Scream

 

School

     

Scream

            It was fitting that I wrote this thousands of miles away from home and while my dad was hundreds of miles away in a foreign land with no means to communicate because the start of this chapter captures the essence of what it is like, for me, to have Asperger’s. It’s weird writing a book report of sorts on my own material, but I still can’t believe I was so precise so early, but the metaphors I use to describe the loneliness is nothing short of spot on.

            The next section in which I speak about starting things made me laugh because I’ve blogged about this several times and had no idea I had already written about it in my book. Again, I don’t remember what I write word for word and outside of the concepts I don’t remember how I worded things in my book so it did make me chuckle that I identified this problem long before I re-identified the problem in a blog post back in 2011.

            The next section, about the practice session at the SLKA, was a great learning experience. There’s a reason why no one starts out at the top of their game and that is the fact that a person isn’t ready. While that practice session went off without a hitch, I learned that I had to be more assertive and at that point in my life I feared the consequences of every action I took. The following year I would be voted in as race director and my ability to make decisions, which sometimes were difficult (you try and tell a nine year old that they are DQ’ed for the day after heat 2), became easier and easier. I never could have imagined (I know I’ve used that a lot in my Finding Kansas Revisited series) that I’d reach a point where the challenges I wrote about would ebb, but with working with USAC and SKUSA I am now firm on when I make a call I voice my opinion about it. I could share many stories about this, and I’d love to actually, but I’ll spare you the excessive race talk.

            Still in the same segment I realized and isolated the issues I have with time-lapse and processing delays. What I didn’t know then was that this issue wasn’t because I was “slow” but instead it was because my brain was/is going too fast. A lot of people have talked to me about my wordage and issues at bowling with coming up with the right thing to say only to find that a few hours have passed and that I’m driving home. During those few hours it isn’t that I’m slow, as I’ve said, it’s that my brain is going so fast trying to come up with the right thing to say so I’m coming up with thousands of possible responses then I’m trying to think of what the response to my response is going to be. It’s an infinite platter of possibilities that can’t be predicted and yet I’ll try and predict the unpredictable thus my response time can be greatly delayed.

            I finished this chapter by writing about my experiences in Kibera which I referred to as a, “mega-slum” in my book. I’ve kept the picture of me there in my presentation within the “Alias” section because it was writing this section that the seeds of my future were planted. While writing the Kibera section I thought, “What if someone, anyone, out there is going to read this in the future? If so, I need to explain where I am, and what it is like. This was the first time I allowed myself to think that what I was doing had merit. 

            There were many more chapters I wanted to write but sadly, shortly after finishing “Scream” my dad’s laptop computer power supply cord shorted out and I was stuck with no computer and only bad American movies or English soccer in French. As bad of a situation as that was nothing could prepare me for what was coming four days later.