Daily Life

AUDHD & HSP

Autism, Daily Life, Musings Leave a comment

I have been trying my best to unmask more lately. It is not an easy thing, but I am finding myself less exhausted each day.

As an autistic teacher, there is a lot to unmask. First of all, I have hypersensativity. (HSP), which makes things harder. HSP basically means I feel what others feel. I don’t understand the feelings, I just feel them. If I am with a small group, the strongest emotion leaks over. But if there are a lot of different emotions I get stopped.

So when I joined my new school, four years ago, there was a lot of emotions. Some of the older teachers didn’t feel that the new batch of “Covid-Teachers” were going to be any good. I could feel that. Some where sympathetic. I was told by my grade level lead that If I told anyone about my autism, the parents of the school may demand my resignation. It shook me. I never mentioned it around him again, or anyone else.

The problem with HSP & Autism is that I can sense how someone feels near me. I just don’t know why, or how to fix it. So the first thing that happens is my mind goes into hyper-analyzing everything to solve this problem. Did I cause this? How? Did I look like I don’t understand, or did I come off as smug. I come home and think over everything. This is energy and mental capacity that SHOULD be used to analyze my students. But I cannot focus on those things.

I have been taking a lot of time in the last 2 years to try and spend time doing what I need to relax, and disconnect. This means, I spend more time locked in my corner behind Homework books. There I listen to my music, and rock in my rocking chair. I dance in the corner to my headphone music when the kids are in other classes. I take more time to do things, and set reasonable goals for each day.

I did download an autism manager app for my phone, but I have not had the energy or motivation to get in the routine to use it, yet.

It is hard to break through the fear of exposure though. I naturally do not like being the center of attention. I abhor it. On top of that, I still have ingrained into me the fear that if I go completely unmasked, I will have a lot of unhappy people around due to outdated stereotypes.

Despite this, I think the most important part of unmasking, has been being able to talk to a couple of my coworkers that I trust about my autism. When I started, 4 years ago here, I had 1 friend who knew. each year I gained 1 more. All where friends from my previous school. But in the last month, I have shared my autism with 5 new people and had positive responses.

I told my new Vice Principal, and I told her that I felt scared my coming out may cause me to lose my job. She thanked me for sharing this, but then she did the opposite of my old Grade lead. She assured me that It would not make any difference to my work situation. She then asked me about my support system, and if she could help in any way.

I just realized I lost track of my topic.

AUDHD stands for Autistic with ADHD. This means that I get distracted easily, and then beat myself up over it immediately, but then analyze it when I am alone. This is frustrating for me, but to help I have informed my class that I cannot hear when there are more than 1 person speaking at me at the same time. Or that in noisy rooms, I cannot hear. In fact I get massive headaches.

I explained to my students some of the difficulties I have because It helps them understand me better and me them. I have seen a few students with similar traits. and I should have filled out their assistance recommendation forms, but I get exhausted just looking over all the paperwork.

My HSP does help me deal with children, except the beginning of this year was hard because of the amount of fear and anxiety these children came in with. It was a lot to deal with, and I felt like I was carrying around an elephant everyday. It was very hard to do anything.

The Peace of a Bookstore.

Daily Life, Family, Musings Leave a comment

I love book stores. Public Libraries to a lesser extent, but not school libraries.

I feel a sense of peace, just being in a bookstore. Walking in, fills me with a calming feeling. Even if I can’t read the books, I feel this calm. the smell of the books, and the quiet of the store.

My local bookstore has no English books anymore. I still love going in there. I can escape into the shelves. They have tables and chairs set up for people to just sit and read their new books at. People sit in the children’s book area reading quietly with their kids. But it is all so quiet, and calming.

These people get it. Books relax.

Every time I think about physical book stores closing in favor of online stores, I feel like crying. Any other store, I don’t mind being online. But book stores need to be real.

Some of my best memories are getting lost in bookstores around the world. I will happily get lost just looking over the titles, and selections available.

There was a bookstore downtown Beijing. It was in the WangFuJing tourist district. It was called the “Beijing Foreign Language Bookstore”. When we arrived in Beijing, it was a four story shop. the top floor was first language books. English and Japanese novels. All age levels, and genres. 3rd floor was textbooks and educational books for learning foreign languages. 2nd and first floors were for the travel guides, information books about places, and other Local information books in English.

For years I loved taking the children there. We would go there almost monthly. I loved it as much as the kids did.

