Journeys with Autism

I’ve never really considered myself a literal thinker. Most Aspies seem to have many childhood memories of taking idioms and metaphors literally. I have just one or two, and I usually have trouble bringing them to mind. I’ve often wondered why I don’t have lots of childhood stories about literal thinking. It bothers me, because I want to sit by the campfire and make all the other Aspies laugh, too.

In the last couple of days, though, it’s occurred to me that I have a major piece of literal thinking that derails me time and time again: I take people at their word. Or, to put it another way: When people say things, the picture that their words paint seems so real to me that the image takes on a reality of its own, even when I know that the words aren’t true. And worse than that, I believe that other people will be taken in by these words. That’s when I start to worry, big time.

Part of the problem is that I don’t really understand deception. I don’t understand why people would say things that are patently false. I can come up with all kinds of reasons for this phenomenon, from self-deception to outright cruelty, but viscerally, I feel a deep loyalty to words and what they represent. Just as I would never use a saw to cut an apple, I’d never use a word to signify something that I know isn’t true. I can’t fathom why other people don’t see it that way.

But what really gives words their power over me is that I see them spelled out in my mind when people speak. When someone tells me his or her name, for instance, I see the name spelled out in my head. Multiply this example a few million times, and you’ll get a good picture of how my mind sees information on a daily basis. It’s as though the words themselves, because they are so vivid in my mind, have actual, living substance, rather than being inert, disposable objects.

This way of seeing trips me up in a couple of ways. For one thing, it can make me very inflexible. For example, when my husband says that he is going to be home at 8 pm, I see the words so clearly in my mind that it’s as though what they signify has already happened.

Time and again, my husband and I have knocked heads over this issue. He’ll tell me that he’s going to put Plan 1.0 into action, and I’ll get ready for Plan 1.0. Then, Plan 1.0 changes to Plan 1.1, or Plan 1.13, or Plan 1.13A or, for reasons I can’t even begin to imagine, Plan 5.0. I mean, how can you go from Plan 1.13A to Plan 5.0 without going through Plans 2 through 4 first?

If there is an external, objective, unchangeable reason for the plan to be modified, I can adjust—not always gracefully, but I can get there within a reasonable amount of time. After all, it’s not my husband’s fault if there’s a backup on the highway or the store doesn’t carry my daughter’s favorite brand of cereal.

But if the plan changes just because people decide that they’d rather do Plan 1.13 than Plan 1.0, I’m lost. Utterly lost. Ultimately, I throw my hands up in resignation at the desecration of all that is high and holy, wander in a wilderness bereft of logic, and send the following unanswerable question into the void:

Do WORDS have ANY meaning AT ALL anymore?

I have spoken that question so many times in my life, I can’t keep count.

Now, if inflexibility were the only problem that results from the vividness of the words in my head, I wouldn’t mind. But there is a much worse problem. When someone says something that I know isn’t true, I get so confused that I start to panic. I can adduce all kinds of reasons why a person would lie, but the cognitive dissonance causes me so much physical, mental, and emotional pain that my current context fades out, and a brave new world comes into being, hewn from the stone containing the lies, as though the previous context had never existed.

And if this entire new reality hinges on someone saying something untrue about me, dear G-d in heaven, I’ve got to clear my schedule so that I can perseverate on it for several days and drive my husband nuts with the catastrophe going on in my head:

WHAT? Oh no! How can anyone SAY that about me? It’s not fair! It’s so untrue. And here are all the REASONS it’s untrue. [Insert numerous reasons here, repeat them, increase volume with each repetition.] And oh, yeah, I just thought of another reason. [Add new reason, repeat entire sequence, increase volume with each repetition.]

This is bullshit. How can anyone say SAY such things?

Oh. My. G-d. Maybe they’re right. Maybe everything they’re saying is true. Maybe the sky really is red at noon and we all walk on our hands to the store on Tuesday. I mean, if it wasn’t true, why would they say it?

