With my ‘gifts’ of robotic and inhuman focus, I find I can slog without stress through even the most mundane, monotonous things — except one.

Emptying my dishwasher.

It is indeed the dumbest thing to get worked up over, but if you want to ruin my day, spike my anxiety, and unnerve the tight-knit fabric of my task attacks, just get me unloading a dishwasher.

“Why not just not do it?”

Y’all ain’t be reading this blog long enough – tasks undone make me undone.

“Can you seek help for this?“

…

Let’s start that conversation and see if we can go more than five seconds keeping a straight face about ‘dishwasher anxiety’

“Ok, H2, you got me. Why is this such a pain?”

I’ve been wondering that too.

It’s the strangest thing to be worked up over, so I’ve given it a thought — even applied the ol’ “Task Management System” approach in deconstructing why.

1: It just doesn’t flow

I like logical, behaving things, and my dishwasher is anti-logical relative to my kitchenware arrangement.

If I start from the bottom, then I feel like I’ll forget the top rack. If I start atop, then — well, that’s it’s like it’s hanging over, and there’s too much space beneath—

2: It feels like too many steps

Even when you consider the phrase “unloading the dishwasher,” in my mind, that can only be a single step.

But when I find myself shuffling items out of the unit, staging them for later, stacking cups, bowls, Tupperware to fit in the cabinet, loading newly dirty dishes in, then taking out the silverware basket, and then—

It’s not as simple as it sounds, and that disconnect just frays me.

3: I get stuck trying to “solve” when I need to just “do.”

There’s probably an art, science, and alchemy to doing this.

Someone must have cracked the code.

This must be a solved equation.

That’s at least what I tell myself each time, getting crankier as I fumble plates and jam yet another poor Tupperware tower into a cabinet and then forget I still had silverware to redistribute across adult, toddler, baby, and —

But that is indeed The Life Autistic, conquering challenges great and small. Or in some cases, grimacing and bearing them out, one load of dishes at a time…