Before I knew more about autism, I thought of it as (partly, at least) a need to create and follow rules. To have order and structure. The stereotype of having a special interest in train timetables. Nice, predictable, neat things.
It’s one of the reasons I never thought autism could be used to describe me and my way of operating, because generally I’m, well, not at all organised. I can be, with effort, and I now know that many of the times in my life I was super well organised was because I had hyperfocused in on cleaning or organising strategies - but nothing ever stuck. I was often frustrated by my inability to be consistent about just about anything, but had come to mostly accept it as one of those things.
Since finding out I’m autistic, and realising how my mind is actually incredibly organised but just in a very complex way (that other people don’t always often tend to understand) my view on this has completely changed. I have my own way of organising things, my own routines and often my inconsistencies have come not from chaos but the difficulty in having to be flexible.
It makes me think about the stories that we create to justify our behaviour - and how, for me, these hid my own autism from me for a very long time. And part of that is realising that I don’t operate by rules, but I do operate in equations. Learning that has been a game changer. Bringing those equations into my consciousness - so they can be explored, and examined, and questioned further - has not only helped me to hold them a little more lightly, but has also enabled me to learn why conflicts in my equations could be so disabling (and yes, I use that word purposefully. Part of my learning in recent months has been disability acceptance and coming to terms with what that means for me)
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