So, it is spring again and my birthday is coming up soon. I can’t believe I am turning 37 this year. I honestly thought that I’d have my life figured out around 30 and here I am, closing in on 40 and I still don’t have a clue what I am doing with my life.
I am feeling somewhat better than I have in while and I am hoping it’s not just because I have been on holiday for 2 weeks. Long Covid has been a long struggle these last few years, not helped by the fact that I have been trying to live the normal life everyone is always talking about. Going to work and sitting in an office every day between 8 and 16 is not my best life circumstances even at the best of places. This place, the office I am in, seems built in the worst possible way for someone on the autism spectrum. I had a colleague in the beginning who was also on the spectrum, but the place was too much for him and he was let go. He has luckily found a place that is better suited to support those of us on the spectrum – something I am truly happy about. I don’t have the kind of luxury to even imagine looking for something else and since all my struggles these last years to make the place a little more open to changes that could have a positive effect and make it easier for me to exist in the kind of space the office has become has all been in vain, I am at a point where I can only do one thing – accept the place as it is and just fight through as long as possible.
I had hoped that things could be different, but sometimes we have to accept the limits of our abilities and, well, if I am the only one deeply unhappy, I can’t force any changes or complain anymore, as they would only be annoyed or saddened by me. If they are happy and this office is exactly as they wish, then they can keep it that way.
Making the best of any situation is something I always strive for and if nothing else, these last 2 years in this office will teach me to stay positive no matter what happens and wherever I end up in the future, I can only be grateful.
It’s not hell on earth or anything, don’t get me wrong. Problem is just that as someone with autism spectrum disorder I struggle with things that, even though others struggle with similar things too, they do not suffer to the degree someone like me does. Some days in the office, the light and the noise from the many, many other people (it is one big office with few and useless dividers) is so bad I can hardly get through 5 minutes without suffering panic attacks and the little glass walled meeting rooms in the middle of the office have bad ventilation, so going into to one of them is like being stuck in a glass coffin for all to see you like an animal in a zoo.
I do not understand that normal people are perfectly happy in these places, but hey, to each his own, as they say.
During the holiday I have been thinking a lot about what makes me happy and what kind of life I want to live, and you know what is really amazing? I think, I might be well on my way to figuring that out. I am ready to figure it out. I am grateful to have realised that I am not someone who will ever be happy working in a big, corporate office with meeting in glass cages and fancy breakfasts and lunches with fancy coffee makers and uncomfortable, but fancy modern chairs. I am more the kind of person who would sit in a forest somewhere and drink coffee made on a pot over a fire. I don’t want fancy shoes or a big apartment in the city and meet my friends for drinks in bars and stuff like that, stuff my colleagues enjoy. I am not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not who I am – but I cannot deny it is part of who I thought I was.
I enjoy sitting with a book under a tree or going for a walk by a lake in the rain. I like street food and camping, not restaurants with many stars – I like my stars in the night sky, if you don’t mind.
How wonderful it is to know myself better, how wonderful that I will never have to wonder about what could have been.
It’s going to be difficult, I am sure, I am going to do my very best to stop forcing myself to do things I don’t want just to make others happy and instead try and focus on trying to do things I want to do, so that I can be more happy. Perhaps, by doing that, I will be able to enjoy my time in the fancy office while I am there and find some way of earning my money in the future that actually makes me happy.
I also hope it will give me more energy and thereby write more on this blog and my fiction, which I also hope to share with everyone in time. I am trying to structure some of my fiction in a way that I can share not just the actual stories I have written (and the ones I am working on now), but also share the process and how I go about finding time to do everything. It’s a bit difficult, because now that I am ready to share it with the world, it’s also more frightening.
One day, I hope, I can work happily every day and produce a great amount of content for you all, but until then, it will unfortunately take longer than I had originally hoped. It is coming, though, and I am terribly excited for the future.
