So right after fiction writing took over, I really had to wonder what do about it all. The pursuit of fiction writing is different from the pursuit of academia. You go at it alone. And at the end of it all, the chances of making a living out of it are slim at best. So from a practical perspective at least, it seemed like no decision really had to be made. I’d continue on with academia and continue with fiction writing as something I do on the side and hope for the best. And in a way, while I have chosen to continue on with academia (at least for the time being), the reasons why have less to do with the practical perspective and more to do what I’m interested in writing.

And what am I interested in writing? Well, before fiction writing took over the math, I wanted to write mystery novels. But when fiction writing took over math that changed. It’s not as if I was thinking “I love to write fiction. I absolutely dislike academia now.” I wouldn’t have chosen to go to graduate school if I had thought like that. In truth I still liked academia. It’s just that I decided that I liked fiction writing more. Yet I wanted to keep math and philosophy in my life. (Of course, the practical perspective is rolling its eyes now and saying, “What’s your problem? That’s your day job as a writer. Almost every writer has one of those.”). So how did I want to do this? Well, when I became interested in philosophy, I thought about combining math and philosophy and going into the philosophy of math. Combining math and philosophy with fiction writing? Write novels about math and philosophy! Write science fiction novels that involve deep pure mathematics and deep ideas in philosophy. And since I also like mystery I could throw in a mystery in each novel to boot.

But here’s the catch: if I wanted to write novels about these kinds of things, I wanted to know a lot about math and philosophy in order to write them. Well, that’s easy enough, I thought. Two PhDs, one in math and one in philosophy, should do the trick.

And this is the number one reason I’m in graduate school. So I can do this kind of thing.

Now, I have both the passion and practical sides shouting how absurd this plan is. Passion: Do you really want to pursue all these years of school and then have to climb up to tenure to take over so much time in your life when you could be writing? Practical: You’ve just made your chances of success even worse. Math-phobia is pretty much widespread and to attempt to explain deep math in a novel that a reader is supposed to enjoy and at least somewhat understand in his spare time and that which a publisher is supposed to find engaging as he goes through his slush pile of manuscripts is pure insanity. Not to mention you may be overdoing your resume when you apply for a “day job” as an academic.

Both of these positions have certainly swayed me. For example, last term was a nightmare and as a result really made me question my plans. Maybe it would just be better to read about math in my spare time. Although now that everything is better academically, I’ve still decided to stick with this plan. Besides engaging with actual professors and other students is probably the best way since I will then get a lot of guidance toward learning math and engaging in research. As well, I haven’t found very many mathematical novels. I haven’t read a lot of science fiction, but in looking at blurbs on websites and bookstores, I can really tell that it’s a very uncommon genre.

So why do I choose to stick with this plan? Because of the huge passion it generates within me. I’ve found my dream and have chosen to go along with it. That might sound a bit too simple and a bit corny and cliché, but it is true. A heavy cost with little chance of success comes with it, but so what? At least given how highly strange this path is I have the comfort of knowing how strong I am in not letting the pressures from society tempt me otherwise.

And I think that’s a skill a writer should acquire anyway.

I can choose between two attitudes. The first is to complain how I have totally unmarketable ideas and how my dream will be laughed at not only by publishers, but society at large. Or I can take the attitude the uniqueness of my ideas is what makes them special and how I’m so lucky to have such wonderful ideas. Who knows? Maybe I’ll explode the genre of mathematical fiction and increase the public’s understanding and appreciation of math.

But it’s scary. I really have no idea what the future holds in store for me. And one can only speculate so much about it. I also have fears if I fail. I worry about how much fiction writing passion will drive me and how much of other aspects of my life I will end up sacrificing for it. This is probably my biggest fear. But while I can speculate on my success until the cows come home, any aspiring writer should just sit down and write the damn book.

A post on another blog that portrays my feelings exactly is the following: Starving For More. It’s by another aspiring writer and how she describes how it’s her dream of becoming a writer and how her fate is so uncertain and if she’ll end up joining all of the starving writers and artists out there who are dying penniless. I especially love the last line.

“And maybe I’ll never be awarded my own turn, but that’s OK. As long as I’m starving, at least I know I’m hungry for something more.”

I know what I’m hungry for. The truth. And like her and every other aspiring fiction writer out there, I await my fate.

But I sometimes think about what made this take place, whether there was any possibility that could’ve happened sooner or if it could’ve happened at all. I must admit that the reasons why I started writing fiction at 16 aren’t the same as they are today. It is possible to enjoy fiction writing as a hobby, while having a job as a professor, and my reasons for choosing to write fiction back then was compatible with that plan back then. Now, however, I want fiction writing to be something more. Why did this occur?

I think first and foremost you have to go through the reasons why I chose to pursue math. The study of mathematics was a passion rooted deep in childhood. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love math. I have a few vague memories of wanting to be a policeman when I was like four, but I’m not counting that. And even though it wasn’t until I was ten that I heard that such people as mathematicians existed for that was when I wanted to pursue a career in mathematics, I did have a passion for it throughout elementary school. Getting excited when learning about the rules of arithematic, for example, of subtraction and multiplication. Actually getting a babysitter I had to show me how to do long division (one that I like to laugh at even today).

