Within the past few weeks, I have been experiencing more fatigue and excessive sleepiness. I don’t know if it was the time change and excessive cold and rainy weather or the fact that I have not been adhering to a routine of either medicating or keeping engaged throughout the day and instead sleeping excessively out of boredom.

I must agree that as ritualistic as autistic people can be, I have not been nowhere near a continual solid routine for over the past five years that I have been living on my own. Not medicating routinely has played a part in that. In addition, I have continued to buy in to the fact that a specific medication that I still have a continual love-hate relationship with I still relate to it making me sleep when it does so much more than that. Yes, it helps wind my brain down, but Moreso since working to get back on track, I have related the medication to an instantly getting into bed.

There is also a great struggle with the fact that with challenging with transitions that I need to work better at the fact of easing my way to bed instead of rushing or being continually in bed. For the last few weeks, I have spent a great deal of time in bed, and I know I must work at staying out of bed better than I have been.

I do not want to rule out the fact that I do experience autistic burnout, but the fact is that I am not allowing myself to have a chance to try to at least stay up and keep engaged in something because I do not allow myself to show some interest in doing what is needed to be done beforehand. There are times when in the past it has been too much for me in an environment, but with things overall getting better, I am many times more using bed as an excuse for boredom rather than the need to fight the way of the bed and to be engaged in something rather than being bored.

It is that I am not short on anything to do. In fact, there is plenty of things to do If I look around and see them or look good enough. I am just not being receptive of being able to focus on something just as much as I need to when I need to. It is also the fact that I allow myself to oversleep causing a unwillingness to wake up and not focus on things that need to be done in the daily routine.  I know that those things are necessary to be done, yet I pass them off because I choose not to focus on them.

There is also the fact that I have waddled down my load a great deal and there is a lot of time that I just sit around overthinking about things that cannot be changed at that very moment. What good is something that I cannot change at that moment or even not at all going to help me at that moment. It is the fact that I just have embedded patterns of things that are hard to escape my brain and realizing that I need to not only be kind to myself but also work at ways to avoid staying in those dark places just as long as I do.

I do have to admit that I did get out of the slump that I was in the past week, but there needs to be a lot of recognition of what to do and which coping strategies to deploy when I am near that point, so it is not as severe as it was the past week. It is also important to care for myself when necessary and realize that I do go through a lot, and I too need to give myself grace for all that I have been through.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t overcompensate on how sorry that I need to feel about myself. It’s the fact that I cannot make it as an excuse but rather recognize it and realize that I am stronger than I thing and allow myself to determine a new way of thinking and allow myself to keep engaged and see how that goes for awhile instead of making excuses for having to sleep when it is not necessary.