And maybe it really is all my fault. Maybe the sky was blue and we all walked upright until I came along and fucked it all up.

No, no, no. It’s not my fault. I know that. I know it, I know it, I know it. [Insert numerous reasons here, repeat them, increase volume with each repetition.] And oh, yeah, here are twelve more reasons.  [Add twelve more reasons here, repeat entire sequence, increase volume with each repetition.]

But no one else knows it’s not my fault. Oh, crap. Everyone’s going to believe that I turned the fucking sky red. My life is toast.

It goes on like this until I get a migraine. Then, somehow, if the Sumatriptan kicks in fast enough, the hard drive with all this crap on it melts like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz—except that the flying monkeys scoop up some of the best bits and bytes and scatter them hither and yon into my poor, tired brain. After all, the witch must be avenged. 

At that point, I figure, I’d better keep busy and have some ice cream. So what if dairy isn’t good for me? Holy shit, the world is ending, and it’s all my fault. Give me my chocolate.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

In an October, 2007 article, Henry Markram, Tania Rinaldi, and Kamila Markram of the Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, posit a new theory about how the brains of autistic people work. They refer to autism as Intense World Syndrome, turning widely accepted thinking about autism on its head.

I recently stumbled across this article, so I thought I’d share some of its insights. While I dislike some of the authors’ attitudes toward autism and autistic people, their theory seems to reflect many of the ways in which we describe our own experiences.

I’ll get the negative aspects of the article out of the way first, and then we can look at the positive things the authors have to say.

Problems with the Article
1. There is the usual garbage about how we suffer from a horrendous disease. For example, the article begins with the following words: “Autism is a devastating neurodevelopmental disorder…”

They’re lucky I’m tenacious and hopelessly optimistic. And autistic and hyper-focused. Otherwise, I’d have stopped right there.

2. The authors show a stunning lack of knowledge about how autistic people learn and develop over the course of our lives. For example, the authors state, “Autism is now recognized as a neurodevelopmental disorder manifesting within the first 3 years after birth and progressively worsening in the course of life.”

I guess I’m lucky I can still write. I’d better get going on the rest of this post before I lose any more brain function.

3. The authors make the blithe assumption that autism can (and should) be cured.

They first posit that autism is a disorder in which the “normal unfolding of the genome can be sabotaged by an epigenetic attack.” An epigenetic attack is one that causes a genetic change without affecting the underlying DNA sequence. The authors speculate on possible causes of such an attack, such as environmental toxins.

But never fear. There’s hope for us mutants yet. The authors continue: “Understanding the ultimate cause of autism lies in understanding the nature of the epigenetic attack and developing the ultimate cure for autism lies in being able to prevent this attack and reverse its effects once it has occurred.”

So someday, someone may try to turn me into a normal person. Good luck.

4. They come to their conclusions based mainly on research using lab rats. (I’m not defending the rights of lab rats. I’m pretty warm and fuzzy toward most animals, but as far as I’m concerned, rats are on their own.) My issue is that they use rats to arrive at conclusions that they could also arrive at by talking to autistic people.

If I didn’t mind flying, being away from home, or going on sensory overload, I’d probably spend some time outside one of these labs with a sign reading:

TO THE NEURO-TYPICAL DOCTORS:
FORGET ABOUT THE RATS.
THERE IS AN AUTISTIC PERSON OUTSIDE.
SHE WILL TALK TO YOU FOR FREE.
JUST USE YOUR WORDS, AND YOU WILL FIND TRUTH.

Okay, so much for the problems. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Definition of Intense World Syndrome
The authors lay out their hypothesis in this way:

“Based on the recent multi-screening results obtained on the valproic acid (VPA) rat model of autism, we propose here a unifying hypothesis of autism where the core neurophysiological pathology is excessive neuronal information processing and storage in local circuits of the brain, which gives rise to hyper-functioning of the brain regions most affected. Such hyper-functioning in different brain regions is proposed to cause hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory that could potentially explain the full spectrum of symptoms in autism.”

