had no motivation just to go walking. So for the next few days, I stayed at home. I discovered that the effects of the walking lasted two days. I felt great on the Friday, so-so on the Saturday, and then on Sunday I was getting pains again (although not such bad pains as usual). But I had a new bodily awareness. Normally I react to the pains by wondering what I can eat to make them better – but this time I felt an awareness that eating would make no difference, and that my body really needs exercise to help the pains. But I didn’t want to go outside. It was raining, and I could not muster up any motivation. But then it occurred to me that I could do some sort of exercise indoors. So I did some jumping jacks, and then some jogging on the spot, and then some stretching exercises, and then some more jumping jacks, and I felt better afterwards – not just physically better, but also more motivated and as if I’d conjured up some momentum. It wasn’t as good as the long hilly walk – the pains returned later and I had to keep doing such exercises.

Anyway, as I think I have mentioned, the following week (this last week), I was given five shifts. Two were in a care home which is too far away to walk, so I walked part of the distance only and took the bus for the rest) and the other three were in a care home which is only three miles away, so I walked the whole way – both there and back. Even when I was very tired, I forced myself to do this, as a sort of experiment, to see if it would work. And it did – it was definitely worth it. This last week I would normally have been in a lot of pain and feeling very unwell, but I have felt great. The only slightly negative thing I’ve experienced was being very tired (but not the overwhelming exhaustion I normally get – just the tiredness one gets after doing a lot of exercise) and having aching legs from all the walking (but the aching subsided the more I walked, and I decided that the aching was actually a positive thing, because it’s evidence that I am fit and healthy enough to walk long distances – I am especially aware of how mobility is something to be grateful for when I work in care homes with elderly people who need assistance to walk).

Well, today is Sunday, and I have a day off. I have another shift tomorrow (I got a phone call from the agency today offering me the shift tomorrow and I took it).  I am grateful for my day off, but am also looking forward to work tomorrow. This whole realisation about the healing and motivating power of walking on me has given me even more enthusiasm for my agency shifts, because I still see the whole walking thing as a type of experiment, where I observe the effects it has on me.

So far, based on my experiences of the last two weeks, I have the following hypothesis:

Regularly walking substantial distances involving hills has the following effects on me:

1. It takes away abdominal pains and helps me feel healthy
2. It makes me feel more cheerful and positive
3. It creates a sort of momentum, which somehow works against the inertia thing, making it easier for me to get started on things

I have no idea how regularly I would need to do this walking in order for it to have a constant affect on my life, but then this is what I hope to observe as I work various shifts. I will obviously also have to observe whether the same happens next month, regarding lack of pain, or whether this is just a one-off thing. I want to make sure I do it at least three times a week. I might supplement with swimming, but I don’t think I can replace it with swimming, as there have been times in the past where I would swim every day and although it helped, it never got rid of my pains. So I think I will make it my goal to walk at least 5 miles at least three times a week.

It’s been a while since I’ve written in here, and that absence of entries was actually deliberate – at least, at first. Last time I wrote in here, which was following a night shift, after I’d had a sleep and was stilll very tired, I wrote the entry and came online to post it. I realised afterwards this was really daft, particularly in the light of what I’d written about inertia getting worse with tiredness. The place where my inertia is worst is the internet. So I stayed on the internet all evening and then all night, till 7:00am my brain so tired that it hardly knew what it was doing. So then I told myself I must not go on the internet when I am tired.

However, since then I have been on the internet, and it has been on my mind that I want to write in here about new things I have observed. I have also been working quite a few shifts. It is interesting being solely dependent on an agency to give me work. It’s not like a stable job where I know I will get a certain amount of money each month. I am dependent on whether there is work available and whether the agency chooses to give it to me – but ultimately, I see it as me being dependent on God. I have to trust God in a different sort of way from before. Especially at the moment – because I haven’t worked with the agency for a while, they do not give me any priority. They don’t give me shifts at the beginning of the week in advance for that week, like they do with some people. They offer me the really last minute shifts – so they’ll phone me at 1:30pm and say ‘Can you work at such-and-such a care home this afternoon, from 2:30 to 9:30?’ And I say ‘I wouldn’t be able to start at that time because I wouldn’t have time to get there by then, but I could start at 4:00pm’. And because they can’t get anyone else to cover the shift, they agree to that.

