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This weekend I got to hang out with Ruth and her partner Alex for the first time in absolutely ages. It was lovely to see them; as they're based up North, they're not often in this neck of the woods. They're down here for a wedding that's taking place today. Ruth's Uncle Boris (the father of the groom) took us down to the Plough for a pint or two (or four). And when we got there, we bumped into the usual suspects.
After a couple of pints, the Plough still felt crowded and very noisy as public spaces have always done for me. The sensory aspects of autism meant that I was struggling to follow much of the details of any of the conversations going on, but while I was very aware of how I wasn't able to keep up, the mindfulness CBT I had a few years ago (for a completely different thing) kicked in and I was able to recognise the fact and accept it, rather than getting more and more stressed or just freaking out and leaving.
It's been a very long time since I found myself getting out and about with my friends for three weeks in a row. I've been a bit of a recluse in recent years. Now that I've finally figured out that I'm autistic, I understand just why I prefer to stay at home, but even so I've been very surprised by how much more willing I've become to leave the house this month. I think it's because now I know to keep an eye on my surroundings so that I can identify when things are getting overwhelming. I also have the confidence, once I know just what it is that's affecting me, that I can do something about it (if I need to) without being thought of as a freak. That's new. And a welcome relief.
And believe me, I used to reach overload quite rapidly back in the day, even in the humble surroundings of my local pub. I'm no longer surprised by how much I used to drink, because it was the only coping strategy I had which didn't draw attention to itself as being a coping strategy (and isn't that a sad commentary on the state of our society?) I have just been reading an old blog entry about going out for a pint on the bank holiday weekend five years ago and even if you take into consideration the fact that we had just come out of lockdown, my comment about feeling claustrophobic being in a crowded space lands completely differently now that I know rather more about who I am than I did back then.
Ruth's mum Rebecca sent me a link this weekend to a BBC report that a staggering 97% of autistic adults over 60 are undiagnosed. Oh boy, does that article hit home, and not just the description of all the negative health issues that result from that. It was the remark about how people end up feel "disconnected from others" which resonated strongly. I might not be good at dealing with it for extended periods of time—I never have been—but I still crave company. So I'm very thankful to have been able to spend so much time this month with my friends.
Today is the last day of meteorological summer and true to form as I type this, it's chucking it down outside. But it's been an exceptionally dry season. A mate of mine posted some photos yesterday of him standing on the bottom of Baitings Reservoir in Yorkshire, which is more or less empty at the moment.
But the blustery nature of the weather today means that my energy provider is giving me free electricity between 14:00 and 15:00, so I will be taking advantage of that and doing a load of laundry!
Saturday's street party was a success.
You won't be at all surprised to learn that I'd been put in charge of the music for the day. I made sure to canvas everyone about what they wanted me to play beforehand so that everybody would get to hear at least one of their favourite tracks. People actually thanked me for doing so, which was lovely. I have to say that there were one or two very eclectic choices! As I did last year, I put my old KRK Rokit 5 monitors on stands on my living room windowsill; if you're an audio nerd (and of course you are) then I can tell you I was driving them from my mobile recording setup: a MOTU M4 audio interface connected to to my Alienware laptop, with the open source (and free) music player FooBar2000 working its way randomly through a playlist I'd stuck on a USB stick. The volume levels were more than sufficient, and the Rokits' tendency to overemphasise the bass worked very well in their favour when listened to from outside.
The chilli I cooked went down well, particularly when it was used as a topping for hotdogs (I had three, because they were only very small frankfurters). After doing the majority of the preparation on Friday night I had time to let the onions and garlic caramelise for a full hour so the kitchen still smells of garlic! Last year the whole batch had disappeared in about twenty minutes so this year I'd considerably upped the quantity I made. As a result I had plenty left over afterwards to put in the freezer. Chilli always tastes better after it's been frozen, somehow, so I'm looking forward to trying a portion later this week.
