‘“Ah!” said Rabbit, who never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.’ From ‘The House At Pooh Corner’, by AA Milne
“Every human thought, and every human action, is based in either love or fear. There is no other human motivation, and all other ideas are but derivatives of these two.” From ‘Conversations with God’, by Neale Donald Walsch
I have all the patience of a toddler waiting for Christmas to arrive. Just like Rabbit, I find it almost impossible to wait for things to come to me, be it inspiration for a painting or a piece of writing, or the answer to some question.
For a long time I believed that this was intrinsically part of my ADHD, but I’m no longer certain that’s true. I think it just happens that one of my particular personality traits is an excess of impatience (like I seem to have an excess of everything!), and having ADHD exacerbates it.
It’s as if the ADHD trait of poor impulse control combines with my impatience to produce, or heighten, my distractibility, restlessness, and quick loss of interest. It’s kind of like they have a symbiotic relationship - the more impatient I become, the more easily distracted, etc. The same goes with any emotion, whether it be positive or negative, e.g. if I get too happy I find it impossible to calm down, leaving the way open to the familiar ADHD symptoms.
Another characteristic I have, which I believe is part of my autistic hard-wiring, is a bone-deep inability to stop myself from copying, and absorbing. I say it’s hard-wired because I do not choose to do it. It happens automatically, without any conscious decision on my part, and more often than not I haven’t got a clue that it’s occurred, until later.
If I had a choice, I wouldn’t do it - it’s one of the things about having Asperger’s that I actually hate. It has confused me for a long time because I am so vehemently against the idea of imitating other people: I long to be an individual. Before I got my diagnosis I wasn’t even aware that it was something I did, probably because I was wandering around with the conscious belief that I didn’t want to be like other people, or follow the crowd.
But it seems it’s often the case that the conscious thought is merely what you would like to be the truth, and not what the reality is: as in this case. And everything about me screamed out otherwise - from the way I behaved, how I looked, to what I believed and said. I was like a walking car-crash, a tangled mess of confusing and conflicting influences, with hardly a sign of the original, intact person left behind.
The fact is that, much as I might be telling myself that I don’t like copying, at the root of me something is going on which I can’t see, which drives me to do so. And, again, just as with the ADHD, discovering that copying is part of my nature as an Asperger, and trying to attribute it solely to that, has only served to answer half the puzzle. But I might have finally found the rest.
I copy because I don’t have the patience to wait for an answer, or the faith to believe that one will come in time (God’s time, not mine).
I copy because it’s easier and quicker than having to deal with the unknown, and the feelings that sprout forth as a result - I can just follow someone else’s path instead. Unfortunately, this still means that I have to wait for the result, which I also find impossible to deal with, hence my inevitable tendency to chop and change, abandoning one person’s ideas in favour of someone else’s, and never being able to stick to one path and see it through to its natural conclusion. As I’ve mentioned before, I am the Queen of Tweak.
I copy because when I get distracted, restless, and lose interest (an ADHD attack) it’s the quickest way to fix it, to go on-line seeking new stimulation to try to awaken my dopamine-deficient brain.
Basically, what all of this boils down to is that at the root of me I am motivated by fear. I fear that if I don’t go and look for the answers then they’ll never come; I fear that I’ll miss out on something; I fear that I might be doing it (whatever ‘it’ is) wrong, and I won’t learn unless I go looking to someone else for the answers; I fear that the feelings will not pass.
In the words of God (from the book ‘Conversations With God’), “This is what I have called the Sponsoring Thought. It is either of love or fear. This is the thought behind the thought behind the thought. It is the first thought. It is prime force. It is the raw energy that drives the engine of human experience.”
So then you put these two things together, the autistic copying/absorbing, along with the fear-driven motivation, and the result is me going searching on the internet for quick answers and inspiration (not to mention it’s distractibility appeal, which allows me to forget myself and all those pesky feelings that I’m trying to escape).
But, whilst I might break free for a while, I don’t escape unscathed. Instead, I return with a confused mess of new ideas and information which will inevitably come back to bite me on the arse at some point in the future, when I’m suddenly reminded of something I read, and decide on a whim to try to integrate it into my life. Which usually means abandoning something that works in favour of something new that inevitably doesn’t.
Of course, this wouldn’t be such a problem if I weren’t autistic, and if I possessed that miraculous ability to filter information, discarding what isn’t relevant, and adapting what is to suit my needs. But I don’t. For some reason, God saw fit to create me without a filter.
It also requires some modicum of self-awareness, to be able to identify what is relevant, and to recognise the commonalities you share with the people about whom you’re reading. Nope - I don’t have any of that either, and it doesn’t look like it’s coming my way any time soon, much as I’ve kept on striving to acquire it. Seems this, too, is a hard-wiring issue, and I came out of the factory with the relevant bit missing.
So what’s the answer? Well, I guess I have to accept that I copy, and always will do, so seeking solutions and an escape on the internet will always be a problem. It does not hold the answers for me, but merely compounds my difficulties. My choice is between non-acceptance of my autism/ADHD and it’s limitations (which could be turned over and viewed as blessings), or giving up the fight to prove that I can do what other people do.
Acceptance means the need to shift from fear into love (and faith) - which means practicing the opposite to what I do at the moment, and start believing that God has the answers, and will provide me with them and everything I need, if I allow Him/Her/It to do so. Which means trusting that “This too shall pass” (a slogan we have in AA), when I am plagued by feelings - as long as I allow them to do so, by not going off and trying to escape them.
Filling my head with other peoples’ ideas and opinions does not help me to find myself - it merely helps me to lose touch even more with who I am, as I get buried under a blanket of random useless information. To act out of love (to trust in God) would mean to honour the fact that I am autistic/ADHD, and so stop doing the stuff which only serves to hurt me.
Maybe then I could truly embrace the concept of ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’, ‘cos I might finally find the Self to which I could be true.