Neurons process and transmit information by electrochemical signals in the brain. Sensory neurons respond to visual, auditory, tactile, and other stimuli. So, according to these scientists, autistic people do an excessive amount of sensory processing. We experience the sensory world more intensely than other people, we attend to details in a more focused way than other people, and we store information (that interests us) far longer than other people.

Makes sense to me.

They continue: “We propose that a common molecular syndrome is activated in autism that produces hyper-functioning in a coordinated manner by forming hyper-reactive and hyper-plastic microcircuits in different brain areas.” As far as I can tell, they are positing that the autistic brain reacts more strongly to sensory stimuli than a neuro-typical brain (thus, the “hyper-reactive” microcircuits), and rearranges the connections between its neurons more often than a neuro-typical brain (thus, the “hyper-plastic” microcircuits).

The researchers then suggest that our hyper-reactive and hyper-plastic microcircuits cause us difficulty in integrating sensory stimuli. Thus, we tend to focus intensely on one part of the sensory world, and we have difficulty shifting our attention:

“This core hyper-functioning pathology is proposed to cause the spectrum of autistic symptoms by rendering local neural circuits hyper-sensitive to novel and past stimulation, and once activated, these microcircuits could become autonomous, difficult to control and coordinate with the activity in other microcircuits. Hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity are therefore proposed to cause exaggerated perception to fragments of a sensory world that are normally holistically correlated…and furthermore to cause hyper-focusing on fragments of the sensory world with exaggerated and persistent attention. Such hyper-attention could become difficult to shift to new stimuli…The positive consequences are exceptional capabilities for specific tasks while the negative consequences are a rapid lock down of behavioral routines to a minute fraction of possibilities, which are then repeated excessively.”

The authors also discuss their finding that autistic people may have a hyper-reactive amygdala, the part of the brain that processes memory and emotion. Because the amygdala is hyper-reactive, they believe, we do not let go of fear memories in the same way as neuro-typical people. We therefore perseverate as a way to calm and channel our anxiety.

Having concluded that our brains are highly sensitive, the authors assert: “In such a scenario, the world may become painfully intense for autistics and we, therefore, propose autism as an Intense World Syndrome.”

I think that’s right.

Now for the fun part: upending the accepted theories.

Poor Executive Function Theory
The term executive function refers to a person’s ability to disengage from his or her current environment in order to act upon a model of behavior in the mind or a series of future goals. Because autistic people tend to have poor executive function and a preference for sameness and routine, researchers had assumed that this deficit derived from hypo-functioning of the pre-frontal lobes.

However, the Intense World Syndrome theory posits that poor executive function derives from hyper-functionality of the brain’s circuits, causing an autistic person to attend to, remember, and focus on particular pieces of information, especially stimuli in one’s current environment.

Theory of Mind (ToM) and Mind-Blindness
Just because it’s so wonderful to hear someone else say these things, I’ll let the researchers speak for themselves:

“Autistic people are thought to be severely impaired in empathising with other people and ‘reading their mind,’ which is captured in the ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mind-blindness’ theory of autism… The proposed deficits in reading other people’s feelings and thoughts and the lack in empathising with other people has been commonly used to explain the impairments in social interactions and communication as well as inappropriate responses in social encounters…

We…propose that the autistic person may perceive his surroundings not only as overwhelmingly intense due to hyper-reactivity of primary sensory areas, but also as aversive and highly stressful due to a hyper-reactive amygdala, which also makes quick and powerful fear associations with usually neutral stimuli. The autistic person may well try to cope with the intense and aversive world by avoidance. Thus, impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into some else’s position or lack of emotionality, but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.”

I think they’re onto us now.

