(My) autism and restlessness

There’s something peculiar about summer, besides the obvious concepts of higher temperatures and the longer daylight hours.  There’s an amped-up-ness, a summer zenith opposing the winter’s nadir, a yang running counter to yin.

And everybody “out there”, meaning outside of my apartment, is just a little more yang.  It happens every year; I wonder if they notice the pattern?

But patterns are my job.  I’m a Systemizer, after all.

I’ve often lived my life with the sensation of being an outside observer, living on the planet but not really in it.  Being human without being a member of society.  Being a classmate or a family member without being much of a participant.

My lack of social interaction permits me the spare time to notice things others miss, although the medical professionals would rather focus on that which others see that I miss.  I suppose I could put the “ire” back in “irony”, but it would be lost on most (of them), so it seems a futile gesture.

Speaking of irony, I suppose I could take a moment and turn any power of perception I might possess inward instead.  And if I’m perfectly honest with myself, I notice that my own “yang” factor bumps up a little higher around this time of year, too.

Normally, this results in a sharper, more intense laser-focus on areas of intense interests, projects, and the search for information and intellectual stimulus.  Normally I create more, produce more, advance more, develop more, and have more to show for the time I’ve spent hunkered down for hours on end without finding a stopping point.

I have usually found summertime grand, for exactly that reason.  My basal mental energy rises and falls with the seasons, and I’ve been quite comfortable with that.

This year and last year however, the whole year has been somewhat of a stopping point.  Hell, I’m not even sure I had a starting point.  Summertime came, and, like last year, I could not shift into that higher gear I’d come to know and love and flourish in.

For at this moment, and for the past couple of years now, I have felt somewhat stuck.  Stuck in what, I’m not sure.  I might describe it as a fog or a mist, or perhaps a slick, greasy film of oil coating my brain.  I’m scattered, my focus dissipated and disordered.

This does not jibe well with my Asperger’s/autism, of course.  It creates an antsy-ness that won’t subside.  My Aspie/autistic brain wants to catch onto a target-topic in its crosshairs, latch onto it, and fly.  It wants to learn, create, and produce for the sheer joy of learning, creating, and producing.  This damp, misty confusion only frustrates that energy, much like the bright setting on vehicle headlights only worsen nighttime fog and further reduce one’s ability to see the road and immediate surroundings.

But my AS brain only knows one way of operating; my “lights” are either on the high-beam setting, or they’re off.  There are no “running lights”.  There’s no in-between.  And yet, my brain won’t turn on its high-beams.

You see the conundrum.

You can imagine two pictures, side by side, of the same landscape.  One was taken on a bright, clear, sunny day, with deep blue sky and vivid color.  The other was taken on a dreary day with dense, low-lying fog that obscures everything except that which is closest by, which is then converted to some kind of depressing grayscale.

My brain wants to function like the first picture.  Instead, it functions like the second.

And if I attempt to look at the scenery through a pair of binoculars, all I see is the fog in finer detail, appearing closer to me than I would like it to.

So, scratch the binoculars.

Except that I want to focus.

Conundrums breed restlessness.  To remedy this, most people go to the beach.  If they’re “normal” people, they’ll go despite crowds of others with the same idea.  Somehow, water and shorelines have recuperation effects that make all be right with the world.

Not I, said the Wave.  (Which is pretty funny, if you think about it, given my blog title.  But waves are for surfers and social movements.)  I’d rather go to the desert.  It’s the antithesis of drizzle, the bright against the bleak, the dry against the damp, the perfect counter-strategy for me.

A good road trip to the desert would indeed be ideal in this situation.  Unlike the beach and the lake or ocean (I’m relatively close to either), the desert blows me dry, clears me out, gets me going.  I think.  At least, it has before.  It seems as though now, everything has changed somewhat–a glitch in the Matrix.

I wouldn’t know for sure, though, because I haven’t yet tried.  Although school will be back in session here in a matter of weeks, signaling the coming autumn, we’ll remain quite warm here until around late-November.  Perfect time to drive out into the desert.

But money is tight, and the traffic is intense at this time of year.  I’ll likely need to wait until school starts again, when vacation time is over and everyone scurries back into their daily routines, chained once again to their daily lives.

Until then, I bide my time, doing what I can, plotting my journey, getting through each day, trying to make out what I can through the mist, and hoping I’m seeing things as they appear to be.  I’m pretty sure I’m not, but it’s the best that I can do.

In the meantime, I can work out, which I’ve started again, I can devise plans for a time when my head is clearer and my mind sharper, and I can relax in the evenings to a Netflix marathon of BBC’s “Sherlock” series.  😉

The sun is bright, and brightness eventually burns away mist.

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(Image Credit: Danny O’Connor)

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