I’m taking a break for the holidays.
To my usual readers – catch you later!
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To those of you out there on the spectrum with me:
I feel the irksome woes of routines being all askew this season.
I don’t like that much either.
Christmas and the holiday season should be fun, but I get it, it’s just different. The shake-ups can shake you up.
They’ll be doing the same to me.
Hang in there.
Cheers,
H2
My wife, a wonderful human, has come to me quite often before, expressing her jubilation over legitimately awesome things: artwork, design, experiences, even things that happen to me — you name it.
She’ll then turn and ask:
“Aren’t you excited?”
I nod.
I grin, even.
I do try to sell it.
“…yeah….no?”
She hasn’t yet stormed off after asking what’s wrong, or how any normal human could fail to be excited or enthusiastic about things.
But we know.
I’m not a normal human.
I don’t get all that excited about stuff.
While depression is a serious challenge that many of us autistics face in some shape or another, that’s not always the root of our excited-less-ness.
Emotions are tough for us to understand, to process, assimilate, and synthesize. Not that we lack them, but they wax and wane in different ways, and not always for what we should get excited over.
But it’s OK.
We get that you’re excited, and we’re happy for you.
We’re just not always on the same bandwidth. We get excited about different stuff.
My wife chided me for being more giddy over the BattleBots final than I was for when I was promoted at work, or something truly important.
We’d help if if we could.
So am I excited, ever?
Rarely.
But I’m OK.
Ever feel like you’ve done everything right and still end up like it all went wrong?
Where you’ve mastered every facet of your work, acquired new skills, checked the boxes, and yet — failed?
When you look around and realize, while you may do everything better than everyone else, you are not the best?
This is a hard lesson in life, even harder in The Life Autistic.
“There should be logic to this,” we think. “The whole should consist entirely of the sum of its parts — that’s how it works!” we plead.
That’s not how it works.
Early in my career, I thought that mastering my current job would be the gateway to the next level up. Surely, being a top Advisor would open the doors for me to manage, right? (Don’t laugh.)
But it took a different set of skills (like coaching, motivation, leadership, organization) to progress.
“Ah, so that’s it — it’s all about the DIFFERENT skills!” we think.
As I picked up skills that helped me move beyond to organization leadership, I was motivated to “learn all the things” and fortify every deficiency for success.
Presenting? Check.
Forecasting and staffing? Check.
Employee engagement? Check.
Reporting? Check check check CHECK.
—
Hopefully your neurotypical minds figure out what took my autistic mind too long to discover, only after I’d stalled.
It’s not about the skills.
It’s about attributes.
Respect. Tact. Diplomacy. Patience. Approachability.
Not just what you do, but who you are.
I was dismayed. I’d done so much, and I thought I could solve it all by doing. But as it turns out, it’s about being.
Your success must go beyond your skills.
In The Life Autistic, it’s so much easier to do, do, do. The idea of being is not impossible, but it’s tough! To practice things that would normally be just someone’s personality – that’s difficult.
It still doesn’t always make sense to me.
But I’m still making sense of the world. Making better sense of me and people like me to the world.
The Life Autistic 