An Aspies guide to peace & quiet
Let us start as we mean to go on: Many neurotypical people are hung over and bad tempered on new year’s day. The children have given up their expensive toys in order to bang two saucepan lids together and whine that they are bored and if very young, asking when Santa is coming again.
A great tip for falling out with family and friends right now is to get onto social media and let everyone know you hated the outrageous shirts or skirts and post a picture of them, together with a photo of the silly prune who sent them. That, with luck, will ensure that next year you won’t get the brightly coloured bin fodder again. If another Aspie gave you the unsuitable garments you can be honest and ask where they left their brain on the day or just say:
“If you want to repeat the performance next year, I wouldn’t mind a book on forensic psychology, cars, meteorology or a book about the brain or if possible, a plastic brain”, depending on the specialist subject with which we bore everyone to death in social situations.
Your companion will take it on the chin and put their order in as well so you don’t waste your money or have to worry about this empathy lark.
Now we get to valentine’s day. The neurotypical person will be miffed if no special meal, together with the soft lights, hearts and flowers and romantic music don’t materialise. If you have such a partner and you are Aspie, offer to take out the bins and tell them that the day is a commercial rip-off intended originally for the person you’d love to get to know, hence the card as you are too shy to tell them straight out so hope they will or did guess. Now me, being such a poor mind reader, so Simon says and here was I thinking that was a kids’ game at school or that frustrating machine out years ago, I’d just say that my name’s not Valentine and did you post the card through the wrong box or address it incorrectly and say that if so you are obviously not very bright. That’ll see the sender off if you manage to identify them.
You can wrap the birthdays of kith, kin and anyone else with just one sentence:
“Well now you’re getting on a bit I didn’t think you’d like to be reminded, hence no card or present”.
We get to easter and all that egg hunting and bunnies and parents are both hot and cross. Get some eggs from the supermarket or an obliging hen if you are into organic grub and saving the planet for Trump and Putin to divide up between them. Boil the eggs while the little darlings are at school or out playing and give them time to cool. Get them to peel them in order to relieve their boredom and tell them chocolate is bad for their teeth and besides that, at present in Britain dentists are as rare as hens’ teeth (see what I did there)? It’ll save you money and when the kids grow up they can get therapy for having been deprived of easter eggs and having mean parents who stank the house out with hard boiled eggs.
Ah! Those idyllic summer holidays either taken with other families or just with your own. The other couple will be moaning about you and your kids within a few hours, that’s all it takes and you’ll be doing likewise about them and theirs so, straight out with it:
“I didn’t think your kids were such spoiled brats and hubby looks so much better, well perhaps not that much, out of rather than in his swimming trunks”.
If you’re all in one of these or two of these civil partnerships, the idea is to practise incivility from the word go so that you won’t be lumbered with them next year as you have been for the last twenty all because you were too cowardly and didn’t have the brain wiring required to say them nay. If you go on your own which I have never been able to do without a lot of assistance, you can get the beach to yourself by breaking all hygiene rules, staring at people who look different, are stick thin or very large and when they ask if you are staring at them, just answer:
“Yes, I am”
And supply the reason why, offering advice on nutrition and diet if your thing is medical information. I don’t have the staring problem, well not intentionally and have never had a hygiene problem either.
How to avoid sleep-overs: Advise your little darlings to tell their pals that if they come, it’ll be a working weekend. Seven is quite old enough to chop down trees with an axe and if in a flat and the hole is large enough, sliding up and down the rubbish chute will save money on outings and getting wet on rainy days. It’ll be fun to sit in A and E waiting to be seen because then you can comment on all the poor unfortunates with broken limbs, just like yours may be, drunks who are making the health professionals’ lives unbearable and blind old ducks, just like me who will sing: “The Wheels on the Bus” with an absence of embarrassment and not care whether it’s age appropriate. Now me, I may even demonstrate: “hands, and fingers, knees and toes, knees and toes” while blithely ignoring the screams of the children of the parents who have taken my unsound advice and let their kids go up and down in the rubbish chutes which is why they are here in the first place. Broken limbs will mend and a good bath or shower will rid you of the unpleasant odour of rubbish and the bother of organising sleep overs. Who knows what your children will pick up if they go to such things themselves. It’s enough to send your anxiety levels soaring and they may be subjected to a broccoli binge if they end up in the clutches of a health food guru and in the topsy-turvy world of the neurotypicals, we all know that the bad food which tastes great is cheapest while the good food that tastes appalling is dearest.
