by Henk ter Heide on Thursday March 4, 2010
Steve Pavlina revisited his idea about ordering things from the universe.
A few years ago when he talk about this subject it felt a bit out there, so I didn’t take it very serious. But this time he said something that actually meant something to me.
“What would happen is you order a meal at a restaurant and changed your mind before you have gotten it?”
His answer was that if you keep changing your mind you will never get any thing to eat.
That struck a note with me. I realized that this is something I’ve been doing the last few years. Maybe even on purpose.
For years I’ve been dreaming that I would like to have some friends in there early twenties.
I’m not quite sure why. But mostly because I can relate to them.
People my age are usually in a relatitionship or want to be in a relationship and I don’t want to be in a relationship.
Actually I would want to be in a relationship but I’ve found that being autistic means that my ideas about relationship differ from most non-autistic people. So to get a relationship I would have to find a gay guy of my age who’s also autistic.
What are the changes?
But anyway. Back to friendship with gay or straight guys in there early twenties.
15 Years ago I had three friends of that age.
One after an other, spanning about 6 years.
But after the third I stopped trying to find new friends.
It took too much out of me.
I felt as though they didn’t play by the rules and that I had to fight constantly to get them to visit me.
After six years of fighting with people who where supposed to be my friends I just gave up.
But now I’m starting to understand how the world works. And especially how I work and how autism influences the way I deal with friendship.
There are two main differences in the way I deal with friendship.
The first is that I don’t have as much need for close contact as non-autistics do. And secondly rules are far more important to me then to most non-autistics.
I like to be in a friendship where I see a friend every 6 to 8 weeks.
But of course to non-autistics once every 6 to 8 weeks means a very shallow contact. Which means that when I try to get them to visit me they sometimes have other priorities.
15 years ago I felt trapped by rules I never understood. But now I think about them I realize that those rules aren’t that important.
Are gay people allowed to befriend straight people? Of course they are.
Are people in there late forties allowed to befriend people in there early twenties? Of course they are.
The strange thing is that I actually know quite a few guys in there early that seem to be friends.
For years I’ve been wondering why it is that a guy in his twenties would want to befriend me. But I’ve concluded that it might be because I’m truly interested in them. Maybe it’s also something about needing a father figure.
Until now, though, I’ve hardly ever followed through. Mostly because I have been distracted by exactly the problem Steve Pavlina points out.
I feel like I’m in a restaurant with thousands of interesting dishes. I’m having such a hard time deciding which dish I’m going to sample that I never try any one.
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday June 17, 2009
Thinking about my thinking process.
- Processing abstract information
- Finding the limit of my thoughts
In my last post I wrote that I expected that post would be a little further apart in future. This one is taking even more time then I had expected.
On the up side I have figured out that my very annoying habit of talking to myself is actually a symptom of my autism.
Having a visual thinking process means that I can’t think about subjects I can’t visualize. Things like “feelings”, the word “goals”, “business deals” are to abstract to visualize.
I’m not able to think about them except by talking about them.
Accepting that this is a symptom of my autism means a few things.
- It means that I have to accept that I will never get rid of this habit.
- It means that I’ll have to accept that I can’t draw as much as I would want to. Because I can’t think visual at the same time that I’m processing abstract information.
- But it also means that I need a better understanding of this process. There must be a natural boundary. A point where I’ve solved the problem I’m working on and should go back to thinking visually. That’s what I’m working on right now.
by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 29, 2009
A few days ago I wrote about my problems with self confidence. To solve those problems I tried something that’s completely new for me.
I always have the feeling that everything in the world is interconnected. That you can’t move one thing without moving the whole world.
I’ve been told that is something that’s typical for people who have a visual thinking process.
One of the results of that feeling is that I tend to want to solve all my problems all at ones. It never works but I keep trying.
This time I decided that I should find out what would happen if I solved my problems one at the time. At the moment I have three biggies. I started with the one that annoys me the most and work my way down.
