This is a post for me. A therapeutic release of all the thoughts that weigh heavy on my head at this moment. This article won’t feature advice and its message may not be uplifting. I hope that, one day, I will be able to orphan the feelings that these words were written with but, right now, it’s too hard.

It’s hard because I have no certainty. It’s hard because no one has any to spare. It’s hard because every word which describes uncertainty sells my thoughts short and, as such, I’m just uncertain.

I’m not even sure what I’m uncertain about though. I think that’s the reason I’m writing today, in a kind of hope that an explanation will stumble out of my words whilst writing and a kind of faith that, in understanding myself, others in similar situations may benefit too.

A new normal

You might have heard the phrase ‘a new normal’ being bandied about as reassurance of what will come after this pandemic, this civil unrest, this whatever you can call the upheaval that is 2020. However, I never fully realized that ‘new’ means a complete departure from the old (and not like when I lost my old Gameboy on holiday and got a ‘new’ one in the exact same colour).

This scares me.

Currently, I am out of work and, while I knew this was always going to take its toll on me and my routines, I mistakenly had the idea that, at some point, Morgan Freeman (or whoever you believe to be God) would hit reset and everything would be back on track.

For this reason, I have been distracting myself, creating new routines to detach from the world around me, hoping that in doing so my concerns would eventually evaporate and I would one day wake up back in my old life. However, I’m now at a stage where these distractions are running out and I am slowly but surely realizing that we are not in Kansas anymore. For example:

When I stopped working, I told myself to focus on my flat move.

When the flat got delayed, I started to catch up on new movies.

When I had watched all the new movies, I focused on learning new skills, but available materials and limited opportunities will also see this well run dry soon.

I guess this should be a lesson in addressing the negative things as they happen and not waiting for it to blow over as, if I had given any of the unfortunate events a second thought, the back of my mind could have mulled them over while the front still had ways to distract me (but I guess we live and learn).

Of course, I should count myself lucky. In the wider picture, many are in much more challenging spots than myself yet, every time I try to put my problems into perspective, I’m not relieved about my comparatively small challenges – I just feel guilty.

The bigger picture

On May 25, 2020, A man by the name of George Floyd was suffocated by a police officer in the U.S., for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. On the weekend of the murder, protests had begun; initially statewide, then countrywide, before expanding internationally. In some locations, rioting started: with shops being looted and buildings burnt and, by Sunday, people were challenging the motive behind those seeking equality.

This worried me.

Yes, I was already worried about injustice – especially when, just days before the killing, an autistic man was ‘mistakenly’ shot in his home, but this time the worry was different, a new worry, a worry about how I had got to the stage where I would do anything for the world to go back to normal, when over the pond people were putting their lives at risk to ensure it did not.

People should have the right to feel safe. People should be able to trust those who ‘protect’ them. I know this and surely everyone does, but the Black Lives Matter movement still found opposition from people who didn’t want things to move: people so obsessed with keeping the status quo that they have let hate grow on their doorstep.

I disagree with every retort that the people who spit ‘all lives matter’ stand for. People’s rights shouldn’t be defined by their skin and it shouldn’t take killings caught on camera for people to consider changing. However, it worries me that when I hear the word ‘change’ it still makes me shiver and makes me question if I share a mindset with those I loathe.

Change

If I was in your shoes; reading this, I would think that my words sound like someone who has had it far too good for far too long, and maybe I have. However, since the days where I made unhealthy friendships that long outstayed their welcome, change has never been easy for me, regardless of whether I am better or worse for it.

I understand that this is part of my autism, that I struggle to trust anything I can’t 100% understand but, this is unlike before. Recent events have altered my perspective of change from black or white to a kind of murky grey. This lack of comprehension has subsequently ignited the part of my autistic brain that wants to obsess and learn everything it can, whilst another part, which is responsible for this post, holds me back in purgatory.

I think this is because I struggle to grasp that change is constantly changing. I get lost in the branches that it creates. One change might be moving from the city to the countryside but, once there, it’s then considered a change to return. In a way, that makes my problem a case of foresight and, to that extent, a little perspective could resolve this.

For example, right now, I may be scared that the things I take solace in no longer have a place for me, but this could mean that I became way too reliant on things that were never stable to begin with. Similarly, while I’m worried that my attitude places me in a mindset that hits pause on progression, the fact that I’m worried about this tells me that I do want the progression and I want to be part of it happening.

I guess that this means being scared, worried or uncertain isn’t something to feel lost about. If I listen to the reason I feel this way, they can be a guide on how to act (and not be the weight holding me down). Due to this, I realise that I, and anyone else struggling at the moment, need to seek some sense of control, and I think that writing this down and understanding myself is the first step to getting there.