From the category archives:

Autism

Solving my travel phobia

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday December 1, 2007

My problems with toilet habits turned out to be a lot bigger then I thought.

Ever since I started this blog at the beginning of this year I’ve been surprised by the amount of knowledge you need if you want to write an article about something you don’t know and how much you must understand if you want to write an article about something you don’t understand. This means that I not only have to solve problems but I also have to figure out what the problem was so I can write about it.
That seems like a lot of extra work but actually it’s a good thing.
I’ve been taught to try to find the easiest solution for problems and go for it. I’m not sure whether that is one of those things you learn by accident or that it actually does work for people who aren’t autistic.
Although this doesn’t work for me I tend to forget. I work very hard at solving a problem the hard way and then at some point I realize what caused the problem and within 30 seconds it’s gone.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the problems I have had all through my life with toilet habits. I told that it had come to a crisis and that I had to take some sick leave. But I had gotten a handle on things and was planning to go back to work in a few days.
Sadly I didn’t. I couldn’t.
A few minutes before I should have been picked up by the mini van to be brought to the shop in Capelle I felt some bowel movements. Not knowing what these feelings meant I called in sick again. Which turned out to be a good decision. If I had gone I would have had an other crisis.
After that I stayed at home for a few weeks. Thinking I should first learn to distinguish between the different feelings I have in my bowels.

Two weeks ago my counselor came by again.
We talk al lot about the toilet problems I had been having and he pointed me to something that I hadn’t noticed for some reason.
I was getting afraid to leave my house.
To go down town I have to cycle down a 2 kilometer long narrow road with water on both sides. When going down town I was getting afraid that I might accidentally drive into the water. Strangely enough on the way back I didn’t have this fear although I cycle down the same road.

Thinking about it some more I realized that I never had a problem with toilet habits. It always was more of a phobia and although it has something to do with toilet habits it’s more of a fear of travel. Since fear cause diarrhoea it’s an easy mistake.
The best way to deal with fobia is to face them right on. The more you think about your fear the bigger it gets. If you just deal with it usually it passes.

I went back to work last Tuesday and had two anxience days in which a took I lot of anti diarrhoea medicine and had four very frightening travel experiences.
On Thursday some one asked me what exactly scared me. Not something I wanted to talk about because I thought that my fear would increase if I thought to much.
But the opposite happened. I realized that I wasn’t afraid that I would soil myself. I was afraid of the feeling it self.
The moment I realized that the fear was gone.

BTW I read that some autistics are afraid of public toilets.
Although I never feared them I do have a problem with a lot of public toilets.
There are two types of toilets. In homes you usually find the type with a plateau on which the stool comes to rest before you flush it down.
In public places you tend to find the type with a watery hole in which the stool disappears.
I’ve always had the problem that I couldn’t feel my stool coming. I still have the problem that I can’t feel how big the stool is.
To know if the rest of my day will be “save” I have to look down. It’s quite scary when that isn’t possible.

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Does loosing skills lead to background fear?

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday November 22, 2007

People talk about background radiation. Can you talk about background fear? If so I have it.

The WordPress editor I’m using to write this article has an “Save and Continue Editing” button. Just like in working with any editor you want to regularly save your work in case you have a power outauge. Or what happens more frequently is that an other site I’ve opened (for instance my thesaurus site) becomes unstable and closes my browser. In that case I don’t want to loose my work.
The problem is that every time I hit the “Save and Continue Editing” button I feel this strong fear that I’ll have a database error and I will loose everything I’ve enter so far. Which is ridiculous because it has never happened.

I have the same problem with drawing the last few days.
I’ve been drawing for the better part of last year and have produced a few really nice drawings. (If I may say so myself).
The last few weeks I’ve been working with the book “Drawing on the right side of the brain” and have produced a few drawings that are much better then I had ever expected. But the last few days I’m getting frightened that I won’t be able to do it again.
Even thinking about a drawing I want to do, I feel the fear creaping up my throught.

