Hypographia

Hypergraphia is an intense desire to write.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraphia
I have bipolar disorder. I have also taken stimulants such as Ritalin to treat attention and alertness issues.
I have always been a detailed, technical, thoughtful and analytical writer. I learned to touch type early and can type quickly. In my work as a computer troubleshooter, I often thought through writing. I would often generate long emails for a single subject to a single recipient.

When I started being in a manic state, I would write in a manic state. I often thought during those times that I saw patterns and truths that others did not see. If I read in the manic state, I would often start scribbling frantically in the margins as I made associations. Many of my favorite books are disfigured in this way.  It is funny and sad to see the scrawls.

Later, as the mania became more intense, I would stay up all night thinking intensely. Perhaps I would crash before dawn for a few hours rest, or I would be up into the next day. Typically that next day I would feel horrible. Some of the worst feelings I have ever felt: exhausted, fearful, hopeless and sick. That day I would have to clean up my mess from the night before. And sometimes I would have to go to work and pretend like I was fine.  But very consistently, toward the evening of the second day, I would have a burst of Hypergraphia.  I sometimes likened this burst to throwing up. It is as if I had consumed various ideas and writings during the previous day, then stayed up all night churning my brain, then the next day have a distillation regurgitated forth.

It was the pages of scrawling hand-text that finally tipped off one doctor that I needed to see a psychiatrist for a mood disorder.

Being also a compulsive keeper of my every written page, I saved and organized my hyper graphic work into what is now ten binders, each two inches thick.  I feel it is going to be a great challenge to find anything useful in this.

I have found that mania is a wonderful thing. I feel that, when you are manic, your thoughts associate much more readily and feedback much more quickly between themselves. You are able to develop and hold marvelous theories, and you are able to reinforce your private beliefs much more easily. But the problem with manic thoughts is that they make little sense or have little utility when shown to the outside world. In short, manic thoughts and theories are not understandable or useful to others, who do not share the heightened, abstracted mental context in which they were formed.

How do you make anything out of 1000 pages of navel-gazing?

I like the early writing of Phillip K. Dick. His creative ideas have been the basis of many SF movies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_K_Dick
He may have suffered from substance abuse and mental health issues.
He developed a detailed inner mythology, which he captured on paper in periods of Hypergraphia.
After his death, these notes were compiled by researchers into a book called the Exegesis.
I have a copy of this book. It is wonderful, awe-inspiring and completely impenetrable. One would have to read over 900 pages and master his idiosyncratic language to understand him; and then have the task of finding meaning that could apply to the real world.

My Hypergraphia has stopped. I still like to write. I do a fair amount of writing in my job. The difference is that now I only write what the other person needs me to write. I don't write more than what is necessary. I have realized that my reader only has energy to consume just the text that they need and no more.  This isn't an imaginary scenario where I write whatever I want and my reader reads every word and welcomes and acts on every additional thought I include.  In the real world I am concise and actionable. No one has the extra stimulated energy to do otherwise.




 

Asperger's Syndrome: it's not a bug, its a feature

It was in 2004 that I learned I had Asperger's Syndrome. There was a feature in the Sunday Seattle Times. I had one of those moments of self-identification when you realize you are looking at yourself. I was 40 years old.

You can read about it for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome.

I think it is interesting that Asperger's Syndrome is named after an Austrian doctor who documented child patients in 1944. I am constantly amazed by the sophistication of weapons and technology of the German empire as evidenced during WWI and especially WWII. Is there a connection?

I also think it is interesting that the condition did not receive a standardized diagnosis until the mid-1990's. What is it about this cluster of diagnosable conditions that resists easy recognition? I'll offer some thoughts on this later in the article.

There is some comfort in having a name for what you have, or who you are. There is some relief in knowing its not just me, that I'm not just a failure for no reason at all. It gives me part of the answer to the question I have asked myself over and over: why is everything so hard? It makes me sad for myself, to recall all the struggle and shame and humiliation and inexplicable under-performance that went undiagnosed from birth. It is my wish that early childhood diagnosis and intervention may help other children to grow up properly treated and accommodated.

