I quite like the idea of risk taking, which I guess may not be typical of my condition. However, the problem is, when I take risk, I often end up in trouble. Not always, let me clarify that, but often.

I guess, possibly, as I’m in trouble now, I focus on that a bit more and it will be good to see how this blog will look in a couple of months. Hopefully I won’t be clinically depressed and in need of 24h care. But what I wanted to say is, I sometimes really want to do something but it somehow doesn’t end up how I was hoping. Even changing a job, although that was ultimately before I found out I’m autistic: I wanted to be a maths teacher. Maths teachers are in demand in the UK and I was very good at maths. So I got in touch with Polish Saturday School in Swindon and become teaching assistant.

Mind you, I was only working 5 hours, once a week, and I was coming home exhausted! Especially with all that noise kids can make! I barely survived to the end of a school year.

Ok, so possibly that was not a proper risk taking as I wasn’t risking anything by doing that, but I guess it could be a similar story if I took risk and it didn’t work out. Because I wasn’t able to predict not only other people reaction but also my own.

It’s like I may think for example that I like when food items are arranged very nicely on a supermarket shelf so possibly I should get a job in a supermarket (I never worked in one). And then it turns out that it’s a lot about dealing with impatient customers and I cannot do that. That is my understanding of real life situations, very limited and simplified, almost naive, like if I was a child.

Only after experiencing a situation I can understand why it didn’t turn out the way I was thinking. So finally, a while after my diagnosis, I decided I won’t be taking any risks, I won’t be changing anything in life at all. But then what I didn’t predict is that the situation will change by itself, colleagues change, manager changes, rules change and by consciously avoiding risks I put myself into a situation where I denied myself that little flexibility I used to have so I ended up in troubles anyway.

Writing this blog is a risk. I revealed my name on it. I suppose it’s something that I really wanted to do, write about everything that happened to me, including my two psychotic episodes and the hallucinations that I used to have at that time.

I deeply admire people who openly talk about their issues and can build community around that, like for example Cecilia McGough, a student and an activist with schizophrenia. I doubt I’d be able to build any community, I’m autistic after all so building a community is not my thing and it will probably never happen. But I always wanted to be heard in some way and it was just another thing that never happened to me so at some point I stopped trying, but felt really unhappy about that.

I published a novel in my early 30s, as an e-book, and received that one, rather harsh review: that’s not how real people think, it’s very fake. I didn’t know how to react to that. My character was thinking exactly like me and I was convinced I revealed the truth about people that other authors were missing!

Obviously I didn’t know at the time I was autistic, but it was one of those situations when I was hoping to get heard and I did not.

It’s Sunday morning. I think at the end I managed to get some more sleep during the night. It’s so difficult to know for sure as I was in bed anyway and it was rather dark. But I was worried a lot during the night. Having an aging parent is difficult, and I have an alcoholic brother on top of that, who completely lost any touch with reality. And I’m autistic so I’m not great at dealing with life at best of times.

I spent most of yesterday transferring my blog, I had to do that post by post, copy and paste, and I still have quite a lot left but I think, as I was busy during the day and didn’t have time to worry, I had to worry during the night instead.

I’m not sure if I can trust the new care home manager, what if she starts giving me troubles? As I said, she seemed like a person who’s very skilled at finding things about people without asking questions and I already revealed too much about myself.