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Following on from parts one, two and three, I’m giving an rough outline of the course of my life to date, not necessarily with regards Aspergers directly, but just to give the history of how I’ve got to where I am.

Socialising

At the end of part two I mentioned that I started to spend most of my weekends in Manchester with my friend Emma. She was very sociable and would have friends over for socials every weekend, so I started to learn how to socialise. I realised that I am a slow burn. It takes me a while to get to know people, but once I know them I can be very sociable, but I have to be comfortable with them. I also quickly came to learn that if Emma wasn’t there, then I would really struggle making conversation with people that I could easily talk to when she was there.

It’s the same today. I can be sociable with Maria’s friends when she is present, but if I picked them up to bring back to our house, or when taking them home, I would always feel very uncomfortable making conversation. I need the comfort blanket of knowing that there is someone there to bail me out if needed.

Moving To Manchester

At the start of 2001, Emma asked me to take her car to the local car wash. Enroute we noticed that the show house had been opened on a new Barrat Homes development, so we stopped and went for a mooch. I left an hour later having bought a new home that I didn’t realise I needed. The sales rep was clearly very good at her job. To date it’s still the biggest impulse buy of my life.

On the day that I took ownership of the house we found out that my mum had cancer for the third time in 9 years, and this time it was terminal. This kind of threw things up into the air a bit. I know that sounds a bit glib and coldhearted, but I’ll write in a later post about how I coped with that.

My mum was severely ill; she could not keep food down due to the nature of the cancer, so she was hospitalised and then moved to a hospice. She was in for 17 weeks before she eventually passed away on 22nd August 2001. So I delayed moving into my house in Manchester and stayed at the home I’d shared with my mum so that I could easily visit her, which I did every day.

As I needed to furnish my house in Manchester I asked the sales rep if she would have a key and let deliveries in for me, which she agreed to do. Her name was Maria, and she was a vision of beauty. To be honest one of the reasons why she’d managed to sell me a house that I didn’t know I was looking for was because I instantly fancied her. Over the course of the months that she was helping me out we struck up a friendship, and then one day she told me that she was moving sites. I was gutted.

I didn’t see her again until a few days after my mum passed away when I visited her new site. It was on this day that she told me that she was pregnant. It had never dawned on me to ask her if she was single, so my heart sank, but it turned out that she had been engaged, but had split up recently.

Our friendship developed slowly and I first invited her over a few weeks before her daughter was born. To this day she still points out to me that you should let the heavily pregnant woman sleep in the double bed and you take the single in the spare room, but hey I’m Aspie, and I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant.

I finally found the courage to ask her out on a proper date in the following April. We dated but as with my previous relationships it only lasted for a few months before things went wrong. As before it seemed to be down to my behaviour, this time my anxiety rather than lack of social skills. We remained friends and they came to stay with me every weekend for the next 10 years. It was as though we were a family, but we were not in a relationship. We’d holiday together, and do all the things that couples with young kids do, but there was no romantic or sexual connection.

Then one day she told me that she had met someone. My world fell apart instantly. I’d been in love with her for years, but had never dared to tell her. I’d taken her to Paris to fly on Concorde for my 30th birthday in 2003 and told her that weekend that I loved her, and she didn’t speak to me for over a month. So I feared that if I told her again that she’d never see me again. I’d lose my weekend happy families routine, and I’d be alone.

I would constantly tell myself that I’d never find anyone else and I’d be eternally lonely. I know that is supposed to be what we Aspie’s crave, but it isn’t. It really isn’t. Every one wants to be with somebody in some capacity, it’s just that the anxieties involved in that make if very hard for someone with ASD.

As I had nothing to lose I sat down and a wrote her a letter telling her exactly how I felt, which I sent through the post. She called me and told me that she felt the same. Not one to do anything by halves, and fearing that she might change her mind, I suggested that I move in straight away, which I did.

In retrospect that was probably a mistake, but I’ll leave that for the next part.