It is sixth grade. The teachers do not understand why I walk around the edge of the playground by myself, looking at the trees, imaging they are pipes or alien machines.

It is junior high. The gym teacher takes attendance. I dread my name coming up because I know I will have to speak. Do I say Yes or Here? The gym teacher makes us run laps around the yard. I throw up on the locker room floor.  Later, the gym teacher makes us do a routine on the balance beam. I fail the maneuvers and fall off. Later, the gym teacher calls me into his office and forces me to read a poem above not quitting.

It is high school. I am to play baseball with the class. I take my turn at bat and strike out. And again. I am not able to coordinate my swing with the ball. It is humiliating.

The most chilling thing to me about the Asperger's Syndrome traits is how spot-on they are.

• Difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication
• restrictive, repetitive patterns of behavior and interest
• preservation of linguistic and cognitive development
• physical clumsiness
• atypical use of language

Social Interaction

It is the time between sixth and seventh grade during the summer. I realize there are other people. Until that time, there was only the house I lived in, my father (when he was present due to being a single-parent and a Doctor), and my brother and sister to the extent I needed to take care of them and mediate their fighting. There are people besides me. I just noticed them.

In Junior High I realized that I exist. Which is to say I realized that I existed as being perceived by some other alive things, although still largely irrelevant. I was teased and mocked on a regular basis. I did not know, until I was put down, that there was a properly masculine way to carry one's books. I was mocked for not knowing that there was a Super Bowl and who was playing.

I realize now that, by and large, other people do not exist for me. It is as if I am invisible, or that I think I am invisible to them and they cannot see me and harbor important thoughts about me.  It is also that other people are like manikins to me: empty scarecrows that are placed in the seats of the class room. Aside from the mocking, there wouldn't have been much difference if I attended a school completely by myself.  Because I did.

In class I am a good student. But I do not care at all what other people think. Sometimes I shake things up just to be different or a show-off.  In class we are each asked to name an example of an exclamation. When it is my turn, I yell "AARRG!". When asked to create a sentence to be diagramed, I write: "Every globule of gaseous moisture has an inner luster of a metallic hue". [the first half isn't the original quote, but you get the idea].

I have no dates. I don't got to prom. I have no friends, except for two physics nerds like myself.  I don't care. I go home and do my homework and read.

I have no emotional connection between my one brief girlfriend, between ninth and tenth grade. I am sitting in the dark with her discussing Love. I tell her something like, there is no Love, or I have no Love, or I how can I know what Love is. She is crying and I feel misunderstood.

Restricted and Repetitive interests and Behaviors

It is 1971, outside Boston MA. I am watching re-runs of Star Trek, Gilligan's Island and the Wild, Wild West. While doing so, I am playing with Lego's. But I never build anything. I simply categorize the shapes and colors. Or if I must build something, I build a cube or a pyramid. I am more interested in what the types of the pieces are, than using them to build anything.

Soon, I have seen and memorized every episode of Star Trek. My favorite episodes are The Doomsday Machine and the Galileo Seven.  But there are many more. I know all the plots, the parts of the ship, and the guest stars. To this day I often surprise people with my ability to name the title or describe the alien in a given episode. There is an homage to the episode Arena in the move Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey.

It is 1976 and I am 13. It is seventh grade. At that time it was rare to have any kind of computer in a Junior High, much less a mini-computer (half way between a mainframe and a PC [which didn't exist yet]). Actually, the first year, the school has a kind of giant pre-calculator, called for its manufacturer, Olivetti. I am able to write a primitive program, getting the machine to count down in a loop. The next year, our math teacher accomplishes an amazing acquisition and we have a working Digital Equipment PDP-8/E with high speed paper tape reader, a real video terminal (only 12 lines) and 4 noisy teletypes [like a VW bug crossed with a typewriter]. I was the chief assistant. I could do a cold start of the computer by toggling in the bootstrap sequence. I could start the software called "Multi-User BASIC" by configuring the about of memory (16K? 32K? 12-bit words). I knew all of the BASIC code for all of the games we had, and liked to tinker with them.

