I’ve been blogging less frequently lately but always happy to respond to emails. The “Ask” has a form to contact me. In this case I sent you an email directly.

Thanks! A lot of what goes here is about challenges and tends to be personal and a bit on the serious side. The lighter fare shows up over at The Odd is Silent, should you ever need to cleanse the palete after one of these.

Thanks for the explanation, Tom. No harm, no foul though. It isn’t that I was offended by the comment so much as it crystallized in my head a bunch of topics I’d been kicking around. I knew I wanted to write more about the dark side of massive weight loss but was having trouble finding the right context. At the same time I’d been trying to articulate what bothers me about online conversations. The intersection of both of these was that everything is over simplified because the Internet is designed for short attention spans. We reduce everything to one or two dimensions. Obesity bad. Weight loss good. You made me stop thinking of it as exposing the dark side and more about saying it has complexity and nuance, and that broke the logjam. So thanks for that!

Thanks for sharing your story, Kristine! I appreciate your comments about asymmetry (see update in the post above) and it may be easier for me to take on top than in my mustache. when I let the mustache go natural I looked like the :-/ emoji. There was a LOT more contrast, too.

Comments along the lines of “you really do have a lot in common with us neurotypicals” tend to show up a lot on my posts and it’s a sentiment with which I agree. The way I like to think of it is that we each have our own reality whose structure is like a net. What we think of as our shared reality is those points on the net that are in register with the same point for most other people. Those parts that are out of register tend to stand out but what we often don’t appreciate is that they also pull on the fabric of the net. Even though they might not pull another point completely out of register, they always impart a certain bias to it. In some cases they pull a point into register that would otherwise not be so.

In my case the incident in which I was engaged to a person who I did not recognize on sight was so upsetting that it continues to tug on the net to this day, more than 3 decades later. Some NTs would have had an anxiety attack under the same conditions, and for some of those it might have been just as severe. I’m not suggesting otherwise. That’s something I would have in common with those people. What I am saying though is that my autism, of which the prosopagnosia is an element, was a contributing factor to the severity of the anxiety attack that I had. The hair anxiety is a point at which our realities are in register. My autism tugs on the web around that registration point to influence my perception of it. When I explain the autistic impact on some incident it’s never my intent to claim autistic exclusivity. Rather it’s the opposite. I want to highlight the commonality but also reveal the autistic texture visible in the brush strokes. If I do my job well, both NTs and autistic folks will recognize something of themselves in the essays. When I get comments telling me it sounds very NT then I know I’ve accomplished at least part of that goal.

Thanks for the read and the comments!

TRob – Nice post and explanation. Strangely enough “Shit storm” is not in my normal vocabulary, so I am not sure why I brought that out. I am surrounded by depression and anxiety in my married family. While I academically understand it, i have never personally experienced it, hence truly do not understand it. I joke that my biological family did not pass on the empathy gene to me, so this doesn’t help either. I have gone through my fair share of weight losses (100-120lbs), but none of them rapid. The gain back is rapid. I have had the folds, but maybe not to that magnitude. For some reason, I am wired to focus on the accomplishment and ignore the negative feelings, my wife and son are just the opposite. A negative feeling consumes them, no matter how great the accomplishment. I just wanted you to focus on the accomplishment vs the negative aspects and I did this without empathy.

Enjoy the reading.

Hi Tom, thanks for the read and the considered comments. I also don’t believe that people look at the bat wings in revulsion. In the post I wrote that fat people in revealing clothes get that reaction, and that it is the reaction I would expect if I had revealed my hanging skin folds. There are many people now who have posted their post weight loss photos with hanging excess skin and the comments section on these posts tends to bear that out, sadly. In the case of the bat wing episode my client was so distracted that I had constantly to wave a hand in front of his face to regain his attention. They had to get someone else to work with me until I was able to go buy some long sleeved shirts and I was freaked out thinking I was going to get tossed off the engagement or lose my job, not to mention extremely self conscious.

My response to “you took an amazing success and turned it into a shitstorm” turned into the Surviving massive weight loss post which, I hope, explains that there’s a lot more complexity and depth to the issue than I expect you realize. Hopefully the post lives up to the topic and some will find it helpful.

Anyway, thanks!

“We’re rooting for you” !!! Boom boom!

I colored my hair for years until I just got sick of trying to keep up with the roots. There was a day of reckoning that culminated in a very short cut. Very, very short. My good friend laughed and said we looked alike (with the short greying hair) so I laughed and put on a plaid flannel shirt to match him. We now have several photos of us posing as “twins.” In my natural state I noticed a particularly white shock starting at my hairline, but only on the right side. So I changed the way I styled my hair so it emphasized the asymmetry. It’s interesting. If you think about it, perfection gets sort of boring. It’s imperfections that make us individuals, and thus, interesting.

I’d like to leave you with this thought: the two best haircuts of my life were ones that were much shorter than I expected, and it was hard not to leave the shop bawling. However, as I got used to the “not me” changes, I came to enjoy them and embrace them. I’ve spent several decades now trying to get the same cut as that first shocking one. This taught me an important lesson about facing, embracing, and owning change. With that in mind, I’ve discovered many things about myself I never would have known. I’ve had wonderful experiences I would not have chosen.

Courage, T. Rob! I wish you well and hope you can come to like and embrace this “new” part of you that was there all along. Do keep us posted; we’re rooting for you.

As I am reading backwards, I do not think people look at your bat wings in revulsion, but more confusion or perplexity as they are not part of their normal everyday routine. As you mention in a future post, you took an amazing success and turned it into a shitstorm. Maybe this is why software security is a calling as well as therapy for you. Just a thought. You have helped many people in the world and folks look up to you with admiration of your dedication and knowledge. (Batwings and all)