I might have been a teensy bit hung over on Sunday morning. That was the first alcohol I'd touched in more than a week, and even though there was plenty of lovely food to soak it up, it hit me quite hard. It's been a mad few weeks and I'm really struggling to sleep because of the pain I'm in, so I felt I needed to get properly drunk for the first time in months. It seemed to pay off, because I don't remember much at all after I went to bed on Saturday night until I woke up at about half past five on the Sunday morning to get a much-needed drink of water and go to the bathroom (but well done for making sure to do the washing up before going to bed, drunk me).
It's the August bank holiday today in England and Wales and the weather has been kind: it's a lovely warm day outside with clear blue skies. I just checked the travel page on the AA's website and as expected, the M5 is backed up from Clevedon as far as Tytherington.
But today it feels like we're at the end of summer. The evenings are noticeably drawing in now, and last night the temperature in the back garden was down to 7° C (45° F). This morning I changed the settings on my trail camera because it's getting dark earlier in the evenings and it doesn't get light here until 05:30 (sunrise this morning was at 06:11). The hedgehogs are still very active, and there are at least four different ones visiting the garden every night together with a variety of cats; they all seem to tolerate each other. I think it's been a good year for fleas, judging by how much scratching the hogs are doing at the moment.
The weather is expected to change tonight as a cold front tracks in from the west and—hopefully—it will be bringing with it some much-needed rain. That's going to be followed by the remnants of Hurricane Erin with a region of low pressure arriving from the Atlantic from Wednesday onwards. I don't have any plans for the next few days, and I will be happy to just stay at home, work on music, and catch up on my reading.
I've just updated Notepad ++ to its latest version, because this morning I updated my Netbeans installation from version 25 to version 27, which was released last Thursday. Yes, I ended up skipping an update again; I can no longer work up sufficient enthusiasm to keep all the programs on this machine up to date any more, because life's too short to obsess about such things.
There's nothing much in the changelog for an old duffer like me to get excited about and the user interface still looks like it's running on a CGA display from the late 80s, but at least I didn't encounter any error messages this time.
Version 27 installed itself in a completely different location to all of the previous installs: Program Files/Apache NetBeans instead of Program Files/NetBeans-nn and yes, I found that really irritating, because I'm me. I also had to manually edit the Windows registry to get rid of the previous installs, because their uninstall programs didn't remove everything. And in doing that, I discovered that the registry still contained references going back as far as Netbeans version 8, and that was a long, long time ago. I've also just updated Libre Office to version 25.8. I've skipped a few revisions there as well, although the version number these days identifies the year and month of release rather than significant or minor changes to the software. Which is, quite frankly, ridiculous—and about as much use as any of Apple or Microsoft's "progress bar" spinning wheels, which no longer give any indication whatsoever of how far whatever is happening has got. They've lost all utility and become a pointless, infuriating visual gimmick. What is wrong with programmers these days?
I really miss the days of Windows for Workgroups, back when programs just sat in one place on your hard drive and didn't put down roots in lots of other documents that made it really difficult to keep your OS tidy and running smoothly. And back in the days of DOS, if you didn't like a program, you could just delete it. The hardest thing you had to do to make sure things would keep ticking over nicely was to tune autoexec.bat and config.sys.
Those were the days...
It's the August bank holiday weekend this weekend and we're going to have a street party here tomorrow afternoon. I've just been out to buy the last ingredients I needed for the big vat of chilli I'll be cooking tomorrow morning. Chilli dogs, anyone? I'm going to be sensible this year and do as much of the preparation as I can tonight so that I can get everything ready in time for the start of proceedings tomorrow. Last year I left things a bit late, and I don't want to do that again because it made me incredibly stressed. So this evening I will mostly be peeling and chopping a lot of onions, garlic, mushrooms, chillies, and peppers. Distracting myself from all of my worries, preoccupations, and obsessions by getting engrossed in cooking has always been a fine way of passing the time, and I get something delicious to eat in the process; there's no downside!