In the last week I’ve all but solved my bowel problems. It turns out to be a paradoxical problem.
I find it very difficult to trust feelings I only partly recognize. But the moment I did it became very easy to trust my feelings.
The second problem is work related.
For the last year I’ve been filing complaints about something that is going wrong in my job and nobody listened.
Thinking about the problem as a self confidence problem I realized that there are two bold moves I can make that will solve the problem. The first one is something simple that will show that I’m not some one to mess with. The second will probably take some months to implement but will solve every problem of this type.
(I tell more about this in one of my next posts.)
The third problem has to do with drawing.
I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes this next drawing so difficult and I must say that I’ve been kind of stuck.
The drawing doesn’t seem that difficult to me. I should be able to just start with it and find which parts of the face I should practice some more.
Not being able to find a solution for the third problem I’ve spend most of my time thinking about the second problem.
While doing so I realized that I was wrong. I don’t have three big problems I have four. I’m not drawing because of the fourth problem.
I never realized it but there is a problem with being both autistic and gifted.
Most autistics are very fanatical with some type of collection or have a, often strange, subject that holds their attention for there whole life.
I’m an autistic of the last type. I need a subject that is interesting enough to spend most of my live reading and thinking about. But being gifted means that there is no subject complicated enough to keep me interested my whole life. Which means that I have to switch subject every 15 to 20 years or so.
I’m about to switch to my third subject; learning to draw as good as is humanly possible.
The problem is that I can’t make that switch without closing the second subject. Or actually without find a way of doing something with what I’ve learned.
From my 19th till my 35th I tried to understand why people consider suicide and the process they go through while they’re considering suicide and how one could save them. After about 15 years it became clear that saving some one who’s suicidal is almost impossible. Even for a psychiatrist.
Knowing that I lost interest.
But my current subject if different. There’s actually a practical use for it. Only thing is that the people who should organize it don’t seem to know. Or maybe they don’t care. In any case I don’t know those people so I’m not able to tell them.
But as I said. I can’t move on without doing something with my knowledge.
So I’ve decided to write a few articles about it on my own blog.
So the new category “odds and ends” will be about everything that interests me that’s not art related.
by Henk ter Heide on Monday March 30, 2009
Examining some feelings that prevent me from drawing.
Eye problems
Twenty years ago I tried my hand at studying to be a programmer. I went to school for a year and got the basic papers you need to get a job. Then I went on with studying on my own to get a perspective on a better job.
It was then that I run into a strange problem with my eyes.
Every time I picked up my books to do some studying my eyes would go out of focus and the letters on the paper would get vague. At the same time I felt very tired. Although I didn’t know why I felt tired I assumed it had something to do with the eye problems.
Although I had my eyes examined I never found out what the problem was.
Examining a feeling
My involuntary holiday of, coming up to, 4 months as a result of breaking my hip gave me a lot of time to examine a few things you never get to.
So I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter, a lot of time thinking about several problems we have at my job, and examining a frighting cold feeling I have in the sauna and when taking a hot shower.
I don’t know about other people with broken hips, but I found that it became very easy to take really long showers. Sitting on my shower chair. Not having a lot of interesting things to do. Not having any appointments. I found I could easily sit in the shower for two hours.
Which would have been very nice if it wasn’t for the cold feeling on my back I always have when taking a shower.
I tried making the water hotter, as I always do, but that didn’t help. It never does.
But since I didn’t have a hell of a lot to do I decided that I might as well examine what was going on. Why I would feel cold under a hot shower.
Although it was very frightening I tried to concentrate on the feeling. It took me two weeks but I finally realized that the feeling I had wasn’t cold but the feeling of water running along my skin.
I also realized how it came about that I misinterpreted the feeling.
In autistics the part of the brain that recognizes feelings doesn’t work as it should. Which makes it very hard for us to recognize our feelings.
It has happened that I only found out what I was feeling by going by the authority of other people.
Someone would tell me: “I think you feel such and so”. And since I didn’t know what I was feeling I took his word for it.