Then there is my computer game. Mahjong. A simple game where you have to find to matching tiles and make them disappear.
I’ve been playing this game for years.
Until I started working for the sheltered work place I used to be very good at it. The last few years I became worse and worse and at some point stopped playing it all together.
Last year after discovering my autism I started playing it again and have found that I’m better at it then I ever was. Just yesterday I broke my all time record of the shortest time to solve the playing field.
I’ve even figured out why knowing that I’m autistic is important for this game. I make use of my wider then normal field of vision. By staring at the playing field I can see all the stones all at ones. What makes it possible to see which stones I should disappear and in which order.

The strange thing is that as I become better at this game I also become more frightened of the game. Although I’ve always been afraid of this game. I never recognized the feeling but I did know that I couldn’t sit still while playing. I’ve learned in the last few months that the more frightened I am, the more I move.

So why am I always afraid?
My theory is that it has something to do with the loosing of skills problem autistics have.

Usually you expect that if you start with something new that you won’t be very good at it. But if you work at it you’ll find that your skills improve and you’ll get better and better.
Of course you can have days that everything seems to be working against you. But generally your progress will be linear. And then at some point your progress will drop off. You’ll have reach the maximum amount of skill you can get with the time your willing to spent learning this skill.
(Of course the more you spent at it the futher you’ll come. But not everybody needs the skill to drive a car round a corner at 200 miles/hour.)

For me learning skills works very different. For one thing my progress doesn’t seem to be linear.
I start out as you would expect with becoming better and better but instead of a drop off in my progress I seem to experience a drop off in my level of skills.

When I was about 13 I played tennis for a little while. I started out with hitting a ball against a specific point at a wall for a few weeks (or maybe even months) and then joined a tennis club. A few weeks joining the coach taught me the backhand and from that moment it seemed as though I lost all my skills.
All over sudden I lost the ability to aim. Instead of hitting a specific point my balls went all over the place. Mostly up. After loosing a lot of balls by hitting them over the fence I stopped playing tennis.

For years I thought that the problem was that for what ever reason there was something wrong with my learning curve.
25 years ago I played the guitar for a while and that too lead to strange problems.
I noticed that instead of practicing a lot it seemed as though I would learn more when I didn’t practice. After playing a nice tune in the morning and failing miserably in the afternoon I wouldn’t play for a few days only to find that my skills had improved.
Up till a point it seemed as though I improved my skills by not practicing. But of course if you hardly ever do something you’ll loose interest.
So although I still have my guitar I haven’t played for years.

Now I’ve learned about autism and experienced it for a while I think this problem is created by two symptoms.
I’m told that autistics have a harder time learning new skills because they have trouble with automating skills. (I’m not sure whether this is the right word).
When you repeat a new action often enough your brain will create a little program that takes care of that action. So you can do it without thinking about it.
Learning how to walk would be a good example. Anyone will know of the kind of struggles little children have with walking. Then at some point they do it without thinking.
Apparently it takes more time for autistics to create these programs. I haven’t had any experienced this in the last year so I don’t know whether this means that I should make more of an effort to learn a new skill or that I just should be more patient.

The other problem that autistics have with skills is that these little programs sometimes just cut out. For no reason what so ever you’ll loose a skill you’ve know for years.
For a few minutes, days, weeks or maybe even months the skill will be gone. And then as if nothing ever happened the skill will come back.
Minutes, days, weeks or months…? Well, actually I don’t know for what period the skill will be gone. I hope it’s only for a few minutes of maybe a day.

I’m assuming that my problem with learning to play tennis had something to do with skipping parts of learning the skill of forehand hitting. For weeks I practiced daily to aiming at a stationary point. After joining the tennis club I had to learn in a few hours a week to aim anywhere but towards my opponent.
In hindsight that’s probably exactly what I learned. The problem being that “anywhere” wasn’t right. It should have been “anywhere on the playing field”.