It's a lovely day out there today, and the combination of a Bank Holiday and fine weather always encourage the crowds to flock to the seaside in large numbers. In the past, I got caught out by this, so these days I check the traffic situation before setting off, just in case. Today I immediately changed my destination from Thornbury to Cam, because the M5 southbound had already started to snarl up. That meant lots of traffic was leaving the motorway at my local junction with people trying to use the A38 to avoid the jams. This never works, of course; it just spreads the congestion to all the surrounding roads. It was much easier for me to head in the opposite direction, so that's what I did. It was the correct decision, and I had no hold-ups at all.
Traffic this side of Bristol has eased up since I got home, but right now, the M5 is backed up from Burnham-On-Sea as far as the Almondsbury interchange, which is about 35 miles. The queue from Almondsbury on the M4 hasn't reached junction 18 yet, but it's already building and it doesn't look like it'll be long before it gets there. And it's not 3 pm yet. I have no plans to go anywhere beyond the village at all for the next few days.
I think I must have reached the "Too tired to care" stage of exhaustion last night. After putting a freshly-washed duvet and clean bed linen on the bed and smearing myself with large quantities of Voltarol, I actually had a decent night last night. Half of it was spent in NREM sleep, according to my watch. And simply directing attention towards that sense of mania lurking in the background which I mentioned yesterday appears to have banished it, at least for the time being.
Today I feel markedly better. If you saw me in the supermarket earlier, you'd probably have assumed I was completely normal and not at all feeling completely overwhelmed trying to navigate my way through a building full of shoppers who appeared to lack even the most rudimentary sense of personal space or awareness that they were standing in someone else's way. You would have been mistaken, though; I was focusing very heavily on breathing slowly and deeply and not letting it get to me. But that's a new and very significant development, because in the past I wouldn't have realised why I was freaking out, let alone be able to do anything about it. Now I'm back home, but unlike previous trips to the shops this year, I am not sitting here reduced to a shaking wreck. I feel fine. That's real progress for me.
When I read back what I'd written for yesterday's blog to check for typos and clarity (yes, I do a QA check on what I write, because I want it to be worth reading and I want to improve my craft) I found myself wondering whether I might be guilty of oversharing given the way I've been carping on about what I'm going through at the moment.
For about five seconds. It's not my intent at all.
If you've got that impression, I've not been doing my job as a writer. I've been sharing all of these experiences here because I know I can't be the only person out there who has recently discovered that they're not neurotypical. If you're in the same neurodivergent boat that I am, I just want you to know you're not alone. And the best way I can help you is, I think, by describing my journey as it's happening. I've been going into a lot of detail, I know. But I'm going to continue to do that, and we can discover what happens next together. I'm hoping that I can look back on these last few weeks as a turning point in my life; one where things started to change for the better. I want to record my frame of mind so that I can come back to it after a few years and remind myself of how I was feeling at the time; we have a tendency to paint our recollections in a flattering light, but I've tried to be as honest as I can about what's happening to me. If you feel motivated to get in touch and share moments from your own journey, please do; my email address is up there in the page header.
I said last week that I was feeling wonderfully calm and not at all depressed, and while I'm still not feeling down, I'm less sure about the calmness part any more. Yesterday I realised that I could feel the manic energy I experienced last summer lurking at the back of my mind once again, although it's by no means as pronounced just yet. I think I'm going to need to watch myself very carefully over the next month or so to make sure I don't drop off the edge once again, because what happened to me last autumn really wasn't very pleasant at all. I suspect that one thing which will work in my favour to prevent a reoccurrence this year is the fact that, thanks to the ridiculous amount of pain I'm in, I feel absolutely exhausted at the moment. Last week my sleep score was in the mid 90s. This week it dropped down to the low 80s and last night was particularly bad. The discomfort from my hips was severe enough to wake me up at 3 am this morning and I didn't really get back to sleep again, even after I'd hobbled down the stairs to the kitchen and topped up with a couple of ibuprofen.