I loved math as a child for several reasons. These were the predictability of it, the patterns that arose from it, and how it sheltered me from the highly unpredictable world. Even the most simplistic of mathematical facts such as that the cube root of 8 is 2 I found beauty in. And even though my childhood had other interests surrounding the math such as drama, playing the trumpet and piano, and writing fiction, math always remained a priority over these things to me. I even took an interest in philosophy and took a course on theory of knowledge in high school where we talked about random controversial issues.

So why the change from October 2009 to August 2010? What I find most interesting is that the nine months right before this period, my passion for math was as strong as it ever was. In the winter of 2009, was my second semester of second year and I can certainly remember how fed up I was over that school term because the math that was being taught to me at that time, I had no interest in. I had to take a differential equations course as well as a statistics course. I wasn’t really a fan of the differential equations course and downright hated the statistics course. It wasn’t the type of math that I was interested in. Where was the pure math?

My turn to philosophy in the fall 2009, however, while unpredictable, my life did give subtle hints that the subject would really start competing with my passion for math. In my first two years I had taken philosophy as an elective every turn. And in fall 2008 I had decided to turn it into a huge minor before declaring my double major a year later.

Then the passion for fiction writing deepened, which begs the question. Why? How could someone who loved math, always thinking of it as a number one priority, from when he was practically 5 to 21, suddenly switch lanes so swiftly? As I pointed out earlier, my interest in philosophy deepened, which probably encouraged it, as philosophy and fiction writing are more linked in a lot of ways than math and fiction writing are, but even so it was a huge transition.

I won’t pretend to have a complete answer (since when is there ever one in life?). Sometimes thinks happen just because they happen or there are just so many reason and so many influences that it’s impossible to analyze the situation fully. But I do have some idea as to why this happened. I think it happened because I love looking for and studying truth. By truth I don’t mean truth in any specific context. I’m just talking about truth as simply the way things are in this world as well as in any other worlds out there.

This is why I fell in love with math at an early age. In mathematics there are patterns and it is these patterns that express the truth of math. You don’t have to study a lot of math in order to see its beauty. Just Google the term ‘fractal’ and you’ll see what I mean with what comes up. When I first saw prime numbers as a child and how chaotic they were I instantly wanted to know the truth behind their randomness. And unless I knew what all the prime numbers were, it would be impossible for me to know their pattern unless there was a pattern in their randomness. This is what attracted me to math. Its system of categorisation and patterns made its truth so precise and clear.

It is also why it took some time for my love of fiction writing to develop (of the 23 years I’ve lived, it has only surpassed my interest in math in the last year and a half). You don’t really need any experience of the empirical world to love and appreciate the truth of math. But you do (at least for me anyway) need experience to appreciate fiction I think and the kind of truth that fiction presents. I could easily grasp what pursuing the truth of the prime numbers meant when I was ten, but it would be much harder for me to at least somewhat appreciate the themes of gender and sexuality in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood at that age. Truth in fiction writing I think comes more slowly because we require experience of the world to appreciate its truth. Mind you, to understand math at a deep level requires great maturity with the subject, but having such a deep level is not required to appreciate the beauty and truth of the subject. For fiction writing, an appreciation of the truth involved there does require a deep level of understanding, which is why I believe my passion for writing didn’t develop until I was far older even though the potential for it was always there.

Math may have been my shelter from the wider messy world as a child, but as I grow the more I find my needs and desires requires more interaction from the external world (for example, wanting a greater social life). And thus the fiction writing passion began.

How is everything working out so well? Well, again, it has to do with pain and the misery I felt last time when everything seemed to be working against me. I think I’ve really transferred that pain and misery to my advantage, which is why everything is working out. For example, in my last post, I pointed out that the aftermath in last term included an increased feeling of sexual frustration because the work last term really sucked any chance of a social life right out of me. I’d like to share some of the strategies I’ve used to get everything back on track.

Two of these actually came from a psychologist I saw because of the stress I’d endured last term. He asked me what really contributed to the misery and I told him that because the work had completely overwhelmed me, other areas of my life that I thought were important, for example writing and a social life, weren’t really pursued at. What he suggested I do then if I really wanted to pursue them was to build a schedule. Also, because my math, writing, and a social life were very diverse interests, he also suggested that I try limiting the time I spend on each one to make none of them overwhelmed the others. For example, I decided that I would spend a maximum of two hours on my writing per day (which includes my novel and this blog I’m writing now). So far that suggestion has worked out nicely. Putting such a limit on it has helped me keep its importance in perspective. Mind you, I certainly couldn’t live without it given that my passion for it is so high and I’ll certainly see about finding even more time for it in the future, but for now when I’m still young trying to adjust to everything around me at most two hours per day is certainly sufficient.