I think that my problem with learning to play the guitar might be related with impatience. I didn’t have a good idea of the amount of practice that would be needed. But succeeding to play a simple tune in the morning and failing in the afternoon didn’t help. So being disappointed I wouldn’t play for a few weeks. And a few weeks later I would find that I could still play the tune. Which is what I would have expected if it wasn’t for the fact that I couldn’t the last time I tried to play it.

I’ve been wandering why pushing the “Save and Continue Editing” button scares me.
The problem seems to be with the way I write my articles.
The general advice for bloggers is to brainstorm for good ideas and articles but I never do. I write my articles in the same way as I used to do my homework when I was in school.
With many school assignments I didn’t know what was expected of me. So I would read the assignment and then stop and do something else.
After a while it would come to me what was expected of me and then I would continue with the assignment. (Of course my mother never understood what was going on and punished me for procrastinating).
After having done an assignment I sometimes lost it. I would misplace it or forget to take it to school. (Or you had to tell the teacher what you had done without looking in your notebook.) I don’t remember how often this happened but I do remember how frightening it was to face the same problem all over again. To ones again have to figure out what was expected of me.
I always tried to solve the problem by trying to remember how I solved it the last time. Which almost never worked.

I still have this fear. This article contains 1500 words. If something would go wrong I would have to reproduce it. I can’t remember it and I don’t know whether I could write the article again.
The same holds true for drawing. How do I know that I can repeat the drawing I did yesterday.
The holds true for mahjong. How do I know whether I can improve my time if I don’t know how I did it the last time.

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Dealing with fear

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday November 20, 2007

It’s difficult to judge how long you’ve been suffering from phobias if you’ve never been able to recognize your feelings. But judging by the types of behavior I’m learning to recognize it must be for years.

When I started with drawing at the beginning of this year I figured that I would learn a lot. But I didn’t figure I would learn more about myself then about drawing. (Although I might still become quite good at drawing )
The last few weeks I’ve been reading and working out off the book “Drawing with the right side of the brain” and it works. Doing the exercises seem to have made it possible for me to use the right side of my brain much more then I have the last 30 years, or so. As a result I’ve almost entirely stopped thinking in words.
I’m getting feelings and thoughts back that remember me of myself 30 to 40 years ago.

When I started this I expected that it would enrich me. I didn’t expect that I would have to deal with a large amount of fear. I’m now noticing that I have so much fear that it’s becoming ever more clear that I have to deal with it.
I have to defeat it or it will defeat me.

The coming few days, or possibly even weeks, I won’t be doing much drawing. For one thing because that too begins to scare me. But mainly because I’m busy sorting through half forgotten memories to figure out when fears and phobias started and how I will deal with them.
For one thing is clear. I’ll have to do something.
When your really scared of something you’re tempted to curl up in a little corner but if you do that you only get more scared and at some point you’ll never come out of your corner.

I’ve seen that happen with a friend of mine who gets an anxiety attack every time he wants to leave his house. The last time I saw him was about a year ago. He was in the middle of an anxiety attack. He told me that he always got them when he had to go out to do his shopping or to visit his psychiatrist.
That was all he had left. Visits to his psychiatrist and doing his daily shopping. The rest of the world scared him to much.

I don’t want to become like him. So I’ll better deal with my fears.

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Understanding right sided thinking (Drawing: Horse without a knight)

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday November 6, 2007

After reading some more and thinking a lot about it, I’m beginning to understand the right sided thinking and why it seems to be much more easy for me.

It turns out that I didn’t do my last two drawing in the way the book expected. With the Faces and vases drawing you were supposed to name the parts of the face you were drawing in the left face. Then draw two horizontal lines and then draw the right face.
It’s quite possible that this drawing is almost impossible if you do it that way.
But of course I didn’t. I don’t like thinking in words. I do it much to often and get very tired. Especially when I’m drawing I try to only think in pictures.
My way of drawing a face is think of a face in silhouette and trace it. The tracing part still doesn’t work that well. But it is getting easier.
With the right face I switched to the vases view and there was nothing to it.