In this case I learned to interpret the feeling I was having standing on the edge of the swimming pool on a cold Saturday morning 40 years ago, by listening to what people told me.
“You must be cold”. Yes I must be.
In reality it wasn’t cold that I was feeling. It was the sensation of wind blowing along my back.
Dealing with panic
Of course this blog isn’t about recognizing feelings. It’s about drawing, what I learn while drawing and what I need to draw.
I like to draw.
But being autistic I don’t really recognize that feeling. I interpret it in the same way I interpret all my feelings. In this case by the fact that I can’t get myself to stop drawing.
I don’t draw very often so after a time I tend to think that I don’t need it any more and store my drawing stuff away.
But every time I do, I get new ideas of drawings I want to do and get my drawing stuff back out.
But then I can’t get myself to sit down and draw.
After I figured out that I misinterpreted the feeling I have in hot showers, I thought that it could very well be that I also misinterpret feelings that have something to do with drawing.
So now I’m examining several annoying and frightening feelings of which I don’t think they have very much to do with drawing.
Yesterday, for the first time in twenty years, I ran into my little I eye problem. While using Twitoria to unfollow inactive Twitter profiles I got very tired and my eyes went out of focus.
At first I though that I should stop and relax for a moment but then I recognized what was happening to me. I was experiencing some type of panic attack. So I went on with what I was doing and after a while the feeling past.
Knowing what the feeling is I now realize that it’s something I have quite a lot. While writing this kinds of entries for my blog for instants.
Translating the pictures in my mind to words is hard, sometimes even painful. Many a time I’ve stopped writing and walked away with the feeling that it would go easier when I came back. It never did.
Writing this entry I also felt the need to walk off but knowing that I was experiencing a slight panic attack helped me to go on. Although the writing process is still hard to do, the panic attack did pass.
by Henk ter Heide on Thursday October 9, 2008
Recognizing the feelings that have to do with drawing enables me to draw.
The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:
- Cognitive behavior therapy
- Strong anonymous feelings
- 751
- Feeling scared
- Accepting comments selectively
- Mad as Hell
Although we’re not yet there, I asked the psychiatrist whether a strong tingling feeling in your body is a happy feeling.
He was not sure. Could be. But he did say that if I enjoyed the feeling it’s probable that it has something to do with feeling happy.
I do enjoy the feeling.
Now I know that it is supposed to be happy feeling I find that I’m able to just sit down and draw. I can resist the urge to jump through the room.
I’m also trying a new technique.
After finding that my problem isn’t with drawing techniques but with recalling techniques, I’ve decided I should draw more interesting scenes the a bunch of rising squares. And since it isn’t possible to draw a lighter color on top of a darker color, as you would with paint (Or at least it is possible but it isn’t visible if you do), I’ve decided to try a new technique.
So this drawing is based on some image I imagined a few days ago. I’m starting with the lighter colors and working my way up to the darker colors.
I’m not quite sure what I must do after this but hopefully I will know by tomorrow.
751
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 1, 2008
Realizing how I deal with feelings that I don’t recognize.
The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:
- Cognitive behavior therapy
- Strong anonymous feelings
- 751
- Feeling scared
- Accepting comments selectively
- Mad as Hell
Some times I feel
- a kind of tingling white noise going through my body. It’s actually quite a nice feeling but I don’t know by what it is caused. Which makes it impossible to summon it.
- a cold wind blowing through my body. The kind of feeling that wants me to turn on the heating. But then I look at my thermometer and find that it’s 24° C in my room. It’s a horrible feeling but since I don’t know what causes it I don’t know how to avoid it.
- talkative. I shouldn’t list talking to myself as a feeling. But it is kind of a feeling. A very annoying feeling at that. It tenses me up and it paralyzes me. It makes it impossible to do the work I would like to do.
- anger.
- a collection of psychical sensation of which I’ve learned that it means that I’m scared. But I don’t always realize the meaning of those sensations.
