Those Bad Times

So however positive I am in regard to how I approach my neurodivergence and the management of it, there are times that it can go 1 to -100 in a matter of minutes.

The challenge with Feeling things as deeply as someone with neurodivergence does, is how much it actually impacts your ability to be able to continue as normal, or as normal as it gets, for you. The way that this presents is probably very different in each person but I know for me what it does is I seem to somehow just go on an absolute crazy, let’s go mental energy and just keep doing and doing and doing until I fall down exhausted. I know if I stop it’ll give my head the chance to think.

For me it seems as though I can cope with maybe one emotional trauma but more than that, it sends me into a spiral of being in a place where the only way I can regulate is this doing, doing and doing. Unless of course it is at the weekend where I can dance, dance, dance. Whichever way it comes out it unfortunately does not help with my energy regulation, which at most times is sketchy. And the only thing, where times like this exist, is to ride them out as kindly as possible. I have said many times that I want the world to stop so that I can get off, as the burden of feelings presses so much on you, that you feel that you will either implode or explode. I now laugh, remembering the times when as a child, my Mum would send me down to the bottom of the garden to scream when I got so frustrated in being unable to explain my needs or get a hold on my feelings.

However, I do come to reflect on times like this where I wonder how good it is for those of us of the neurodivergent persuasion to be in a full-time permanent job where we are working 37 and a half to 40 hours a week, with set hours and that this just really isn’t the way that it should be for us and the way that gets the best out of us either. But it’s not like life is set up like that is it?

I know that there are times throughout my working day where I will go through at least some kind of phase of berating myself because of not being able to do what other people can and cope with job demands the same as my colleagues, due to my emotional life at any one time.  And whilst I have every appreciation of now having the understanding that I know that I’m Different, this does not take away the yoke of late diagnosis where there is that guilt, that burden that knowing that you are now different and that actually you can’t do the same as other people, but you are also in a place where you are still trying to do that and that it is still expected of you. There are so many things that are put into place to enable you to reach this particular benchmark of abelisation within Society. Everything you do is to somehow normalize towards some kind of benchmark. Who the fuck made this benchmark anyway?!

If mine and everybody else’s neurodivergences are not a medical twist and are just an evolutionary branch of development, triggered by the environment we were conceived and continued to be created in, then therefore they cannot be medicalised as we are not here to be fixed. Science, medical or psychological does not have all our answers.

For me one of my biggest challenges is that I do not, and have not had, a significant other that can take the pressure off by doing other things together or for me, within a normal suburban lifestyle. Would this ever have helped? When I do seemingly get someone caring and intimate in my life it usually ends up being too much, not enough or totally uneven. Of course there could be elements within here towards my perfectionist tendencies and naivety coming in to play along with self-sabotaging. When I see my other neurodivergent friends who have Partners and wives or husbands, where from the outside, they seem to be able to cope a lot more because there is someone to take the burden of various life chores off you. But that is another discussion all together. And before someone chimes in with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria…that too is another discussion!