It isn’t completely clear to me whether people were supposed to recognize the subject of the up side down drawing. For most people trying to draw an up side down picture is so taxing that they stop talking inside their mind.
The point being that talking is an ability of the left side of the brain and drawing is an ability of the right side. Drawing up side down is so taxing that the left side gives it up and leaves it up to the right side to do the job.

The book describes a special feeling people are supposed to have while they are doing this kind of drawings. You should feel more alert, more relaxed and not notice the passing of time.
I can’t say that I experienced a special feeling while doing the up side down drawing.
I do have those feelings when I concentrate on thinking in pictures. Especially noticing the passes of time seems to be something that is closely related to thinking in words.
I remember from my youth, when I primarily thought in picture, that I had very poor sense of time. But of course back then they called it day dreaming.

Could it be that one of the differences between autistic and other people is that autistics make more or better use of the right side of their brain?
I don’t know.
I do know that autistics are supposed to have a different thought process. I can think in words but it is a lot of work. Very taxing.

Any way. The book advices to do several up side down drawings before going on with the next assignment.
This was supposed to be a horse with a knight. But when I copy I always enlarge. So by the time I got to the head there was no room left for the knight.
I drew the horse up side down and then turned the page to draw in the shades.

Considering that this is the first time in my life that I’v drawn any kind of animal. I think it’s not to bad. (Except for the right fore leg.)

Horse without a knight

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Need to repeat

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 28, 2007

I’ve finally found a solution to a problem that has been bugging me for the last 30 years.

For the last 30 years or so I’ve been talking to myself. Well, not really talking to myself. I had imaginary talks with other people.

As a child I was always afraid that I would get them confused with the real thing and would at some point start having those conversations out loud. Some 20 years ago that fear became a reality when I indeed started to have my imaginary conversations out loud. Although I never confused them with real conversations, people must have thought I was mad.

Over the years I have had innumerous theories about why I would talk to myself. Maybe it was a way to deal with tension. Maybe it was a method to suppress feelings. Maybe it was a method to think about problems. Maybe it was a way of talking to people when I had no one to talk to.

Over and over again I tried to get rid of this habit by using a brute force method. I thought that if I just were strong enough I should be able to succeed. But I wasn’t
Every time I started with not talking it felt good but within a few hours my motivation would be gone. For some reason talking to myself would feel nice again for a while and I forgot that I was trying not to do it.

Yesterday I finally realized that there is a lot of repeating going on in the imaginary conversations I have with myself. Often I just keep repeating one sentence and even when it gets very annoying I just can’t stop myself.
Thinking a little more about that I realized that actually all of my imaginary conversations have some repeating element to them. First I think of something and then I start talking about it.
In every conversation I repeat at least ones but usually dozens of times.

Loving to repeat is a major symptom of autism. Actually as much as I had thought about it I never did find this symptom in my own behavior. But here it seems to be.

I’ve made myself a little repeating toy. A chain with beads to fiddle with.
Although I made this toy less then 24 hours ago I already feel a lot more at ease with myself then I ‘ve ever done.
Every time I feel the need to talk to myself I start fiddling with my chain and the feeling fades away.

Even writing this article is a lot easier then usual. Usually it takes me days to write a story. I find a few words that could fit and keep repeating them over and over. That gets so distracting that it takes for ever to come up with some more words.
This time I jumped out of bed at 5.30 AM and the story came in one burst.

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Being autistic or having autism

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday October 27, 2007

Thinking about the relation between autism and identity.

