skills

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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