The Finding of the Cure: Volume 2

Post Reply New Topic

First Try

Back on april 2006, I was researching human behavior online a lot. I came upon this website: http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cgt/courses ... _power.htm. I figured using some of those advices could help me seem more normal, which I very much wanted at the time. On april 20 i was gifted this book: http://www.amazon.com/Camino-Exito-Span ... 731&sr=8-1, full of advices on how to be more social. The woman who gave it to me wanted me to be normal, one of those people who think you have just to decide to be normal to be it. This time she did have an impact though, for on May 2006 I decided to compile a list with the advices that would really apply to me. I wrote them into a file I called Recipe.txt. The file had three equally sized sections, one was a summary of that page. The second one was a summary of the book. The third part was my own, extra exercises that I thought up, some of them based on autism websites that I knew since mid 2005. One of the entries on that third section reads: "Avoid contact with myself, expand". Last modification to that file was on june 25.

But I couldn't take that to practice and by mid july I had completely forgotten the exercise and the entry in that file. I didn't forget the file existed but it was lost to me for years. I kept creating new exercises from symptoms of autism as I identified them but I kept them all in my mind from then on, or at least I tried to, for I did forget many.

Second Try

It is now eleven in the morning of saturday 22, july 2006 and I am on campus, sitting at the cafeteria. There's an aspie girl sitting near me. She is squeezing both hands between her legs. She asks me for my laptop for a moment and I let her have it and then I run away, scared of having to socialize with her now that I don't have my laptop to hide behind. Far away I lay on a bench, staring at the clear blue sky and I think. About her, about all the things we have in common. I sit with my legs closed and one or two hands squeezed between them very often.

I spend days thinking about it. Many aspies do it too, I had seen it before. Our hands feel good when squeezed. Our whole body does, our whole body likes to bend inwards into a fetal position. I noticed that I even sleep in fetal position every night.

I thought about deep pressure, weighted blankets, portable hugging devices. I thought about Temple Grandin's squezzing machine. I thought about how being constrained feels good in many ways. I thought about freedom, how unwanted it really is, how threatening it can feel. I thought of what John Locke said about babies, that they sleep better when wrapped up tightly, that it's much later in life when people start looking for freedom. The last episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion makes a good explanation of how freedom is confusing and we need limits to feel safe. Weak people feel better when they are told what to do, when they have orders to follow.

The many days of thinking about this gave me a better understanding of asperger syndrome, but it didn't lead me to an exercise, I couldn't come up with one that would be the inverse of deep pressure. I had already identified lots of symptoms that couldn't be turned into exercises and this was shaping up to be another one of those.

The Finding of the Cure

On an early august afternoon (oddly enough the most important event of them all is also the one for which I couldn't track down the date) I was sitting in front of my computer when I went back to the original image I had seen: an aspie girl sitting with both hands between her legs. This time I focused on the hands being together and I noticed that at the moment my hands were together too. Aspies tend to keep their hands together. I thought I could make an exercise for that. I stared at my hands for a while and then I put them as far away from each other as I could, and then even farther, and then a bit more, and more. The earliest definition of the exercise was "keep my hands far away from each other". Once my arms were... spread, I thought I should spread my legs too.

Later, that night, I tried the exercise in bed, spread my arms and legs. Then I had the idea of spreading the fingers too, which was easier if I turned down the palms of my hands. I decided that I could keep my fingers spread during the day too. Trying it in bed that night made me feel relaxed and strong. I didn't give it much attention because of the other hundred exercises I was doing at the time, but the memory of how I felt that night in bed was what made me keep the exercise on my list, months later, when I was eliminating the bad ones.

On the morning of saturday 5, august 2006 a cellphone picture taken of me shows me already using this exercise. The posture is a bit odd as many details hadn't been polished yet. I was lifting my shoulders too much and I didn't know where to put my fingers so I would rest my hands over my legs, instead of raising my arms over the table, as I do now.

This was my official definition of the symptom/exercise for the rest of my experimental phase:

Symptom: Aspies like to bend their body inwards into a fetal position
Exercise: Spread out, try to use up as much room as possible

Notice the mention of using up space in the definition. This was because I, like many researchers of body language to this day, thought that this exercise was about communicating something, I thought that people spread their bodies to look bigger to others.

Keeping my hands away from each other was the hardest part in the early days. I found that it was not just a habit of mine to keep my hands together, there's something else. I didn't notice until I was trying to stop it, something pulls them to each other when I feel certain emotions. Something else... something that has been given many names. And I would give it yet another new one on september 2009.

beSpread

I named the exercise "Be Spread" somewhere in mid 2007 after watching the Nihilum vs. Illidan world first video. Kungen kept telling his people: "be spread", "focus". And I thought "hey, I have an exercise I could call 'be spread'". It became stylized as beSpread in late 2012 as my new job as a software developer influenced me to use camel case for all my discoveries.

Epilogue

I went back to autism many times between late august 2006 and early may 2009. A last attempt to go back occurred in december 2011 but I couldn't pull it off anymore. I had forgotten how to be autistic and learning those habits anew would take me months. They were truly gone and had been so for a long time. The fading away of those habits was a slow, steady and never interrupted progress lasting from august 2006 to my june 2010 trip to New Zealand. I was never the same when I came back. It can be done faster but I slowed it down for research purposes.

The Making Of

Data gathering for this post took place between march 2008 and may 2010, with redaction happening on november 2011 and final edits on december 2012. All of which took place years after this chain of events that didn't seem important in their time, so this writing is rather the result of detectivesque work of reconstruction instead of a download of memories.

Volume One was written between november 2007 and august 2008 but it tells of events that were relevant in their time so it didn't require research, it came straight from memory, as did Volume Three.

Other Parts Of This Story

(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp250144.html#250144) - An Old Post
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1690329.html#1690329) - Volume One
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp5105561.html#5105561) - Volume Two
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1750632.html#1750632) - Volume Three
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1306940.html#1306940) - Update 1
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1363152.html#1363152) - Update 2
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1532363.html#1532363) - Update 3
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1690332.html#1690332) - Update 4
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp2053493.html#2053493) - Update 5
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp2305113.html#2305113) - Update 6
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp2600573.html#2600573) - Update 7
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp3059593.html#3059593) - Final Update