solutions

Thinking about my thinking process.

So I had figured out that I talk to myself to solve abstract problems. I figured that since the behavior has a purpose there should be a natural border. Some place to stop talking.

BTW When I say I’m talking to myself that’s not completely true. In my fantasy I’m having a discussion with some one who is an interested party in the problem I’m trying to solve.
I tell him the story of the problem plus every solution I’ve found up till now.
Sometimes I get stuck and I will repeat the same few sentences over and over for hours. Sometimes even for days.
You can imagine how annoying that can get.

It took me a while but I finally found out that there is actually a very obvious answer to this question.
For me the whole world is connected. Every problem is connected to every other problem – I’m told that this has either something to do with being autistic or with having a visual thought process – So when I start analysing some problem I can’t stop because the problem goes on and on.

But I can greatly reduce the number of problems I have to solve if I simply apply the rule that every problem I solve has to improve my life.
So Dutch unemployment crisis, as interesting it might be, is not something I should be thinking about. Same holds true for the famine in Africa.
But Promen’s (my employer) embezzlement of reimbursement of travelling expenses is a problem I should try to solve. Not only because it is costing me money. But there’s the simple matter of people doing what they are supposed to do. I should follow the rules and so should upper management. (What can I say. I’m autistic. People acting the way there supposed to, is more important to me then money )
(More about this when I’ve solved it.)

So I’ve been living by this rule for a few days and it helps.
A bit.
After a few days I found that even when I limited myself to problems that actually influence my live. I still spend a lot of time talking to myself.

Turns out that I’m somewhat impatience.
When I run into a problem I tend to think about it until I’ve found the first 10 solutions. Then I implement the first solution.
But instead of waiting to find out if the solution works I continue thinking about new solutions. Which is a waste of time because the first one usually works.

But some times it doesn’t. Some problems are a little more complicated. Like the problems with my embezzling employer. And that is when I run into the real problem.
Turns out the there is no logic in the way I solve problems. Possible solutions come at random intervals.
There’s no way of knowing if I’ve found every solution or whether there are still a few more.
And as I said sometimes I get stuck and repeat the same few sentences over and over again.
Sometimes I follow a train of though to it’s bitter end. Only to find that it wouldn’t work.

And then I stop.

And I have no idea whether I stop because I’ve reached the end of a school of thought. Or the end of a series of solutions.
Or just stop because I don’t feel like thinking abstract anymore.

The thing is that if I stop because I’ve reached the end of the school of thought or the end of the series of solutions. It would imply that I do know how many solutions I might expect.
If that’s the case it stands to reason that me getting stuck has more to do with my own annoyance then with my thinking process.

To Be Continued…

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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.

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solutions

Finding the limit of my thoughts

Looking for a resolution