The Autistic Me

The Autistic Me was selected by Feedspot as one of the Top 50 Autism Blogs Blogs on the web.  http://blog.feedspot.com/autism_blogs/    Thank you... 

The lumbar radiculopathy, which sounds too much like "ridiculously" for me, hasn't faded completely. My left leg still cramps, tingles, and hurts with sharp pains. My mind remains cloudy, too, even as I stop taking painkillers for the back pain and a recent surgery. Efforts to reboot and get back on track intellectually, physically, and emotionally are off to a slow, grinding start. It reminds me of an old 80286 PC, the infamously confused Intel CPU that wasn't sure what it was meant to be. And this was before the "SX" fiascos, which wedded 32-bit CPU cores with 16-bit connections. The 80286 was supposed to be able to multitask, but design flaws resulted in a first-generation that was useless to operating system vendors. My back, my knees, my ankles are each making noises like those old computers. If I haven't already lost you as a reader, the basic problem is that my mind cannot focus on one task for long without exhaustion and multitasking see...

English: Love question (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visitors have asked why the blog doesn't deal more with personal issues like romance, marriage, children. There's not much to "teach" other people. My advice to autistics is to stop trying to please everyone else and find your own social network. In that social network, you might (or might not) find friendships and love. If you don't have friends, you definitely won't find love. I am a believer in friendships helping us cope with life. Before I removed the Q&A section on the blog site, the majority of questions I received were about relationships / dating. Basically, "How can my son / daughter have a 'normal' social life and find love?" I tired of the question because 1) there is no one answer and 2) many of the autistics corresponding with me hated the pressure to find "love" and didn't want parental help with romance! Though I have a short ebook available on t...

A friend wrote that she feels more and more depressed each day, following news and politics on social media.  My advice? Stop it.  Getting away from social media can be the best thing for someone with an impulse to follow and comment on... everything. And I do mean everything. It's like a compulsion for this friend and for many others.  Let things go.  Having been stuck at home and in bed for a month, I can attest that social media is depressing. Take a break from it if you need to. There's nothing wrong with realizing that online life isn't real life and that it can be overwhelming.  I fear some friends just cannot turn away from social media, even for a day or two. Try it. Maybe you'll discover it helps. 

Trying to reboot as 2017 begins, I attempted physical therapy for my pinched spinal nerve. The therapy appointment lasted only 30 minutes as I discovered the horror that is electrical stimulation and heat on an inflamed spinal cord. Diagnosed with radiculopathy, a pinched and inflamed nerve root in my lumbar column, the treatment is physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medications, and time. My therapy schedule was to be every other day for six weeks. The first session began with the therapist measuring range of motion and asking the basic questions. How long have I been in pain? Since birth. No, how long has it been bad? Since birth. Doctors can dismiss it and people assume I'm okay because I walk about and work, but I am always in severe pain. My lower back, shoulder, neck, hips… they all ache. The brachial-plexus injury at birth, the years in a back brace, and somehow doctors still don't believe what isn't in an x-ray or MRI. I hurt. A lot. The therapist pl...

I was in my late 30s. I still don't know if the diagnosis helped. Maybe it helps others. More often, it simply frustrates me to be so tense and anxious all the time. I would like the world to be quieter, calmer, more honest, more logical. Is that being "autistic" or simply being an intelligent introvert? What I want, more than anything else, is a steady and secure job. A career. And it seems that is what the adults in this article also want. 'All my life suddenly made sense': how it feels to be diagnosed with autism late in life | Society | The Guardian : I meet Baron-Cohen in a crowded Starbucks near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where he wryly comments on the mixture of chatter, clattering cups and muzak – “For a lot of autistic people, this would probably be hell” – and casts his mind back over the 35 years he has been thinking about and researching autism. He started working with six autistic children in a special unit in Barnet, north London, in 1982. F...

In a few ways, 2016 has been (with a nod to a great children's book) a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for my wife and me. We have had medical issues, I have not had a full-time job, and a pair of accidents took our Jeep out of service. It has also been one of the best years my wife and I have had. The following is a lengthy post on the past and our future. A friend and I had a polite debate on the topic of sponsors for "The Autistic Me" blog and my other creative projects. I generally believe that writers and other artists should find a market for their efforts and seek compensation accordingly. The idea of "donations" does not appeal to me. "But you give to several organizations, including the performing arts," she insisted. "What is the difference?" Much to my wife's chagrin, I do donate to theatrical organizations, local independent film projects, an autism cause or two, the humane society, and other non-profit gr...