If you haven’t heard this cliche while discussing your neurodivergency with someone, then I envy your luck. Yesterday I fucked up, I feel shitty, but also I am pissed.
Our brains are impulsive af and tend to forget the most important information. We mess up, our RSD (and empathy) kicks in, we feel terrible, we vow to be more careful, but guess what? Thats fucking exhausting.
As a result, we start overthinking our every waking moment, stressing over every little thing. Because, we are trying to be aware of the things we cannot perceive.
At some point, hopefully we realize that we cannot live like that, and we start to arbitrarily ignore our compulsion to overthink. Most often that works out great because most often the threat is not real, but sometimes we make the wrong call.
The times we overthink are still more than the times we do not, and we still mess up. Let us have our fucking peace.
Perhaps you can take solace in knowing that when you hear the phrase “good in a crisis” you can bet your ass that they only got that way by constantly fucking things up and making it work at the last second.
Those “planners” and people who can “remember things that aren’t directly in front of their face” just freeze up like a deer in headlights when things go sideways.
Where do I learn the skill of remembering/noticing things that are directly in front of my face
If you can handle the things that aren’t, we should team up.
Most of my brains bandwidth is used up by remembering things like that my passport is in that canvas bag half under my bed and that my birth certificate is in a specific stack of paper at my mums house in my former room. So yes, let’s!
Perfect! I don’t know where ANY of that shit is! You’re hired!
There’s also a subset of us that were exposed to random, horrific child abuse and developed crisis management skills early out of necessity.
When one of my sites had 2 feet of flooding in the server room and everyone was freaking out, I stepped in, downed the racks, cut the power, and began moving the equipment before my phone even rang.
They praised me for this but in my heart I knew it was nothing compared to having your bedroom door kicked off the hinges by a drunk, angry man four times your size at 3am because you dared to go to bed without emptying the dishwasher.
If I can survive that, no other crisis compares.