The Hypo-Functioning Amygdala Theory
I’ll let the authors speak for themselves again:

“The current version of the amygdala theory of autism assumes a hypo-functional amygdala, which leads to lack or inappropriateness of social behavior in autism. In this view, autists fail to assign emotional significance to their environment and for this reason are not interested in others, do not attend to faces, and fail to engage in normal social interaction…[W]e propose that this view may be not correct and that quite to the contrary, the amygdala in the autistic individual may be hyper-reactive which leads to rapid excessive responses to socio-emotional stimuli. In this view, the autistic person would be overwhelmed with emotional significance and salience. As a consequence, the subject would want to avoid this emotional overload and would have to withdraw from situations, such as social encounters, which are rich in complex stimuli.”

Amazing, isn’t it? I keep reading this paragraph over and over, just to make sure it’s real.

The “Autistic Person Is Missing Some Puzzle Pieces” Theory
Far from considering autistic people as incomplete individuals with missing pieces, the authors conclude that “the autistic person is an individual with remarkable and far above average capabilities due to greatly enhanced perception, attention and memory. In fact, it is this hyper-functionality which could render the individual debilitated.”

In Closing
I found my way to the Intense World Syndrome theory by way of a great article by Maia Szalavitz. The article discusses Intense World Syndrome and contains some very good information about autism and empathy. 

Looks like word is getting out.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

[Note 1: This post includes some general information about the abuse I experienced as a child. The descriptions aren't graphic, but if you're not feeling up to reading about the subject, feel free to skip this post.]

[Note 2: I spell the word God like this: G-d. It represents my belief that G-d is beyond all words and images, beyond any name I could employ to represent the unfathomable mystery of existence. It works for me, but I don't mean to suggest that it should work for you. I have enough on my hands without telling other people what to believe!]

And now, my post:

In the process of realizing that many of my challenges are neurological, rather than psychological, I’ve begun reassessing key relationships from earlier times in my life. A great deal comes into focus. I can make sense of things that had previously been entirely baffling. Most of the issues revolve around my very painful relationship with my parents and extended family, so these are the issues I will share in this post.

My Relationship with My Father
My father was most likely an Aspie. He was abusive, but in a very odd kind of way. He lacked meanness and guile. I never felt that he was a bad person. He just didn’t understand boundaries or what kind of behavior was appropriate. He seemed very lost. I knew he was on overload a lot, even though I didn’t have the words for it. He had many other Asperger traits: he couldn’t make eye contact, he thrived on non-sequiturs, he loved detail, he couldn’t hear me in situations involving more than two people, and he constantly interrupted and changed the subject of any conversation.

Regarding the abuse, I don’t excuse his behavior, but I see why it always had this weird quality of cluelessness rather than malice. It never seemed textbook, and until I discovered AS, I was mystified as to why. I kept waiting to meet someone with a story similar to mine, but despite going to a number of survivor support groups over the years, I never found anyone who did.

My Relationship with My Mother
Oy. My mother was always certain that she was right and knew the proper way to do things. And everything—everything—was always about her. For instance, if I were sick, she wouldn’t say, “Oh, I’m sorry you don’t feel well.” Instead, she’d say, “Goddamit, I had plans today.”

Needless to say, she dominated both my father and me. My next-door neighbor from childhood described my parents in this way: “Your father is a puppet, and your mother is the puppeteer.” I immediately had an image of my mother in the second-story window manipulating the puppet strings while my father watered the lawn. It was the perfect image to describe their relationship. As a result, she was able to dominate me almost entirely. It was like living with a tornado.

It may have been common for Aspies in my parents’ generation to marry a dominating partner. I can see why an undiagnosed Aspie might want to marry someone who is absolutely sure she is right, at all times and in all places. It didn’t go very well for me as a child, however.

My Relationship with My Extended Family
When I was 33, I cut off contact with my both of my parents. I wasn’t able to assert my boundaries and be taken seriously, so I continued to feel very unsafe, even in adulthood. After every conversation with my mother (even from 3000 miles away), I fell into very deep depressions in which I didn’t think that I deserved to live. In response to my breaking contact with my parents, the rest of my extended family broke contact with me, including my brother (and only sibling). I have tried to reestablish contact with several family members, but my attempts have been rejected.

