SEPARATION ANXIETY

A quote from the “Autism Not Weird” website regarding obsessions:

“Normal people have interests. Autistic people have obsessions.”

The writer stated he was being cynical in his quote. Well, I’ll write what I know. Obsessions, having them, is a daily thing as I go about the business of living. My interests go well beyond interests.

One computer is fine, but three? One TV is fine, but three? A few boxes of cereal is fine, but nine boxes of favorite brands stored in my bedroom closet? (The kitchen is my Mom’s territory). A few packs of six-pack diet soda is fine, but five to six six-packs stored in the same closet? My bedroom is not a house of horrors, but is one for housing obsessions.

A crisis is when a product of one of my obsessions goes on the blink or goes missing. Just recently one of my gadgets gave me a bad case of “separation anxiety”.  It was a product from my obsession of electronic gadgetry.   

It wasn’t a member of my cheaper line of gadgets; although, a cheaper one would have given me anxiety too.  I’m a mother hen over my gadgets! I don’t mean that lightly.

The gadget that gave me such a scare was my smartphone.  I first noticed it was not in its designated sweatpants pocket after I got back inside my car at the grocery store.  I figured I had left it at home.  WRONG!  I was horrified that it wasn’t there either.  I do mean horrified!   My tummy was tied in knots.  The Aspie in me was headed for a shutdown. 

My phone is connected to my home computer and a check on my computer showed wherever my phone was it was outside of wi-fi range.  My car is connected to my phone, too, and it told me I wouldn’t find it there either. I still combed my car twice though. I called the grocery store to report it and no one had turned one in.   

Not in the house.  Not in my car.  I was at my wit’s end.  Thoughts were popping in my mind as to what to do.  I went on-line to my phone website and suspended my phone service just in case someone found it who wouldn’t do the right thing.  How did I know to do that? I’ve lost my phone enough times, that’s how.

At a low point, feeling sick to my tummy, a thought came to ask my “Google” voice-activated device to “find my phone”.  The Google-friendly male voice’s response was “I can’t respond to your request since I don’t recognize your voice.  Try going on Google and searching on ‘where’s my device'”.  I guess my “separation anxiety” affected the tone of my voice.  I did sound pitiful all right. 

I didn’t have much hope but I took up the suggestion since I had nothing to lose.  Since I was logged in on Google Chrome, it recognized my Google account and my Google pixel phone, and pulled up the map on my computer screen.  I clicked on the icon and low and behold the picture of the grocery store’s parking lot pulled up.   

I took Google at its word and drove the mile and a half back to the store.  With my suffering from separation anxiety, that mile and a half felt like an across-town trip.  I kid you not! It was like all drivers in my path got the word to “SLOW DOWN”!  It was like the two traffic stop intersections were notified to turn RED upon my arrival.  Did I have a meltdown at the wheel? Well, I did take out my anxiety on the steering wheel.

As I pulled up to the parking lot, I saw my phone lying down at the exact spot where I had gotten out of the car.  Relieved? You would have thought I was a Mama bear who had found her lost cub.

The drive back home didn’t feel near as long as the drive there.  I prayed with gratitude to the Lord for guiding me through my separation anxiety.  Such as NOT giving into panic and ordering a new phone.  Yelp, I was tempted! 

This wasn’t a major storm in my life; although, it felt like it at the moment.  But seriously, it was a minor storm and I believe the Lord works in those little storms too.  Some might ask me, “Why would the Lord care about you losing your smartphone for the upteenth time?”  I take it on faith He knows all about my Autism and why it is that my gadgets are like my own kids. 

My Mom told me I should wear that phone around my neck.  I laughed because it is true.  I conveniently blamed it on my sweat pants’ pocket.  The pocket was not designed to be a phone-keeper-in-tact.  My Mom helped me out by sewing on elastic strips on the opening of the pants pocket.  That way when I wear those pants, (they are a favorite pair) I can put the phone in my pocket and seal it up.  Smart thinking on my Mom’s part.  I wish more of her smartness would rub off on me.  As it is, I do wear my keys around my neck.  I haven’t locked my keys in the car with it running since.

No Middle Ground

When I like something, I go way, way, overboard. When I don’t, it wouldn’t bother me in the least to not see that something for the rest of my days. Obsessions is one of the slices of my Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) pie. Compared to the ASD meltdown slice, it is easier to digest.

Fifteen years ago, more or less, I had a base case of VAC-itis. Some see a vacuum as a household tool; I saw it as a toy. At the height of my VAC-itis, my then-apartment resembled a used vac store. When asked why I had so many, I could only think to say “I don’t rightly know.” This was years before I knew about my ASD and the true reason behind my vac obsession as well as other obsessions.

