I’ve never been good at dealing with excitement. Or, to be precise, every time I feel excitement I ruin everything about the thing that excites me.

It is very easy to say it’s self sabotage and, again, explain that it’s because I don’t believe I deserve good things happening to me (exactly what my counsellor used to say in 2015).

But the truth is rather different: I believe my brain interprets excitement as danger. Hard to say why that is. I was brought up in rural Poland, during communism – there really weren’t many things to be excited about at the time. But I think there is one more problem here: I have absolutely no idea where things are going long term.

When I was in the radio station today (I’ll write about it in details later on) I was offered to run my own program as a volunteer. I was told I can record as many times as I want, till I’m happy. That was really nice. I said yes. And I thought I was coping. I came home, watched a film, didn’t think too much about it. At 21.30 I went to bed and now, two hours later, I’m still wide awake. I feel like there is this tiny, little voice in my head, demanding to know where this is going. I suspect the voice has more to do with my terrible lack of social imagination and less with insecurity. Or, possibly, lack of social imagination causes me to feel insecure?

I would really like to have the same opportunities that non autistic people have, you know? So what that I ‘don’t look autistic’ if my brain does those things to me? And this is exactly how I used to see it ages ago, before I realised I’m autistic: my brain does that to me. That means that even though I’m perfectly aware that my reaction is not helpful, I’m unable to stop it.