Home as you left it

Strewn yet hewn

When I returned home late in the night a week ago, it never occurred to me how if anyone had seen a dog in the window of my apartment over the weekend, they could come back on my return, point to the dog and ask how much it was.

In fact, I could have left my bathroom scales in my wine rack (I did not do that, someone else did) and expected to still find it there or carelessly left the fridge door open and met it undefeated by gravity or the rotational forces of the earth in the same position I had in my forgetfulness abandoned things.

That lack of trepidation as to the condition of my home that always seemed to leave me a total stranger in my own home after any sojourn away, was bliss. None of the disorderliness which to the mind of another was their order, or apparent disarray was due to poltergeist activity, I simply had a trusted house sitter.

Behold an earthquake

Trusted is being generous to a fault, because except for the entirely immovable things, everything moved, changed places, or just disappeared. The lack of care for the very basic things even though to his thinking he was keeping the place tidy, robbed me too many times of the enjoyment of home, yet overwhelmed to a masochist trait, I submitted myself to more abuse.

However, after a 16-hour journey back from Cape Town, still barely at 60% of my strength, I stepped into my home and though he was present, I found myself running the vacuum cleaner through my apartment before I even took my jacket off. When I opened the fridge, a hurricane had swept through it with pieces anywhere but where they should be.

That I was still finding things out of place five months later is testament to his genius that has a madness to its method, but the day after I returned, I asked him to give me back the keys to my apartment and I bought myself the unimaginable treasure of space, independence, and wallowing in the mess of my own making. I could live with that.

Peace with my pieces

The next time we saw each other, it was at a waving distance attending a funeral, I bear no animosity toward him, I consider him a friend, even if he thinks otherwise. It was a necessary intervention, rescuing myself from the throes of the unmentionable trying to articulate the indescribable.

Just to have your home unspoiled and be able to suggest the best price for the dog in the window the stranger saw the other day and get a good exchange without rummaging through the depths of Hades for the upper set of your false teeth and the missing tail of the dog. You do not want to know what I still cannot find in my own home.

Thought Picnic: The little foxes of pique

The inexplicable imponderable

A mobile phone holder on my office desk disappears and there is no other explanation for the disappearance beyond the likelihood that the other person who has full access to the apartment has moved it, used it, and lost it.

Yet, we are left to consider the unexplained in terms of the improbable when it is so patently not the case, for to level an accusation might sour the relationship whilst your sense of discomfiture is hardly assuaged by the realisation that you are losing control of your entire to trusted forces out of your control.

Take another example: a wallet that was vacated of essential things with some unimportant items left therein was placed from clear recollection on that office desk the night before a journey. A week later, I got a call that it had been found in the garden that I had not passed through for close to a week before my journey.

Then, it had rained for most of that week, but the wallet was dry having been picked up that morning by a jogger who happened to spot it on her way out for morning exercises. I find myself caught in another debate of the ridiculous. I guess the wallet just thought it was stuffy in the apartment and decided to step out for a walk, then could not find its way back home.

The obsession proposition

Much as one attempts to be unbothered by the minutiae of the hows and whys of what people do out of commission, omission, absentmindedness, carefulness, or carelessness, all of that never really matters if it is not noticed. My inordinate attention to detail that has found the trenchant criticism of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), is simply a need to maintain some order amid many other chaotic things totally out of one’s control.

You wonder, why people change things that have always worked for something that they have not had the opportunity to assess the efficacy of. The seemingly immediate advantage is lost to the long-term inconvenience that could exacerbate the annoyance of others.

Patterns are distorted as your record of how things were is displaced and influenced by thinking, events, or people working from a different perspective and have an inclination to tend to an alternate frame of reference. We all suffer from the inability to be inclusive of all the parameters that could make for a perfect setting.

Leave things where they were, be inquisitive but resist interference, consider the quirks of others which are quite different from their faults, and know when to accommodate rather than repudiate. The subtle traversal of advice to correction lies in the deft art of communication. For all times, know the clock should never be wrong.

These are the little foxes that ruin the vineyard in bloom. [BibleHub: Song of Solomon 2:15]

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: From overloaded to overcoming

Body in overload

Having been back from Cape Town for just over a week, it has been unsettling without the clear ability to concentrate on anything so functionally productive. For the last two nights in South Africa, I took time away for just myself, much as I have a quest for lasting and exciting companionship, I am quite essentially an introvert, desperately in need of just my own company and my own space, I love the outer quiet that allows the robust debates in my head to engage quite vigorously, almost to exhaustion.

Back at home, without due consideration for the change in environment and weather, I took my second COVID vaccine booster (the fourth jab), the next day. They did not have the Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty product on offer which I had for the first two vaccines and the booster, but I was offered the Moderna Spikevax instead, and it is based on the same mRNA technology.

Questions on disorder

As I am in a vulnerable cohort, I will on the advice of my supervising medical personnel take whatever protections are offered, I do not have the requisite medical knowledge to make far-reaching decisions that can be quite impactful on my health and wellbeing, I would rather ask questions demanding satisfactory and convincing answers than unilaterally exclude myself from the purview of medical management.

I think both factors; the change in weather and the booster exacerbated a feeling of discomfort and unease, along with some weakness and tiredness. Much as I exercised will over capability, there was much I was not doing, including getting back to my walking exercises. To heap on that distress, my house sitter had rearranged my home, with things not being where I would have had a mental note of leaving them and other things not being in the order or way they should be left.

Patterns of mindfulness

I try to convince myself that I can handle a bit of chaos or bring some order to things, but it is more upsetting to realise that deliberate disorder has been introduced to a space that is usually exclusively yours. It might well be that I find myself somewhere on the autistic spectrum that once the patterns I expect to observe have been distorted, I am deep into stress management and countermeasures.

At one time, I could not find what I was looking for it had been secreted away somewhere else, I just went to bed trying not to bother myself until they were found the next day. Later, when I could not find the power adapter to one of the laptops, I could not be bothered with asking, I just ordered another and held off until the next day again, what I wanted to do.

Funnily, it is at these times that could trigger a mental breakdown in others that I just want some peace around me, refusing to socialise even when it can be beneficial, because I just want to be alone with my thoughts or go to sleep and let all the turmoil resolve itself in the subconscious.

Completing all material

It might seem quirky too that the rest of the material for the Microsoft test I passed two weeks ago that I could never have done in time for taking the test on the Microsoft Learn website needed going through. I completed the full curriculum on Monday and Tuesday over almost 20 hours. I had the feeling, that just because I had passed the test did not mean I should abandon the material. I did the same for the test I passed in early June.

I think over the next few days, I would get back to myself to be more full of what I like to do, I am taking each day at a time, thankful for all the blessings and goodwill that surround me.

I do miss Brian, he is everything that exudes the joy and fun I enjoy in a person as much as he can infuriate and frustrate, you learn to manage these things in a relationship, and for all the apparent togetherness I portray, I am just as imperfect, hoping to be a better man and lover – it is a work in progress.

I am a dreamer and my dreams have come truer and better than I ever could dare to imagine, it comes to a point that I am sometimes afraid to live in the reality of extraordinary dreams coming true, for that I might just need some help because there are exciting lives to live and stories to tell.

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.