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between having autism and being autistic.
When I first started writing about autism I talked about having autism primarily because there are more searches for the keyword “autism” then for the keyword “autistic” and I wanted my writings to be found. Even so I had to correct myself several times. I’m prone to using the word autistic.
In the mean time I also read about autism. At first I read about the symptoms of autism and those article were written by experts in the field who always talked about having autism.
The last few months I try to read article that are written by people that have experience with autism themselves. That turns out to be much harder for the simple fact that there don’t seem to be many people with autism who blog about autism.
But the few I’ve found are adamant in their opinion that it should be “having autism” and not “being autistic”.

They seem to hold the same opinion I come across at the sheltered workplace were I work. “I’m not a wheelchair but I sit in a wheelchair.” Or a more clear cut explanation: Not being able to walk or to see or to lift heavy objects is only one of my qualities. It’s not my foremost quality.

But I still haven the feeling that it should be “I am autistic” and not “I have autism”.

So I’ve been thinking about the difference by comparing it to being gay.
I’ve defined myself as being gay, although it is indeed only one of my qualities, ever since I was 18 yr old.
I discovered that I liked men when I was sixteen. For two years I thought about what that meant for my life and what kind of problems I would have to face and by the time I was 18 I came out of the closet. I have had my fair share of problems but I must say that hardly any of them had anything to do with being gay.

But there is more.
I’ve met several thousand gay people over the years and in general they had a good life and were happy with the choices they had made.
I’ve also met some 50 to 60 men who like men and without exception they have a lot of problems. Not only with their sexuality but with all parts of their lifes.
They don’t like the job they have. They don’t like their girlfriends/wifes. They don’t like sneaking around (although they only think about it but never actually do). And most of all they are always afraid that they will be found out and loose every thing they have. (Although I would think they hardly have anything that is worth anything.)

Reading about the problems that people who have autism describe I’m reminded of a lot of the problems that are common with men who like men.
Fears of the consequence of being different. Fears of being bullied. Fears of not fitting in. Stories about painful remarks people have made.
What I miss are stories about solutions. Thinking about the sort of problems you’re likely to face and how you will deal with them. Instead of being blindsided the moment it happens.

So what’s the difference?
Well the difference between having autism and being autistic is something I’m still thinking about. But the difference between being gay and liking men is something I’ve solved years ago.

Sexual preference is hereditary. It’s something that just happens to you. You don’t control it. It’s something that makes you different from other people and they will react.
Identity is a choice you make. Usually it entails thinking a lot about your main characteristics. It means that you’ll have to think about what you want from life and what you want to change. You’ll have to think about what you could change and how to do that. You’ll also have to think about the characteristics you can’t change and how to deal with those. You’ll have to think about the kind of problems you’ll have to face and how to deal with them.

It’s a lot of work to think about identity but at some point you’ll be finished. You will have a blue print with a describtion of the way you want to live your life. Although this blue print won’t prevent you from having problems it will make it a lot easier to deal with those problems.

Twenty five years ago I had dozens of strategies about how I could deal with the kind of problems a gay man could face. I’ve forgotten most of them because I never came across any of those problems.
I’m not sure why that is. Maybe I was to pessimistic about what could go wrong. Or maybe I was able to recognize problems and avoid them. Or maybe I displayed so much selfconfidence that people left me alone.

This time I think it’s probably better to just define an identity for myself to steer my choices. I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend to much energy in thinking out strategies for situations that might never happen.

I define my identity as autistic gay artist who will get back at his ideal weight of 65 kg at some future point.

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Twisted toilet habbits

by Henk ter Heide on Monday October 22, 2007

Autism causes some problems with feeling the need to relief myself. (A somewhat graphic description.)

For years I’ve had this annoying habit of having to go when ever I left for somewhere or arrived somewhere.
In my teens I didn’t think anything about it. I just did. At times my mother would get very angry because of my need to “go” at the last moment. But I thought that just was part of our ongoing battle.

