Executive Functioning, Friendships

One thing that is said often about people who are autistic is that we abhor change. This, for me, is true in some respects. Emotionally, I don't mind change; I actually enjoy it to some degree in that it keeps my life interesting. In other respects, however, it plays hell on my life because it makes it very difficult for me to accomplish anything. Routine, for me, is critically important for my productivity and disrupting my routine can be disastrous.

Take, for example, housework. I have a great deal of difficulty working in a "slightly messy" environment because the line between "clean enough" and "needs cleaning" becomes too blurry for me to conceptualize. In response, I will allow the area to become a complete sty before I become so frustrated due to my inability to live in the environment that I engage in a frenzied purging, cleaning spree to restore my environment back to the way it should be: I restore my system returning everything back to exactly where it belongs. It becomes easy enough to maintain this system because it becomes easy enough to recognize when something is amiss and I'll be capable of correcting it.

Should something disrupt my routine, however, such as a bout of depression or stressors from some other source prevent me from properly attending to my duties things can become highly difficult. That counter top which used to have a special place for every single item no longer has the same rules to it. I am no longer able to become upset that my father's coffee mug is in the wrong position or that the garlic humidor is misplaced. A new system must be generated: this is difficult and this tends to lead to neglect.

This is the crux of the problem. I'm either able to obsess over something or completely ignore it. I have enormous amounts of difficulty finding a middle ground. Having extremely strict routines or systems allows me to obsess over more things without them completely dominating my entire life, at the risk of having my routines and systems disrupted.

This is one of the reasons why I worry about living alone sometimes. My routines and systems are very fragile and having someone around to nag me really does help me overcome situations where my routine has broken down or when my system is disrupted much more easily than I would be able to do so on my own. I worry that without the occasional nag I'll fail to be able to correct a broken system or routine in time to prevent it from impacting my other systems leading to a cascading failure in my personal life.

It's not that I'm lazy, although I often feel lazy. I am extremely hard working when it I have an intact schema. It just takes a little bit of help for me to maintain a schema under stress or depression when they tend to change and fall apart.

Managing relationships are another area where I have difficulty in this regard. As long as we have a routine or system I can maintain a friendship but, because people are unpredictable often finicky, I find it extremely difficult to maintain my systems and my friendships fall apart. It becomes much easier when my friends "nag" me by calling me if they miss me or by running into me often because we work or live together. Of course, other people often seem to interpret this kind of neglect as a sign that I don't really care about the relationship when it in fact is just because I don't have a system and that's what happens when I don't have a system.

... I'm also probably struggling with a great deal of anxiety when deviating from my system in a social situation which further compounds the problem in ways usually don't occur with things like dishes.

Instant messaging programs have saved my life socially. Being on my buddy lists means that when you get on your client I'm able to see you log in and that acts as a "nag" for me to reach out to you. It's become so important in my life that not having an instant messenger has become synonymous with an inability for me to develop a meaningful and long lasting relationship with said individual. It's a system and it tends to work well.

To compound my reliance on instant messengers I find phones extremely anxiety-producing and difficult to navigate so I end up avoiding them if at all possible.

This is executive dysfunction in brief, or at least a significant part of it. This is the part of autism which most people fail to understand or acknowledge because, to the outsider who only casually knows you, this is very difficult to observe. Yet, it is real and, for me, it is the most significant point where I need support when it comes to being autistic.