Being listened to

I was getting increasingly stressed and had the feeling I wasn’t coping at all in the weeks before I saw a dietician for the first time on the 6th of August. I was going in to work telling myself I must see the nurse, even making notes to self in my phone to do so and not getting round to it. I was having reveries of telling my boss to fuck off and stick his job and they seemed to be becoming increasingly regular or increasingly intrusive. I was angry all the time, and increasingly aware that I wasn’t taken seriously at work nor respected, and that things weren’t going so well outside of work. We had moved house, and I was doing all the cooking and trying to wort a few things out, buy things for the place and kit it out, and I wasn’t having time for writing at all. I was snappy and didn’t want to be around people.

It was a terrible bloody day.  I had been keeping a food diary for a couple of weeks, on paper, because we haven’t had the internet installed yet and my dietician would need a paper copy which I wouldn’t have got round to if I had first written it down on paper or onto my blog, and I had been counting up the days I hadn’t drank any alcohol, nor caffeine, and so on. Doing so made it very clear how important these things are for me, not drinking caffeine, and avoiding alcohol. I had slipped a couple of times with caffeine, and once with alcohol, having a pint at lunchtime at work with some people I rarely see, and both times it had really knocked me about for a couple of days. Suffice to say I hadn’t really drank much alcohol for a good few weeks, just a pint or a half here and there. And then we had a barbecue. It was my turn to be host - and it must be said that as anti-social as I am, I enjoy being a host, not exactly being the centre of attention but kind of setting the pace and keeping myself busy, especially with a barbecue. Predictably, I didn’t manage to stay off the alcohol, and convinced myself, once again, that vodka would be ok. In a way it was for a good while, until once everyone had gone (at least, I think I lasted that long) and it really all hit me at once.

M____’s mum was over. It was a barbecue for her, but also a housewarming. Only her Polish friends hadn’t come over, letting her down despite knowing a month in advance that her mum would be over.

In any case, the next day I had the worst possible hangover, and was barely able to move. I did little but look at page3.com and drive my boss about a couple of times all day. Except that lunchtime dietician’s appointment.

I turned up in the carpark, my car smelling of partly composted grass from the load of bags full of the stuff I had offered to take to the tip, and worried that I recognised the car in the corner as belonging to one of the women at work who I’ve had a few reveries about and had bitched about that day as being both condescending and hypersensitive - she, after all, has a number of food intolerances. It was one of these complexes with several anonymous buildings fenced off and notes on doors saying to use other door, door round corner etc.

I finally found the place and sat down trying to hold back the reveries about seeing supercilious medicos and finding they don’t listen at all, getting angry and walking out and the like. I picked Bleak House out of my bag but of course couldn’t read more than a sentence or two.

Finally, she called me through.

She listened. I introduced myself and said that, though I have not been diagnosed, I consider that I satisfy all the diagnostic criteria of both ADD and Asperger’s syndrome. And she agreed with me that my psychiatrist is wrong to say that if I was ADD I would have been diagnosed at school.

I found I was talking quickly, just like I always do sat in front of my shrink.

She then talked me through an exclusion diet. I would be excluding a lot of things of course to confirm first of all that food affects my symptoms. It would be a restricted diet that could not in any way be recommended as a permanent solution. Following this, foods would be reintroduced one after another for a three day period in order to check whether they triggered any symptoms. If they did they would be rechecked after all the others had been checked or eliminated.

In addition to being gluten free and dairy free, I would not be allowed onions, potatoes, beans and pulses, nuts and corn.

I wondered about a couple of things. First of all the fact that I would be allowed any quantity of any kind of fresh fruit seemed to exclude this being a diet which could check for candida. Secondly, I had read that there are food families, and that should, say, potato be excluded then aubergine should as well.

Nonetheless, it seemed a positive thing. I would have a structured diet, and an incentive to follow it for a set period of time. I hoped, and I hope, that this will help me to better conform to those aspect of the diet that I was already trying, mainly unsuccessfully, to follow, and to those additional aspects of it.

Thus far I have not began the diet. I have indeed conformed to the no alcohol, no caffeine, no gluten nor dairy part of the deal, but in using up some old frozen meals and making a couple of things I had bought ingredients for, and indeed in conforming to this part of the diet to a fuller extent in transition to the exclusion diet, but have figured that I need a little more preparation yet to make the full switch.