My VAC-itis started when I bought one after moving into a new apartment in 2005. The apartment building was only a few years old and the apartment was the nicest-looking one I had ever lived in. I wanted to keep the apartment “spic and span”. When I went shopping for a vac, I was in awe of the various kinds in the vacs. They had come a long way since I had been down the vac aisle. I didn’t buy a regular run-of-the-mill one but one that had the feel and look of something out of this world. Its accessories in my eyes were tools to play with. I know it sounds strange and I promise I’m not making this up.

It wasn’t long before I added a hand vac, a stick vac, and mini-vacs that ate crumbs off of desk tops. I went big and acquired a heavy-duty vac that also sipped up water from off the floor. This really came in handy when the toilet overflowed. I didn’t forget a vac for my car. I graduated to the carpet steam cleaner. I didn’t much care for the steamer after it burned my hand giving me third degree burns.

On hindsight, my VAC-itis was an offspring of my gadget-itis. My obsession with gadgets that come with batteries or a power cord go back so far that I don’t know when gadget-itis started. In the past few years, my gadget-itis has broadened to electric scooters and video game and virtual reality consoles.   

My obsessions isn’t limited to things I work or play with. It extends to what I eat. My bedroom closet is proof of that. I would keep my food items in the kitchen but I don’t live in a place all my own. I share the kitchen space but I don’t share my bedroom. Cereals, snacks, sodas, etc. reside in my closet along with my clothes. I maintain the supply of my favorite foods in bulk! I grieve as if I lost my best friend when one of my favorite brands is banished from every food store in the neighborhood.

Obsessions come and stay for the long haul; some are short-term; and some come and return. I should know. My latest addition: a broom and vac in one!

I Like It Blank

I’ve been in retirement ville for almost two years at this writing. What do I like most about retirement? I have fewer events to dread beforehand, to endure, and to recover from.

A good week is the one on my calendar that is blank! No events. No appointments. Most weeks, thanks to being among the truly retired of the AARP membership, I can get by with more blank weeks.

Although there are fewer of them, I still have events to attend to. It is a well-known fact that the more birthdays you have, the more likelihood of doctor visits, lab tests, therapy sessions, hospital stays, and so on. I have been so fortunate that at the age of 62, I have only been a hospital patient once and I was way too young to remember it since it was at birth. But it seems that since I hit the 50 mark, I am having to make multiple visits in a year’s time to a doctor for this check-up and a doctor for something else. Gone are the days when I got away with not going to the doctor except when I was hurting so bad that I gave in.

Each appointment is an “event” that I am looking forward to being OVER! I will not relax about it until I walk out of the doctor’s office. I have nightmares before the event. I take my anxiety pill that I only take for “as needed” the night before. I rehearse beforehand of what I will say to the doctor as if I have a crystal ball forecasting his questions. Even though I can’t recall a time when what I rehearsed did in fact occur, I still rehearse anyway. I cannot help it!

There are other events I must attend to as well. My car has health exams, too, every six months or so. Then, there are the unexpected repair appointments that carry with them extra anxiety since they were unplanned. I dread the car appointments as much as my own. It’s not unusual for my car to be held up in the examining room longer than myself.

Thanks to retirement, I have no work parties or lunch invites. Some of my former colleagues go to retirement luncheons on a monthly or semi-monthly basis. It is nothing against them, but I wouldn’t go to one unless a gun was at my back. That’s an exaggeration but I kid you not, not by much. When I was a member of the work force, I couldn’t get out of parties but I didn’t have to fear being invited to go to lunch with one or more. I suspect it was because my excuses not to join them for lunch got pretty lame.

Another event is family gatherings. I truly wish I could enjoy such events as my family members do, but I haven’t found a way to make that wish come true. Before I learned I had Autism, I didn’t understand why the gatherings, usually on major holidays, did not live up to my expectations. I did like the food though and watching the kids play. If the kids let me join them, I would! It was more fun playing with them than being at the grown-up table where my mute button was on. The year of 2020, I got out of these events for the entire year because of a pandemic. I was not glad at all about the pandemic. Absolutely awful! Something I hope I never live through again. I knew of those who died and those who survived it. Even as bad as it was, there were a few silver linings and that was one of them.

I don’t wish for no events for the year! I’m not that much a hermit. But I am grateful for retirement where I have fewer events and have more choice in making or avoiding them.

Playing with Billy

“Billy” is my nickname for my Autism. I have a nickname for my car, a nickname for each of my scooters, and it seemed like a good idea to have a nickname for something I live with around the clock.

Alex Durig, a Ph.D., author of numerous books about autism, wrote that people with Autism will often enjoy doing puzzles. I totally agree with Durig. Working on puzzles is on my daily routine list. If there is a day that I don’t touch a puzzle, it is a day that I’m on my backside in utter misery. I mean UTTER misery! It has happened so seldom that I can’t recall offhand when I had a puzzle-less day.