I never feel sadness but I do know that when tears run from your eyes you are supposed to be sad. Or it must be the kind of orange tension I feeling when I’m crying. But I don’t think so.
At this weeks session of CBT we set the target for the therapy and talked about recognizing emotions.
Although I’ve been in therapy before this was the first time I actually got to set the goal. Which is nice because it gives my control over the therapy.
Two of the 6 therapies I had in the last 25 years had a clear cut goal that wasn’t reached. But still the psychiatrist was very pleased with himself. Once the psychiatrist set a goal with which I didn’t agree but I was told to take it or leave it. The other three times we just talked for one and a half year. I never felt that my problems were solved but apparently the psychiatrist did.
This time the goal will be two fold.
One goal will be to get a better understanding of my feeling. The second goal is to get rid of the talkativeness. To finally find a way to do the things I want to do.
Since last weeks session I do know why have been talking to myself for all those years.
It has a positive feedback loop to it.
Even though it tenses me up it does make that I don’t feel the tinkling feeling and more important it also makes that I don’t feel the cold feeling. It’s very difficult for me to deal with feelings I don’t recognize. Even when they are nice feelings.
Last week I’ve been trying not to talk to myself and to find out what kind of feeling I would be suppressing. Once I felt a little nervous, but most of the time I just didn’t recognize the feeling. Mostly I felt cold.
After setting a goal we talked about emotions and feelings.
What is the difference?
I always thought that feelings are what you have in your body, headache or pain in your leg, and that emotions were the more abstract kinds like anger and falling in love.
But apparently there is an order to feelings.
The more basic feelings that even a dog could have; anger, fear, joy and sadness are called “emotions”. The more human feelings like disappointment are called “feelings”.
My homework for this week is to think about the difference between feeling nervous, feeling fear and feeling panic.
Difference in the psychical sensations they invoke, the way you would react to them and an other thing I don’t remember.
About 15 years ago I took a few years to figure out what the psychical sensations of the most important emotions were. And to figure out in what way people would act when they had those feelings.
The main reason I wanted to know that was to be able to recognize people who where angry or fearful. But I found that it also helped my to recognize my own feelings.
But in the last few days I realized that there is a difference between feeling and knowing a list of behavioral features.
The problem is that it is to theoretical.
When I see some one dressed for cold whether while it’s 25° C I conclude that it’s quite possible that they are scared. But when I feel cold shivers going down my back while it’s 25° C I never realize that I might be scared.
I don’t think I am, but I never even thought about it.
I know the list of psychical sensations associated with feeling scared by heart:
- choking feeling in your throat.
- pain in your stomach.
- pressure on your lungs.
- feeling cold.
- an ever stronger need to go to the bathroom.
But I never realized that the toilet problems I’ve been having, had anything to do with feeling panic. Even though they started with a panic attack I had a little over a year ago.
by Henk ter Heide on Monday January 14, 2008
Experimenting with box perspective.
After doing my last study of perspective in a box I felt that something was wrong with the lid. But I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong.
I decided that if I really wanted to know in what direction I should draw the ribs of the lid of a box I should take a better look at a box.
After making a box with lid I found that none of my tables was high enough so I had to lay down on the floor to see the box from below.
But it was a fruitful experience. It turns out that I made a mistake in my last drawing.
After some experimenting with a tilted piece of paper I thought that the vanishing point of the ribs of the lid should be in the lower left corner. But that was wrong.
The vanishing point should be in the upper right corner far beyond the frame of the paper.
Practicing perspective box with lid 2
Obvious there are a few things wrong with this box.
For one thing I haven’t put the vanishing point high enough. The ribs of the lid should look as though they were almost parallel.
There’s also something wrong with the box it self. It’s strange the the right side of the box should look as though it has a different shape then the right side.
It took me a while to realize that this is the result of the strange view point.
My field of vision is much wider then that of most people, about 180 degrees instead of 45 or 90 degrees(?). (This is a symptom of autism.)