Over the last few days, on my own in the new house with M____ flying back to Poland with her Mum, I have worried that though diet is a large contributory factor to my problems, however well I eat it will be no panacea. I have been eating pretty well, with perhaps medium-high GI dishes (lovely vegetable curries with gram flour pancakes, for example) but still finding that I’m having pretty intrusive and often angry reveries. More than once I have needed to go and do some vigorous exercise, some shadow boxing and the like to try and get it out of my system. In fact today or yesterday I started to worry, comparing myself to J D Salinger who I have always believed to have a temperament very similar to my own (granted every adolescent believes this, but I do tend to feel that carefull exegesis of certain passages in Catcher and elsewhere in his oevre demonstrates a tendency towards ADD and perhaps Asperger’s to a degree little less than the evidence Kay Redfield Jamison amasses in Touched with Fire demonstrates the bipolarity of the personalities she discusses). Salinger is of course a famous recluse, and in articles I will soon post elsewhere, I will discuss my own tendencies in this regard. He also is prone, according to some reports, to be attracted to many and varied methods of healing, many of which it is safe to say, have not been submitted to peer review. I have always been subject to crises of confidence regarding my diets, mainly perhaps due to the blank faces, scepticism and suspicion I meet when I describe my problems those few times I trust people enough to bother to do so at all, and this was one such.

Still, it is fantastic to have somebody simply listen.

On leaving, she even told me about a friend of hers who has been diagnosed as Aspergic in his late thirties. This guy had been very academic, getting a clutch of A-levels and the like and going into computers. Only his employers referred him to a counsellor for problems he was having at work. Bingo.

We chatted for a little while in fact before I left. All in all it was a good day. M____ rang to ask how it had went. I thnk she was glad finally to hear something positive, that something had gone well.

So, fingers crossed!

Trip

I’ve been on another trip with students, and I’ve come back much more settled, and looking forward to my move to new accomodation. I’ve been jokey with M____ again, playing around, and she has sensed that I am looking forward to the move. This could perhaps be taken as proof conclusive of how I am sensitive to changes in my routine.

By and large I was ok there. I took a lot of food with me and for the first time really anticipated the difficulties I would have with food and compliance to my diet. After all, I am away a lot, and came to feel that I was using trips and birthdays and celebrations and the like as excuses for non-compliance. Especially a problem, I am coming to see, was that I was using non-compliance in one often less avoidable sense as an excuse for non-compliance elsewhere, particularly with smoking and caffeine: I am tired from not sleeping from eating cheese and drinking beer, so I need nicotine or caffeine to perk myself up. This despite having proved this logic flawed again and again.

I did have a little caffeine over there, but not as much as I have elsewhere. I had batter with fish, and black pudding which contained oats and wheat flour. And I had flapjacks most days. But otherwise I did better than I often do, and didn’t feel myself drifting off quite so much as I have in the past.

I have been back a couple of days now and I have fallen into the old rationalisations. Yesterday I had a decaf coffee, telling myself I fancied the taste. I had it with sugar, because I had sugar a couple of times in Wales and didn’t feel any real ill-effects (before I have noticed that the effects of sugar are cumulative). I then had another, unconsciously (as I admitted to myself once or twice before repressing it) wanting the caffeine.  This morning I woke very tired, as I tend to do once this caffeine vicious spiral has taken off, and eventualy succumbed to a full-strength coffee with sugar. Soon after (and no less tired) I began to feel that I was drifting while reading Bleak House, I can’t recall the reveries, but they were there.

I have wondered whether I should ditch the idea of full food diaries and simply record days of compliance. Ie. caffeine - 3 days, gluten 4, dairy, 7, beer 3, spirits 5, nicotine 24. This would then simplify the record and all slips would be regarded as such with neither decaf coffee nor flapjacks regarded as somehow borderline cases. It would also help me in interpreting the evidence since I rarely/never look over old diaries and am only able, therefore, to interpret a single day’s reactions. I am sure there could be a good calculation too to record the resultant mood and concentration, perhaps involving the day’s results plus some fraction of the preceeding days. Some months ago I became possessed with the idea of trying to input into Microsoft [reveries of playing guitar for everyone at work, triggered by Blind Melon’s No Rain, but continuing from regular soundchecking reverie] Excel. I couldn’t manage it, and it became just one of the many hundreds of structures I have attempted to impose on my life that have fallen by the wayside, along with the transparencies I was hoping to draw graphs and pictagrams on and all the rest of it. This blog is the most successful so far!

One thing I noticed from Wales was that the sores in the corners of my mouth completely cleared up.