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Until recently there has been just one period of my life when I’ve lived alone, and that was from the age of 28 to 38. During that period the only person that I had to feed was myself so I could pretty much do what I wanted, and I did.

I love to cook. It’s one of my hobbies. I’ve collated around 500 or so recipes that I’ve tried over the years. But it’s boring when there is only yourself to cook for. I’m recently single again for the first time in 8 years, and I’ve started to revert back to how I ate during my only other period of singledom.

I have the same thing over and over. Repetitive eating.

For years all that I would have for my lunch would be tinned tuna fish. My kitchen cupboard could easily have 50 cans in it at any one time. There was a little bit of variation in my diet. I would either have sandwiches, or with a light salad.

My evening meals would be a little more varied. I would batch cook once a month and freeze enough meals for the coming month. However, I’d only pre-cook 3 or 4 different meals. A lamb curry, a chicken curry, bolognese and chili. Sometimes I’d have the same meal night after night.

I’d never get bored of eating the same thing day after day, but then suddenly I’d stop and move on to the next food obsession. I’m not sure whether this is an ASD thing or not, but I don’t know of anyone else that enjoys having the same meals day after day.

I’ve branched out these days on the batch cooking. As well as the 4 mentioned I also prepare a variety of pulled porks, beef bourguignon, stews, and goat curry, so there the time between repetition is greater these days.

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I work for one of the world’s largest online technology companies as a Web Application Developer.

When I was researching Aspergers I came across this logo online and decided to use it as my avatar on the company’s internal bug tracking system.

A few months later my manager took me to one side and asked me to stop using it as someone within the company had complained that it was offensive.

As I was playing with their ball I complied and chose a different avatar.

However, the company dress policy doesn’t prevent staff from wearing pin badges, so I purchased the image as a badge and have been wearing it to work for the past 4 years just to stick two fingers up to whom ever it was that made the complaint.

You can buy one here https://www.zazzle.co.uk/asperger_king_button-145642560160442614

I’m not affiliated with Zazzle in any way. Just a happy customer.

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It’s almost 5 years since was diagnosed with Asperger’s, aged 41. Since then I’ve been on one hell of a roller-coaster of a ride, and during that time I’ve discovered that all the weird difficult people in my life are in fact normal, and that I’m the weird difficult one. It’s certainly been one hell of a journey, as annoying people would say.

One thing that I’ve discovered about myself is that I really can’t communicate in real time. That’s where the majority of my problems stem from.

What I have learned is that I am OK at expressing myself in writing. That’s great, but you can’t go through your life asking people to wait whilst you write a letter to them, when you’re stood face to face with them.

But that did help me when I was sent to live with my uncle for a year, when my partner of the time, Maria, could no longer cope with me. And again when she moved back to her mum’s for a couple of weeks.

I was able to write down how I felt in letters to her. I’d write, read, and re-write and never gave her most of them. Eventually I’d come up with something that truly reflected what I wanted to say and give the letter to her. From that she was able to understand me, and things were resolved.

But relationships require real-time communication, and eventually ours broke down for the third and final time in 2018.

I wasn’t looking to meet someone following our separation, but someone found me pretty much straight away. But this only lasted for 6 months, and came to an end 6 weeks ago when I had a full on autistic meltdown.

So that’s autism 2 – relationships 0.

So I’ve decided to do what I’ve been meaning to do since getting my diagnosis, and I’ve started a blog.

The primary purpose of the blog is for me to try to understand myself. As I said, I learn a great deal from writing letters when things go wrong, so hopefully this will be just as therapeutic to me, now that I’ve no one to write letters to.

I’ll also post about normal day to day stuff that probably has little or nothing to do with my autism. I’m going to be frank and honest, with no topic off limits, so for that reason some names may be changed to protect the innocent.

Whether or not any of what I post will be of interest to anyone I know not. But over the past few years I’ve been into schools to give talks about autism to parents and teachers, and also to people in the youth organisation that I’m actively involved in, and people are always entertained. So hopefully some of what I write will be of interest.