As a person with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), I’ve learned that writing plays an important and meaningful role in my life. I write a lot. By ‘a lot’ I mean to define it as a daily activity. Sometimes I will spend my entire morning and afternoon writing. Other times I will be up through night because my urge to write about something has kept me from sleeping. Most often I write about maths and physics, keeping track of my thoughts and ideas, planning essays, or writing about my work. But I also make it a principle of life to read widely. Indeed, I enjoy reading – studying – as much as I enjoy writing, and this often motivates me to write about many other topics. The two go hand-in-hand.

One reason writing has become important for me has to do with how, as a person with Asperger’s, social communication (by which I mean verbal, but of course also entails other forms like sign) is a source of struggle. I don’t often write about my Asperger’s, mainly because I find it a difficult process. It is hard to organise my thoughts about it, and I am never sure what is appropriate to share. In formal language, my Asperger’s is described clinically as high-functioning but severe. A big part of my life is about learning new strategies to cope. Some of the strategies may even be familiar to others without ASD, like learning to talk in front of others in ways that minimise anxiety and stress, or without completely freaking out (what we call in my language ‘red card’ moments). Or, to give another example, we work on finding strategies for the times I am at the office, so my brain doesn’t go into hyperdrive and so I can focus on discussion and also things like writing on the whiteboard. Another thing about my Asperger’s is that it can be hard adjusting to new people and it can be very stressful acclimatising to new environments. I’ve been working with Tony, now my PhD supervisor, for two years or more and I have only recently started to acclimatise and find our engagement a bit easier to manage. Indeed, in the same time I’ve been at the University of Nottingham, it remains an ongoing process adjusting to this new environment and to being on campus. Like with my close friend, Arnold, who, even after seeing him everyday for years, it was often still a challenge for me to engage with him socially and to visit his house. There is a lot to my experience, not just the social aspect of experience, that can be difficult and demanding as well as overwhelming. I also struggle a lot with anxiety and other things, in addition to extreme sensory sensitivity. So I require a lot of time and space for stillness in my own environment, with my own structure and routine – usually in my own space with my books and other comforts – because sensory overload can easily overwhelm.

In my one attempt to write about living with ASD I expressed how it can be difficult to understand cultural meanings as another example. This is a way of describing orientation to many of the ‘codes’ or behavioural routines that normalise in society. For example, I remember when I was a teenager being pressured a lot to establish the same routine economic patterns as others, or blamed because I didn’t have a job or couldn’t maintain one. I find it difficult to compute things like why daily life is the way it is for most individuals or why people behave as they do. What motivates daily behaviour and routine? How do people make decisions or direct the future course of their lives? Science, textbooks, and studying fervently became, at least in part, a survival-based mechanism. There is no instruction manual about humans; or about why history has taken the path it has in the course of human and societal development; or why many arbitrary social customs have come to be the way they are; or why my father acted and behaved the way he did; among many other things that come to be a feature of life. Studying became my way to cope and to understand, and writing became an extension of that. For instance, I studied every aspect of psychology to help better understand my experiences growing up or why, at least in part, people act violently or use violent language. I’ve read and written across most of philosophy; the same for economics, certainly enough to understand the fundamental debates; and also a lot of sociology. At one point I read a lot of political history, with history one of my favourite subjects. While all of this has a purpose in aiding my attempt to try and understand the world I am a part of, it also supports my passion for studying, my focused interests, and provides the stimulation I need.

On top of it all, living with Asperger’s can be quite exhausting. Indeed, one thing that is common for people diagnosed with autism is the experience of a certain type of fatigue, or what, in my house, we call ‘crashes’. These are a daily experience, where I need to put on my headphones and sit in my own (still and comfortable) space for however long it takes to calm my brain. For these reasons, day to day life is often spent in controlled environments, because it helps ease the red card moments, reducing stress and anxiety, and thus also helps combat the amount of crashes.

I think it all adds up in some sort of complicated sum as to why I find writing an important outlet. But even writing has its own difficulties. I remember my teacher, when I was 6 or 7 years old, say that my brain runs faster than my pen. I think this is true. I think of the sluggish pen effect as the difficulty in converting the internal representations of whatever concept or idea into concise written form at the pace I wish to feed ink to paper. So even though I write everyday and have been practising for many years, the usual result of my writing is typically permeated with errors. The process can be disabling and discouraging, to be honest, with many moments of frustration and failure; but, I’ve also learned that when I battle through and produce something I am happy with, the moment of victory is worth so much.

For many personal reasons, I’ve been regularly encouraged to write more and share more on my blog, and this is something I’ve been working toward. I think that, over a couple of years, I’ve grown more and more comfortable sharing essays and technical notes, although perhaps that is especially true in recent months; but I am also practising writing in other ways, like more personally and less formally. Technical writing is much easier than informal discussion, although a definition of the latter still seems somewhat unclear.

So as one step, there is a new blog post format that I may start experimenting with over the coming weeks, in addition to my usual research entries, essays, and technical notes. Although I prefer to keep my blog focused on my maths and physics research, which of course is mainly string related, allowing from time to time the inclusion of the odd bit of academic diversion, I think this (weekly or fortnightly) format of thoughts may be a fun space that allows me to practice writing in different ways, to share disconnected thoughts or random interests, outside of the formal essay or technical structure.