One thing that is not helping my pain management at the moment is the state of my bathroom. I'm not taking baths at the moment because the old acrylic bath has started to show signs of disintegrating. There appear to be cracks in it, and it flexes alarmingly when I stand in it so I've decided it's much better to be safe than sorry and limited myself to taking quick showers. But without being able to lie in the bath reading (which takes the weight off my hips and lets me relax and recover) the pain never really goes away. I was up in Cheltenham earlier this week working with a bathroom designer, because it's made me realise just how badly I need my quality bath time. What we've come up with will be something special, and I hope I can get it all installed as quickly as possible so that I can get back to lying in the bath with a good book for hours on end once again. In a steel bath. With a reading light.
What calmness I still have this week is because emotionally, I'm now completely shut down. Lifting the lid on my feelings earlier this week to take a peek at how I was doing has convinced me that it would be a really bad idea to examine that side of things too deeply at the moment. Or at all, in fact. After the initial shock of discovering that I'm autistic eased off, I started to think that this meant that I could finally get my act together and that my life was about to radically change for the better. I started letting my expectations mount up. Which was stupid, because when it comes to affairs of the heart, I'm not in good shape and that aspect of my life is still just as challenging as it has always been. I was just putting an unreasonable amount of pressure on myself, and that was unsustainable. Even if it serves me right for doing so, for the last couple of days I've been feeling totally overwhelmed.
So I have been immersing myself in technical matters to divert my attention elsewhere. For example, I've been working with one of my pals from Real World to try and get a remote recording session going using Steinberg's VST Connect software to transfer recordings from my recording studio in the back bedroom to his rather more spiffy setup in the north of Scotland, but Cubase has been proving remarkably recalcitrant. After an hour or so last night we finally got to the point where an audio file of me playing guitar that I'd recorded through my setup ended up on a hard disk on Alan's machine, but while we can see each other on video and he could hear me, I couldn't hear anything he was doing at all. The talkback channel wouldn't transmit anything and we had to use our phones to communicate instead. Alan's already put in a support request and from what he passed on to me this morning, Steinberg have been very helpful. It looks like we were on the right track, but we're not at the point where I can play along to his music and have my performance drop seamlessly into Cubase on his machine quite yet. It'll be very cool once we can get it to work, though.
Even if it wasn't the most productive of sessions, that was an hour or so where I was focused on music rather than anything else. And that felt really good.
I can't give a clearer sign that I am feeling out of sorts right now than to note that the Perseids are nearly over for another summer but this year I haven't spent any time meteor spotting in the back garden at all. I've not been able to muster up any enthusiasm for doing so, and that's most unusual for me.
The fact that nowadays there's a lot more light pollution outside at night doesn't help matters. When I first moved here, the night sky was so dark it would take your breath away. I'd been living in a city for the previous three decades, so being able to stand in my garden and clearly see the Milky Way with the naked eye was a bit of a shock. But now, my neighbours have fairy lights on their sheds and garden furniture, everyone has PIR lights on their houses, and the people in the flats at the back of my house leave their lights on all night.
It's very sad. A truly dark sky is an awe-inspiring sight but few people ever get the chance to experience it for themselves any more. And even if they do, the chances are high that some asshole billionaire will have strewn his garbage across it...
What was I saying about parts of my presence on the web being rather out of date? I just noticed that instead of pointing at the current headfirstonly.com address, the link to my blog on my page at the Book of Face was still pointing to the old, http:// instance of the site, which I haven't updated in over a year.
Oops.
Now fixed. Sorry about that.