There is actually something I like about such last minute shifts. I find that having a rota where I know my shifts for the month ahead is quite depressing. It’s always in my mind and I’m always working around it, and my life seems to loom ahead of me, all pre-arranged with a stifling sameness. If I wake up in the morning knowing I’m going to work in the afternoon, that knowledge casts a shadow on the morning and I can’t focus. If I don’t know, then I can totally enjoy the morning, assuming I have the whole day ahead of me to do as I please. There is no chance for anticipation – and the anticipation is always more gloomy than the shift, because I generally enjoy work when I’m there. There is something very satisfying about the simple act of helping people with the basics of living – assisting them to the toilet, to the dining room, serving them food, helping them to bed. I feel I am contributing to society at a simple, core level. I see straight away the effects of my work – it’s something so simple and yet so essential. And so many residents appreciate such small things – the fact that you joke with them, or smile, or listen to them, or reassure them. It’s very humbling. And it is nice being agency staff, because I don’t get burdened by any of the staff politics.

So I realise how agency work suits my personality more than regular work with a contract. I know that logically I should feel insecure because the work is not guaranteed, and particularly now that a lot of care homes have closed down, but I really am feeling a trust in God about this – in what Jesus says about considering the sparrows and the flowers, and how God knows we need food and clothes and will provide.
…

Well… just after I finished typing the previous paragraph, the agency phoned me with a shift for this afternoon. So I agreed to do it and then went to prepare some lunch to eat before I go, and then the agency phoned me again to give me a shift for tomorrow and another shift for the day after. Sometimes it feels like God is smiling down at me and winking.

Now, I must eat my lunch now and leave for my shift, so I haven’t had time to write about all the things I was going to write about. But I will post this as it is, so that I get back in the habit of updating my blog, and I will write the other stuff another time.

On 2nd February, my plans were somewhat disrupted by a night shift.

I’d started the day by writing my daily thoughts, which enabled me to evaluate the previous day and what had worked well, and I started to plan what I would do that day.. I’d done about half of it by 6:00pm. I’d just returned from grocery shopping and was planning my evening meal and study when the agency I work with phoned me and asked if I would be able to work a night shift that night.

I am quite an indecisive person, because I always think off all the pros and cons all at once and then I get overwhelmed. Doing agency work really makes me aware of my indecisiveness, because it often demands on the spot decisions like that, which I defer a little by asking questions – What home did you say it is at? What road is that on again? Can you remind me what are the hours of a night shift? etc. – while my mind is racing.

Yesterday the racing-mind decision-making process went like this: Ooh – night shift. More hours and mre money than day shifts. Almost double what I’d earn on a PM shift. I really need money. But, um, I decided I wouldn’t do any more night shifts because they make me feel unwell. I should pay attention to that decision and say no. But, well, for the past few nights I’ve been going to bed at 3:30am, so I’ve developed a habit of staying up half the night anyway. If I don’t do this night shift, I will spend from 9:00pm to 3:30am on the internet, no matter how much I tell myself not to, so I might as well be spending that time earning money, putting elderly people to bed and helping them go to the toilet, and, besides, there will no doubt be quite a lot of time where I am just sitting there doing nothing, so I could study too. I could get quite a bit of study done in between the hourly rounds. But I might feel too tired to concentrate. But considering I stay up till 3:30 anyway, I won’t be too tired before then. And I can walk there and get my exercise for the day, and I can walk home tomorrow and get my exercise for tomorrow. And I can listen to my iPod on the way and listen to lots of iTunes U lectures. And, well, one night of awakeness isn’t the end of the world. I occasionally spend all night on the internet.

