One thing about me that I think is part of my Asperger's is the fact that I find doing "adult" things quite difficult and scary. I'm not talking about "adult" in the sexual sense, I hasten to add; I'm talking about functioning as a normal adult human being in the regular world.
A lot of the things that I find difficult or scary are related to my anxiety. I don't like phoning people, for example, and if there's one positive thing to be said for the modern Internet-connected world, it's that it's actually rather rare you need to phone someone any more. Even if, instead, you typically end up stuck in a hell of a text chat with some minimum-wage robot who doesn't speak English very well and copy-pastes all their responses to you.
But then there's other things that I don't have any rational reason to find particularly scary or difficult, but for one reason or another I just put up a mental "block" against doing them. Doing anything related to car maintenance is one of those things, particularly dealing with my tyres. My tyre pressure light had been on for a few days and I'd been putting off dealing with it. Part of this was because there was always someone using the air thing at the petrol station whenever I actually thought about doing it, but also I have an irrational fear of overinflating my tyres and blowing them up or something. This is something that, I believe, is literally impossible to do with modern air thingies so long as you set the correct initial value, but it still worries me.
The flipside of this, of course, is that when I successfully do accomplish something as mundane as pumping all my tyres up and making that annoying light go out… I feel like I've scored a significant "victory" of sorts. I've achieved something. I've acted like a normal human being for once.
Not anything to be particularly proud of, I know, but every little thing like this that I notice helps me to understand myself a bit better.
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