I've spent hours and hours this weekend tweaking the CSS on quite a few pages on this website to make them more responsive on mobile devices. I really got the bit between my teeth. This happened because I added a couple of images to my Home Page as part of its recent update and then realised that when I looked at the page with my phone, they weren't resizing properly. Clearly that wasn't at all acceptable, so now they do—but solving that problem left me feeling compelled to roll out the same tweaks to quite a few of the other pages on here (the blog has now been corrected as far back as January last year) and that led me to completely revamp my Bass Guitar Page to the extent of taking a whole bunch of new photographs of my gear to replace the pictures there which I'd taken with the first digital camera I ever owned, way back in 2003, and suddenly it's the middle of Sunday afternoon and where did the day go?
I think I have ended up immersing myself in computer stuff because I'm trying to distract myself. I've been sleeping really badly for the past few nights. I'm in a lot of pain (so no change there, then) but I've also been stressing out rather badly about the effect that learning I'm autistic might have on my relationships with my friends and loved ones. If I was being rational about this I know I wouldn't need to worry, and the reactions I've had from people who already know about this have without exception been kind and supportive but this is a big deal for me and to be honest being rational about it isn't really something I'm capable of doing right now.
I could really do with a hug.
But instead, evidently "immersing myself in code" is the way I'm going to be dealing with things for the next few days. At least the deeper recesses of this website will be a little less out of date as a result (I have only just noticed that the HTML header for my archive page for this month was still set to July 2025, for example). And I think I'm beginning to understand CSS properly, which is good.
I'm still in a profoundly introspective mood. I think that means that I'm not done making sense of things just yet. And there have been times today when I've realised that I just needed to stop and not think about anything at all for a bit. I'm not used to needing to do this, let alone to have the ability to just take my foot of my mental gas pedal for a while. When it happens, it's wonderfully calming.
I wish I could do this once I've gone to bed, though. Then, it's a very different story and my mind will just not. Shut. Up.
As it was my birthday earlier this week, I've given my Home Page on this website its annual update. This year it's received a far more extensive rewrite than it usually gets, and if you've been following the blog recently you'll understand why I felt I needed to do that.
I found myself laughing a few times as I wrote the new version of my biographical details. It wasn't even remotely funny at the time, but the realisation that my job at Selex was so awful that I quite literally needed to be on drugs to continue working there had never occurred to me before. Now, it's painfully (but hilariously) obvious.
As I write this, the supposed "depression" that those drugs were intended to treat continues to be conspicuous by its absence. But unlike last summer, when it had been replaced by an unmistakably manic episode which left me feeling totally out of control, today I just feel calm and collected. And happy.
I still keep finding myself lost in thought about what's been going on, and I think it'll be a few more weeks yet before I can get back to anything resembling my old routine. But that's okay. In fact it's more than okay; it would be silly of me not to take all the time I need to come to terms with what's been a seismic shift in my self-knowledge.
So I'm just going to chill out for a bit and be happy being happy. It's way past time I was able to do that.
I only have one Windows machine left which has Firefox set as its default web browser, and for the past week or so this machine has been behaving as if it was busy doing a lot more than running the programs which I was asking it to do. It would sometimes take more than a minute to respond to a mouse click and even restarting the computer didn't help once I tried running Firefox again. I was beginning to think a piece of malware had somehow gotten past my security protocols.
Instead I found out today that it was because the latest update of Firefox includes a new AI chatbot feature, and it enables it by default. And as a prime example of Mozilla's depressing tendency towards enshittification of their products, the fact that as a result Firefox hoovers up all available CPU cycles with it is hard to beat.
So now Firefox is no longer my default web browser on any of my machines. Instead, I use Vivaldi.
Today it's my birthday. I'm not altogether sure how I managed to make it this far, but I'm sixty-five years old. And to my surprise, I'm cool with that. In fact, for the past week I've had this weird feeling that's been so unfamiliar that it's taken me a few days to recognise what it was. I actually feel happy.
I did my celebrating last week. I got to hang out with Helen, who had come down from Yorkshire for a couple of days. Many chocolate biscuits were eaten and plenty of cups of coffee were drunk. We shopped. We went out to lunch. We had dinner together. And most of all, we did a lot of talking.