So I took the shift. I walked there, and felt very refreshed when I got there because it’s a four-mile walk. I listened to two iTunes U lectures on the way. It turned out to be quite a busy shift, but still I managed to get lots of studying done. I walked home the next morning, feeling very tired and zoned out, and not enjoying the snow, which was falling quite heavily. And then when I got home I had a bath and stayed in the bath far longer than I normally do, and only got out because it was getting cold! Then I dried my hair for far longer than was necessary and then went to bed. slept from 10am to 4:30pm, and I woke up feeling the weird heavy sort of tiredness that comes with doing a night shift, and I wondered whether I’d made the right decision. I lay in bed analysing it came up with some interesting thoughts:

When I am tired, my Asperger characteristics are increased. One such characteristic is a difficulty with auditory processing. This means when I hear people talk, I don’t automatically get the meaning of what they are saying. I can hear and understand individual words – and the details of the accent in which they are spoken – but not the meaning of them all put together. Lessons at school never had much meaning for me unless they were really interesting and made sense in an obvious sort of way, which heightened my focus and alertness. I have never been able to do listening comprehension of other languages that I have learnt, despite the fact that in all other aspects I was very good at the languages. It wasn’t that I was hearing wrongly – if someone says something in French, I can repeat it and sound almost as if I’m French (whether I understand it or not!). It wasn’t that I didn’t have the vocabulary or grammar – I was always very advanced at that. It was simply that I didn’t understand the spoken form – not even after attending a French summer school, where French was spoken all the time.

Obviously it’s more pronounced in other languages than in English. And there are many ways of getting round it in English – I tend to have a reputation for being a daydreamer and not paying attention. But this is not really completely what it is – I notice other people absorb what people are saying without maintaining the intense sort of attention I need in order to do so. Now, it is something I’ve worked a lot on over the years, and taught myself to concentrate and I can generally do it now if I focus. It seemed to disintegrate a bit at college over these past couple of years, because there were so many other things exhausting and stressing my body – such as the fluorescent lights, the powerpoints, and the fact that the course is so unorganised that I never have a sense of overall context.

But one odd thing is that I automatically seem to process the individual sounds a person makes, and the details of phonemic variation and accent. This is why I’m very good at phonetics at college and I never struggle with it in the way that others do. It comes completely naturally to me. I remember when our phonetics teacher was explaining that there are many ways that one person can pronounce one word, depending on linguistic context, environmental context, etc. and they can even change a consonant and people still understand – and she was saying this so that we’d understand that what we do naturally is actually a really advanced and complex skill, but my unspoken response was ‘Yes! I know! This is why it is so bloody hard to understand what people say!’ Well, apparently ‘normal’ people can filter out phonetic differences and hear all phonemic variations of the same word as the same. But I can’t do this. I hear every variation. That is why it is such an effort to get the meaning – because I am simultaneously taking in the exact phonetic sounds.

Well, the reason I was thinking about this was that it happened this morning as I was walking home from work listening to my iPod. I had actually been finding I could absorb the meaning of the iTunes U lectures really well – I was focusing intensely on what I was listening to with no stressful distractions. But this morning, I was very very tired and zoned out, so what I was absorbing was along these lines: Why does the lecturer pronounce ‘measure’ as ‘may-sure’? He doesn’t have an accent of someone whose mother tongue is not English. He seems to be clearly American. Is that a form of American accent? I can’t remember having heard that before. Maybe he learnt it wrongly when he was a child and never noticed. Oh – he pronounces ‘vision’ as ‘vee-sion’. Maybe he elongates short vowels when they are preceded by a ‘zh’ sound. Let me see if he elongates them in other places… oh, yes, before an ‘l’, but not before a ‘k’. Maybe only before voiced consonants. Oh, not before ‘g’ – maybe not before stops. But he says ‘brain’ more like ‘bren’ – the opposite thing. Or is it simply that the ‘e’ of his ‘measure’ is the same as in ‘brain’ – it seems too long for one and too short for the other. Maybe they are the same sound to him. I must ask American people if they make a difference between the initial vowel in ‘measure’ and the vowel in ‘brain’. Is one a diphthong for Americans or not. Maybe it’s an Italian thing – maybe he has Italian ancestry.