As a result of my scheduling my time, I’ve become more productive. Mind you, I rarely stick with the schedule down to the half-hour time slots within it (unlike a lot of autistics who I know would be very uncomfortable about not doing so), but it keeps everything in my life in check.

The other thing that the psychologist suggested is a relaxation CD suggested one that would probably help me Feeling Deep by Eli Bay. I got it off amazon and am now getting into a regular routine of playing it. It works so nicely. It really made me help me cool down. I sit or lay down and imagine things happening with my body that are making it relax.

And finally the social life. It’s getting better bit by bit. I asked a fellow math student to hang out at the grad house, which we did last week, as well as go play pool with a few other grad students. And I now have plans to have supper at the grad house with another math student tomorrow. I even joined a dating website as another avenue for talking to girls. And I’ve talked to a few on there. And all because I took action.

What can I say? It’s been one heck of a crazy year. I certainly hope it keeps up!

But now there’s been an interesting turn of events over the last week. Not school-related. School’s fine now. What I’m talking about is feeling pain for a whole different reason, namely from sexual frustration. Now sexual frustration is nothing new for me as is probably clear to you if you’ve read my previous posts Figuring Out the Dating Game Part 1 and Figuring Out the Dating Game Part 2. I’ve felt it for a solid decade. About a week ago, however, it really started bugging me a lot more. It was actually painful. Luckily, my roommate has a couple of shelves full of self-help and psychology books, and I actually managed to find a book called How to Get a Date Worth Keeping by Dr. Henry Cloud. Even though the book has a religious theme running through it and I’m not religious, I’ve since found the book to be a good read.

I think part of the reason why I’m feeling like this, however, is because of last semester. Last semester, because I was so worried and suffered large amounts of stress and anxiety due to my school work, it was like I didn’t have time to worry about anything else that needed to be addressed in my life. The pain from school stress completely numbed my pain from loneliness and sexual frustration. I think it’s analogous to why a person who experiences emotional pain cuts themselves. They do it to make the physical pain overtake and make the emotional pain seem trivial. In the case of me, however, the pain from stress from school certainly wasn’t intentional, although it had the same effect. Now that school is no longer a problem, my sexual frustration has radically increased.

So what could I do about it? I had a problem on my hands and while I doubted there was a quick fix I wanted some way to manage it. I have since used one piece of advice from the book I mentioned above and not only do I now feel a lot better, I’ve actually taken a step further in improving my social life.

Let me explain. The book actually posed the challenge that I try practising to talking to random girls that I’ve hardly met before. The conversations didn’t have to be long. Just a few minutes or so. I didn’t have to know anything about the girls in question or likewise they didn’t have to know all that much about me. When I first read this, I first thought that there was no way I was going to do this. I was having a hard enough time trying to talk to the ones I was acquaintances with. But after thinking about it for a day or two, I decided to test it out.

As it happened, I got a chance at the first meeting of the philosophy society. Last term, at philosophy society there were no girls, but at this meeting two of them had showed up. I decided to try talking one-on-one with one of them at the end of the meeting. I started by asking her where she was from and it turned out she was originally from Africa, but was now permanently living in waterloo. I didn’t get much further than this at the end of the meeting because one other guy joined us as we were heading out and we were all talking philosophy again. Once he left, however, she started asking me questions about my life, which I answered, and reciprocated. So after a few minutes of this, we said our farewells, hoping to see each other at the next meeting.

I was amazed with myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I had that good of a conversation before with someone I had just met.

Then I went on. In one of my undergraduate math classes I had on Friday morning I caught a girl I had never seen before who was sitting alone. I hesitated, wondering if it was worth the risk. I decided to go for it. I sat down beside her. Boy, I was a bundle of nerves! I felt panic. I asked myself what on earth I thought I was doing. What were the chances that this would go well?? But somehow my determination simply matched to all these worries that were going through my head. I sat there for a couple of minutes without talking to her, although that was more because I felt it impolite to start talking to her when she was texting on her cell phone. Luckily, she finished with that activity and I grabbed the chance and introduced myself. It was better than I thought it would be. Not as extensive as it was with that girl from philosophy society, but we said a few things about each other like how I was a masters student taking this course to beef up my background, while she was a math undergrad student in another department in the math faculty. I even commented on the weather and how we had least gotten a sprinkling of snow so far.

Afterwards I posed a task for myself that would surely be even more challenging than this. I decided that I would go to the Chapter/Indigo bookstore in Waterloo and try conversing with a girl I would see there. Not wanting to think about the possible pitfalls that would happen here, I decided to go ahead with it and did so today. At first I just pretended to be an ordinary customer browsing for books. Girls came and went and I did indeed find it more challenging! Not only was this a place where people moved around in random fashions, but I became worried not just what the girl would think of me, but also what the others around us would think of me. At least in the math class, others were talking and so talking seemed the natural think to do in that setting. The store certainly wasn’t empty today, but hardly anyone was talking, at least not to perfect strangers it seemed. And it was in a much more unofficial setting unlike philosophy society or class. Certainly as someone who loves structure, I had a difficult time.