During the Pandemic, the bookstore shrank down to 1 floor. The books were damaged, and on sale. It was now only the foreign novels. The place had lost its lifestream, and was struggling to stay open. It lost. I tried to go there a few months ago, and it was locked up with a “for rent” sign on the door.

I was heartbroken.

Even though I cannot read the books at our local shop, I still patronize them. My wife and I will get bookmarks, notebooks, trinkets, whatever we can to keep the store open.

Please everyone, don’t buy books from online sources if you can. Go to your local bookstore. If they don’t have the book you want, they can order it for you. Don’t let bookstores and libraries close.

Memories vs Reality

Autism, Daily Life, Family, Musings, , , , , One comment

Throughout my life I have done and seen many things. I have some great memories. I have amazing memories of going places. I have wonderful memories of meeting people. I have memories that are not accurate. I have memories that nobody else has.

This always baffled me growing up. I remember experiencing a lot of things, or being told things. I remember seeing things happening. I remember things happening to me. But when I asked people about them. nobody else remembers, or they remember it extremely different.

Tire Swing

Probably the most prominent one is the Tire Swing incident. When I was very young we moved around town a lot. My Mom and Dad had separated when I was still in diapers. So Mom moved to the City nearby. One of the places we lived at was a white condominium. There were 4 buildings all arranged in a rectangle, leaving a kind of paved courtyard in the middle. The courtyard had space at two corners for cars to enter and drive around inside. This happened before My Mom married my step father.

The other 2 corners had space for people to walk through. I remember one corner had a tire swing set up. The tire swing was one where the tire was laying horizontal. It was attached by 4 chains to a central pivot in the frame. The tire could spin or swing.

I don’t remember how old I was exactly when we moved here. But I was lower elementary age. probably 6 or 7 years old. I do remember clear as a bell that one day I was on the swing. I think two of my brothers were, there. Some older boys came in through the corner path, and saw me on the swing. I can still see the face of one of the boys. He had curly light brown hair. They grabbed the swing and spun it as fast as they could go.

I flew off the swing at top speed because I could not hold on. I tried my hardest, but it was just not in the cards for me. As I flew off, I hit the speckled wall. These buildings had little bits of quartz or white rock as a weather proofing sticking out of them.

I hit the wall. and most of the boys ran off. I blacked out. Somebody carried me home.

This did not happen, according to my family.

Apparently, I did have an incident on a tire swing like this, while in upper elementary. I was across the street at the school. This was after we had finally managed to buy a house. My mom and stepfather had been married a number of years at this point.

In the version everyone else remembers, but I do not. I was at the school across the street, (I should have been 11 or 12 at this point). Some bigger boys, probably High School students came through the school grounds. They spun the tire swing really fast as before and I flew off of the swing. But instead of hitting the gravel-ridden building wall, I hit the metal frame of the tire swing.

huh.

Mom’s had Enough.

Another situation that I can remember is different. I believe we were at the condominiums that I mentioned before. Mom was still trying to put her life back together. She was preparing for a date, and of course us boys were being crazy. There were four of us, so we were loud. But I don’t remember being loud or bad. I remember being in the living room.

I remember clearly Mom getting so frustrated. Eventually she had enough and threatened to leave us there, never to return. She stepped outside when she said this. She had not even gone to the curb when she came back to apologize.

This memory is carved in my mind. To this day, I get anxious seeing children take advantage of their parents. The feeling is worse when I see parents losing their temper at their kids.

Never happened, according to my family.

I love my mom. As a father I can sympathize as to how stressed she would have had to have been to say that. But apparently, my Grandmother had done this very same thing. Mom had never told us about it until I brought up my memory. She had promised herself to never pull that on her own kids because grandma had done it.

Head Full of Tubes.

As a child I remember mom telling me clearly about when I was a baby. Mom told me about how when I was born there was something wrong. I remember being told that I had a swelling on my brain or something on the day I was born. Mom told me that the doctors had rushed me off to intensive unit. I was told that they had to put tubes into my head. These tubes were to relieve pressure on my brain. If they had not relieved the pressure, I would have died.

Not only did this conversation never happen, but I did not have tubes in my head as a baby.

I have more memories that are seemingly false too. To this day, I am not 100% sure of my long term memory. There are a lot of things from my childhood that might still turn out to be false. I don’t know. I will hold onto these memories tightly even if they are not real. They are part of me. These memories that I have helped shape me into who I am, even if they are not true.

What makes me worried the most is that I do have family that has difficulty with the same issues. Memories of things that didn’t happen. But their memories are much more recent, and they are not always convinced that the memory is false. I worry about them. I also have fears that this could be my future.