I talked in my last post about how difficult it is to know how you are feeling when you are on the autism spectrum. It’s commonly said about autistic people: ‘Oh, they can’t express their feelings’. I would argue that it is a lot more complex than that. In fact, those who know me well would say that I’m very eloquent in expressing my feelings. But learning to express my feelings has been a long and complicated process. When your body and mind are hypersensitive, and take in every detail, you feel a lot of things very intensely and simultaneously, which can easily lead to overload. And that makes it pretty much impossible to know at a particular moment what you are feeling – to be able to break down every feeling and the reasons for it. You’re too busy just trying to survive! And if you don’t know what you are feeling, it is of course impossible to express it in words. So part of my journey has been learning to process and know what I’m feeling – then I can express it.
I’ve written before about how writing helps me to process my feelings. I often don’t know what I’m feeling until I write. It’s like my thoughts and feelings bypass the ‘inside my head’ processing, and go straight from being an unprocessed mess inside me to being an organised, clear description on the page. It’s as if my fingers themselves are doing the thinking as they type or write! I can’t explain this, other than to say it happens, and continues to happen, each time I write. From the simplest things like realising I’m tired or hungry (so many times I’ve written ‘I’m hungry’ and then realised at that moment that, yes, I am hungry – the writing had to come first, before I realised it!) to more complex things like writing about my feelings when someone dies.
I find the more overwhelmed I am, the more necessary it is to write – although ironically it’s when I’m most overwhelmed that I find it hardest to discipline myself to sit down and write. It is a discipline – and when one is busy with lots of other essential things, it’s easy to not bother. But as I have grown older, I’ve realised that writing, while it may seem like an optional extra, is really a necessity for me, and is the major way I’ve grown and developed and learnt to understand myself and the world around me, and to function and thrive.
I’ve realised something new about this recently. I discovered a site called 750 Words. The idea is that you write 750 words a day, and the site gives you ‘badges’ for writing a certain number of days in a row, and there are graphs that show your writing speed, and also your mood and attitude while writing (based on the words you use – it’s not always accurate, but it’s quite fun, at least if you’re someone who likes graphs!). So I’ve been doing this, and have found that the graphs and badges have motivated me like nothing before has – and I got so carried away with wanting to write lots of words that I decided to write 5,000 words a day. On the free 30 day trial, you can only write up to 1,000 words a day, but if you buy a ‘cup of patronage’, which is $5 (around £3 in UK money) you can write unlimited words. So I did this, because I was finding the site so very useful and wanted to see what it would be like if I wrote a much greater number of words. I then started writing 5,000 words a day, and sometimes more – sometimes 10,000.
This is way more than I normally write, and I figured I’d probably dry up and not know what to write and get bored – but instead, I found that I was writing all sorts. Lots of pointless things – just any observation that occurred to me – but also things that were important. Not only was I writing thoughts and feelings, but I was writing things I had to do as they occurred to me. And I found the act of writing them down like this actually got me to do them – far more effectively than a ‘to do’ list, which always overwhelms me. I have always had a difficulty with organisation (‘executive dysfunction’, it’s called, and is a common problem for autistic people), and have experimented with all sorts of strategies, but this actually helped me get things done. I can’t explain why, and can’t say it will necessarily help others on the autism spectrum, but the simple act of remembering and writing down things I have to do, as part of the process of writing down my thoughts in general, has made me organised than I’ve ever been. I’d write about it and then do it.
I’ve also found that the extended writing, of several thousand words a day, has got me beyond simply just expressing how I’m feeling, to finding solutions to things that bothered me. I was quite upset that the 750 words site was only free for 30 days, and then I’d have to sign up and pay monthly, when I don’t have an income at the moment. I wrote a lot of upset feelings about this, but then, as I kept writing, I found myself moving on to exploring solutions – such as maybe joining up each month with a different email address, or finding another site, or looking for software that I could use without even having to connect to the internet. And then it occurred to me that maybe there was another way to get membership without paying, even though the site didn’t say so – thinking of other sites, where I’ve written articles, or volunteered as staff on the site, in order to get a membership.