In 1979 at the age of 15, on a lark, I type up a resume on a typewriter and send it in to Digital Equipment Corp. The resume and cover letter are forwarded to their internship program. I receive a summer job programming for the amount of $5/hour. I develop simple database applications for their quality department. I am surrounded in the internship by college students.

Speech and Language

Frequently I have difficulty answering the right question. The trigger which caused me to write this essay was one of my Doctors asking me if I liked to write. I answered that I sometimes write at work. And back a few years ago when I was manic, I had hypergraphia and filled a whole box of journals with thoughts and feelings.  He went on anyway, and said that, since I was able to articulate my conditions so clearly, perhaps I should write them down. Oh, he was just asking if I would like to write something!

Often when I am asked a question, I over anticipate what the asker might have in mind. Do I need to defend myself? Am I in trouble?  Does the person asking have the historical context? Does the person asking know that their question has multiple subtle interpretations? Or that there could be multiple answers depending on their time and resources involved?  Did they ask the right question? Should I reword it for them? All these things run through my head and cause me to respond with To Much Information.

 One of my favorite examples preoccupation with Jargon is a collection of slang from the computer culture of the 1970's. It was called The Hacker's Dictionary. http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
I studied the Hacker's Dictionary. I liked reading the Hacker's Dictionary just for being a dictionary. In the era from 1978-85, I knew people who worked on the college mainframes or worked on them myself. At that time, hacker speech was a normal part of our vocabulary. I liked to slip hacker phrases into my everyday life. Such as "he's some RANDOM guy from the English department" or "I can't PARSE that" or "We're going to LOSE BIG here".   I liked "bogus", "canonical", "feature", "hack" (high praise) and of course "kludge" (disrespected insult).  You might say that hacker culture was a dialect and its own private world, and I loved to live it and use it, even in the outside world.

Motor and Sensory Perception

It was 2007, at the age of 44, when I realized that I hated water. Or that the feeling of water was painful to me. Or that the minutest difference in the temperature of water causes me extreme amplified feelings of the stimuli. I remember as a child being distrustful of the shower because of its fickle behavior, having a handle whose meaning changed depending on what room you were in. How you had to work to adjust it just so, and then having the temperature jolt high or low at a whim while it was running.

It is 1971 and I am to take swimming lessons in the local lake. I am told to walk out on the dock and jump in the water. I do this and the water feels like needles, extremely cold, like being plunged into ice water or being shocked. It is painful to make this transition quickly. And I do it again, day after day.

It is the 1990's and I am still married and raising my children. My children love the water. Some of my children find the water soothing, and quite enjoy taking a bath. I never take a bath: I don't lie how it feels and the disturbing signals. When we travel, I take the job of chaperoning the children in the pool. In each case, it takes my body five minutes to acclimate. My children have already jumped in without a moment's thought. Five minutes for the pool. Twenty minutes to get all the way into a hot tub.

 I am very sensitive to noise. I cannot study or read if there is any music or distracting talking going on. I used to have to ask my roommate to wear headphones while playing his music while I was studying. Sometimes, I had to ask him still to turn down the volume because I could hear the sound in the headphones. At home, there is only a small range of volume at which the TV can be set at, or otherwise it disturbs me greatly. Even if I am not in the room, the ambient noise of something that is too loud bothers me to the point where I can't be in the house.

The processing of sound is also different for me. When we are driving and the traffic gets complex, I turned down the radio so I can think more. I cannot understand people when I am in a cocktail-party or noisy environment. I cannot easily discern the speech from the noise.  It upsets me greatly if multiple people are having separate conversations near me.

One interesting thing I've noticed when watching movies is that I get more out of them if I watch them with the English subtitles (or closed-captioning hard of hearing-impaired) turned on. It seems as if the depth and appreciation of the movie increases by a third or more. I realize that with me, even though I hear spoken words, they don't fully sink in or register. I think sometimes that even though I can hear, I am actually deaf in terms of fully decoding human speech. I don't understand what people say and I miss a lot of the nuance. I wish that everyday interactions in the world were subtitled!

