IPH (27th April 2009)

IPH’s Web Log

Monday 27th April 2009

This last week I have again been trying to characterize this state, which at times slightly resembles a form of inactivity which my mum used to describe in my father, at times when she’d leave him to do something and he’d sit frozen to the spot, as one day I remember her describing when it was his brother’s (my Uncle Jack’s) birthday shortly. She had sat him at the table, where she put the card she’d bought in front of him and left him for an hour or two while she went out to do some shopping, with instructions: “here you are, write a birthday message to your brother” and when she came back he hadn’t moved and the card was still unwritten.

It’s also a bit like the state often compared to a rabbit on a road at night, staring at a car’s headlights as one stares metaphorically at a forthcoming event date or deadline, and the rabbit is frozen to the spot unable to decide which way to run to the side to save its life. In real life, the comparison fails because nothing rushing towards me on the calendar is fatal; it is just that another month gone by and almost nothing has been done.

The last 6 months have gone rather like that. I’ve read a few books and sat watching a bit of TV; I’ve surfed the web and written long emails to a few people; and I’ve been trying to get on with — find out or decide how to do, do, and test and finish — one remaining feature for a good cause website which I have been updating for somebody. I am still working on this last feature, which in November I thought I’d have done by New Year. Ah, well.

The rabbit comparison is connected to the fact that I seem to have nowadays a greater mental block than ever before, about doing anything for a short time (such as an hour or a morning) when there is something else, officially more urgent, to be done first. I have had the thought in my head: “must finish the website”; and whenever I thought “This needs doing; why don’t I do it now?” the answer is “because I’ve got to finish the website”. But I found myself getting bogged down in reading up details on a million different aspects of the theory and technology of this particular bit, which involves people logging in and being recognized/remembered and tracked during the session, which I have never done before. Because of this steep learning curve, I kept getting exhausted by the learning process, & figuring out the details; and yet, because I now seem to have an extreme form of aversion to putting a job to one side for a change (which is as good as a rest) and doing something else that also needs work, whenever I needed a break I’d do nothing — other than read or watch TV. Consequently, everything round the house (except basic cleaning) has been on hold for months.

As I was out of action with gout this March and, with a bad back for 3 months (mid June-mid September) last summer after a fall from a ladder, I have done amazingly little for the last year, really, except for all the trees that had become a threat and a nuisance to property such that I felled them in May/early June and in the last week of September last year. Of course, it was while doing one of them that I had my small fall.

I have a suspicion that this reluctance to attempt a mild kind of multitasking — which makes me incapable certainly of doing several things at the same time, but incapable, also, even of just switching among several things during the same week, a reluctance which has crept up on me in the last few years — is an aspect of the extreme male brain, equated by expert Dr Simon Baron Cohen with autism spectrum conditions including Asperger’s, of which I reckon I have 4 out of 10 threads as described in some books on it.

I know that the feeling, like being frozen to the spot, sounds like simple laziness, or lack of will-power to get on with something; but to me, from the inside, it is more like the feeling of being captain on the bridge of the ship that is me. There I am, giving orders, and yet (although there is no actual mutiny among the ordinary crew) the ratings who are at the other end of the signal system, maintaining the boilers and obeying signals from the ship’s bell about how fast to run the engines, are oing nothing because the entire officer crew is standing motionless on the bridge, unable or unwilling to translate the spoken orders from the captain into signals on the bell to sail at “full ahead both“. They’ll always obey “stop“ but they only obey “ahead“ instructions occasionally and for a short time.

As all the textbooks on clinical depression say: strangely, it isn’t any good either the “ships’ captain” part of the person (me in my head) just saying “come on, pull yourself together!”; still less is there any point in anybody else saying that to me: I want to get on, but when it comes to it, nothing happens. I say in the morning: “Right! Today I am going to get started again on that and really make some progress!” But when I am sat in the chair in front of my computer, my brain sort of seizes up most days. I can pursue any number of distractions for any amount of time but, on so many days, actually getting on with the task seems to be blocked every time I try to get going.

All this is quite weird and distressing, almost like a purely psychological analogue of physical paralysis, such as is caused by nerve damage during physical injuries. One feels helpless. Almost the worst aspect of it is the degree to which it seems to other people to be me just (as I say) being lazy, or making excuses, or just hopelessly procrastinating; and, given that I’m on a medication of which since August 2008 I have been on a 50% higher dosage than I had for the first ten years (it was increased to try to counteract the slow decline in powers to do very much over the 2006..8 period), there’s no treatment (apart from this mild antidepressant dose that I am already on). I just have to keep hoping that, when I eventually finish the task at the top of the list, I’ll feel able to tackle other less daunting ones more easily.

Oh, well. I have now almost finished the new website feature. The breakthrough came the other week when I decided how I could break the task done by the form page (it’s a form to fill in or in which to change information held) into four parts andthen how to tackle each part separately but present all the parts in an easy to understand way to the punters.