I used to blow up a lot.

I still do, but I used to, too.

This week has been corrosive; admittedly, I’ve been more hair-trigger, foul, grating, and abrasive. To my disappointment and shame, I let it creep in when getting feedback conveyed to me from my boss — after I felt my tone downshift into a snarl and put acid on the clicking consonants of biting words, I realized:

There are things that make me angry, and this is a problem.

There are universal angry triggers — I mean, I’m probably not going to react placidly after being cussed at, slapped in the face, or otherwise insulted.

But I had to step back and get a better angle on my Life Autistic and face why the things that drive our anger do so.

1) Intrusions to routine

For the record – I’ve gotten way more accustomed to my routine being wrecked! That’s OK in the grand scheme — life happens.

What drives me mad is when people disrupt the norm without warning. If you’re in a place in which you don’t belong in my routine, it’s going to fizzle me out and draw some ire — even if you mean well! 

The surprise intrusion just lights fuses that often smolder into generalized anger — it sucks, but it’s a fuse.

2) Being reminded of our “otherness”

I’m in a high-visibility role and judged on my ability to present and relate to business leaders. So I’m often working on two fronts: trying to be relatable as a human, then to my audience — there’s a lot of thought that goes into what I present to where they get a polished version of my professional, masked self.

So in the cases where I’m advised that my points didn’t land, or that my audience didn’t follow, I can struggle with taking that feedback!

As a serial overthinker, I default to my innate, autistic self: “But I thought I accounted for my quirks…I barely used monosyllabic words…I tried to be human, funny…this seemed like it went well?”

It isn’t the fault of the audience, so I sometimes blame the thing I know the best: myself.

It is an angry reckoning.

3) Re-arranging the pens in my bedroom

Not anymore, heh.

3) Being emotionally outnumbered

“You’re a jerk, Hunter.”

“Yeah, a real jerk.”

“That was an awful thing to say, which means you’re an awful person.”

I’ve never quite blown my lid at a person, but I’ve had moments where I’ve ERUPTED Pompeii style at people. 

My problem-solving (er, well, undoing my own idiotic actions) works better on the cold, logical, rational, individual level.

Facing a crowd isolates me back to a corner I’ve worked hard to come from.

I’m not perfect, and I’m very flawed — and even at my best, I already feel isolated in my own being.

So combining high-stress incidents, my own fault in likely causing it, with people-plural pressure that sticks me back into further defenseless isolation — that’s a trigger.

 

When people ask “How can you keep blogging when you don’t feel like doing it anymore,” I can’t help but ask and ask myself “How can you stop?”

Am I excited about this venture 100% of the time? No. Is it something so joyous I chase it with—no. 

Let’s get this straight out of the way: this blog has become an autistic obsession, compulsion, and enthusiasm for me. It’s baked into my routine, and when it’s reached that level — it is sure to be done.

And I guess I’m thankful.

Otherwise, I’d have quit by now.

No one asks me to do this. There’s no voice in my corner that says “Hey, you should work on your blog, Hunter!”

No. Life’s busy, and I am demanded by it.

My sails on this boat spend more time being torn, and many of these posts are propelled by firing the motor or rowing through waves by sheer will than they are by gusts of inspiration and support.

I have my intractable, snarling autism to thank for this.

It has not quit me, as I cannot quit it.

Its obsessive attributes, anxiety-tied fixations, rage-inducing outbursts at deviation — they’re a difficult cocktail that too few imbibe and understand.

“You don’t…get it. I have to do this.”

Even if I feel like I’m the only one on the planet who can feel that.

It’s tiring. It hurts sometimes.

But it gets done.

Almost every other account you’ll read involving “autism” and “parenting” will involve autistic kids and neurotypical parents. Sometimes it’s both (both kids and parents on spectrum).

Not often is it “autistic parents of neurotypical kids” – but here we are, folks.

Are there challenges with that? Sure. I’ll save those for another post, another time.

Are there perks? A few. And here’s a major one:

I’m always ahead of the messes.

Wait, how is that—

A perk?

Read a few momblogs, parenting meme pages, and “exhausted parent laments.” Parenting is hard work, and the environment and chaos left in its wake makes it harder. The scourge of mess, clutter is the great undoing that stamps out the doing.

I come away reading things like “finding my house a wreck at the end of the day,” and “this place is just always dirty and I can never get ahead”  and think: Y’all need the services of AUTISTIC PARENT.

If you’ve seen WALL-E, you should recall M-O, my spirit animal, who treads around erasing dirt, mess, foreign contaminants.

That’s me. 

I am like a mess-erasing, toy-picking, surface-cleaning, clutter-destroying machine.

MACHINE.

It doesn’t tire me. It doesn’t crush me. I am the end of my house’s chaos. The finisher. The punisher.

It’s my nature.

I cannot help but pick things up off the floor, wipe things down, restore order where there is none, and rectify the sins caused by disarrangement.

I go beyond just being the trash picker — I’m the dad, so I’m a little autistically extreme on this even in parenting. The girls know what I’m about.

“Sorry Zo, I know you’re crying, but these dishes cannot abide in the sink another second.”

“Mo, you are not leaving that area unless you clean up that Barbie campsite and put out that fire.”

Is it work to manage the house to where you don’t make another mess until you’ve cleaned the one you made? To swoop in like a vulture and grab every errant piece of clothing left behind? The be the reverse-tornado that re-orders everything that the children and canine tornados wreck?

YES.

I’m not clean, not a neat freak; I’m just autistic. And I’m very autistic about it.

But I’m always ahead of the mess.