mitchmaitree wrote:
I'm 56 years old and only recently discovered I was ASD. It explains so much about my life that previously made no sense! And I'm still learning.
Last night I had a major realization. My 2-year-old is also autistic. When something doesn't go the way it usually does, he sees that as "not right" and has a temper tantrum. If we run out of milk for breakfast, if he doesn't get his nap on time, if he can't find the toy he wants... or sometimes we have no idea what it is he has a problem with. And I realized that especially as a child I had the same worldview. Something was either "right" or "not right." "Not right" was not okay and I had frequent temper tantrums that I couldn't explain. It was just "not right."
I'm wondering if there are better words to express this? I've been trying to explain this to my neurotypical wife, and I think she gets it, especially when I put it in terms of how my toddler acts, but I'd hate to try to explain it to anyone who knows me less well!
Looking back, I experienced this as an environment of changing rules so that I never knew what I was supposed to do, and a distinct feeling of injustice. I suspect now that it was just normal changing circumstances in day-to-day life.
I drank and did drugs for ten years, and when I was loaded "not right" didn't matter much. I was generally a happy drunk.
After I got sober, I seemed to be more tolerant of "not right." It made me good at my job because I wanted to make sure everything *was* right. But I lived in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, and that was clearly and disturbingly "not right." I went into depression and lost my employment and my first marriage. I spent some time volunteering in Sri Lanka, and their civil war was "not right." I spent a year studying it in college and ended up helping a group bring about a six-year cease-fire. So as an adult, this feeling of "not right" has had some positive effect.
As I said, I'm wondering if there is a better way to express this. Do others experience this? How do you describe it?
What your 'right, 'not right' experiences bring to mind for me are how I experience the world when things don't go to plan. Fot instance, tonight I am cooking salmon for mine and my son's dinner, but if I were to smell, on opening it, that the fish has gone off then I would have to change my plan, For me this would be really 'not right', even though I have other food I can cook and if the food was prematurely bad I could get a refund on it. It just feels horribly wrong when something doesn't follow the plan. I get the same thing when people are late or when the order of service changes in church (I play piano so I know ahead of time what's happening usually, but our minister is sometimes led to change things at the last moment and although I know she does this for good reasons for me it still feels 'not right'.
When things are not how I think they should be or how I expected them to be everything feels 'not right' and my anxiety levels go up exponentially. I see this as tying into two parts of a standard description of ASD - love of routines and difficulties with sudden or unprepared change.
Does this fit with your experiences of 'right' and 'not right'?
_________________
"That's no moon - it's a spacestation."
Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ICD10)
06 Jan 2017, 9:03 am
