Expectations & Milestones

Hi, I'm new here.

Self-diagnosed (high-functioning ASD), I have an assessment booked quite soon so I'm having kittens whilst waiting for someone who doesn't know me to have a crack at telling me what I already conclusively know, I'm not NT.

My current level of stress is predominantly focused on other people's expectations. After a recent bereavement, and subsequent departure of a sibling emegrating overseas, I am left at a stage of life unfamiliar to me - no close family, just my partner and me in a new city, with all of life's expectation sat on my shoulders.

Whilst I try to run a business, commute, and build a new life in this city (this alone is exhausting me daily), I am expected by my partner and aging parents to now want to add children to this situation. Something I have been wrestling with for a while.

I like kids sometimes, but the idea of having that as a new responsibility on top of my business, immense social isolation, and chronic IBD that is triggered by stress, has left me often feeling suicidal. My anxiety is pumping around my body daily and I have panic attacks each time I get on the train, the long commute leaves me exhausted and I have to psych myself up to even go to the station, so I'm so exhausted by the time I've done it twice and get home. How children would be as an addition to this frightens the life out of me.

Just wondering, how do others deal with expectations like having children when you already feel you completely deplete your reserves daily just trying to live?

I love my partner so maybe I should love her enough to let someone else love her? I just don't think I can survive without her, we've been together for over a decade and that relationship is the best thing in my life. All my friends moved away, the others have kids and no longer respond or venture out. I'm finding meeting g new people very hard