I only realized that something strange was going on when I got my first IT job.
We worked in two shifts. An early shift from 8 AM till 5 PM and a two men late shift from 3 PM till the work was finished.
When I worked the early shift every thing went the usual way. Just before leaving at 5 PM I would go. But when I worked the late shift I began to notice something odd. The two man shift had to perform some tasks together and every man had a few task of his own.
So it would often happen that one of us was finished while the other still had a few minutes work. In such cases the first one to finish would turn out the lights in none essential areas and get his stuff so we could leave the moment the other was finished.
When I was the first to finish I also would go to the toilet knowing that we would leave within a few minutes.
The strange thing was that it happened several times that while I was leaving the toilet my colleague would announce that he was finished and that we could leave. In which case I turned around and again went to the toilet.
While going to the toilet for the second time in one minute I felt very guilty. But how ever guilty I felt I couldn’t stop myself.

It was only when I started working at the sheltered workplace that I realized that this wasn’t just a habit but something much more compulsive.
By Dutch law large companies are compelled to give employee a break every two hours and to service them with a canteen where they can eat there lunch, grab a smoke etc.
While working at the sheltered workplace I found I had to go every time on route to the canteen and on route back to the department.
It got ridiculous. Going to the toilet ten times a day: When leaving my home, when arriving at my work, when going to the canteen and coming back (6 times) and when going back to my home and when arriving at home. And then in the evening I would go ones when I went to sleep.

The last eight month’s since I started working at the shop in Cappelle my toilet compulsion is getting frightening. It’s a thirty minute drive and every day I’m afraid that I won’t make it without having an accident.

Two weeks ago the Autism center send me some help that took the shape of an “Social Psychiatric Nurse”. A gentlemen that is going to help me organize my housekeeping and deal with a few other problems.
After telling him about my toilet problems he suggested that I should eat bran to activate my bowels.

After eating bran for two weeks I’ve finally figured out what the problem was: I’ve never been able to feel my bowel movement! So I never knew when I had to go. So I always squeezed my buttocks together. Which for some reason gave me the feeling that I had to pee.

The last two weeks I’ve taken some sick leave to have some time to learn to recognize the different feelings that warn you. Which turned out to be somewhat complicated because you have no way of knowing if you really have to go without going.
So if you don’t trust your feelings and you are really afraid that you will soil yourself, you tend to go early only to find that you actual didn’t have to go. Then while you are mustering up your courage you can withstand ever stronger feelings that might mean that you have to go.

At the moment I’m reasonably certain that I will be able to recognize the feelings. So next Wednesday I’ll resume my work. Let’s see how it works out.

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My first lie ever

by Henk ter Heide on Friday October 12, 2007

My (little) problems with Theory of Mind (ToM).

I have a theory. My theory is:

That you too have self awareness.
That your knowledge differs from mine.
That you think about different thinks then I do.
That although you have the same set of feelings that I do, you feel different about different things.

That is my theory.

Well, actually it isn’t my theory. It is one of the problems of people with autism I came across when I started reading about autism.
My theory is that this theory gets it’s name from the way people think about other people. You can’t really know whether other people have feelings, thoughts and knowledge. But you can theorize about it.

As I understand it people without autism think that ToM is a very important concept in communication theory. A lot of people with autism thinks it’s not.

The first ten months after I had discovered that I have autism I didn’t think that ToM posted a problem for me. Not only do I know about self awareness and the other three points on the list. But I recognized the problem in the guy who first made me aware that something was wrong with me.

He told me that he changed after his friend died and I didn’t understand him. It took me a month before I realized that he never told me how long ago his friend died. Only when he told me that it was something like eight years ago did I realize what he tried to tell me.
He never told me when this friend died because he assumed that I knew. But since I only knew this guy for a little over a year, at the time, and we had never talked, he should have known that I wouldn’t know that.

(He didn’t want to talk about his friend but about something that happened around the same time. This was something I recognized. People with autism have a problem with either the way they remember or the way they talk about things that happened in the past. As soon as I’ve figured this one out I’ll write an article about it.)

