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Is it my fault?

aurelis

I’m 27 and had the past few years doing different creative jobs here and there. I’ve had a lot of interests but really struggled with sticking to one thing. I feel really confused as I keep trying  to do many different things, but can’t keep up with my expectations of it all, and I’m not earning much. I feel shame as many people have told me that I’m doing too much, and I continue to try and do too much. I feel really unsatisfied and I feel as an adult my age, I should know what I’m doing , stick to one thing I can really focus on and progress in that.

But I keep getting tangled up in my head. I’m trying to prove that I have an adult mindset at the same time and please what I think people want of me, and I can’t find what I really want to focus on. 

I think there is a lot of self judgment and being stubborn in my own head, and I think that’s affected me a lot. I don’t want to be in this same position in a year, that’s for sure.

Sorry if it seems I’m being too hard on myself. I struggle to give myself grace when I do feel I need to sort myself out soon.

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  • That being hard on yourself seems to be something a lot of people I've encountered in this chat group are too.  I certainly am regularly upset with myself when i don't meet my personal expectations of myself.

    I've reasoned it this way:

    I've got to be really good at what i do in order to not get picked on and/or hide my autistic differences in society so that life is less stressful.

    I've invested so much time and effort into what I'm doing that if it goes wrong it seems like a disaster rather than a simple human failure.

    I've kindoff lived for so long with a possible acquired sense of "wrongness" in/from society that I've picked up on it and internalised it.

    So in short that's me and I don't want to inoculate you with pessimism. For what it's worth i'm 62 and a lot of the time haven't a clue what I'm doing and a lot of people who I meet who say they do are self-delusional at least to the external observer.  I don't think you're alone in feeling how you do. 

    solutions...  well I think you're probably on the right track by voicing and sharing how you experience things at present as that can give a base line for noticing and adjusting - also sometimes things make more sense looking back on them then when we're doing them at the time.  

    I've read that sometimes autistic people struggle to see the bigger picture and experience life thro' lots of intense "tunneled" focuses - I certainly do that a lot and so can end up struggling to get a balanced perspective .  Maybe what this ends up doing is the equivalent of gathering parts of a metaphorical jigsaw puzzle that will some day come together as a bigger whole?  Maybe people like us are already doing the things that we think we should be and if in some way it was easier to explore bringing them together would help realisation and "personal development"?

  • in reply to Phased

    What’s the thing that you feel you have to be really good at? It’s something I feel, as if I need to be so good with my thing (music) but because of that I end up in my imagination of how good I need to be and don’t feel as present in trying to work on it. Sometimes I can’t quite tell reality between imagining how I’ll fit in once I complete the knowledge I need vs actually doing.

    thanks for sharing this. Interesting you mention about tunneled focuses. I would describe my experience with life as many small fragments. Those fragments feel like small tunnels but they don’t feel like they’ve completed. 

  • in reply to aurelis

    regretfully I feel I have to be good at everything I get involved with  - maybe a trauma response from being shown my limitations or as I suggested not wanting to give anyone an excuse to express the sort of biases that being autistic can lead one to experience.  Maybe also the sense of knowing I'm fortunate to have some gifts and yet never really achieved as much as I reckon I should have for the effort I give.

    Funny thing is "being present" is like trying to hold sand in a fist - the harder one tries the more it escapes perhaps?

    The fragments are hard to connect for a lot of autistic people as I understand it.  "Weak central coherence theory" is about "seeing the trees but not noticing the forest" and like you say is closely akin to tunneling and monotropism maybe .  I do a lot of "bottom-up processing" like this myself.  Has it's advantages and disadvantages in my experience.

    mind maps, checklists, etc to make a substitute "virtual forest" can help in my experience

    best wishes

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  • in reply to aurelis

    regretfully I feel I have to be good at everything I get involved with  - maybe a trauma response from being shown my limitations or as I suggested not wanting to give anyone an excuse to express the sort of biases that being autistic can lead one to experience.  Maybe also the sense of knowing I'm fortunate to have some gifts and yet never really achieved as much as I reckon I should have for the effort I give.

    Funny thing is "being present" is like trying to hold sand in a fist - the harder one tries the more it escapes perhaps?

    The fragments are hard to connect for a lot of autistic people as I understand it.  "Weak central coherence theory" is about "seeing the trees but not noticing the forest" and like you say is closely akin to tunneling and monotropism maybe .  I do a lot of "bottom-up processing" like this myself.  Has it's advantages and disadvantages in my experience.

    mind maps, checklists, etc to make a substitute "virtual forest" can help in my experience

    best wishes

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