We had some very intense conversations about life in general and autism in particular; I was able to talk about aspects of my life which up until now had always left me baffled. Now, they are finally starting to make sense. It's obvious I have to stop pretending to be the version of me I thought I should be, because it was making me ill. I'm still finding the idea of "unmasking" quite scary, but Helen's daughter Ellie has recommended a book about it for me to read which she found helpful, and a copy is already on its way to me. And as Helen and I talked, I began to realise that I like this new version of me a lot more than the old version. I hope she does, too.
Hence this strange feeling of happiness. I'm sure it's why the sense of calm which I mentioned in my earlier blog has not just persisted, it's become stronger. What a weird few weeks it's been. How much weirder is the next year going to be?
Last night was one of those increasingly rare occasions when I slept so well that my watch gave me a perfect score of 100. And I needed a good night's sleep, because I had a couple of rather late nights over the weekend. On Friday night I was kept awake by Wessex Water, who were carrying out some emergency work after the sewer in the street at the front of the house started to overflow; ew! I didn't get my birthday lie-in this morning either, as they were back digging up my neighbours' front garden with a pneumatic drill by 09:30. There's a very large hole in their front drive right now.
On Saturday night I was back doing front of house sound for Function 246 again—and after helping with the load-in and load-out and lugging PA cabinets around one-handed, I didn't get home until after midnight. I forgot to take any painkillers and ended up having one of the most uncomfortable nights' sleep I've had in a long time (my watch gave me a score in the low seventies). As a result of that I ached all over on Sunday and I was pretty much running on fumes, so I have absolutely nothing planned for the rest of today at all.
I have always had a problem getting round to fixing things that bug me a little bit—but not enough that I can't bear to look at the results of not fixing them. An "inability to attend to tasks that aren't considered important", it turns out, is one of the principal behavioural traits of someone with ADHD.
There are so many tasks like that around the house which are waiting for me to get round to fixing. Most have been like that for a year or more.
Yesterday, I decided that I'd actually frickin' attend to a few. So I spent half an hour or so grovelling under my home office desk rearranging power cables, swapping over mains leads, and plugging in a new extension socket so that I can position my scanner within easy reach on the sideboard and the mains cables for my KRK Rokit 5 speakers aren't trailing across the desk any more. In the process I even found space to put an old Ikea desk lamp of mine somewhere where it will actually come in useful instead of leaving it in the conservatory where it's just been gathering cobwebs. It's a ridiculously trivial bunch of things to accomplish, but it feels really good to have done them.
Okay, in the process I discovered that there's a layer of dust several millimetres thick on the sideboard, but it's a start, right?
Today, the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) approved all of the outstanding funding (thirty-nine-and-a-half million quid of it!) for Charfield station. As reported here on the blog, the enabling works have been under way since the beginning of February, and this phase of development (which has more or less finished) will now move forward into the main construction works. And they're not hanging about, either; work will start this month on the construction of the new passenger footbridge, two platforms, the station forecourt, and a 70-place car park. The widening of Station Road (to enable the flow of two-way traffic to the car park) is planned to start on 18th August. The station is still intended to open in spring, 2027.
What's somewhat less worthy of celebration is the news that as a result, Little Bristol Lane will be closed again from Tuesday 19th August until early 2027. At least it's only closing in one direction this time.
I wonder which direction that will be?
(Edit: looks like we'll be able to get out of Little Bristol Lane okay, it'll be getting back in that will be problematic.)
It's the first of the month and it's a Bandcamp Friday, so of course I'm going to want to tell you once again that my latest album A Kind Of Lightning is available right now for you to stream or buy. But yesterday we got plenty of proper lightning here with not one, but two violent thunderstorms; it's a sign, I tell you!
