Imagine if you only had some pieces of your daily plan together, yet there were some blank spaces within your day that allowed you to have some time for you to freely allow what you could do? What would you do with that time, would you put it to good use or would you waste it by not being productive and then starting a mental decline. Recently, I have made the decision to allow myself to build the void that was so long there and make use of it for the first time in my independent, everyday life.

Lately, I have discovered that while I have been living on my own for over five years, I have yet to define what kind of routine that I really have. That is likely because I have never really had the opportunity to build what kind of life that would be for me. It has been hard to imagine what kind of life that would be for me yet, I am slowly finding new interests and hobbies to put into those blank spaces, designing my routine.

As we near 2024, I am learning yet more about myself and the need for things that make my life as an autistic adult that lives independently essential in my life. I will admit that 2023 as well as the past few years has been quite the struggle of years, although they have had their moments. There are just some bad habits that I have carried on in the past few years that I want to leave in 2023. As we prepare for 2024, there is no time better than never to prepare for what I need to have a better, everyday life.

It may sound odd that I, being an autistic adult, had not truly established a routine in all my time of being independent. The reality is that I never had the opportunity to and now that there are necessary things that are essential to my daily living and existing in the outside world, it is now something that has become a reality that must be done.

I do have to give credit to some of the autistic parents’ who have podcasts out there, by listening to then at moments I have had down time, it has given me more of the insight of what is needed for me to exist in this world and understand the reality of things like sleep, medication, activity and so forth. I am slowly working on improving these things going forward and have finally understood and recognized the consequences when I wasn’t doing my best. I must accept and realize that I must do whatever it takes to not go down that path again.

So that’s where we lead ourselves to where I am today. Understanding that I must fill those blank segments of my day instead of having the want and desire to automatically retreat to bed out of boredom and the fact that I have been doing so much within this week alone to better my mental health so that I can exist in the world outside of my personal space that within my own time, I must build the ability to do what is necessary to stay out bed at times when it is not necessary. Indeed, bedtime is bedtime, and that time should be dedicated to only sleeping and not previous unhealthy habits, but to fill that much needed void, I must do the work to get where I need to be.

In fact, there have been many things in place for some time that quite honestly have never been used. A bookcase full of books, a gym membership that a few months ago I vowed to cancel if I was not using it, and just keeping up with housework alone does slowly fill that void. However, it takes initiative on my part to get out the door or break away from what feels comfortable to me and do what may not necessarily feel comfortable to me but is essential to daily life.

Although I have been living on my own for over five years now and have acquired much knowledge and experience from doing so along with managing some of the most outrageous obstacles along the way, this will be yet another opportunity for me to define the life that I indeed want and not have the life that I do not. It is defining what life that I need to have and while working at bettering my life altogether. It is breaking the old habits and replacing them with new, healthier ones that will make my life much more manageable and better all around. It is still finding who I really am after the long and tenacious road that I still am after breaking free from my parents’ nest so many years ago and finding what works for me and ruling out what does not.

It may be my new beginning, but it is finally picking up all the pieces of what has been fragmented all along and learning that there is hope, optimism and even new opportunities if I allow myself to learn and grow from my past experiences and see that there is hope to where I want to go in life.