Eating an Elephant

I have noticed something in myself that I have noticed in other people with autism. I go into such detail that some things don’t get done.  I think through the whole thing. I gather more information than needed for the project.

I have been unlearning this for a few years.  As my mother said, “You don’t need an A++ when an A or even a B will make things happen.”

I’ll tell you a story.

Hubby has offered help by saying, “The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.” Can you guess what I pictured?

I saw an elephant lying on its side in the yellow grass dead. Suddenly, the awful scene shifted. I was tearing at the the skin and bloody meat of its thigh with my teeth. Then intellect kicked in by thinking that for one person to eat an elephant would take months. The elephant would start to rot, and birds and insects would be picking at it.

I told hubby, “Why do people say such things? It’s disgusting.”

If you’re on the autism spectrum, you know how pictures can instantly pop in your head when someone uses a saying instead of a direct, factual sentence.  I told hubby what I saw, and he was surprised.  He explained the saying to me.

Instead of freezing up with the overwhelming workload of a project, break it into smaller projects that are a part of the overall project. Do each small project before moving on to the next one. His point was that a large project can’t be done as a whole all at once.

I suggested we change the elephant saying into “eating a turkey one bite at a time.” I picture a cooked turkey just out of the oven. I could smell the sage scent of stuffing, and the sweet tang of cranberry sauce cooking in the pot.  This makes sense to me.

If you cook or eat turkeys, you know a turkey is eaten in stages.

1. Serve the turkey meat fresh out of the oven for the first meal.
2. After supper, save the turkey juice and the carcass for boiling to make soup, and put some of the turkey in containers in the freezer.
3. Make turkey soup and eat it for two days.
4. Make hot or cold turkey sandwiches.
5. Eat turkey and cranberries for a snack here and there.

That’s how projects are done–one phase of the turkey eating process at a time.

Thinking is pure pleasure

I’m not a box.  I don’t think in one or outside of one because with autism/Asperger’s, the thinking runs through a different maze in the brain than neuro-typical people.  Oh, I haven’t a study to quote to “prove” this, because the proof is all in my head.

Before I was diagnosed (as an adult) I knew, and other people said, that my thinking was unusual.  I spent time analyzing how I think and mentally observing myself thinking.

“Observing” is the right word, not “hear” or “knowing” or “feeling” because I see my thoughts in pictures.  Temple Grandin had it right with the title of her famous book, Thinking in Pictures.  Often I don’t see the thoughts as they are coming together, but the end result is always a visual.  I’ll give examples.

I go to an adult spelling bee once in a while at the 331 Club in Minneapolis.  The emcee always calls me The Speed Speller because I spell the word so quickly.  The reason is that I see the word in my head then just read off the letters.

Doing art is a passion of mine I wish I could indulge in more.  I already see in my mind what the next picture is going to look like, even with the new medium I will be using.  When I do the art, it’s like connecting the dots or paint by numbers on a blank canvas.  It’s very satisfying to see with my eyes what I have enjoyed in my mind.

When the concept of mind mapping became popular in the eighties, it made sense to me because I already thought that way.  People said I was creative with my wild ideas that worked.  I didn’t put two and two together because it didn’t happen that way in my mind.

I have taken in so much information from my intense drive to find out and understand when I don’t know something.  I have read the gamut from poetry to engineering.  So my creative ideas are really concepts and pieces of information that clang together in my mind.  For example, what if we took an idea from poetry and applied it to engineering or vice versa?

I don’t think about it; it just seems to happen, and the result is a picture.

I don’t know if I should write this, but I spend hours thinking up scenarios, which I call “meandering,” but I end up applying the new ideas and connections to something in the real world.

I saw this article last night and wrote it this morning.  I came up with the idea for the blog post as I was drawing in my mind the design of a new kind of weighted blanket for my business, Cozy Calm–my mental meandering.