Then I decided to just go for it. I walked up to some girl and asked if she had found anything good. It turned out, however, that we weren’t into the same type of books (she into personal non-fiction, I into fiction), so we said bye. Even though it wasn’t much, I was proud of myself that I had had the courage to do what I just did.

I wasn’t going to give up that easily though. I was determined. I caught a girl looking at some science fiction novels and made the general comment once again if she had found anything good. I managed to get this conversation to last longer. We talked a little about what a great activity reading was and she even recommended some science fiction novels that I might enjoy.

I walked out of that bookstore feeling very amazed and also very strange. I’ve completely surprised myself over the past few days. Something that I think has helped me, however, deals with a passage in the book: ‘Return to the way you were in the safe, structured settings of high school or college where this kind of interaction happens naturally. As an adult, you have to make it happen for yourself.’

Looks like I’m succeeding in making it happen for myself. Even some of the sexual frustration has gone away. Now that I’ve started playing an active role in improving my social life in a way I hardly pictured myself doing, I feel less afraid of the world and more connected to it.

I’m taking action. It feels damn good!

As I said in my last post, I’ve had difficulty adjusting to grad school. That was early November. A lot has conspired since then, but the basic story is that the demands just got so big that I found that I couldn’t follow the conventional plan for their graduate students anymore. No, I haven’t dropped out. I’ve just made adjustments. Like making accomodations for my autism (without accommodating myself too much, of course!). Anyway, here’s the story.

I continued finding the course work for my masters incredibly difficult to complete. I raised the number of hours I worked on to try to not get behind so much. Instead of working 50 hours/week (although I ended up putting in a lot of extra hours because of the difficulty of the assignments), I bumped it up to 60 hours/week. This worked fine for about a week or two, but nearing the end of classes, I still found this not enough. I raised it high still to 70 hours. When classes were over, however, I knew something had to change. The last math assignment I was given was extraordinarily tough and what eventually happened was that I pulled an all-nighter working in an empty classroom with another student on it. While I still got it done in time (to the best of my ability), I knew something had to change. I actually felt that my joy in math was being sucked out of me.

At the end of classes, I ended up talking with a bunch of people, including the admins of the pure math dept. as well as the graduate officer. We decided that a full load of three math courses was too much for me and so in the winter term I could take only two math courses and still maintain my standing, as well as extend my masters into next fall. I also got my functional analysis exam moved until the first week of January so I wouldn’t have to concentrate so much on the few days right before the holidays.

Then the unthinkable happened. I blew my algebraic number theory exam. I had 59/60 in the course going into the exam and the exam was worth 40%, but I really blanked out on it and couldn’t answer any of the questions. I spent a lot of time preparing for the exam so it wasn’t because of lack of preparation so much as stress and high levels of anxiety that I’ve been experiencing all semester because of the workload. Thankfully, I’ve got some medicine to help with it and am planning on seeing a psychotherapist when I get back to waterloo.

I talked to Dad a lot about my problems and we agreed that there was a bit of a knowledge gap between what acadia taught me and what waterloo expects me to know. I didn’t mention this in my previous post, but I found I had to catch up on a lot of material as well, material that I was supposed to know in order to take the courses I was taking. And let me tell you. Playing catch-up isn’t fun. It’s stressful (although I’m an easily stressed out person) and tiring. It caused me to fall behind. I got uncomfortable at learning material at such an unnaturally hurried pace. And the suggestions that I got from professors of reading further textbooks and sitting in on undergraduate courses WHILE trying to stay on top of the graduate courses were of little use. I love math, but I do actually like having time of actually appreciating what I’m learning and that only happens if I can take my time with it. So after calling the pure math dept. we found what looked like a good solution. I would be put into a probationary period in my masters so that I could focus on taking a couple of undergrad courses in the winter and then a couple more in the spring with a TA in both terms. Of course, I’ve had to suspend my scholarship, but at this point, it really doesn’t matter to me. The plan is to resume everything next fall with it. And as well as the couple of undergrad courses they’re letting me take this winter, they also let me try a graduate course on top of it (the course is on logic and is one of the lower-level grad courses so I’m hoping it doesn’t cause me too much trouble not to mention I love logic!)

So what has all this come too? Right before coming home I was getting some textbooks to help with my studying for my functional analysis exam when I had an epiphany. I had never gotten closer to rock-bottom with math than this term. I failed miserably on both the one test and the one exam I had and the work was tougher that what I had ever experienced before. And one thing in particular that it has helped me with is getting rid of my perfectionism. Instead of worrying that wouldn’t get A+’s in my math courses like I did at Acadia, my worry turned to whether or not I would even get my degree. I cast aside my obsession with achieving top marks because I was past caring about them.

