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Living With Autism:
Portland Library Reopened!!!!! YAY!!!!! And some thoughts on living with Autism.

Living With Autism:
Portland Library Reopened!!!!! YAY!!!!!
And some thoughts on living with Autism.

Portland Library Reopened!!!!! YAY!!!!! And some thoughts on living with Autism.

Posted on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 | Comments Off

My library is open again – OMG! the $10million expansion is AMAZING! 3 floors of 2 million books! It’s like I died and went to heaven! My month and a half long library withdrawal panic attacks are over! I was there 4 hours and I still only got part way through the building. Uhm, they closed for the day so I had to leave, other wise I’d still be there.

it is so HUGE! OMG! I love it! The best library in the state is ten times better than before – I could live there and never go home again; and get this – new addition to the library includes a COMIC BOOK ROOM! ARRRGH! OMG! a COMIC BOOK ROOM! I love it! and a picture book room – a whole room devoted to picture books! hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them! I could live in that room.

And people wonder why I don’t mind driving 2 hours to Script Frenzy meetings? HELLO! Biggest library in the state! I’m there every week anyways! I’ve practically lived in the building for the last 20 years, it’s my home away from home – you have no idea what hell it’s been for me since the library closed. One of the worse symptoms of Autism, is I can’t deal with change on any level – extreme OCD and adherence to routine, so when my weekly 20+ year library habit got taken away, I was going bonkers with major meltdowns over it. I didn’t realize how bad my library addiction was until the library shut down – but it’s back, and bigger, with loads more books.

But everything is remodeled, so I’m going to have to start at the first book and go through all 2 million of them all over again to memorize where they are again. I can’t stand disorder and confusion, and not being organized. Everything has to have a place of it’s own and it’s always suppose to be there in it’s assigned place and not move from there. That’s one of the reasons I love libraries – they catalog EVERYTHING. You know exactly where everything is. You can walk in, and there it is – everything all alphabetized, cataloged, lined up in nice straight even rows, and all in order. No confusion, no disorder, unless of course people mis shelve the books, than I have to take them all down a re-shelve them right. I hate it when people mis-shelve books or leave them laying on the floor or table. My going through every aisle re-shelving books is half the reason it takes me 5 or 6 hours to go to the library to pick up one book.

But, I knew where everything was. Where everything belonged. But now non-fiction is in the basement and fiction is on the first floor, and now there’s a DVD room and a Comic Book Room, and a Picture Book Room, besides all the other rooms, and nothing is where they’ve been for the last 20 years, and all the new stuff I’ve never seen before – it’s like an atom bomb went off in my head and chaos has taken over, and I can’t deal with it at all. Well, I can’t go through the library and put all the books back in their old places, So, I have to start all over again, and go through each aisle one at a time and rememorize the whole system all over again, but yow – Maine’s biggest library! 2 million books, I mean do you have any idea ho long it takes to memorize where 2 million books are supposed to be!?

I’m lost in the library if I don’t have their entire collection cataloged and memorized in my head. 2 million books – it took me well over a year to memorize where they all were before, and now they are all moved so I have to do it again. I will be spending many hours of many days at the library memorizing their catalog this summer. Well, at least I have my summer planned out ahead of time this year.

Most places I go, people hate me. They tell me I’m annoying or in the way, or whatever, but not libraries. Stores like WalMart and such, can’t stand it when I go through the store reshelving and organizing things – they say they have people they pay to do that so the customers don’t have to. Well, if they have people paid to do it, why than are the shelves all messed up and out of order? I mean, how am I supposed to buy a can of Bush’s chick peas is their are’s another brands kidney beans sitting there instead? I can’t. Just one can ou of place like that messes up my whole day, and I can’t think about anything else. Even hours later after I go home, all I can think about is that one out of place can. The only way I’ll get that out of place can out of my head is if I go all the way back to WalMart, and take that can and put it back where it goes, but than I’ll see another can out of place, and another, and another, and before you know it, I’m just re-shelving the entire store! It’s pat of the reason I don’t go shopping very often, because just running in to by a single can is an all day trip for me. Shopping is not good for me – I obsess terribly over having everything where it goes, and I can’t think straight if I see something not in it’s proper place.

People rarely invite me to their houses for the same reason. There’s this one family, used to invite me over every few weeks, but, in their living room is this wall of VHS and DVDs movies, like hundreds of them. We’d all sit down in the living room, but I couldn’t hear a word they said, all I could see what those DVD cases out of place. I’d have to alphabetize the whole shelve. Than they had this Budgie (bird) living on top of the shelf, and I’d take her out of her cage and sit on the floor talking to her. I’d totally forget that there were any people there in the room with me. They’d get mad and say I was being rude, but I wasn’t, I didn’t mean to upset them. I didn’t know back than that I had Autism, so I’d get depressed and upset, because I couldn’t understand what it was I had done wrong to get them so mad at me. Now that I know about Autism, I studied about it, and now I realize that me cataloging everything and losing track of time and people around me, is what it is that gets people upset, because now I realize that “normal” people don’t do those things. I try to ignore things shelved wrong, but it’s like all those unshelved items have neon lights on them that are so bright they blind everything else around me, and they only way I can shut them off so that I can see everything else, is if I re-shelve them in the right order.

Librarians love me, because I go in and start shelving books – not a one of them can remember the system the way I do. It takes them hours to re-shelve books- I do it in only a matter of minutes, because I don’t have to look anything up – they are all in my head. In most parts of my life my Autism is hell and disruptive – in a library though, it’s a blessing of extremes. And that’s just Maine’s biggest library I have the collections of five other libraries memorized – I know which library has what, where.

Ask me to mingle at a party, give you change, have a conversation with a stranger, or work with a team, and I’m lost; but send me into a library or ask me to restock a store’s shelves and there is no one who can match me. Unfortunately my Autism prevents me from getting a job at the libraries, due to a requirement of a college education, something that is not possible for me. I’m great with words. I can’t make heads or tales of numbers. College requires 2 years of algebra, and I can barely count, let alone get past addition, and subtraction forget it, so no college for me  It’s frustrating, because there are so many jobs I excel at, but are barred from getting because I can’t attend college. Autism is frustrating because it make me uneven – I’m extremely overly good at a few things, but lost when it comes to everything else.  Like the organizing things – it makes a 5 minute shopping trip a 4 hour nightmare, but it makes me a librarians dream come true.

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Comments Offon Portland Library Reopened!!!!! YAY!!!!! And some thoughts on living with Autism.Posted in adults with autism, Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, blogging, books, library, living with autism, Maine, Schizotypal Asperger's Syndrome, Wendy C. Allen

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