Each of us have a few unusual foibles, in rare cases they define who we are but in most of us they simply help, along with physical characteristics, identify us as individuals. In many instances these imperfections are seen in a positive light, as a character quirk or a small sign of eccentricity, “Oh, that’s John for you!”
But, label a group of people with a unifying description, and these same traits become disabilities. As an Asperger I have a number of traits that can be identified as being common with others labelled with the same mind set, because, face it, that’s what Aspergers basically is. A group of people who share a particular vision of the world in which we live.
One of the traits that impacts on my daily life is hypersensitivity. In the normal use of this descriptive word, it defines a person as more prone to allergic reaction from an external stimulus. For me this means noise and touch, but not just any noise or touch, just a few specific types.
Complicated noise, that is noise made up of various components, like the hubbub of conversation of a large group of people (the level of the noise is not the deciding factor) since this hubbub could emanate from a cocktail setting or a nightclub with throbbing music, it’s the jumbled babble that acts like hay fever’s pollen and every verbal stimuli, no matter how banal, sets off warning alarms throughout my system, overloading my brain.
Random gentle touch does the same thing. Moving through a packed crowd where you have to frequently and randomly touch people as you (or they) do to get through the crowd sets my nerves all on end, with each touch escalating my sensitivity to a point where I feel I have to scream to to release the tension.
I think, for me, a big component of this hypersensitivity is random patterns. Patterns dominate my life, they explain, they sooth, they comfort and they entertain me. From the banal ritualistic life patterns of getting up in the morning, getting ready for work, working, getting home, going to bed in preparation for another day, the patterns of eating – breakfast; lunch; snack; tea; dinner, the patterns in music, the patterns in dance, the patterns in numbers…even the patterns in human relationships.
Not being able to discern a pattern, hence jumbled noise, random touches etc. are hard for me to deal with. Even simple things like a cluttered desk makes it hard for me to work, first I have to convert it into a recognizable pattern. For entertainment I play a game whenever I'm driving, I look at the license plate of the car in front of me and try to determine the pattern of relationship of one number/letter to the other. Letters are converted to number by their position in the alphabet.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t transform into a raving lunatic from hypersensitivity, after all I've been dealing with this since I was born. Like most people who suffer from allergies I know the triggers and try to stay away from them, but when it’s necessary to place myself in such a situation I can steel my mind against it for a limited time, and I have to withdraw from time to time, to reduce the stress before heading back into the fray.
And like the allergic, my hypersensitivity does not end with the elimination of the stimuli, it takes time for my body to return to normal. This means isolation time, a removal of stimuli, to allow my body to return to its normal state.
These, and other traits, make me an Asperger but it does not define me, it does not control me. The one mistake many people, including some of those closest to me, make is defining me based on a series of general traits that can be ascribed to Asperger’s syndrome, instead of seeing my positive virtues which break me out from the crowd and define me as an individual.
They mistakenly try to mend my weaknesses, rather than build upon my strengths, excellence can be achieved only by focusing on strengths and managing weaknesses, not through the elimination of weaknesses.
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