Well, so you see how my tiredness affected my auditory processing. And I noticed as well that it affected – increased – the whole inertia thing. Why else would I not get out of the bath? I actually have noticed in the past that this is a pattern of mine – when I am very tired it’s like I’m too tired to get out of the bath. It’s not that I’m unable to – somehow, the intrinsic motivation seems to go and I even forget that people are supposed to get out of baths and I just stay there until acted upon by the external motivation of the water being cold! This reminds me of something similar – when I was a child, if I was on holiday with my family or some holiday group, I liked to find a stream and walk along it. But once I started walking, it would never occur to me that at some point I should stop and go back. I would keep walking for hours – until I realised I needed the toilet! Then I would walk back to go to the toilet – and would always be very confused as to why I was greeted with people shouting out my name in relief and asking if I was okay and where I’d been and how worried they were.

Well, this morning, not only did the inertia thing happen in the bath, it happened with blowdrying my hair. This has actually never happened before – probably because I rarely dry my hair. But I was about to get into bed, it was snowing out and my house was cold, and I didn’t want to sleep wih wet hair. So I dried it. And then I just sat there continuing to dry it. Eventually I realised what I was doing and made myself turn off the hairdryer and go to bed.

Now, it occurs to me that this sort of thing, though more pronounced in people on the autistic spectrum, must surely happen to everyone. I’ve often heard people say they are too tired to go to bed. Maybe it’s not that they are literally too tired to move – maybe it’s that tiredness has suppressed their ability to initiate action, and placed them into that inertia state.

On a similar note, when I wrote my daily thoughts today, after I’d got up, I realised that emotionally I wasn’t feeling anything. Or rather, I wasn’t aware of feeling anything. Just tiredness. Now, it is commonly said that people on the autistic spectrum have difficulty processing and expressing emotion, and it occurs to me that maybe this is why. Firstly there is the whole inertia thing – not being consciously aware until thinking about it. But also there is the tiredness – the being overwhelmed by so many sensory stimuli, and being unable to filter out – which can cut off your ability to know how you feel. I think this is a normal thing at some level in everyone. I’ve sometimes asked people how they are feeling about something emotionally, and they have said ‘I’m too tired too feel anything’ or ‘I just feel tired’. I remember when my Grandad died last year I was very bothered by the fact that I didn’t have chance to feel sad properly because I was so exhausted and unwell with travelling to my placement every week, and so stressed by the many demands of college and placement. It was like my brain didn’t have enough space in it to feel sad as well – sort of like when a computer is using too much of its RAM – so I had to feel sad later when it was the holidays.

Sometimes I feel very frustrated when non-autistic ‘experts’ try to explain how the minds of people on the autistic spectrum work, because they don’t realise all these things. I often think I’d like to write a book properly explaining what it is like. And now I am thinking it is like when your computer has too many things running, and you have to close some of them in order for it to function properly, or else it freezes, or else works really slowly. This is what it is like in my brain – but I am not able to close things that are running in my brain, because I am always aware of everything that is going on. This is why I like to have a simple life. And why it is better to do things one at a time, and to be given instructions one at a time, rather than having lots of assignments that I’ve been told about all at once.

Well, anyway, this entry was about how I did a night shift. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea in general for me to do night shifts, but this one was good because it taught me a lot about myself and how my mind works. It was also good because of the study I got done – and there is another example of tiredness increasing inertia (this time the inertia of motion). I was so tired last night and was often thinking I’d done enough study and I wanted to stop. But somehow I kept going, as if driven purely by the fact that I’d started. The momentum was enough to override what my conscious mind was saying.

This entry might be a bit disjointed, because I am still tired, and seem to have decrease in my ability to look at the whole and bring it together. I have simply been pursuing the strands of details, perhaps because I am processing as I write. Maybe in the future I can bring this together as a coherent whole. My diary title – ‘working it out as I go along’ – is true in more ways than I realised when I thought of it. It refers not just to the process of experimenting with techniques for my life, but also to the very act of processing things mentally as I write them.