Clearly this guy has a problem judging which kind of knowledge I could have and which kind of knowledge I couldn’t have. So he has problems with ToM. But I don’t make this kind of mistakes. Or do I?

Two months ago I caught myself doing something really stupid. Sitting in the toilet I was thinking about ways to justify the amount of sheets of toilet paper I use.
What if someone would tell me that ten sheets are to many. Maybe you should only use eight or five sheets.
I was thinking that I could tell them to bugger off and leave me alone or something along that line. I spent a large amount of time thinking about how I could defend myself against critics.
This time though I finaly realized something. How could they know?
I live alone. But even if I didn’t, I’m alone in the toilet. Nobody can see how much toilet paper I use. Using the information in there computer somebody at the grocery could calculate how much toilet paper I use. But seeing as how unimportant this is, they probably wouldn’t.

Now I know. I know that nobody can possibly know how many sheets of toilet paper I use. But even after two months of thinking about this I still catch myself defending myself against criticism. I don’t do it as much as two months ago. But I still do it.
Although I know that people can’t know I still have the feeling they do.

Which brings me to the subject of lying.
I never lie.
I know that you’re supposed to tell the wife of your boss that she has a lovely dress but I won’t. I never get in this kind of situations but if I did, I wouldn’t spare her feelings.
But of course I don’t recognize her feelings so it’s only natural that I don’t think they are important.

I thought about lying. I remember a few instances in the last 20 years that I would have wanted to hide something and I thought about lying about it. But I always felt that it was pointless because it always would come out.
I’ve been in situations where I could have volunteered information but didn’t. But that isn’t really lying, is it?
I still feel that lying is something like telling people that the ceiling is black while everybody can see that it is white!

But a few days ago I’ve done it. I’ve told my first lie ever. Everybody who visits my website can see my lie and you don’t even know it.
I’m very proud of this new ability of mine.

If you look to the left (and a little up) you’ll see a list of popular post.
I have a plugin to calculate that. It gives points for:

the times a post gets read by people visiting my site.
the amount of links to a post.
for the times a post gets read via my RSS feed.

It looks at a few more variable, but mostly at the times it gets read by visitors.

I’ve been annoyed with this plugin for as long as I have it.
There is something fundamentally flawed with any list that influences it’s own creation.

People visiting my site want to read my best work. So they will read the article that is on the top of the list. This article will get more points and stay on top.
The problem is that it is quite possible for a mediocre article to reach the top. That’s because when I first started using this plugin I didn’t have that many readers and articles didn’t get read that much.
Let’s say that when I first started using this plugin, article on average got read three times. That would mean that an article only would have to be read four time to reach top possition. After reaching top position the article would gain points just by virtue of being in first position.

I know from experience that some of my colleagues roam the internet looking for articles about the company. That means that any article about Promen – especially when I mention the name in the title of the article – will get read by four or five colleagues.
About a week after installing the popular post plugin I wrote an article entitled “Promen is running out of work (drawing: Truck 1th sketch)”. I don’t link to it because it wasn’t a very good article. For one thing the title didn’t match the subject of the article.

Today it wouldn’t matter if four or five colleagues read one of my articles only because the name Promen is mentioned. But a few months ago when I published this story it tipped the scale and put this article on top. Which resulted in the situation where one of my worst articles ever got read most.
To amend the situation I pulled the output of the plugin a few weeks ago. The plugin is still running. When I feel that the list has changed enough to be a real represent the populous of my posts I’ll put the list back in.
Or at least that was what I thought three weeks ago.

Two weeks ago I realized that nobody knows what the most popular article on my site is. Even I don’t know.
All the plugin tells me is which article has the most pageviews. But even if people leave within a second it still counts as a pageview.
So I could very easily make a list of articles and call it “popular post” and nobody would know. That is except for the people that read this site regularly. But like with most sites, although they are very important to me, the regulars only compose a small percentage of my total readership.
I could get away with it.

