Autism: Do you see what I see?

Taken at Woolworths in Rosebank, Johannesburg - February 2019.

It was not spelt right

Look at the picture above and have you noticed something? This is a regular conversation I have with Brian when he comments about my ability to see things others do not see. In my own view, I am left quite surprised it is not that obvious.

I cannot tell how it is that I see things in patterns, especially when it comes to words, there is an expected order and when things are seemingly not in that order, I notice. That is not to say I do not commit the same mistakes. What I have written and what I perceive is there could be two different things. It comes with the territory.

However, the number of times I have heard people say, “It’s only you that would see that.”, would suggest there is something, a gift or some irregularity that I possess demonstrated in these observations I cannot seem to keep to myself.

Sensory observations out of pattern

It was only two Sundays ago when in our church Sung Eucharist pamphlet where the credits for the hymns were written, the year of birth and death of one of the credited showed he had lived for 165 years. Who reads that? Well, I do and I noticed before I showed it to the dean after the service.

Yet, it is not just patterns in words, I sometimes hear sounds out of place even if my hearing is not that keen and for someone who has a lazy eye, the keenness of my vision along with the inability to use stereo vision to judge distance and speed is quite interesting. It just seems anything that is out of place jumps out to me.

I sometimes wonder if I should ignore these things, then, these observations can make for interesting documentation or conversation. I love the sight of the unusual, the irregular, the strange, the abnormal, the distinct, or maybe, the invisible to others. Somewhere on that spectrum of autism, the strange is just quite normal. It is the way we see our world.

Did you see it?

If you did not see what was strange about the picture above, Brian swears I saw it within a minute of getting to the restaurant and trying to place an order. My Instagram post about it appears below:

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A post shared by Akin Akintayo (@instaforakin)

Autism: Where my order is another's disorder

The order of disorder

When I returned home from a month’s holiday to a fresh home, my friend who was my house-sitter in my time away had cleaned up, new sheets on my, the bathroom quite spick and span, my kitchen and the stove hub sparkling, not a sight of dirt anywhere, but sadly, due to my apparent reaction, none of which was verbalised though inadvertently acted out, I lost our friendship.

I recall when I owned a place in Amsterdam that many loved to visit, I had a cleaner, not because the apartment needed cleaning up, but because he seemed to know where to put things that were out of place, I would return to an ordered place with a good idea of where everything is, it is my home, I am comfortable after that visit.

Just leave it there

There is probably a reason why I do not employ cleaners, I lived in a house in Ipswich over 30 years ago. The landlord had arranged for his cleaner to visit every fortnight to do up the place completely unbeknownst to me.

When I got back to where I thought was my home, I noticed from the moment I walked in, I had to run out to speak to my neighbours, things were not where I had left them and the house was rearranged to the landlord’s pattern without my input, I might as well have been in a strange hotel room.

I like order, yet, my disorder is some sort of order in itself, it is my comfort zone, much as it can be unusual and strange. I guess many may not understand why this useful act of ordering is upsetting for me.

I was in a strange place

When I got home in August, within the apparent order was a subtle displacement, things were not where I left them or things were not replaced when used. With my dangerously keen eye for detail where it does not matter to others, I began to see too many things were not where I put them, in the space of an hour of my arrival, I felt I was not in my own home because I did not know where things were.

A few days later, I had to call my friend over to show me where he had put three laptops away for safekeeping. I rarely ever have guests in my home and definitely no parties, my friend does have friends and strangers over, in certain videos he has recorded at my place, I had to be told it happened in my home.

I guess through a series of meetings in the two weeks after my arrival, my friend decided I was hostile, ungrateful, and maybe even nasty, so he cut all contact with me until he needed to collect an important document two months later. Not once did he discuss with me how he felt, I was hurt and implacable when we met. I still think he is a friend, maybe someday we would resolve things.

Coming to an understanding

However, there is an issue that reveals itself in my mannerisms and attitudes, some of which I will write about eventually. However, I am writing this because my best friend called me last week after having watched a programme on television, the night before. He was not sure of how to broach the subject, he then said, there were many things he saw on the programme that made him think that was familiar and it was ‘our Akin’.

For myself, I know I have been somewhere on the autistic spectrum, not necessarily evident or serious, but significant enough to be noticed by others besides the apparent upset I have when my disorder is reordered. I guess even those quirks were somewhat masked by me from my house-sitter friend who lived with me for 6 months, some 4 years ago. I suppose there is no easy way to help people understand that some strange things related to the lower spectrum of autism attend to a part of my personality.

It is no excuse and not essentially a bad thing, I work on a lot of things of adaptation and integration, even if some of my quirks leave me looking so totally out of place. I have learnt to be comfortable in my own skin whilst aiming to be the best person I can be. This is the first of some of the writings I hope to publish about living with low-spectrum autism.

Thought Picnic: A person I know

A foible I perceive

I try to contain my obsession and pedantry, sometimes with limited success. There is something about disorder that leaves me discomfited.

That is not to say that I am the neatest person around, yet, I do love neatness, arrangements or just patterns.

It probably started with numbers; codes, phone numbers, things like that. I always seem to find some relationship between the numbers that aids in recalling the number rarely as an ordered list, but more as how the relationships between the numbers allow for that order of numbers to exist.

An error I notice

Besides this, I tend to know when things seem to be out of place, a word spelt wrong, a portrait hung badly, contexts lost and much else. Somehow, that does not seem to apply to the first draft of my blogs until I go back to read them after publication.

This morning, I was literally driven to distraction when I noticed that the time on the clock for Madrid was the same as for Manchester – that ought not to be so, Madrid is an hour ahead.

Unfortunately, I could not get to speak to the office manager to correct the error, nothing is as upsetting as to keep the wrong time, I could be so put out by that.

A pattern I deduce

Maybe where the obsession gets the better of me was where the carpets in the hallway and stairwell of my apartment block were changed recently.

Someone chose to order a patterned carpet; rectangles of different sizes and with that came the need, my need, to determine the repeated frame of patterns on the carpet.

I knew eventually I was going to find out because I needed to know what order informed the design. When I did, it was strange to realise that the carpet had a repetitive pattern that took in 10 rectangles lengthwise and 8 rectangles breadthwise before the pattern was repeated.

What a sense of satisfaction I had on discovering that, it meant I did not have to be obsessed with the patterns on the carpet and I could still easily scope out the pattern of repetition.

An obsession I accept

It is probably a form of low spectrum autism that leaves me a bit vulnerable to supposing things are wrong when they are right just because what I expect to see is not what I have observed.

Over time, I have tried to moderate this doggedness to accommodate possibilities I have not yet assessed or discovered. It has also meant that in some situations, even when I am right I have held my counsel just to be sure that I have seen all angles to that situation before offering an opinion.

Whilst I have been called a perfectionist by some, I doubt I am anywhere near that, I’ll just say that sometimes I am compelled to be particular, and when I look at things from that perspective, I am probably alright. Yet, there is still much to learn and I am all eyes and ears for that too.