Taking a Sensory Perspective
You can see why I approached these issues from a psychological perspective for many years. Working on my healing in conventional psychotherapy did me a world of good.

But the picture never seemed complete until I brought in my Aspie sensory issues. For example, I went to support groups with women who had undergone similar kinds of abuse, and they didn’t present the way I did. To be sure, they suffered from depression, and anger, and sadness, but they were able to cope with life much better than I did. I used to watch them relating to one another during and after the group, and they were able to connect in a way that I couldn’t. I just couldn’t keep up, and I could never understand it. I thought that the abuse had broken my ability to connect to other people. No matter how much work I did, I always felt apart from everyone, behind an invisible force field. Even in support groups, I felt overwhelmed and cut off.

Now, of course, I recognize all of these responses as Asperger traits. Clearly, the trauma didn’t help, but no amount of psychological healing can fix Asperger traits. It’s nice that I’ve finally stopped banging my head against that particular wall. Really nice.

However, the break from my parents has been a more difficult issue for me to resolve. Every year or so, I go through a “Should I have broken contact?” cycle, in which I talk to my husband or my therapist or myself about the whole situation, and why I broke contact, and whether I could have stayed in contact, and whether the first people I’m going to meet when I die will be my parents, and whether they’ll both obliterate me the moment I show up, and whether G-d will be giving them instructions on how to do so.

In response to my perseveration on this issue, my husband invariably says, “Rachel, there is nothing you could have done differently. We’ve been through it over and over. You could not have maintained contact and protected your sanity or saved your life. You know it, I know it, and G-d knows it.”

And the last time I went over this territory with a therapist, she said, “You know, we’ve really got to talk over this G-d of yours.” How could I explain that, as long as I’m not talking about my parents, my experience of G-d is one of unconditional and unending love? Only with my parents in the conversation does G-d become merciless.

These days, though, when I consider the breaking contact question, I don’t feel inclined to perseverate on it. Something has changed in me. I’m able to look at the situation from a sensory perspective, and a couple of things become very clear.

1. I hate my parents. There, I said it. I don’t hate them in the sense of wishing them harm. They have both passed away, and I hope they are with G-d and that they are healed. I would not want them to spend eternity in the same state of mind in which they lived on earth.

The feeling I have is more visceral: my senses are repelled by them. I can’t explain it any other way. When I look at pictures of them, I feel sick to my stomach. It’s my Aspie empath ability to take in the full picture of a person’s energy, while missing all the little nonverbal details. When I take in the full picture of my mother’s energy, I feel repelled by it. When I feel my dad’s energy, I feel exactly the same thing.

It goes beyond anything they did. It’s about who they were. I believe that my parents, like all people, were made of G-d’s light, and that their souls were pure. So I don’t think of them as evil. It’s just that who they were in this life, and who I am in this life, could not coexist happily, anywhere.

2. Given my jangly nervous system, my ability to go into immediate sensory overload, and my extreme difficulty in conversations consisting of more than two people, it’s amazing that my relationship with my parents lasted for 33 years. With my father’s constant interrupting, my mother’s ability to dominate every situation, and the fact that I couldn’t politely disagree with either of them, about anything, without a loud, verbal, angry, relentless cyclone of epic proportions coming at me from their general direction, I’m not sure how I managed to share space with them for five minutes, never mind 33 years.

I always feel that people will judge me harshly over this subject. I hope you won’t. I’ve done the best I can with what I’ve got. I wish things could have been different, but I know now, finally, that it simply wasn’t possible.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

I started to hit a wall today while doing the Passover preparations.

My husband and I sat down on Sunday and made a list of everything we needed to do. (I know, a list! Aren’t you surprised?) We wrote down what I could do, what he could do, and what we could do together. It seemed like a pretty realistic list, and things have been getting done.