It also enabled me to look at myself in a more realistic way. I’m human and am prone to making mistakes in all areas of my live. Not just some areas, but all, including math. Not being the top math student anymore meant I had nothing to hide myself behind. My difficulty with math this term exposed my weaker self. I had nothing to hold onto to show how great I was. And hey if I’m allowed to be imperfect with math, then I must be allowed to be imperfect in all ways in my life. So overall, my first term in grad school didn’t just get rid of academic perfectionism, but I think it helped with my overall perfectionism in my life. I know myself a lot better as a result and am not going to pretend to be anything more than who I really am. I can easily make more free time for myself instead of simply letting math take over. I can accommodate what I’m truly interested in (while still pulling down descent marks in my courses!), such as writing fiction (a passion that has really grown).

I truly feel I was set free.

Ack! So much work! How can I keep up with it! And how on earth am I supposed to schedule in writing novels and developing friendships and a social life (not to mention that’s difficult enough given that I’m autistic)?!

Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration. But, yeah, graduate school in math is a lot of work and does take a bit of adjusting to it even for someone who’s good at it like me. While the number of hours I’m putting in is still relatively the same as I put in as an undergraduate, the intensity of the work has increased. While almost all of my undergraduate courses were certainly challenging, the challenge is on a whole new level in graduate school. And while I was aware that a graduate course is more challenging than an undergraduate course, I didn’t realise that that meant I could still get so bogged down in it, given that I’m only taking three of them.

There were ten classes to choose from and during the first couple of days of classes, I sat in on all of them. I remember being really surprised at how difficult a lot of them were to understand. And this was only in the first class as well. I quickly got it narrowed down to four from which I was to choose three. I then felt my passion for philosophy rise again and made a snap decision to take a philosophy course and got permission to take it as part of my degree so I only had to choose two out of the four math. I decided to just sit in on all four of them since the deadline for choosing was still weeks away.

So what happened? Well, I tried doing stuff for each course and then quickly got bogged down. I realized I couldn’t keep up with the work for all four math courses so I decided to audit two of them and continue to work hard on the other two. Well, because I had taken a bit long to decide on the courses, I ended up procrastinating on both the first assignments for the two math courses I chose to take for credit. I seriously worked my butt off in the last two days one of the assignments was due. And for the other assignment, while I did hear it mention in class, I forgot to pursue and only seriously found out about it 4 days before it was due! I did the best I could with it, but couldn’t really get anywhere with a few of the questions and actually went to the professor the day it was due and got him to help me. It turned out I lacked some of the background in algebra that was needed for the assignment and as a result, the professor extended the deadline for four days for me.

While I did get it done in time (and I now have both assignments back and know now I did great on each one), the professor really had to guide me through the solutions (without giving them away, of course).

After the assignment was passed in, I just had to breathe a sigh of relief and immediately dropped entirely the other two courses I was auditing. But lo and behold one assignment from each course I was taking I discovered had been thrown at me. I had developed a lot anxiety at this point. I kept on wondering when the madness would stop. On one of the assignment I actually ended working on it with another student from the Sunday afternoon before it was due until two o’clock on Monday morning in my office!

But then the bomb went off when I actually failed the midterm for the first course. I got 29% on it, although the average was pretty low anyway 63%.

At this point, a whole range of emotions entered my head. I felt fear, anxiety, and dread. Graduate school just wasn’t fun. Certainly not as fun as I had anticipated anyway. I had trouble comprehending that midterm score because of being a perfectionist. The only other time that I failed a midterm was in first year undergraduate, but it was still about 20% higher than this one and the course had an optional marking scheme that completely discounted the midterm. What happened to me just didn’t make any sense at all. I felt like I had fallen through the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland.

Having to deal with these issues as well as still getting used to a new place with a bigger university really made me just want to explode. I may have been able to cope with the work better and not get so anxious about it if I was back at my old small university Acadia in Nova Scotia with the same old professors and the same old group of peers. The number of times I got overwhelmed with work there was uncountable, but it rarely felt like anything I’m feeling now.

And because I’m in such a new place, I don’t really feel I’m taking the time to develop any friendships. I’ve developed acquaintances certainly, but nothing that I would call a friendship yet. And everything is still a little overwhelming for me, even though I’ve been without any math assignment for nearly a week until yesterday.

Adjusting to a new environment is certainly rough for me. I think I’m gradually getting the hang of it, however. I’ve just been given another assignment, although I’ve started work on it immediately even though it’s not due for another two weeks. And I’m starting to continue on with my fiction writing passion again as well since that was certainly thrown to the side. So it seems that things are slowly settling down.

I like to compare it to jumping into a body of water for a swim. When you first jump in, the water just overwhelms you and you shiver because of the coldness of it. After a few seconds, however, the water starts feeling warm and comfortable to you and you can enjoy an exhilarating swim.

I think I’m going to enjoy the exhilarating swim of grad school in math.

But in the past couple of weeks I have asked myself what more I could do and have engaged in some serious self-reflection. And what I have concluded can be answered in four words: a need for structure. Structure for me is good. Structure for me is what comes natural to me. I’m good at navigating myself around a highly-structured system. If something goes wrong, I can easily see why or at least have clear decisive steps at my disposal to correct the problem. This is why I’m very good at math and logic. These subjects rely heavily on structure. If I’m given a math or logic problem, I can rationally figure out how to do it. I might make a mistake or two along the way to obtaining the solution, but if I do, I can figure out why the mistake was a mistake and how to correct it.

So what does this have to do with my weaknesses in social interaction and making friends? The answer is almost too obvious. Because the making of friendships don’t occur in highly-structured systems. Most situations of social interactions aren’t structured (at least not to a degree I find satisfactory).

I will illustrate with an example to help explain the degree of ‘structuredness’ that I desire. The example is math club in high school. The point that I want to make has nothing to do with the fact that the club solved math problems to competed in regional and provincial math leagues. The point I want to make is that the organization itself of the club was highly structured. We all divided up into groups of four and spent a specific amount of time trying to solve each problem (I think it was five minutes). We then did relays where each group of four would line themselves up in a line and each would work on an individual problem that would depend on the answer(s) to the problems that the others in front of them in the line would have. As soon as the last person in the line was done and everything would be answered, he or she would pass the answer sheet to the proctor. If it was correct, the relay was finished, and if at least one of the answers was wrong, then the proctor would simply pass it back, not saying what the answer was. And if one of the individuals in the relay thought one the previous answers was wrong, he would pass it forward.

What do I like about this arrangement? The structure. The activities done here are highly-structuralized. Now I’m not saying that I’d desire if all communication was done this way. All I’m saying is that the communication in these activities was simple and straightforward and there was no degree of uncertainty or subjectivity of what someone was trying to communicate.

In the real world, however, the opposite is true. There’s a lot of subjectivity, vagueness, and a lot of ways to interpret something, whether it be literally or figuratively. And there’s social conventions as well. I just see a big mess. When I try to figure out how conversing works and how people end up becoming friends as a result, I see very little structure. I’ve already illustrated this point in a couple of previous posts, namely Figuring Out the Dating Game Part 1(http://acceptingdifferences.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/figuring-out-the-dating-game-part-1/) and Figuring Out the Dating Game Part 2 (http://acceptingdifferences.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/figuring-out-the-dating-game-part-2/) where I describe how over a period of years I tried to apply my logical mind to figure out how dating relationships work and how I then listed everything I found out in terms of logical rules.

As another example, I would like to take the character of Sheldon Cooper off of the T.V. show The Big Bang Theory. In an episode in season 2, Sheldon wanted to make friends with his unlikeable colleague Kripke at the university he was working at. While his reason for doing so had nothing to do with wanting to have more friends (I think it was only because he thought that Kripke only allowed his ‘friends’ to use a computer lab or something), how he went about trying to be friends with Kripke is completely illustrative of how I think. He looked at a child’s storybook in a bookstore and managed to deduce from it the rules of making friends that the storybook was conveying. He then drew those rules into a big flow chart into how he could become friends with Kripke. What ultimately happened was that he ended doing indoor rock-climbing with Kripke, though it ended up freaking him out (rock-climbing was really only the least objectionable activity that Sheldon agreed to do with Kripke).

As yet another example, I attended something of a social get-together for young people with disabilities in Waterloo. I saw a poster for it at the university, though it had nothing to do with the university itself. I contacted one of the leaders about it. While she was very pleased that I had shown interest, she warned me that since I was high-functioning autistic that the event probably wouldn’t be highly-structured. I was very touched that she had replied like this (I think it was the catalyst of me recognizing just how much I relied on structure), but agreed to go anyway since it couldn’t hurt. I envisioned a group having conversations that I would fall behind in because no rules would be in play (a situation I’ve been in many times before). As it turned out, the group was structured to my liking. Instead of random conversations happening all over the place, what happened was that we played a couple of games that made us get to know each other more. We each took turns in naming three things about ourselves where two of them would be true and the other false and we had to guess what the false one was. The other game was taking random questions out of a hat and answering them. It was through structured games like these that I was able to interact and enjoy being there.

Even in my facebook texting I show some of my love for structure. If someone’s online that I think I’d like to talk to, I just message them, saying, ‘Hi (name inserted here)’. They then greet me back and I say, “How’s it going?” unless I have something specific on my mind I want to talk about. And after texting for a while and I don’t want to anymore, I usually say, “Well, I’ll let you go now”, maybe adding a reason such as wanting to write my novel or go to bed. I’ll then wait for them respond, and then we say our goodbyes.

In my last post I discussed a lot about accommodating myself, though I’m still trying to come up with ways to accommodate myself for this need for structure. I will, however, be pursuing social interactions regardless (of course). One guarantee that this recognition for a need for structure has done for me, however, is that it has led to far more self-appreciation than I ever felt. Now that I’m aware of what my main obstacle is when it comes to social interactions and it’s really built into me by the way I’m designed as an autistic individual, I no longer feel all that depressed of not having that many close friends. Instead, I love myself for wanting to have closer friends and doing the absolute best that I can do to try to obtain them. I feel more complete. And I think feeling more complete and self-appreciation is indeed a firm step forward in obtaining friends to begin with. In order to love others, you must love yourself.

I would like to elaborate on a new technique I’ve been using to help with my autism. In its entirety, this technique is very general and I’m sure can and has been applied no matter what weaknesses or disabilities one has. Here it is. In order for one to cope with a weakness or disability that marks him or her in a minority group, they basically have two options for coping with something they find difficult that is actually second nature to those who lack the disability or weakness. They can either push themselves to complete the difficult tasks to their best ability or they can find another way to attaining their goal without completing the difficult task, which at first glance may seem necessary to attaining a desired goal. In other words, they try to find ways to accommodate themselves.

I’ve had such accommodations. One example is taking extra time on school and university tests and exams. Since having autism has decreased the speed with which I process information in general, extra time on tests and exams is one way that I have been accommodated. While I can’t be sure how much my marks would fall if I didn’t have this or how much I could unnaturally increase speed simply by trying to think harder, such tasks are completely unnecessary once the accommodation has been made. By allowing the accommodation, I don’t have to push myself any harder or get any more stressed out (not on average anyway).

This is an example of an accommodation I have had for over seven years. Since coming to Waterloo, however, I have managed to get myself accommodated even more. For example, when I was an undergraduate student, I had a hard time paying attention to what was going on in class, while simultaneously taking notes. This was especially true in my math classes. Since a lot was written on the board for these classes, I was so busy just writing away that it was often difficult to understand the content of what I was writing down. Mathematics can be a deeply abstract subject and as I started graduate school in the subject just down, it’s just getting more abstract and thus I have to pay very close attention to it in class. I then decided that I needed a different tactic and
decided to start photocopying classmates’ notes. Luckily, in one of the classes, the professor actually posted a booklet of the notes online, which was very helpful since I didn’t have to photocopy anything in that class. I even explained the situation to one of the administrators in the pure math department and she sought out to increase the limit of the number of images I was allowed for the department photocopier without charge to which I’m very grateful.

What is really funny is that I after I decided to go ahead with this plan, I got an autism assessment in the mail that was done four and a half years ago and that I was to present to disability services to receive test and exam accomodations. And in it the assessment, the psychologist had written down that I may benefit from having notes photocopied or having a scribe so I could concentrate on learning the material in class. Go figure.

This isn’t the only thing that I’ve been accommodated for in the last few weeks. I’ve also been accommodating myself in a couple of other small ways. For example, a lot of the food courts on campus can get overly crowded around lunch time. I like to go to one of these places to get something for lunch, but being autistic I don’t like crowds all that much. Luckily, I’ve managed find a spot or two on campus where lunch is served and doesn’t get overly crowded, which is where I usually go for lunch. They’re a lot calmer and quieter, which is what I like. A third example, which I will present, also deals with being surrounded by people. The pure math department hosted a welcome party just over a week ago at the Graduate House (a place where students and professors can hang out), and I, of course, attended. The first couple of hours were actually quite good as I talked a little bit with other students. I gradually felt, however, a feeling of being overwhelmed and I felt like I needed a break from trying to socialize, even it was just few for a few minutes. So what did I do? I left the Grad House and just wandered around outside. I felt the quietness, the calmness, and the outside fresh air touch me. I only stayed outside for a few minutes (less than ten minutes I think), but it was enough. I entered the Grad House again and the feeling of being overwhelmed had gone.

And I managed to stay with some other students for the next several hours.

It makes me feel good that I’ve applied this general technique of accommodation in ways I never really thought of before. It has also led to greater self-appreciation since I’m learning to live with more comfort in making more realistic plans to achieve my goals (which consequently helps with my perfectionism issue as well I think). The only warning about learning to live this way, however, is that you can go too far. We all need to rise and do difficult tasks sometimes (though not too difficult). It’s foolhardy to automatically play a weakness or a disability to excuse yourself from every difficult task that you encounter. What needs to happen is that a balance needs to be struck between how much energy you’re willing to put into something versus how much you should be accommodated for it. I certainly don’t automatically use my autism as my ‘trump card’.

I just like to think very carefully before I act and I think all of what I’m doing to accommodate myself more is just getting me closer to the balance, not further away from it. In my next post, I will share a new insight I’ve had into my autistic life and something, which has both radically increased my self-appreciation and why I find it so difficult to interact socially.

The perspective that I want to share today extends off of my idea of the importance of personal self-satisfaction in one’s life. I’ve already said in my previous posts of how much I’m solely relying on personal self-satisfaction to the things I do in my life and how “external” rewards (praise or rewards from other people) for a job well done are not nearly as important to me. This attitude
has brought on a whole new outlook to my life.

One way is that the various dramas that have played out in my life that have taught me many things I view as my Life Courses. I call them ‘Courses’ because I believe that the knowledge and experience gained through such dramas aren’t really inferior to the knowledge and experience I’ve gained through ‘official courses’ i.e. University courses or more generally school courses. Even though my transcripts and resumes show that I have a solid undergraduate background in mathematics and philosophy, as well as a few other courses in physics, English, and computer science, I have also taken various other courses during the time I took these ‘official’ courses. I took courses in (and am still taking courses in) Loneliness Management and How to Make Friends, Perfectionism Management, and Coping with Changes in Passions. And the list doesn’t stop here either. I’ve also taken How to Date, How to Manage Fear and Anxiety, as well as everyone’s favourite How to Not Procrastinate. I’ve also taken a lot of ‘courses’ in the writing of fiction!

You might think I’m being cute in looking at my experiences this way. Certainly if I’m going to look at my life this way, these Life Courses aren’t exactly the same as ‘official’ school courses. For one thing we have little choice in a lot of these courses. A lot of them just come into our lives. Besides, we don’t even know all the courses we are taking at any one time. I’m probably taking a lot of ‘courses’ right now that I don’t even know I’m in. I had very little idea that I was in a course on Perfectionism Management until I entered university. The other thing that separates these Life Courses from ‘official’ courses is that they come with no grades. Unless you’re stubborn enough not to do so, you will learn something out of each Life Course. But if you don’t from a particular ‘course’, than that ‘course’ will force itself upon you again much like how you have to retake a school course again if you fail at it the first time. Other than this, however, you can’t really give a grade to a Life Course.

But here’s why I call such experiences ‘courses’. I call them ‘courses’ because I feel like I’m not doing justice to them in simply calling them ‘life experiences’. Let me explain. We have words like ‘normal’, ‘abnormal’, ‘official’, ‘unofficial’, ‘job’, ‘hobby’, ‘course’, and ‘life experience’ for denoting how important something is in our lives and whether it’s appropriate to denote an activity with a certain measure of importance. After being associated with the English language for over two decades, I’ve felt the implication behind using certain words. When I say, write, or think of the word ‘hobby’, I can’t help thinking that it represents something inferior to something that represents the word ‘job’. Now we all know that having a job is much more important for survival purposes than merely having a hobby, but I’ve gotten so used to using both words for their respective definitions, that I would be uncomfortable if they swapped definitions (would you?).

This is why I often don’t like the word ‘hobby’ to be applied to my fiction writing passion. Since I ‘feel’ the inferiority of using the word ‘hobby’ to describe this huge passion of mine, I feel like I’m not doing complete justice to it by calling it so. How successful I am with it is irrelevant since personal self-satisfaction is good enough for me. Besides if I continuously thought of my fiction writing passion as simply a hobby anyway, the majority of the time I’d spend writing would simply be cut out because I feel less drive to work hard at something I feel is ‘inferior’ to a job.

Ditto for my life experiences in general. They’re my Life Courses. Calling them such is my method for accepting them as they come into my life even if how I learn them isn’t all that pretty. Calling them ‘Courses’ reminds me how important they are.

You may disagree on my word choice ‘Course’ for life experience because I do realise that not everyone likes school as much as I do. You might feel that ‘Course’ makes it too official sounding or reminds you of a lot of bad experiences you may have had at school. That’s fine. You can still apply this technique by thinking of a different word or phrase to describe it just as long as that word or phrase has a feel of importance about it at least for you.

But if we can ignore semantics for a moment what Life Courses have you taken?

At this point, I just felt like laughing out, but did my best to keep it under control. I do realise that traffic situations like these can have bad consequences (someone could do something silly) and aren’t exactly laughing matters. Nevertheless, I found Dad’s comment hilarious because of how I interpreted his comment. While I realise that the person in front of the huge lineup probably wasn’t literally a clown, the way I interpret figurative language first involves picturing the literal meaning of the statement in question and then applying it to the situation. So here, for example, when Dad said ‘some clown’ was holding up the traffic, I first pictured a clown at the front of the line who had decided to go slow. I pictured the clown as being dressed in colourful clothing and having the white makeup over his face as well as coloured make up around his mouth. I pictured him without a care in the world (certainly not caring about holding up traffic) and it was this picture that mainly gave me the desire to laugh.

When someone uses figurative language like this (even if I know what they’re saying isn’t to be taken literally), I do picture it in my mind when comparing it to the situation at hand. In the above example with the clown, once I have the literal image of a clown, it is easy to make the comparison between it and a person who makes a senseless decision.

Another example I’ll use is the old expression, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” First I picture cats and dogs falling out of the sky. And then a split-second later, I picture the combined mass of all those cats and dogs being converted into rain drops and I can tell that the rain is extremely heavy! When I was very young (less than five years old), I remember thinking that the statement meant it was raining on cats and dogs. I think this was because since my mind has a tendency to take things literally, the only realistic scenario involving both animals and rain was that it was raining on the animals. Later on I found out this wasn’t the case though.

The same goes with other common expressions such as “barked up the wrong tree” and “take a hike”. Sometimes I even forget what the figurative context means (why I just looked up both of these expressions on the internet just now to remind myself!). I have a precise and logical mind, which is why it’s easier to picture the literal meaning first and then compare it to the figurative meaning second (even if these steps happen each in only a split second).

Just like how I analyze the social conventions of the society that I happen to live in with rigor (which I’ve done many times in this blog), it’s how my brain works.