I never realized this until I did my drawing course early last year and the teacher told us that horizons are supposed to run horizontal. The horizon I see tends to curl upward at the left and right end.
For the pictures I see in my mind I’m finding that I often see them from strange view points which sometime causes strange perspective.
Practicing perspective box with lid 3
Here’s looking down on the box.
I changed the position of the vanishing point of the ribs of the lid. This time the vanishing point not only fell beyond the frame of the picture but even beyond my table. But it’s still to close.
I also realized that the line connecting the two ribs should have the right vanishing point.
The picture still looks a bit off but it’s better then the first one.
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday January 6, 2008
I started working from the book “How to draw what you see”.
There is something contradictory in what I’ve been taught as a child.
On the one hand I’m taught to go by my feelings. If something doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.
But on the other hand I’ve also been taught that you should be able to explain why you do the things you do.
You either have to do what everybody does or you have to explain yourself. Not doing either will get you in trouble. In those case you’re told that you should just tough it out because your parents and teachers know what is best for you even if you feel it is not.
But of course not knowing that I was autistic I came about a lot of instances where I knew that something was wrong but I didn’t know why. Running into a brick wall I was told to just go on trying. Not succeeding in something meant that I didn’t put enough effort into it.
It could never mean that my feeling that something wasn’t right for me was right.
Amazon advised me to also buy “Drawing with the right side of the brain” when I wanted to buy “How to draw what you see” by Rudy de Reyna.
“How to draw…” is one of those books that assumes that people know how to look and see details and only concerns it self with teaching techniques to draw. (That contrary to “Drawing with the right side of the brain” that teaches you how to see details as a first step and drawing them as a second step.)
After my painful experience yesterday when I found that I run into problems with “drawing on the right side…” because I see more detail then is expected by the book I decided to go with my gut. Instead of working from a book that wants to teach me something I already know I should work from a book that teaches me things I don’t know.
Rudy de Reyna thinks that the world is composed of four basic shapes that can be seen in every thing you see around you: The cube, the cylinder, the cone and the sphere.
If you concentrate on these basic shapes you are half way through your drawing: A tree is an long cube with cubes attached, an ice cream cone is a cone with half a sphere on top.
Of course you’ll have to draw in details to get a tree or ice cream cone but the basic shape is there.
De Reyna starts of with a very basic assignment. So basic I have never thought of doing it. But in doing it I immediately saw the worth:
Drawing straight lines is something you’ll will have to do in every drawing you do.
And I have done some straight lines and every time I do I get annoyed by the fact that they either aren’t very straight or aren’t parallel to some other line I drawn.
In practicing straight lines I found a few things.
- Contrary to what I believed drawing lines straight down isn’t the easiest method. For me it’s much easier to draw right to left. (I’m right handed)
- Again contrary to what I believed. To draw a line parallel to an other line it’s easier when I draw the second line above the first line instead of below.
- Drawing with speed is easier then drawing slowly.
That drawing a parallel line is easier when you can’t see the first line (because you’re covering it with your hand) really surprised me.
It turns out that when I can see the first line I’m so distracted by trying to make the two lines parallel that I forget to draw the line straight. When covering the first line with my hand I concentrate on where I want to end the second line. Then I just draw and the line gets much more straight.
Here is the exercise I did.
All the lines are drawn right to left and I turned the paper as needed.
Of course I have to do this exercise some more. All the lines in this exercise are in close proximity of each other were as in real drawing they tend to be further apart.
In this exercise I tried whether it would be easier to draw a line parallel to an other line while looking at that line or while covering that line. But in real drawings you some times don’t have that choice. You have a first line and need to draw a second were the drawing dictates.
Drawing straight lines exercise
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday January 6, 2008
Why do I blog?
I just caught myself writing something strange.
In an answer to some one who had commented on one of my drawings I said that I might try some technique that might improve my drawing skills but that I had to think about the impact it would have on my blog.
