Published on 12, July, 2020
Hellooo, I am really in need of some advice from other autistic people that have experienced something similar, which I'm sure a lot of you have!
I'm 20 and tried to go to uni last year, got into law at a great uni, but after like a month and a half my mental health absolutely spiralled and I dropped out six moths later. It has been almost a year since I stopped attending university and I haven't gotten better yet. I know it's going to be a very long process, but I don't feel like any progress is being made as everything feels so impossibly hard. I'm not doing well looking after myself, showering, brushing teeth, cooking etc. I almost never leave my flat. I've also started to struggle with alcohol abuse.
Do you have any tips on how to start making progress? I feel so stuck, and angry at myself. I'm in therapy, but that doesn't help with actually DOING things yk?? All replies will be greatly appreciated :)
I used a couple of strategies in high school when studying was incredibly hard for me, these things relate mostly to depression I think, but I believe everyone should keep them in mind...
1- Celebrate doing very very small things. Yeah that little thing might not have contributed much to the whole thing but it was really really hard to do and you did it! You deserve to feel good. As an example, if you need to write 4 pages on your laptop and can't do it at all, start by just turning on the laptop and celebrate that sh*t. Your next step is opening the app, and it's ok if you just stare and can't do it at the start, that's part of your progress. Remember, somedays you might not get anything done, then just feel good that you survived, that was a really hard thing for me to do back then, just not ending it.
Another great way of explaining this tip (which I heard from Healthy Gamer on YouTube) is: in making progress, it's not about doing things that are enough, it's about doing things that are NOT enough.
2- Remember that you might get in a loop where feeling miserable makes you unable to do things and not doing things makes you feel more miserable, it's a feedback loop. You need to break the loop and it's incredibly hard cause you just wanna hate yourself, but hate will get nowhere. Try hard to be kind to yourself, don't beat yourself up when things go wrong.
3- Using a timer might help, or might not. I didn't always find it helpful, but try it if you find it hard to focus. set 20 minutes, or 40 minutes, or 1 hour, then start doing the task. After the timer has stopped, if you feel not tired, add 20 more minutes to it. You might not get anything done at all at the start, but here it only matters that you spent time focused on the task and that's an accomplishment as well.
Thank you thank you, I think celebrating the small things will really help, it's difficult to understand that my best is someone else 'sup-par', but I also know that my exceptional seems to be far greater than most (not in a bragging way, there are upsides and downsides to it all). Acknowledging that when I'm doing my best, that it is my best, will help greatly