Filling a Gap

This a back blip.

For seven months I've left my journal entry for this date empty.  I thought about leaving it empty, but there's a story behind why it was empty, and also about why I now want to fill the gap.

On this day I reached a tipping point in relation to how my work and life were (im)balanced.  My body told me enough was enough, and my head told me that I needed to start putting some things right.

For me the most significant decision that I made that day was to surface something that I'd been pondering for years, namely a suspicion that I had Asperger Syndrome (AS).  I'd become familiar with AS through working with AS students over a number of years and the more I learned about it, the more of myself I saw.

So on this day, I decided to mention it to my GP and to see what I could do about getting an assessment. It's taken seven months to work through to getting a result, but I do now have a clinical assessment that confirms my Aspergers.  This was not an easy process, and of course having the diagnosis doesn't make me a different person. It's a life long condition - I've always had it and will always have it, but I'm very hopeful that being conscious of it will help me affirm my attributes and work on my deficits.  This promises to be challenging in both home and work environments, but not as challenging as living without knowledge of the AS.

One of the characteristics of AS that many people are familiar with is that related to obsessions, repetitive behaviour and routines.  Some people even go so far as to insist on taking a photograph every day and writing something about it :) If that takes over your life and effects other people adversely, then it may be seen as a deficit. If it is something that keeps you focused on a long term creative act, even when motivation may be low, then it may be seen as an attribute. It's a question of finding the balance.

So on this day, when I'd had a rough day, and blipping wasn't really the biggest priority, something still nagged at me at five minutes to midnight to take some sort of picture.   I wasn't sure that I'd use it, but I knew that if I didn't take a picture, there would always be a gap.  So I looked around, and settled on a selection of Island Porcelain birds that I picked up over several visits to Arran on field courses in the 1990s. One might almost call them a collection...

So here it is, a gap filled. And just in time for my 730 in a few days time, because as all blippers know, a 730 with a gap is not quite the same as a straight 730.

Thanks for reading.




A simple overview from the National Autistic Society: What is Asperger Syndrome?