other_platypus [she/her, pup/pup's]

I think I got it into my head at some point that if I’m not absolutely perfect in everyone’s eyes, that I’m going to be outright rejected.

There’s that one episode of Community where Abed imagines himself in a dark room alone, saying that’s where he’ll end up when everyone gets tired of him. For much of my life, I think I could relate to that. It’s haunting, the idea that people will just put me somewhere when they get sick of me and all my issues.

When I was a young adult, it was typical in my friend circles to weaponize physciatric disorders to other people they didn’t like. I was dating one of them and I remember being accused of being unempathetic. She also accused me at one point of having borderline personality disorder, which was code for “you’re a bad person and I shouldn’t have to deal with you not being easier to deal with” in this context. To this day I can’t watch that episode of Community and watch Abed get basically told the same thing, to tell his story of being called a robot with no feelings, without it all coming back. Some of the depictions of autism in that show I have major issues with, but sometimes it’s just so real and most of that episode was very relateable (I did avoid being stuffed in any lockers in school, at least)

Today I don’t believe these things. I believe a lot of people don’t want to state directly what they want from people because they would feel like they are being selfish or inconsiderate. Some of the worse people like to blame people like me for not guessing, and I think this is the result of the internal contradiction: they can’t state what they want directly out of guilt, but if they don’t they are miserable because they don’t get what they want.

I’ve been struggling with this kind of vagueness at work, the too-subtle-to-be-understood-by-anyone commands, and that’s what’s led me to this conclusion. I think generally the work people are well-intentioned, but in trying to be kind and considerate they are leaving me with little direction and it is stressful.

I generally try to fill in the gaps when I don’t have enough information, and when I can’t tell what people want from me. It’s extremely taxing, and I am usually guessing. I used to “run scenarios” in my mind, trying to prepare for every possibility so that I’d know how I’d respond. I was never any good at it. I only really imagined worst-case scenarios, and my mental model would not at all include people being kind or generous to me. This kind of second-guessing everything people say to me is what’s burning me out, I think.

But, also, part of it is internal. Sometimes there’s no subtext: someone is being direct with me, something happening doesn’t mean I’m about to be rejected, and still the anxiety and fear take over and suddenly I’m stressed again, needing reassurance somehow from someone that things will be okay and that they’re okay and that we’re okay and I just have this lingering voice that’s like “if everything is okay why do I not feel okay???”

It’s hard for me to trust allistic people, even people I love, to mean what they say. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. But at least at work, since I’m a coder, there’s people backing me up who understand that code doesn’t get done without clear instructions. I can at least rely on that, I hope.

my therapist basically told me to take some sick days to help recover, and she recommended me a book on dealing with autistic burnout. I told her that I agree that not all sicknesses are visible, that the burnout I’m feeling is real and only solvable with time off to recover, and that I need more than one afternoon to do so, and that I shouldn’t be using my vacation time to recover as I am sick.

But I also told her I wouldn’t take sick days because I’m scared of taking too many and losing my job, and that the ingrained societal importance of “if you are physically capable of work you shouldn’t take a sick day” is very strong and makes it difficult to take time off when I need to, and if I do take time off I should be miserable and not be doing things I enjoy.

But the nightmares continue. I lost a couple hours of sleep last night just to medical anxiety (Good news: looks like my breasts are growing again. Bad news: Part of my brain thinks I’m having a heart attack because chest soreness.). I had several nightmares. I went to bed early and woke up late and when I went to actually do work and think work thoughts my head started just spinning and I needed to sit down.

I was supposed to have a Hell Day today, a day every other Wednesday that is barely survivable because not only do I have to run a big planning meeting, but I have to be in two extremely high-masking meetings with both my boss alone and with a bunch of management. And yet I told myself I couldn’t skip these because they’re very important.

Also I guess if we’re using the framing of high-masking being exhausting, I’ve had a number of those in the past week or two. One was a fucking disaster as the people running it have no idea what they’re doing, so they spent 40 minutes grilling me extremely poorly, and the other was productive but included the most bazinga-ass temporarily embarrassed millionaire I’ve ever met, who I have to deal with occasionally. She is completely non-technical, doesn’t know it, and is also quite slimy and it is a lot of work to be nice. I’ve been dealing with some shit that a bunch of non-technical people decided last week without us, and when I was openly saying this idea they had with no development oversight was a bad idea, she said “well we have to figure it out because that’s what we’re doing.” Five minutes later when everyone else agreed with me she suddenly says “it was a tentative plan.” Five minutes is too short a time for effective gaslighting, lady, what are you doing? I even confirmed it with other people that were there who said I’m not crazy lol.

If I were in my boss’ place I wouldn’t hesitate to reschedule the meeting with me and would be supportive of me taking some time off to recover. And yet I’m still terrified to do so.

The last month has been absolute hell for me. May was roof replacement month and the company was so disorganized and showed up at random times and worked late into the evening (830 PM most nights) because they were short-staffed. And it’s still not done.

And this month there’s a bunch of commitments and delayed and delayed releases that there’s a lot of pressure on me to get out. Big cross-company code deploys that affect everything. I’ve had a running list of colour-coded problems we have to resolve that I’ve been updating every day as we get through stuff. It’s good (and out of character for me) to be organized.

I miss the days when I could just work on some code, refactor some shit app, or even just do some little UI stuff. I’m not sure if anyone would hire me for a job like that anymore, I hear about how much HR pre-filters resumes without degrees (I don’t have a degree). I also don’t think I’d do well in an office every day, I never did before, I was okay in 2018 with my back to a wall and a bit of a barrier so I didn’t feel like I had to mask so hard and I could focus on work, but open-offices are super exhausting since everyone is looking at you potentially from every angle. It makes it difficult to stim.

It did feel good when I finished up on Friday last week after a super stressful week. I got through everything I needed to do (and everything that was dropped on me at the last minute), it was stressful but when it was done I was happy. And when I’m not working I’m having fun playing modded Minecraft with my partners or watching shows and we like. I guess weekends and evenings are just not enough recovery time. I was hoping to make it to the week off I have coming up but it seems like I just can’t.

My therapist says that I should look at ways to reorganize my work so that it isn’t so taxing. I think the fact that I’ve named days like today Hell Day is indicative enough that maybe I should try to reschedule some things.

Also, re. the chest pain thing, I have had two chest x-rays in the past year, had multiple ECGs, and had an extremely skilled doctor examine me as well. A lot of that stuff was cuz I told my doctor my mom has a heart condition she needed surgery before to fix some problem (they had to cauterize a bunch of the electrical emitters since they were causing palpatations) and I wanted to start ADHD meds. I have another ECG planned (but that needs to be on a day off because it is 10/10 autistic torture) in a couple weeks. I don’t think there’s actually anything wrong with my heart at this point since all of that stuff came up mostly clean. I get pretty strong medical anxiety sometimes, so I’m chalking it up to that.