I thought about it for a few days. Looked at it from all angles to convince myself.
If theory of mind is really true it means that nobody knows what I know. I know that the popular post list on my site is false. But except if I tell, nobody will know.
Usually you would expect that the most popular article wouldn’t be a recent article. Since it would need some time to accumulate points. But the Blog rush site was something of a hype when it was first launched so it is possible that a lot of people would google for information and found my article that way, wouldn’t it?

Saturday I falsified my list, so here you have it. My first lie ever!

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Two methods to fail at everything you try

by Henk ter Heide on Friday September 21, 2007

Over the last forty years I’ve found two ironclad methods to never succeed at anything I try.

The first method, off course, is good old procrastination. Just don’t start at anything that could lead to some kind of succes.
At this moment for instance, I should be drawing trees. But although I have a fairly good idea how I should go about that, I’m not sure that I would succeed.
And lets be honest. Writing an article that could draw a hundred pageviews to my blog is a good investment of my time, isn’t it?

procrastination has one drawback. Everybody knows it’s your own doing. People tell you that you make your own choices.
Deep down you know that you could succeed if you just had more willpower.
To be really successful in failing you need a better method.

To solve this problem I got a habit that wrecked my concentration.
Maybe you are very shy and don’t know what you should say to people. Or maybe you have some other problem. In any case you could fantasize about the conversation you could have.
To be any good at it you should spent a lot of time and energy thinking about what people could say. While you’re thinking about the things you could say you’ll never say them.
If you’re really good at this you won’t have the energie to do anything of importance.

It will help if you can find an psychiatrist who convinces you that all your problems are your own doing and will disappear if you just learn how to talk to people.
It would be especially advantageous if this psychiatrist omits to do his job and never tells you what the actual problems are.

Now I have one good and one very good method to explain why I fail at almost everything I try, I’ve finaly learned that I’m actually autistic and have all kinds of possibilities.
To succeed I only have to unlearn my failing methods.

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Loosing an annoying habit

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday September 18, 2007

After doing my cars sketch I had to make a choice. Should I concentrate on perspective or should I try to get clearer pictures in my mind.

It wasn’t very hard to figure out what I was doing wrong. The usual. I was talking to myself while I was trying to draw from memory. When I talk to myself my concentration goes.
I should really try to break this habit.

But I’ve been trying for years. Every time it annoys me I’m motivated. But after a few hours the motivation shrivels away. I start wondering if talking to myself isn’t something I need.
It keeps the fears and other violent feelings away. Or does it?

I thought about it for a while but I didn’t find an answer. I watch some television, thought some more and went to bed.

Just before I fell a sleep I realize a few things.

Twenty five years ago a psychiatrist told me that having pictures in ones mind was a sure sign that something was very wrong and that I should learn not to have those pictures. So I did.
I don’t really talk to myself. I fantasize about conversations I could have with people and those imaginary conversation are just as tiring as the real thing.
Learning to have imaginary conversations didn’t really temper violent feelings. That I never recognized my feelings is a symptom of autism. One has nothing to do with the other.

When I figured this out it was all the more important to get rid of this habit. It also was fairly obvious how I should go about it. I should concentrate on the pictures in my mind and that way the imaginary conversations should just go away.
I’ve been at it for almost two weeks now and the imaginary conversations are getting much easier to control. I can go for hours without having one.
Just after I awake I have a hard time not to give in to this habit. The rest of the day it doesn’t seem to be that difficult.

I only had one problem when I started the process of loosing this habbit. I found that the method I use to write articles closely resembles this process of imaginary conversations.
Until last week I had a two week gab between drawing a picture and publishing it and for most articles I had a one week gab between writing the article and publishing it. That meant that I should have written last weeks articles just a few days into the process. I didn’t think that would have been a good idea.
So loosing this habbit meant I had to take a little break from blogging for a week.

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