I like the start of a new month. I’d felt my strategies unravelling and was having difficulty getting restarted, but today the fact of the new month made it so much easier to start anew. Logically this does not make a lot of sense – one can start anew at any time, without the external division of time into months – but somehow it was what it took to motivate me. It marks a clear end to January and the beginning of a new period of time. So I decided February would be the month where I focus on study.

Since I’d done all that reading about inertia, it made sense that I should try setting myself in motion, as it were, with my studies. To see if once I started, I’d keep going, according to the law of inertia. So today I tried this.

It actually took a while to get myself started. I had decided that once I’d written my daily thoughts, I would go straight into studying. But somehow this didn’t work. I wanted to put away ten things from the living room first. And since then I wanted to put away ten items of clean laundry. And then I wanted to wash the dishes from last night. And then, for some bizarre reason, I wanted to clean all the mirrors (that is one of the more obscure things that I have an index card for!). And then I wanted to clean all the windows (which really didn’t need cleaning, as I cleaned them a couple of weeks ago). I simply wanted to do things that were on the index cards. And I wanted to find things to do while I was listening to my iPod.

I also realised that while I’d thought my organisation strategies had become unravelled towards the latter half of January, I’d still been doing a lot of the things that were on the index cards, even though I wasn’t using the index careds. Somehow I’d got used to them and was doing them almost as a habit. And today, now that I’d decided to start using the index cards again, I was doubly motivated, because it’s nice to be able to slot the cards forward once I’ve done them.

Well, finally I sat down to study. And I realised that I really needed to have a plan. What puts me off studying is that I tell myself I will read certain chapters, but I have no sense of how long it will take and I easily get discouraged when it takes longer than I thought. So I decided on the following plan:

For several segments of 40 minutes in a row, I would read for the first 30 minutes of these segments, and then have a 10-minute break. I decided that I would read ten pages per 30 minutes, and then I counted how many pages left of the book there were to read, and there were 80 pages left. So I calculated that it would take 8 lots of 40-minute segments, and that I had more than enough 40-minute segments to complete the book.

Well, I thought I might get a bit fed up of this rather rigid way of doing it, and that I’d get distracted and want to do other things, but I found that after each ten-minute break I wanted to go straight back to the book. I had originally told myself that after the first 3 40-minute segments, I would have a long break, where I would spend the following 40 minutes doing something completely different. But this didn’t happen – I wanted to go back to the book. Sometimes I would tell myself ‘Okay, it’s time to eat, so after this 40-minute segment, I’m going to spend the next 40 minutes making a meal and eating it’. But this never happened either. I guess the ‘inertia of motion’ thing was happening, because I always returned to the book. After the 7th segment, when I had one more left to do, I did get a bit distracted. I made a cold meal to eat after I’d finished, and then I washed dishes, and then I used the dishwater to wash the floor and then to pour down the toilets to clean them, and then I decided I would clean the toilets properly and the sinks, and I got on a bit of a cleaning roll, which took longer than the 10-minute break I was supposed to have. Although, to be honest, I was aware of this happening and I decided to let it happen, and to spend the entire next 40 minutes cleaning, because I was curious as to whether it would stop me getting back to my study book. It didn’t. After I’d done that little spurt of cleaning, I started eating my meal, and then I got impatient to get back to studying, so I left half my meal to eat later, and went to finish reading the book.

I am feeling very happy about this. Mostly because I’ve found it so very hard to motivate myself to do studying, and I seem to have found a way to get myself on a roll. Normally it is the internet I always return to – it seems to be a sort of default for me – but today it was studying. And that is what I would like to happen all the time. For my default to be studying, rather than studying to be something that I can never get myself to do.

So, I have decided that February will be a study-focused month. I will try to do this every day, and I will write about each day here, to keep me accountable and to stop me giving up on the idea.