So – and this is partly the reason for this blog post! – I decided to ask if I could earn some membership by writing a blog post about the site, telling people how useful it is for people on the autism spectrum. To be honest, I’d kind of wanted to write a blog post about it anyway – I like to share things that are useful – but I figured this could make it a ‘win-win’ situation. Once I’d thought of this idea, I went to the ‘help’ section, and actually found there was a category of request called ‘plea for membership’ – which immediately made me realise that the site owners are open to granting membership to people with no money. So I asked. And was granted four months membership, even without having written a blog post.
I’m glad – because I feel a bit awkward recommending a site which is a paid site, knowing that not everyone can afford a monthly payment. What I was originally going to say – and which still is the case, really – is that I’d recommend doing the 30-day trial, if you think that writing daily could help processing your feelings and thoughts. And then, if you find it helpful, you can go to the ‘help’ page and do a plea for membership. I recommended it to a friend of mine with Aspergers, who doesn’t normally write (he’s dyslexic), but who wanted a way to understand himself and how his Aspergers affects him. He’s been using it every day since I recommended it, and is finding it helpful – so that makes me realise it’s not just me. And I’ll say here what I said to him – it doesn’t matter if you spell things wrong or write with wrong grammar. It’s just the idea of getting your thoughts and feelings out, in whatever mess they are in – a sort of brain dump. And if you are a visual person, it can be helpful to see your thoughts written out, rather than have them all in a muddle in your head.
Another thing I realised, through asking questions in the help section (all answered by Kellianne, who is very helpful) is that a ‘cup of patronage’ on this site is the same as a month of membership. So as well as buying myself the ability to write more than 1,000 words a day, I had also bought myself a month of membership. It isn’t clear on the site that membership and patronage are the same – at least, it wasn’t clear to me – so I am explaining this here, because it’s something I would have liked to know from the start. Membership is when you start a standing payment that is taken from your account every month, and patronage is a one off payment. Also, you can ‘use up’ your patronage by writing a ‘note of inspiration’ instead of having a month of membership.
The site also has monthly challenges – these just involve writing at least 750 words a day for each day of the month. If you sign up for a month’s challenge and complete it, then you get a ‘cup of patronage’. So, the most logical way to organise being able to use this site is to start a trial membership on the first day of a month that has 30 days. Then you can complete the challenge in your 30 day trial and have a free month, and if you join up for the month challenge each month, and complete it, then you’ll keep getting another free month. This is a way both to use the site for free and to be strongly motivated to write every day!
Of course, if you can afford it and if you like the site, you might want to donate as well. Which was part of the reason I wanted to buy a cup of patronage – as well as wanting to write more than 1,000 words, I was getting a lot out of the site, and wanted to give to it. I just couldn’t commit to doing that every month at the moment.
I will add, because this is always an important consideration of mine when finding sites to write on, that you can customise the writing page – change the font, the background colour, etc. Which is very important for those of us with visual processing difficulties (Irlen Syndrome).
There are of course lots of other sites where you can write too. Penzu is a favourite of mine, and I use that for more structured writing, like writing blog posts (I’m using it right now, in fact!). You can get a free account or pay for a Pro account. The Pro accounts are $19 a year – maybe I could try asking the Penzu people for a free Pro account in exchange for writing about them here! I had a Pro account once for a year, from someone using my link to get a Pro account. It’s a thing they do – so if anyone wants a Penzu Pro account, and wants 20% off, use this link: http://penzu.com/r/86ed2f7e – and then I get a free year of Penzu Pro. And you would also get a link where you could do the same. Penzu Pro is good because it lets you have several journals and you can customise the page to different colour backgrounds (again, so important if you have visual processing difficulties).
But the most important thing, I think, is just to write. I have written in all sorts of ways over the years, with pencil or pen in paper note books, typing in Word documents, in diary software, etc. At the moment, my favourite way to write my thoughts and feelings is the 750 words site – the badges and the graphs are amazingly motivating and fun, and the site owners seem friendly and helpful, which I think is important. I’ve only been using the site for 19 days so far – I was trying to put off writing a blog post until I’d used it for longer, but I guess I can always write another one in a year’s time if I’m still doing it, and then I’ll have a better idea of the longterm effects of such intense writing every day. But in the 19 days, I have written 104,000 words altogether, which I’m quite amazed by! And so far I’m feeling more organised in my thinking and more positive and strategic. So I’d definitely recommend giving it a try.