 Late diagnosis

I asked a question at the start of the essay: why was it that Asperger's Syndrome was recognized as a standard diagnosis only in the mid-1990's, when presumably the condition has existed since the 1940's (and probably before)?

I don't know what the answer is, but I am offer this thought. When you look at the defining criteria for Asperger's Symptoms, they are categorical, that is symptoms for a symptom. Take "restrictive, repetitive pattern of interest and behavior". It doesn't say "pre-occupation with trains" or "memorizes names of stars". Normally, if you look at a diagnosis for depression, say, it might say "prolonged period of sadness". It doesn't say, "prolonged period of feeling something". That is, most diagnosis are for first-level experiences that are exact and specific. Asperger's symptoms can be about anything in a particular way, that makes them special.
 

Raised In A Doctor's Office

One of my doctors suggested I write about my life experiences.

My father died on July 29, 1979. I was 16 at the time, going into my junior year.  His death came as a surprise to everyone. He had battling melanoma for several years though skin grafts and chemotherapy. But most of us assumed he was in remission. He was a dermatologist, and that summer he closed is office for the usual vacation and he came home to die alone.

I found him in the basement where it was cool lying on the couch. He told me to fetch our family friend, who was another doctor. I don't know where my brother and sister were, who were younger than me. When he arrived, we supported my father into the doctor's VW bug and we raced to the hospital. I remember the doctor flashing his headlights on and off on the highway to get people to pull over. My father was placed in intensive care.

My aunt came to watch over us children. I don't think she had been to see us there more than a handful of times, such was the relationship between my dad and his sister. I remember her receiving a phone call a few days later, and she took the receiver away from her mouth to say in a matter of fact way, "He's gone."

Not long after, my aunt asked me if I wanted to come to the hospital to say goodbye to my father. When we were there, I was shown into sterile sparse medical room with an examining table or gurney in the center. My father's dead body lay there. I can't remember of he was naked or only exposed from the waist up. He looked white and his skin tone wasn't normal anymore. I watched him for a while as expected and then we left. I was told this would bring me closure.

I don't have very good memories of my childhood. I'm not sure if that is because of my condition, or whether there were too many things I didn't want to remember.  I think my earliest memory of my father is indirect, of him and my mother fighting or there being raised voices. My mother had post-partum depression, bi-polar disorder, and alcoholism. I heard the story once that, when my mother was rushed to the hospital to give birth to one of us siblings, perhaps my sister, my father was on the golf course. I think my mother suffered in part from demanding expectations and a lack of sociable attention.

My father worked hard in those days doing his residency and lecturing. I remember him retreating on a regular basis to his den in the basement, which had a accordion partition to close him off and from which he was not to be disturbed. Although not a violent or mean man, he was demanding of perfection. I remember him becoming very angry if any of us children were to spill our milk at the table, resulting perhaps in corporal punishment.

When my father's mother was alive, we used to visit their house on Cape Cod in the summer. To us kids the grandparent adults came across as very strict and proper but very smart. The talk went right over our heads. But they weren't very affectionate. Entertainment involved competitive croquet. Looking back, what strikes me the most is my father's strategy for dealing with bathroom breaks on the trips from Boston down to the Cape. I am not making this up when I tell you my father had an empty plastic gallon ice-cream tub under the seat. We were supposed to use as a bedpan if we had to go along the way.

My father, having been raised above our grandfather's hardware store, was good with carpentry and locks and electrical work. As children we were very pleased with the homemade bunk beds he made for each of us.  A fond recollection that I shudder at now was the construction of a tree platform in a tree the yard.  He designed a flat platform that fit in the "Y" of a large tree perhaps twenty feet up. The platform was designed to accommodate the tree limbs expanding, which everyone thought was very clever. What it didn't have was walls. After it was planked, we would climb up to it by putting our feet on a series of bolts, not unlike climbing up a telephone pole.  Perhaps on the request of our mother or other prudent souls, he cluttered the elegant simplicity of the platform in sky with a rope railing around the perimeter.  Despite the obvious dangers, nothing much happened. The thing that happened, happened to me. The children were engaged in a race to see who could ascend to the platform the quickest. Somewhere near the top on the climbing spikes, I slipped and fell to land on my back. I was stunned, taken to the doctor, and ultimately found to be fine.

