If you notice my writing style; I don't make paragraphs which are much more than five lines long if I can help it. The white space between them really helps break things up. When I see one huge mass of text that I do want to read I have a take a deep breath and try to work my way through the swimming mass of words
Then you’ve probably noticed I write the same way. When people write long paragraphs I use the cursor to highlight sections to keep my focus. When reading a book I use a bookmarked to move down the page line by line. To understand what I’m reading I must say every word (learned to do it in my head from being bitched at by teachers) so I only read at a speaking pace.
I also have great difficulty remembering names of people and things. I always try to have a pen with me and will right things like the name of someone or the call sign of the plane I’m launching on my hand so I can remember them. One nice thing about being the military is everyone wears a nametag.
It's really bad if it is someone I'm interested in, because they'll see me react, smile or whatever, to another conversation in the room. They tend to think I'm not into them at all,
I’ve found I can suppress reacting to other things but it sometimes leads to a 1000 meter stare where I’m looking right through the person I’m trying to pay attention to. It also causes me to find lyrics in songs distracting which is why I prefer instrumental pieces and songs in languages other than English. That way the vocals just become another instrument and don’t dominate the music.
On the other side of the coin, I love stimulants. To the point where I don't feel like I can function unless I have a large amount of caffeine in my system.
Stimulants also have a positive effect on me generally helping me focus. I also found certain anti histamines helped me weed out distractions but also had the side effect of causing my brain to feel “clouded.”
The only self medication I use now is running. If I don’t do a tempo run at least once every third day I start to feel overwhelmed in situation involving lot’s of stimuli.
I also found that an adrenaline rush helps bring focus to the world which made me an adrenaline junky. On the positive side of this I’ve learned to give myself an adrenaline rush just by thinking about things. It’s allowed me to take control of complex situations on many occasions leaving people amazed that I could “keep my cool” and make decisions completely chaotic situations. Like the “time dilatation” people often experience during a car accident only I can make it happen when I want. It’s like stepping out of time and looking in at what’s going on from a bird’s eye view.
However, the downside of the adrenaline thing is that driving, especially in heavy traffic, is a huge chore for me. Use to take me hours to unwind after driving home from day shift. Boy do I love being on 2nd shift now.
I was never diagnosed as being autistic, but I remember reading a study which said some autistic children benefited from a treatment as simple as putting in ear plugs. Again, makes me wonder.
Over the years I’ve done a lot of reading trying to figure out why I’m so different from everyone else and one of the biggest things I’ve notice is that so many conditions seem to overlap. It seems to me that there are ranges of conditions and disorders and that actually labeling them makes things difficult because people often exhibit symptoms that don’t always correlate with a specific one.