I've been waiting for the village to get a decent storm for ages, because I've been itching to try out recording in stereo with the ORTF rig I bought in January. Yesterday I got that opportunity, and I ended up recording a single take of more than twenty-five minutes as the weather got louder and louder (I had to turn the faders down on the mixer after five minutes, because it was raining so hard!) The plants in the back garden look a lot happier this morning.
After listening back to the recording afterwards, I'm very pleased with it. There are a few things I'll do differently next time, because even with the mics sitting on a windowsill indoors, they got clobbered by wind noise once or twice. And the lightning was loud enough to cause some clipping on the recording, so next time I'll run things at 24-bit (or maybe even 32-bit) instead of 16-bit—because these days, I can. But the stereo image is gorgeous all the way across the sound field and the Marshall MXL991 small diaphragm condenser mics that I was using did a very good job, considering they cost less than forty quid each!
I'm still waiting for the Austrian Audio mics I ordered last month to be delivered (although they are on their way, hooray!) so I have yet to compare my ORTF results with those from a Blumlein pair but I'm sure as soon as I do, you'll hear about it here on the blog. In great detail, no doubt.
Given how uncannily predictive last month's blog title turned out to be, there's a certain amount of wishful thinking involved in this month's page banner. I'm in a lot of pain at the moment and it's making sleep very difficult. When I weighed myself this morning I was down to 87 kg, which is the lightest I've been for at least seven years (it's 19 kg less than I weighed in 2018, when I first got serious about watching my weight). I don't have a thick layer of fat to cushion me from the outside world any more (and there's a metaphor for the times if ever there was one) and oh boy, my joints are letting me know about that in no uncertain terms. Thank god for Voltarol.
But mentally I'm in a very different place compared to where I was juat a month ago. Discovering that I'm most likely autistic has left me very shaken and unsure of myself. In fact I've had to put feelings of any sort at all on hold for the time being, because I need to understand who I really am before I start examining the emotional implications. I thought I knew my true self, but I rather obviously didn't so I've been practising mindfulness with extreme prejudice over the past week. Doing so has brought with it a deep sense of calm that I wasn't expecting at all. You've only got to read earlier pages of this blog to realise that I've been struggling to deal with an awful lot of baggage over the years but much of that struggle now seems pointless, as if it applied to somebody else, not me. I'm not sure I could describe myself as being happy in the conventional sense of the word as a result, because to be honest I don't even really know who the real me is any more, but at least I'm not suicidally depressed any longer.
I've been reading the National Autism Society's online resources and self-identifying strongly with them; their page on loneliness made for uncomfortably familiar reading (autistic people are four times more likely to suffer from loneliness than neurotypical people).
Dr Hannah Belcher says in her blog on the site that simply getting a diagnosis improved her confidence in being able to deal with the rest of the world. I can empathise with that feeling. For me, realising what is likely to be affecting me has come as a huge relief. All sorts of events from my past, such as the panic attacks I suffered from during most of the 80s and many of the anxieties that continue to affect me to this day now have an explanation. Now I know why it takes me days to recharge after I've been to a mundane social event like a party; for me, socialising is never mundane. Weirdly, even my new-found love of doing front of house sound at gigs probably appeals because wearing earplugs lets me distance myself from the audience around me as much as it helps me to focus on the quality of the band's sound.
The reason you might not have ever suspected that I am in any way autistic is because when you're being bullied at school just for being different, you learn to become very, very good at masking (and that link describes just how much effort it takes to fit in; I've been doing all of the things in that list since I was a teenager. Is it any wonder I spent my entire professional career feeling absolutely exhausted all of the time?)
I'll be 65 years old in less than a fortnight. Somehow I've managed to get to this point in my life without receiving any help or support for the condition whatsoever. The fact that I finally have a good idea that this is what's going on doesn't necessarily lead to a "fix" for it, of course. But at least now I know what sort of situations are going to end up with me struggling and even if I can't avoid them completely, I can start asking for help.