As for how good I am, it depends on the puzzle. Easy Crossword – a champ! Hard -not so much. I don’t want to waste my puzzle books. They are expensive enough that I don’t want to throw one away that has more unsolved than solved puzzles. My method is to look up some of the answers to the hard puzzles to downgrade them to “medium, or “easy”, so I can solve them and make more use of the puzzle book.

The type of word puzzles that are solved and those that are blank when I toss the puzzle book says something about Billy and me. Back when I was a library cataloger, the computer technician and I worked closely since I was the “mother” of the library on-line catalog. She thought I was good at feeding the catalog healthy data vs. bad. She shared with me her observation that I enjoyed playing with words. I don’t take every compliment I receive to the bank, but this one I did. It explains why I like playing word games: crosswords, word searches, cryptograms, quota-grams, and other assorted word puzzles.

The puzzles I don’t touch are logic problems. A typical logic problem goes something like this: Who won the $100, $200, $500, and $1,000 games? Person A wasn’t the winner of the $1,000 game; Person B didn’t win the $500; Person D won more than at least one other player; Person C won half of what another person won, etc. Billy cannot compute that much verbage at once! It reminds me of my difficulty in decoding a long string of verbal instructions such as the box is in the door closet in the bedroom where the plants are, on the second shelf to the right inside the door, towards the back of the shelf, under some pairs of shoes. Got that? NOPE! Draw me a map please!

Durig also wrote that research indicates that people with autism tend to excel at, or favor, tasks requiring deductive reasoning. WOW! That just may explain why puzzles, like Sudoku, are ones I can enjoy doing because they don’t leave me stumped. To play this popular mathematics game, I deduce what number goes in a square by the rules of the game and the numbers I am given. Unlike logic games, Sudoku has no verbage.

I play games on video consoles too.  I would have never thought I would become a video-gamer.  Not in a million years.  You see I have never wanted to play games with others. I didn’t as a kid and that has not changed with my aging.   I was tickled pink when I discovered that there were “single-player” games on these consoles.

The games on my account reflect Billy. There are no role-playing games where I play a super-hero and put mobsters in their place, no strategy games like building a town from scratch, and no games where I have to think outside the box.

A game I consider to be therapeutic as well as entertaining is a Disney game. Mostly children play this game but Billy is 62 going on 12. I lose more than I win. Besides humbling me, it is a calming exercise. The game opens up with a screen diagram, similar to a crossword diagram, with a shape in each block. The shapes may be that of a square, triangle, circle etc. I play the game by moving one block up, down, right, or left so that it is adjacent to two identical shapes. The three in a row, across or down, will knock down a row. The goal of the game is to move the block containing a “special” object, unlike any of the other shapes, to the bottom of the diagram. The reason I seldom win is the same reason I don’t play logic word puzzles. There is a logical way to select which set of threesome, step-by-step, to move the “special” block to the bottom of the deck before the “Too Bad!” appears on the screen. Even though I seldom win, it is a favorite because I like detecting patterns and that’s a common trait of those living on the Spectrum.

I’m also a virtual-reality (VR) gamer too. In my bedroom, I can be caught playing with goggles on my head making all kinds of arm and leg motions. It’s not as strange for me to do as it maybe other folks my age. Because of Billy, I stem with pacing and running in place in any room of the house.

My favorite game includes several songs with up to five levels of difficulty, starting from Easy all the way to Expert+. My VR motion controllers turn into a pair of glowing swords, with one on the left hand being red in most songs, and my right hand being blue. In each song, a stream of blocks come at me, each block being either blue or red. I use my swords to slash the blocks, red blocks with my left hand, and blues with my right. When a block is slashed, it is destroyed and a score is awarded.

Why does Billy like this game? Each of the songs have a pattern. Such as a repetitive of three blue blocks in a row, followed by a single red, etc. The more I play the song, the more familiar I become with a song’s pattern and my score improves. I have upgraded from the “easy” to “normal”, and on a few songs, the “hard”. No expectation of reaching Expert and Expert+. Why? Billy and I are not quick on the feet. The higher levels are too many red and blue blocks coming at me at once. I can’t switch from blue to red, right and left hands, in fast motion. I have this annoying problem about having to “think” when I’m having to choose between my left and right or push or pull. But no matter. I’m content playing to the beat and pattern at a speed that Billy and I can master.

Therefore, Billy has a big say in what games or puzzles I like to play and what I don’t. What comes natural to me and what doesn’t. If someone were to ask me what is a bright side to Billy, I can answer that in various ways. One is to show them my almost finished puzzle book.