Avoiding helping at fetes and church. Offer to organise the flowers and sneeze throughout the services, having remembered to carry your pepper spray but do not neglect your tissues or a handkerchief. Blunt and outspoken, socially inept to a lesser or greater degree Aspies may be but we are not mucky duckies. You’ll never be asked to help at fetes if you are permanently sneezing and snuffling especially on the cake stall and you can also get out of making them for said events because everyone will be concerned that you may not have washed your hands.
Now we Aspies are bad at lying whereas you lot are great at it, having got it down to a fine art:
“Of course you look lovely wearing that tent. Where did you get it”?
This means when someone says:
“You’ve always got a cold”,
You can answer:
“Yes I have, haven’t I”
Without turning a hair. Sniffing the pepper spray and sneezing and coughing loudly in church and at fetes will also get you out of all things to do with the harvest festival in September.
By the time Halloween comes round, nobody will want your children to go trick or treating with them and if, like me, you have no children and get them coming on the cadge or else they’ll do something dastardly, open the door with the chain on and say:
“Yes, poppet, what trick would you like me to play on you and what treat will you give me in order to get me to stop? A month’s pocket money? Well, what then”?
As they start to explain, say very loudly:
“Mind your fingers”
As you are closing the door, just like that woman or guy who advises us all to mind the gap.
Bonfire night can be a bit tricky as the fireworks make so much row, scare the animals and should be set off only at organised displays. I’m surprised the Health and Safety Brigade has let that slip through especially when people are not allowed to climb ladders, or bend their backs and move things when at work. Write to your MP and suggest they only be allowed at organised displays no matter what the occasion but remember that’s too sensible for most crackpot politicians to even think about because common sense isn’t common.
I cannot forget remembrance day when the two-minutes’ silence can give us an opportunity to look at all the war graves and memorials, bow our heads and ask ourselves why we will spend next year adding to their numbers instead of vowing never to go to war again. I do not believe a world filled with Aspies would ever contemplate war and of course the cynics would say that’s because we are animal loving, systemising souls who ignore other people and eschew social contact. Some, but only a few people on the autistic spectrum are violent but they do exist.
Now to the vexed question of Christmas. Don’t get me started! Stop sending the cards and then you won’t get any. (Very much a symbol of goodwill when if you stop sending you stop getting). So much for it being better to give than to receive and let’s not forget the bin fodder from last year! The pepper spray comes into its own again.
“I’d love to invite you all but we all have the flu”. You can even exaggerate it and make out plague has returned and you are isolating just as they did in Derbyshire and yes I know but have forgotten how to spell the place name where they did that.
If all my strategies have failed and you still haven’t obtained all the lovely peace and quiet so you can pursue your special interests, flap and stim like a bird in the washing machine (mine’s called Walter, by the way and you can decide whether it’s the bird or machine), if all else has failed and some poor unsuspecting professional still has to support you, open the door, forget to smile, list your woes, forget to ask about their families and what they have been doing and whether their sore arm’s better and don’t stop talking at them till they go home.
If they are still with you by the end of the next year, they deserve a monument erected in their honour because a little silver or gold thing is too small for them and too insignificant a token in recognition of their fortitude. If you don’t need support but a clingy old duck who needs friends just won’t take the hint just open the door, always wearing your coat and if they ask whether you are going out again just say:
“Might be but not if you agree to go home this minute”!
In the beautiful solitude of your own home you can read a book about empathy and see if you have fallen to Simon’s famous zero degrees positive. If so, you’ll have all the time in the world to recoup your sanity and replenish your resources and if you are lucky, even the children may decide to run away to sea at the earliest opportunity so isn’t it great that you can get rid of the girls as well?
As all these boring and unreliable adverts and misleading lies would have you believe:
“Just follow my recipe for sleep/happiness/thin body and youth and you will be perfectly happy and will be a different person”.
Indeed you’d be a different person.
One who talks their professionals into the ground when they come to support them, one who reaches down too far to talk to a child who has grown about seven feet since you last met, one who will tell you if you look hideous in a dress (well if I could see you I would possibly do that) and perhaps a bit of all the rest, given a touch of hyperbole but above all, you’d be someone who laughs at themselves and the absurdity of lack of tact residing with kindness in the same head.
If you’re really desperate for solitude, eat onions and forget the tooth brush. That’ll knock ‘um dead but do remember that if you do that on a regular basis, dentists are as rare as the people you no longer see as a result of my advice on how to obtain peace and quiet.