ASD Toshiro – Tangents

Hi everyone, this is Autism Toshiro Hitsugaya, or ASD Toshiro for short. Just a quick reminder, I’ve added most of the links I mentioned beneath my previous upload on the bottom right of my banner image at the top of my channel. If you’re watching this on my WordPress blog, then the links are on the menu on the right hand side.

The subject I’ll be focusing on in this audio video is tangents. This is a difficulty I’ve been having in the social world. Mainly in terms of writing, but can be from verbal communication as well. I have this problem when I start to respond to someone. Tangents are moments where I start to expand further and further into additional subjects, that slowly start to seem unrelated to the original statements.

There are times when I feel that I have to break off into tangents as I’m trying to relate their experiences with my own, but sometimes I feel that maybe I went a little over the top. I can’t help it. I just feel a need to express myself, my worry is, do others feel I’m expressing myself too much, >.<;?

I’ve been noticing this a lot more lately, and it’s making me feel uneasy, :(. I worry that people are annoyed with me as there are times when I’m not sure whether I may be writing more than I should.

I expressed myself in my video on my previous channel about my difficulties with my writing. I’ve added a link to the video below this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhNHHsfrbjk.

I have this cannon inside of me that is about ready to burst every time I hit against a subject matter I feel strongly about. Once the fuse line of this cannon strikes a strong subject for me, it triggers the lighting of the fuse. This fuse, combined with listening to music with my earphones, then strikes out powerfully. This is when I get this intense charge inside of me, and I end up writing like Speedy Gonzales, as my mother may refer me to, lol. This charge triggers a feeling inside of me that I feel I have to express myself in full.

I know I talk about school a lot, but that’s because it affected me so badly, it left me with triggers and my PTSD. You see, the need to express myself in full originates from my early school life. This is especially true after those emotional traumas I went through in primary and secondary school. I felt I was misunderstood. After being tricked, and eventually called a ‘creep’ by someone in my peer group, to missing out on a chance to really get to know someone, it enhanced those worries. Being misunderstood is also the feeling I get from my extended family which equally doesn’t help. You combine all of that, and you get a highly charged tangent writing, needing to express and expand on my writing and talking individual.

I feel a need to express myself in full, and this is a feeling shared by my mother as well. She also often finds that she needs to express our story in full in very complex and lengthy writing. I’ve often wondered whether others have found it difficult to respond to her, not only because it hits some very hard areas that really show the system up for what it is, but also because they find it difficult to churn so much information. I totally understand where she’s coming from in that regard, the need to express yourself in case of being misunderstood.

There is another very important point to make about all this. That is that I have had experiences writing on forums as well. These experiences have increased that caution to a greater extent. What I am relating to here is triggers. You see, I’ve said this before, but my triggers can be very damaging and involve education and emotional issues. This can be especially distressing and debilitating as these are subjects that may be written, spoken about or observed many times. Add these triggers to my autism and you have one heck of a combination. The need to express myself in full and travel into tangents, and that relates to my own experiences especially, is that I do not wish to be hurt. My triggers cause me pain, and if I receive a response that takes my triggers lightly. For example, if I receive a message such as, I’ve been able to go to college and university and I’ve done alright, or I’m lucky that I’ve found someone special, well, it’s like I’ve just been given the rope to hang myself. You can never tell when you’ll find and read a message like that. It hits me so hard, like you wouldn’t believe. The intensity of my inward spiral into greater meltdown and depression gets worse and worse the more I experience subjects that hit too close to the mark. I wish you understood just how excruciatingly awkward and almost impossible it is for me to socialise, -_-.

My tangents are my ways of expressing myself in the only way I know how, expand on my own personal experiences and the traumas they’ve caused me. This way I’d hope that it can avoid those painful triggers and I can communicate a lot more smoothly without the concern of feeling misunderstood.

My tangents are also my ways of expressing my interests, like for example, I can have some varied interests. I’m a photographer, nature photographer to be precise, so I’m going to have an interest in photography. I have an interest in birds and other wildlife around the garden since I became interested in photography and started to take photos of them. I have several books that relate to different birds that I may find around the garden; I get excited and often check back to the books every time I see new species I’ve never seen before. I’ve begun to have an interest in gardening after noticing all the colours, shapes and combinations of the flowers and plants around me as I’ve been taking photos of them. I’m often checking the garden to see how everything’s growing, and if I can find any unusual wildflowers that I’d want to add to my collection that I can capture on camera. Herb Robert is a good example as the plant’s new shoots have these interesting red branches that extend to these green leaves, which reminds me of Japanese maple trees. Not to mention, the flower buds look almost alien, and when they flower, they blossom into these really vibrant little raspberry ripple-like pink corncockle flowers.

Another good example of a subject I can talk very in-depth about relates to my interest in the orient, well, China and Japan to be precise. You see, I’ve played the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors video games series in the past, and little did I know at the time, it has relevance to Chinese and Japanese history. Now, before I knew it, as I begun playing the games, my knowledge was filling with all that information. Since then, I became aware of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era of China and the Sengoku period of Japan. Now, for some reason I can recall the Romance of the Three Kingdoms a little better than the Sengoku. I think that was because there were more games in the Dynasty Warriors series than the Samurai Warriors as each one would focus on a different country’s history. You see, as I became aware of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Sengoku, I began wanting to research further into them, and I started reading some books on the Sengoku period of Japan. However; I noticed there was this two-part novel about Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I discovered it was a famous historical Chinese novel that originally spun many, many more pages, but they had to condense it during translation into a two-part novel. I couldn’t believe it, as soon as I picked up the books and started reading, it was like I was aware of what happened before I even read it. Okay, so understandably there were moments in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms book and Japanese history books that contained information that the game didn’t cover. It was, however; close enough to feel strange. I could relate to the story as I was reading it. I was also desperate to go to watch the film Red Cliff in the cinema when it came out in 2008. Red Cliff is basically a famous battle during the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in Chinese it’s called Chi Bi. What it relates to is a naval battle. This naval battle took place around 208AD. The battle consisted of an overwhelming fleet led by a power-hungry Cao Cao against the combined smaller forces of a kind and benevolent Liu Bei, and Sun Quan. During this battle, a famous strategist of Liu Bei’s, Zhuge Liang could foresee the change in direction of the winds. Zhuge Liang, along with Sun Quan’s strategist of the time, Zhou Yu comprised a fire attack plan. A member of Sun Quan’s forces, Huang Gai, would travel across the water on a boat that would be set on fire, they’d jump ship and the hope was that Cao Cao’s fleet would go up in flames. It was successful.

Well, I better not go into greater detail than that, >.<, but that explains one good example of tangents consisting my interests, be they specialist or general depending on my level of interest.

Again, these tangents involve wanting to express myself, but to a different degree. This is not out of a fear of being misunderstood, but of excitement and losing the ability to control myself as I just begin my onslaught of heavy explanation. I can remember a time when I put my uncle to sleep talking to him about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s alright for him, he doesn’t understand what it’s like to find out all this information and have no one to express it to. I can also remember the face of another relative when I told it to him, and the look on his face. It still makes me laugh now, that astonishment and surprise, it was like it was straight out of a textbook, lol.

Anyway, these are two examples of tangents and how they make socialising difficult, either because of triggers, misunderstandings and pain, or due to excitement and wanting to talk about my interests.

That’s it for now, and thank you for listening, or reading, :).