Today, I began to have trouble seeing how everything could possibly get done by tomorrow night. My husband’s basic approach is that we should do everything we can while enjoying the process. Whatever gets done is fine. It’s a good approach, except that I’m an Aspie, and I started perseverating on how I could possibly sweep and mop the floors and get all the Passover plates switched with the regular plates before tomorrow night. I started to get teary and agitated. All of my husband’s reassurances fell by the wayside. I felt like I was moving toward a meltdown. I haven’t had one since my diagnosis, and I really didn’t want to have one today.

So I decided to go to my volunteer job for a couple of hours, just to get out of the house, get some perspective, and have something of a routine in the midst of all the doings. I was glad I did. I got to work on some jewelry for two hours, which is like a zen meditation in a corner of the store. I wasn’t feeling great, but I got to focus on something other than the object of my worries, and that was good.

Afterward, I stayed around the store for a little while and began to realize how “other” I felt. I feel “other” pretty much all of the time. The AS diagnosis has only confirmed that I haven’t been hallucinating all these years. And then I realized why getting ready for Passover has been feeling so impossible.

Of course I can sweep and mop the floors. Of course I can switch the plates. It’s not about that. It was never about that.

It’s about having people to my house and feeling my otherness. It’s about knowing that I can’t possibly keep up with the conversation. It’s about knowing that I’m going to get overloaded. It’s about knowing that I can’t just show up in a group of people and have it be easy. For all the years that I’ve been having Passover seders, for all the years that I’ve been having gatherings of any kind, the feeling is always the same. The moment people arrive, my heart drops to the floor, because I feel so completely and ridiculously insufficient. The minute the doorbell rings, I’m about to fall behind the pack, and I feel it. I’ve always felt it.

It’s hard to think about being “other,” so I worry about the floors and the plates instead, as though they are amulets that will assure me a sense of belonging, a sense of being understood, a sense of being one of many.

My meltdowns stem, in part, from this feeling of otherness and from my fruitless attempts to erase it by working harder and harder, hoping that this time, if I work hard and get it “right,” everything will be okay and I won’t feel so alone. Of course, I work so hard and ignore my needs so completely that I get a migraine, or have a meltdown, or both.

Why are migraines and meltdowns preferable to feeling alone? Because feeling alone makes me want to cry. And why are stomping around and getting angry and having a meltdown preferable to crying? It’s the adrenalin rush. When I have a meltdown, I’m on a roll. I’m the most intelligent, the most insightful, and the most unfairly treated human being on the face of the earth, and I’ve got the adrenalin rush to prove it.

When I’m crying, none of that happens. I have to admit powerlessness and sadness and all that stuff. Who needs it? That’s much harder.

Every year at Passover, Jewish people don’t just tell the story of the exodus from Egypt. We relive it. The point is to liberate ourselves from the narrow places that constrict and enslave us. I feel like I’m in that narrow place of having done the same thing over and over, year after year, working harder and harder, trying desperately to be “normal,” all to no avail. Sometimes, it feels so easy to be this weird person who enjoys solitude, and it all feels okay. But there’s the flip side, where I stand apart and my solitude is transformed into loneliness, even in the midst of people who love me.

The only way out is to embrace the otherness, to fully accept it and to feel everything that comes with it. I hope I can start to do that.

It’s an incredible blessing to be able to write about all these feelings and know that at least one other person out there will understand. One other person is infinitely more than none. It makes the otherness all right, because we share it. Perhaps that’s the way out, to know that we are other, to know that we are alone, and to know that we are together in that experience.

May everyone be renewed in this season of renewal, whatever path you walk.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

The word perseveration has been coming into my mind with great frequency these days. It’s a cool word, you know? The verb form, perseverate, sounds like some weird techno-version of persevere, except that the -ate tacked onto the end makes it sound like something you do with a Cuisinart.

