Throughout life living in my parents’ home, I can remember being told to have a sense of pride and ownership in the tasks I was responsible for to take care of myself. After having a rumspringa of reluctance and it backfiring for some time, I am starting to be heading in the track of having pride and ownership in the simplest of things.
After four and a half years of being on a path for disaster and not admitting that I needed to do what I had been doing before breaking free from my parents’ grasp, I started to want to make things in my living environment nice. For decades, I found this as abusive behavior or as a punishment without seeing it as a way for it to make my living environment a nice place to be by taking pride and ownership in the work that I did to make it that way.
Having the need to do this was reiterated in my brain again and again by my parents along with my lack of interest and not having a focus did not help the situation. My thought was always on refuge and safety at the immediate moment arriving home that I just needed to retreat and do things, even though that wasn’t always the case. My brain just couldn’t see the benefit of doing so.
It was not that these skills would eventually transfer in life and be modified in my own personal way in the present moment. It took having to get here in the present moment to realize that there is value in taking pride and ownership in the simple mundane tasks that make things look and be great, There is a sense of happiness and pride with knowing that things just didn’t magically appear that way or that it wasn’t just automatically done that way. It took you investing your time and energy in the mundane tasks and realizing that you as an individual put in the effort to do what was needed to make things be the way they are.
Sometimes these thoughts bring trauma from the way the instructions or orders were delivered to us as individuals and this can set us back greatly because these thoughts can sometimes replay in our heads for quite some time and we can’t see past them. It can make us want to deflect the idea of doing things that put us on edge and make us constantly second guess what we have to do to make things just right.
It can be hard to imagine how difficult it is for someone of an autistic nature to do the things that our neurotypical peers take for granted like housework, cooking and so forth. Sometimes it takes a lot out of us just to do something simple like cook shells & cheese and other times when cleaning a room or a closet of our living space we can be really good at it, it just depends where we are in the course of the day.
Even though I had my moments throughout life with these mundane tasks, I am still thankful for the skills that my parents instilled in me even today
Dustin's Dynasty 