The Anxiety of Next

What's next? This is a question my brain is constantly thinking and analyzing. However, I want you to expand your thinking on this and not think about what's next as in what are you doing after you read this blog. I mean, you should think about going to Amazon and buying the book called Finding Kansas, however that's not what I mean. Instead, think about next and every possible interaction that could come in the next five minutes. Think of every phone call you may receive and think about all of your potential responses. Then, keep going with an infinite list of possibilities and maybe you'll get in the ballpark of what my brain does to me in almost every circumstance. To put it lightly it is indeed exhausting. A couple weeks ago I talked about autism burnout and this, for me, is one of the things that'll get me there quickly.  

I haven't found an off switch for this and when I am out with people all day long, I become emotionally fatigued in a way that's almost shameful to admit. Shameful? How can I easily explain that, even with nothing directly traumatic happened, I'm exhausted from the daily grind of processing and fearing what may come next? It isn't an easy thing and for myself it's doubly worse because I am aware of this. 

On the flip side of that I also can't explain my strength. Strength? What am I talking about considering I just mentioned I get rather fatigued simply be existing? While it is true that I get a bit overwhelmed at the end of the day the thing is I did, in fact, make it through to the end of the day. I can get hung up on the "weakness" at times and totally lose the fact that it takes an inner strength that is hard to describe to get the nerve to leave the front door in the morning and take on all the anxieties I know I have. I know my brain is going to overprocess and try to calculate the oblivion of next, and yet I will.

For anyone you may know on the autism spectrum I implore you to keep this in mind. While it's easy to focus on the weakness, and we live in a society that so often just focuses on the bad, try and think about how much strength it takes to simply get through the day living life on the autism spectrum whether one can't tune out any bit of sensory input, or to those that overprocess everything. Whatever it may be the dedication, passion, and inner strength it takes to simply attempt to leave the house, or pursue a dream, takes more strength than my vocabulary will ever allow me to attempt to describe.