But I’m still rather out of it. I’ve just been reading an interesting article on M.E. and food intolerance http://www.ldmeg.org.uk/jb/food.htm which I found after looking up caffeine intolerance, wondering how much of my problems may stem from this. I intend to follow the writer’s advice regarding sprouted seeds, indeed I’ve just ordered a book she suggests, The Sprouters Handbook by Edward Cairney from E-Bay and I may go and buy a couple of things in a health food shop later when I’ll be dragged to Mardy Hell by M____. Now though, I think I should go and write an article in my other blog that I’ve been meaning o write for a while.

Oh, one piece of news: I have decided to go for a position at work which I’m led to believe would involve cooking with students.

Unsettled

I’ve not been myself now for a few weeks. I don’t know how far I follow the typical aspie pattern of needing routine, but I have been back and forth on trips with one still to come - we will be taking a couple of students out on Monday - and I’m in between houses with a real worry about not having time for writing when I move. I have been unsettled, and caught myself too worrying earlier in a real waking sweat (I needed to lie down for a nap after dinner, as I increasingly do) over whether I will become a writer at all, despite the ideas in my head.

I don’t know, perhaps this is typical for me. It’s hard, if not impossible to compare your mindstate with some time in the past. I do hope this is not typical. I have been so unsettled, unable to sit down and do one thing. Constantly angry, restless, distractable and irritable. I have been suffering (and truly suffering) angry reveries in re-run and re-runs throughout the day.

This morning it was unbearable. I didn’t want to be around people. I was depressed, and, there were the most difficult people, one of the cliques, with Jaffa and the others who work with him who I’ve always felt look down on me somehow. I can’t deal with their banter in the mornings and I was particularly gauche in the morning. Helgar, unrelated to the clique, made some unnecessary comment which pissed me off and the others were just giving some with the banter which just goes on all around me making me feel all the time like I’m playing piggie in the middle.

I was angry all morning, and didn’t want to be around people at all. I couldn’t make conversation. Less than usual even. I wanted to eschew coffee, and the clique was all gathering around a percolator and some decent coffee. It smelt good but I went outside. Dave, my immediate boss came in to make a couple of sharp comments as he does - he’s a good bloke, but gets irritable at times - about how we were sitting around, and it was one of those days I couldn’t do anything right, everything I tried to do to help was just that little bit wrong; we all have days like that with him.

There was a new member of staff in the morning meeting and I was stood next to him. I wasn’t able to greet him and make him feel welcome. I wasn’t in that frame of mind. I was feeling belittled, condescended to. That my face doesn’t fit. I was having reveries such as handing my notice in, telling one of the guys who is leaving, and with whom I get on best, that I can’t deal with it anymore, and that two years is generally about my limit in a new place. They were talking about new people who were going to replace him, and a direct boss above us, and I was fearing the worst, and feeling like my time with the place has come to an end.

I was glad to be asked a little later to go out on an errand to a guy called Cal one of the scrappies we’ve got to know. I noticed they went out of their way to describe the items they needed in excruciating detail due to my failures in the past to identify crimp connectors and the like. But I was glad of the walk to the car, and then the drive. First, though, I sat down in the car and cried. I’ve been crying a lot recently. And then I drove, got everything they needed, pretty much, and drove back to Sweet Child of Mine blasting out as load as my speakers could take. I parked up, and then sat and listened until the song was over, switching the engine off to reveries of having a discussion about heavy metal being cathartic as we once had in one meeting, discussing the students taste in music, its place and importance in their lives and our policy towards it.
I walked back along the canal and sat and watched some moorhen chicks barely the height of my thumb, until a couple of students came walking by, at which point I stood up and walked back. I was hoping to be missed. To have people realise the state I was in. I was feeling I was going to crack. That I needed to talk to the nurse.

Things got moving then, and more students were around and I got to feeling a lot better. I got through the day. And got through it with no coffee.

It was the last day and we went for a beer after work. I had one, and then had to shoot off to give my dad a lift to the garage where he had left his car to be MOTed, extortionately as it turns out.

I came back, had some food, and then a tiredness came over me so I had to lie down. This tiredness, and the rest of lying down was intermingled with the anger and frustration of not being able to write, and the fear of what it means to not write, this creeping responsibility and even family I feel from time to time.

It was a kind of tiredness that was all over, but in particular in my legs, completely out of proportion to any exercise I had done. It was similar to when I felt what I came to think of as candida “die-off” when I was taking Caprylic acid every day for a few months. This heaviness in my legs, like the aches of flu.

I lay down and slept a while. Now, I’m tired again.

07:15 no coffee, tagine, vit b6, zinc

13:00 chicken drumstick, coleslaw, waldorf salad

16:30 beer

18:30 toasted GF bread with peanut butter, three slices. tagine, with rice

23:15 no hunger!

ps. I managed little conversation over the beer, just more of my slapstick efforts.