The strange thing being that my blog is about me learning how to draw. So every thing that could improve my drawings and drawing skills should be more important then my blog.
My feeling that the blog is more important then learning how to draw got me thinking about why I blog.
When I started blogging I had a few reasons:
- Because I like to write.
- Because I like to draw.
- Because it feels useless to write when no one is reading your work.
- Because it gives me a public forum to show my drawings.
- Because I can get all those cool statistics about the amount of people that read my blog and my RSS feed
Now I’ve been blogging for a while I’m finding even more important reasons to keep doing it:
- Because it helps me to take some distance from my drawings and look at them through the eyes of some one else.
- Having to write an article about some problem means that I have to think it all the way through instead being content with a half as solution
- Because I get to meet a lot of nice people who are enthusiastic about the things I write about.
- In writing about autism I can some times answer question people might have.
- In writing about autism I can, hopefully, show people that we are not pathetic disabled people who need your help but independent proud people who do things in our own way.
- Because it helps me to meet people who point me in new directions.
- Because it’s turning out to be a great tool for growth and self improvement.
(Maybe some one can tell me if a “half as solution” is a decant thing to say?
I hear it a lot on TV but it’s never clear whether you can use it in any conversation or not. To my Dutch ears it sounds a bit off.)
Accepting comments selectively
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 26, 2008
Dealing with anger by selectively listening to comments.
The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:
One of the assignment of CBT two weeks ago was to find the psychical sensations associated with feeling angry.
Seeing as how easy it was to find the psychical sensation associated with feeling fear I didn’t expect that to be very hard. But it turned out to be impossible.
Although I’ve been angry several times in the last two weeks I never noticed that I was angry until the anger passed. So I did notice that being angry causes you to raise your voice. And I noticed that I have trouble expressing myself when I’m angry. I kind of loose the ability to talk.
But I don’t know how it feels.
Talking about this with the psychiatrist, he suggested to investigate whether I have some thought or feeling just before I get angry. So if I can’t recognize my anger by the psychical sensation I might at least be able to recognize it by the thoughts I have just before.
That assignment turned out to be far more easier then I expected. You would think that if you aren’t aware of your feeling of anger you wouldn’t know what happens just before you get angry. But that turned out to be obvious.
I’m always commenting on myself. Or actually I’m always imaging people commenting on me.
Turns out that when I imagine someone talking me down, I feel scared. When I imagine someone giving me a comment in which he tells me that he didn’t listen to something I had to say, I feel anger.
After I found that, I figured I should go to the next level. Knowing what scares and angers me, I should be able to avoid getting those feelings altogether.
But I’ve tried for years to stop myself from imagining people who are commenting on me. I’ve never succeeded and I really don’t know how I could. Further more the comments I imagine that people are giving me are based on comments I really get from people. They frighten and anger me just as much when I get them for real as when I imagine it happening.
Thinking about something a Steve Pavlina says somewhere in his blog: You can decide for yourself which comments have meaning for you and which don’t.
Sometimes people are only commenting because it’s easier for them to let you do the work then to do the work themselfs.
I decided to only accept two kinds of comments:
This is the point I reached last wednesday. After living with these rules for two days it seemed as though all my problems were solved.
I came across several situation where my feelings about myself improved significantly after using these rules. Some of those situations only existed in my imagination while others were actually happening.
The most important one was when I told my father that I had found out that something I used to fight about with my mother really wasn’t my fault. Most autistics have this problem.
But he didn’t believe me!
That horrified me until I realized that it really didn’t matter anymore. This isn’t something I can change, whether he believes me or not. It’s not my responsibility to decide what he believes. And last but not least I been living on own for the better part of 30 years so he can’t really hurt me.
I really expected that this would be the end of my problems. That I would stop talking to myself and start drawing and writing art reviews again.
But it didn’t. The talking to myself has actually gotten worse. I can’t find the energy to draw and to write reviews. (Although I will be publishing the blog carnival next wednesday.)
But the anger and the fear are gone!
I just have to figure out what’s next.
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