Something’s working. But not quite well enough.

Good evening friends, it’s been a little while since I last talked about mental health. Mostly because my mental health has been doing pretty well for the past few months if not longer, But today was rough. As a matter of fact, the last couple of weeks have been rough. I’ve been trying to figure out where the problem is and I think I’ve figured it out. Mostly by accident, to be perfectly honest, but that’s alright.

This morning was one of those mornings that might be very familiar to other people with autism or just mental health issues in general. I didn’t charge my earbuds over the weekend. I forgot something from upstairs right as I left the house, part of my route was blocked off and I had to take a small detour, that kind of stuff. Stuff that a normal person would just cope with but if you’re already having a bad time it can really get to you. Somehow I managed to make it through all of that without feeling particularly stressed. But this wasn’t the end of it.

At this point I’m thinking to myself, I’ve done quite a bit of active adjustment of my thinking. When I went to a therapist back in the day, much of what I learned was cognitive behavioral therapy. How to think more positively and parse your thoughts in such a way that you can filter out the negativity. And it seemed to actually work a little bit. Although I do need to acknowledge that part it is probably the medication tempering my emotions. But as the day went on, I started to feel worse and worse physically. Old issues like stomach pains and chest pains came back and by 11 am I was in my boss’s office discussing going home early. So something’s working, but it wasn’t me today.

So this got me thinking, why isn’t it working? I am doing everything my therapist has told me to do, and I still feel like a wet rag doubling over in stomach pains. I think I know. CBT (and yes, it’s still funny to abbreviate it) is aimed at making you regulate your emotions and thoughts. Doing so takes a lot of energy, but allows you to “function” on a day to day basis. And although this can have some positive benefits for people suffering from mental health issues, ultimately all it does is make them more productive within “normal” society. But the reason it doesn’t work with people with autism is because masking and retraining our thoughts costs a ton of energy. Energy that we don’t have. I’m zoning in on people with autism here because that is my own experience, I’m not saying it’s unique to us, I just don’t have any experience outside of it. 

What I find is that it leaves me in a position where I’ve trained myself to be good enough at fiddling with my thoughts to the point that I can get to work in one piece without having a panic attack – which is great, by the way, I’d rather just feel the physical part of this than also having to deal with a full on panic attack – but it won’t leave me capable of dealing with the strain this puts on my body. So I end up in that position I don’t want to be in. At 11 am in my boss’s office. And I’m blessed with working in a field that is much more understanding of these problems than most. A sizeable part of the student body is obviously struggling in their own way and we would be a piss poor school if we didn’t at least try to figure out how best to help them. So it wasn’t a problem for me to go home early today, but as you can imagine, it also didn’t feel great. To this day, calling in sick for these reasons feels like failure. I can’t get that notion out of my head and it sucks. So when I say something’s working, I mean to say that there are some valid benefits to having gone through CBT, but it hasn’t actually done the thing it was supposed to do. I’m still unreasonably harsh on myself whenever things don’t go my way and I still push myself beyond my limits. So I’ll probably be back to work tomorrow, not learning anything from my mistakes. But I am genuinely going to take it slow on all of the extra things I have going on. That includes writing since I’ve been quite strict with myself lately. But don’t worry, today’s post should only be delayed until tomorrow and I have already finished The Hesitant Hero volume 5, so there shouldn’t be a big noticeable change for the blog. Just one delayed post and that’s it. I’m just not feeling it today and that’s okay too. You wouldn’t still be here if you didn’t understand how inconsistent I can be. Thanks for reading, I’m going to rest up again but it was nice to get these feelings off of my chest.