Anyway, I became curious as to what the authorities think perseveration means, so I went to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and looked it up. Check out the definition and etymology:

Main Entry: per·sev·er·a·tion
Pronunciation: \pər-ˌse-və-ˈrā-shən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin perseveration-, perseveratio, from perseverare
Date: 1910
Definition: continuation of something (as repetition of a word) usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point
— per·sev·er·ate \-ˈse-və-ˌrāt\ intransitive verb
— per·sev·er·a·tive \-ˌrā-tiv\ adjective

I have read that people on the spectrum perseverate about things large and small, and I’m no exception. I’ve had therapists, boyfriends, schoolmates, and family all tell me that I think about things for far too long and that I need to give things a rest. Of course, it’s never seemed like too long to me. Having all those thoughts constantly spinning in my brain, like a hamster on a wheel, has always felt perfectly normal to me. But then again, in the words of a Paul Simon song, “When something’s wrong, I’m always the first to admit it, and always the last to know.”

Not that anything is wrong with perseverating, unless you’re driving the other people in your house nuts with it. That’s where continuing a process “beyond a desired point” gets people tense. Lately, I’ve been watching myself perseverate, and for me, it’s been great fun. My husband doesn’t much mind either, except when I say, “I’ll be right there to watch the movie,” and an hour later, I’m still working on whatever-it-is that really, truly, I-mean-it was only supposed to take a few more minutes to finish.

My main warning sign that I’m about to go on a roll comes very early in the game. It usually starts with a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” of denial, as in, “I’ve got this great idea for a new mobile, and I’m just going to wind the beads around one spoon before coming downstairs and finishing breakfast.” Yeah, right. Several hours later, I’m still working on the mobile and haven’t had anything to eat or drink at all.

Now, I know better than to start when I have a commitment outside my house in the early afternoon. I’ve set up my schedule to start my volunteer work at 1 pm, which means that I need to eat, drink water, work out, drink more water, shower, dress, and generally take care of myself before going out into the world. If it’s a week that my daughter is with me, I can stave off the perseveration even without an outside commitment, because her schedule gives me a schedule, and thus a break from my own extremely focused process.

But if my daughter is at her father’s house, my husband is visiting his dad, and I’m not working outside my house, I’ve got the green light to go. I get so absolutely lost in whatever I’m doing that I couldn’t tell you whether five minutes have passed or five hours.

Lately, when I have time to myself, I’ve been perseverating with my art. I love trying things out, and seeing how they look, and taking things apart when they don’t work, and trying something new, and seeing how to do a task that’s been stumping me. I love the feeling of the beads in my hands. I love wrapping the wires to get them to coil just right. I even love the nicks and the callouses I’m getting on my fingers. I love the whole blessed thing.

When I’m alone and can let the art take me where it wants me to go, I find that perseverating doesn’t happen “beyond a desired point,” because there is no desired point. At those times, it’s the “continuation of something…to an exceptional degree.” It’s better than persevering. It’s persevering by letting go and letting the process take me where it will. It’s persevering with inspiration.

However, nothing exists in isolation from its opposite. So while perseverating on my art feels wonderful, having to stop for any reason is very, very difficult. Sometimes, it feels painful. Perseverating is physical, like a powerful force that doesn’t want to stop. Something has to interpose itself between me and the object of my perseveration. Sometimes, an external commitment, like a doctor’s appointment, will do it. At other times, it’s my internal moral compass telling me that I can’t keep my family waiting endlessly for dinner or for a movie.

There are forces equal to perseveration, and being an adult, I can choose to stop and shift my attention. I love spending time with my husband and daughter. I know that nothing lasts forever, that my daughter will soon be grown, that my husband and I are getting older, and that I’d better pay attention now, because one day, everything will be changed. Growing older provides perspective, and I am glad of that.

It’s the transition from one activity to another that is difficult for me. I even have difficulty saying good-bye to the day and going to sleep, no matter how tired I am. It’s my Aspie wiring. I can talk my way around it and adjust my life around it, but I can’t ever change it.

And why would I want to? As difficult as it is, it makes me who I am. And I’m enjoying who I am, more and more, with every passing day.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg