Yes. That was it.
I am autistic.
I thought the hint I gave was a good one. Rain Man is the only creative work I know with an autistic main character. I also thought that if anyone had seen the movie, it would give them an idea of what it is like.
It should be obvious that I'm not a typical case. Clearly there is nothing wrong with my language skills and never has been, and while I'm not the most social of people, I can interact and converse with people easily. My problems are with compulsive, repetitive and ritualistic behavior, and an obsession with detail.
The first of these is probably the easiest to explain. Imagine having a bookshelf. You accidentally push one of the books deeper into the shelf than the others. Most of you would probably leave it be. Some of you would take it out and put it back to form a straight line. I would take out the entire row of books and put them back in one by one, ensuring that the line was straight with a ruler. This is of course only an example, and I have done the strangest things at different times. I once
combed the threads at the ends of my carpet
. Thank goodness I've mostly gotten over this, although I am still bothered by the sight of things like twisted cables.
The second is where it gets worse. By repetitive behavior I mean repeating actions that serve no other purpose than the repetition itself. These actions are similar to rituals, and constantly change. Something I do countless times every day is place my hands in my lap in specific positions before resuming whatever I'm working on. There have been numerous variations of this over the years. Explaining why I do this is difficult, but in the end the repetition is relaxing and helps me clear my mind. I can find tasks enjoyable that would bore most people out of their minds.
Whatever you thought about when I mentioned ritualistic behavior, you were wrong. Rituals are sequences of actions preceding certain tasks, often complex and changing slowly. The bad thing about them is that their complexity tends to grow over time, and they become even more difficult under stress, resulting in frequent failures and even greater levels of stress. I used to have one for getting out of bed where I would kick the blanket straight prior to getting up, but I've been able to abandon it for the most part. Other rituals have been far more complicated, such as when starting something I felt particularly passionate or obsessed about. My starting point would be in the living room, from which I would walk to my room with exactly sixteen steps. I would stop at a specific spot marked by the pattern of my carpet, and later by that spot becoming visibly worn. There I would correct my position with further five steps and stand at attention, my hands at my sides. Then I would take seven more steps to my desk and stand in front of my chair, which I had to leave in a certain position and angle relative to the desk. I would sit down while crossing my arms in a single movement, then scoot to the desk, and if I managed to do everything perfectly, I could relax and concentrate on whatever I wanted to do. I dare you to laugh. I'm fully aware of how ridiculous this is, but there is nothing funny about being compelled to do this kind of thing. I did not even mention every detail. If I failed to perform the ritual to perfection, I would start to worry about things like stride length and the positions of my fingers as my stress kept rising.
I bet that sounded pretty bad, but it is not the worst part. Obsessing over details is the worst part.
I like to think that having an exceptional attention to detail can be useful, except when I go completely overboard. This, more than any of the above, is the bane of my activity in online mafia, and every kind of creative hobby I have ever loved. When I post, the process starts with planning what I want to write, and I have significant portions practically memorized before I even begin to type. After I do I read over what I have written, then rewrite and reread it. Often several times. The worst part is I don't always even change anything between drafts, but I start over because a single typo breaks my concentration. Another thing I pay attention to is that my fingers press the center of the key. And these are by no means the only distractions I'm vulnerable to. A tiny fly in my field of vision, a stain on the computer monitor, or literally
nothing at all
can force me to start writing the current line or paragraph from the beginning. Note that I'm not just using the word for emphasis, I am capable of working up my stress level for no apparent reason whatsoever. It is simply not enough that the end result is perfect, the actual act has to be perfect also. This means I get stuck on details no one else knows are there, which one could say don't even exist.
As if that was not bad enough, I have a way of turning even the simplest tasks into major exertions. For example, I like moving the mouse cursor in straight lines, which is why I often drag it along the edges of the screen. Imagine trying to reply to a post when just
clicking the reply button
requires a contest of willpower. You try to force your hand to move the mouse, but your fingers twitch, your hand jerks, while your nerves get torn to shreds. For some reason moving the mouse to the right is considerably harder than to the left. I have no clue why, it just is.
So now you know. Despite my low post rate I spend easily as much or more time on mafia games than the average player, I just spend it struggling with my own idiosyncracies instead of something productive. Why have I never explained this before, you may ask? For one thing, this is not something that is exactly easy to talk about, in fact I used to be ashamed of it. Outside immediate family there are only a handful of people who know this about me. And the worst part is that I know I am capable of so much more and hate making excuses. Links to my offsite games have always been available on my wiki page, but I doubt anyone here has ever looked at them. Today I want you to look at
this, the activity overview of my first mafia game ever. That is me at the top, leaving everyone else in my dust. Of course that was a different site, with fast-paced games where conversations often resembled real time chat with many short posts. I also outlasted all other prolific posters, being the last town player left in endgame. But none of these factors come even close to explaining my fall from grace. The major difference was that in my first games I was completely relaxed and carefree, and my problems had no effect yet on my play. Somewhere down the line my passion became corrupted by obsession, and with it came the problems.
I have no idea what you should think or do about this. But at the very least I want you to know that no matter how frustrated you get with my inactivity, you can never come even close to my own frustration with my inability to post.