Both my father and mother were practical in their way. My father kept a second refrigerators in the basement with a stock of Carling Black Label beer. My mother, being also an alcoholic (or being driven to be one), would be getting into the beer. To prevent this, my father surrounded the fridge with a chain and lock, the chain being enclosed in plastic tubing. One day my father came home to find the chain sawed through: my mother having found the hack saw in the workshop.

My mother was institutionalized around 1971 with severe bi-polar disorder and went to a clinic in Belmont MA. She never fully recovered.  My father explained his reasoning for divorce to my mother's family.  In a rare ruling for that time, my father was granted full custody of the children.

In 1974 when I was 11 we moved to New Hampshire where my father started his practice. A first, my father hired a day time care-giver to watch us kids. However, evening babysitting soon became an issue as my father was dating a lot with the local divorced singles group. He devised a system of "babysitting ourselves" where we were each paid on a decreasing scale to watch ourselves.  It wasn't long before we were letting ourselves in after school and fending for ourselves until dinner. My father, being a doctor, wasn't always home on time. After I while was asked to prepare dinner two nights a week as well as look after my siblings.

Perhaps my father's greatest contribution to child-rearing was 'times'. Times were regularly scheduled appointments, usually one-half hour, to do something with father. Typically we worked backward with the youngest at 7:30, the middle child at 8:00, and my time at 8:30. Of course, in typical doctor fashion, if the prior appointments ran later, the later appointments slid. On a tough day my time might not start until 9:30. During my time I remember playing chess, reading and learning to pay cribbage. To his great credit, my father as the doctor always kept his appointments.

On a side note about chess, he taught me a principal that says with me to this day. I was never, and still am not, much of a chess player. My mind just doesn't work like that. But he would let me win, or almost win. I remember having several pieces remaining, and him having only his king. I said that I win. He said that you have to mate the king. So I moved a piece, and he moved his king out of the way. I chased his king all over the board but he would move the king each time. He said the game was a draw unless I could pin the king. He eventually hinted to me how to do it, and the game was over.  Being in the computer field today, it is the core principal of an computer algorithm that it must finish.

One of the saddest stories about my father was his re-marriage. If my father is anything like me, his ability to detect people's faces is triggered especially by bright faces. What I mean by that average women was average faces are ok, but women's faces which are larger than life, brighter than life, have an usual attraction and power over us. My father had brought home women he had dated from the divorced singles group before without anything really clicking. But after attending the community theatre, he started dating an impoverished actress who was lovely but very different from him. She had two children.

It seems like the courtship was a short time. Before we children knew it, we were moving to a house with seven bedrooms and six bathrooms. At my step-mother's direction, we were redecorating the house with modern 1970's style with mirrors on the walls, a sunken couch, a water bed and a full wall mural of a garden of Eden with a scantily dressed nymph. Quarters were prepared for a live in maid, and it seems now that my step-mother was set for an easy time of it. After the honeymoon, I imagine reality set in. The maid was let go.  Not long after that, my father was seen sleeping in another bedroom. 

Perhaps two months after the honeymoon, my siblings and I came home from school to find that my step-mother and her children had moved out. It was a surprise.  I called my father at his office and asked him what we were going to do. He said: "go get the silverware out of the basement".

I believe that the problems I have now with attachment and side-effects of neglect come back to this upbringing.

My father was a very intelligent and hardworking man. He lived his life valuing his work and not such much other people. However in the last few years of his life he began to put people over objects, by serving in a church and giving more service. He counseled the terminally ill. The contribution I remember most however is that he volunteered to work at the VD clinic on Thurs night. I can't think of any human condition that is as close to stigma of leprosy as VD. I can only imagine that the people who attend such a clinic are despised by society.  The fact that my father would willingly and voluntarily give his time to help these troubled people is a testament to his charitable heart.