A trait that an autistic person has is the difficulty in making decisions when the opportunity is given for them to do so. It can be hard for us to lock in on a final decision without understanding possible barriers or ramifications that may provide to us and those around us.

When a decision is asked of us that is so open ended or could have multiple choices and the answer is so open ended that it provides difficulty in making a decision that you can be assured in making the right choice that you will be satisfied with. For example, my mother and I were returning to town a few weeks ago after visiting my father on the wagon train in the mountains and we were seeking something to eat. My mother had the idea of pizza on the brain and I was in agreement, but then was the open ended question of where we would go for pizza? Would we go somewhere where we could sit down and share a pie, or would we go, get our own and retreat to our houses and have a pie to ourselves? Thinking of the establishments in the county seat as compared to our town, then the decisions were so many.

Then there were ideas of whether to go to the “drive-in place” that as a general rule has Ice cream, not that i was thinking about their bag of fries that we like. The decisions were just too open ended and with a variety of options that as we were heading down the mountain that it was too quickly to make a decision. The county seat has Pizza Hut and other notable places, but I had a free pizza to redeem at Dominos, which was close to my home. So I went with the free choice in the end. 

This could have been that I was experiencing a great amount of autistic burnout from the end of the week and that my brain was just fried and wanted to just retreat. In fact, I did sleep most of the night shortly after eating that pizza with doing very little that evening. These are just some of the things that compound what goes into the difficulty in making a decision for an autistic person when given the multitude of options or the total capability of making a decision.

I have seen this barrier when the difficulty arises in autistic children when they have to pick one thing over another and in fact I had many meltdowns growing up when I was faced with having to decide in one thing over another and what the ultimate outcome would be and greatly weighting the value of each choice within that decision that I had to make and whether or not I would be happy in the end.

While decisions today do not go into a full meltdown as they did in the past, I still am hurt if I do not feel that I made the best decision, especially if it includes others in that process. I am not only frustrated about if I had made the right decision for me, but if others were angered or offended by my choices and whether I thought of them in the process. I am only human and understand the need of having my needs met but sometimes they outweigh the needs of others and I do not always consider them in the decision making process.

It is just living life as it is and knowing that my brain only works in certain ways. That there is in most cases no ultimate bad consequence in making dangerous decisions because my brain will always weigh a sense of danger when making decisions for my personal benefit and that I am sure that I will be happy with whatever outcome may come down the pike