Over the weekend Ashley Peterson, the mental health blogger who commented on loads of my posts when I just started (thank you Ashley) asked if we follow back bloggers who follow us. She explained she does if the blog interests her as community is very important to her and my first reaction was to comment that I don’t because, as autistic, I don’t do community. Thank god I managed to realise that could look rude – like if I made an effort to reject her.

Let me explain here, I’d love to be a part of a community, it’s only that it doesn’t work for me. Not only I need to be careful about what I am saying, which takes extra effort, and even if it’s not too hard, now, after I keep practicing for a few years, I can’t be spontaneous and that is a big problem for me. If I was spontaneous with people I’d certainly alienate some people, although I can be ok when I just pop in and out of different social groups. I used to be a part of a meet up group before lockdown, when I could just join events that interested me (it was eating out usually, lol) and ignore the rest and there didn’t seem to be any tight knits there and everyone seemed to love me and find my jokes amusing. So that worked for me, but I knew that if I kept seeing the same people every day or even every couple of days it would stop working. At least I now know that this is because I’m autistic – it was so hard when I was younger and didn’t know what I was doing that people I know for a bit longer stop liking me. My strategy now is to keep social contacts superficial and at least no one will tell me again to ‘open up’ – which was common in my 30s. What was also common was that when I did open up, people used to get disappointed with me.

I guess autistics who are introverts may actually have it easier because there is less social expectations on them. Oh well.

I spent more time working on my patterned images. I only just realised that I never posted about my attempts on painting in acrylics. I always wanted to create patterns while painting but was put off with all the mess that I made along the way and the fact that when I made a mistake all the painting was ruined. The Boyfriend was telling me to keep on practicing but with the commitment of full time work it was too much.

Now, when I see that I’m going in the right direction and I’m worried I may mess the image up, I’ll just save it so that I can start over. I am also having a bit of a problem with overdoing it, I guess this is because I find it so much fun that I want to see what else can be achieved. Hopefully in a few days this problem should not affect me any more.

In short: I got totally obsessed! I’m so glad that I’m going to work today. That will be over 10 hours without digital images – otherwise I’d never take a break. I actually woke up at 3am today… I tried to fall asleep at first but the urge to create turned out to be much stronger.