When anyone is going though tough times, it can be challenging and rough to bare it alone. Especially when you have special challenges and have expectations that you will always have a lifeline out there to manage the challenges you are facing. But those that support you cannot always be there for you around the clock. I have learned through some challenges in the past year that you cannot always rely on a lifeline out there, and it has given me the ability to problem solve on my own.

It can be easy to rely on others to find a solution to the problem if we do not take it upon ourselves to find the solution. We often at times think of ourselves as less able to do things because we overthink things or let our emotions get in the way of being able to regulate ourselves so we can pull ourselves together to find our own solutions. There is certainly no expectation that everyone will be able to do this, but when it comes to being trivial in nature, there needs to be an understanding that it is important to have the problem-solving skills necessary to be able to deescalate yourself from challenging situations and get through something that is challenging for you, or me in some instances.

The past year, I have been through some rough stuff. You would have thought that I would have had to fall on a continual lifeline at some points when I did not know if my future was uncertain. It can be extremely difficult as an autistic person when we do not know the answer for things, and we have to problem solve or at least regulate ourselves to manage our emotions until we know that answer. Sometimes we must realize that things happen because they are being shown to us as a lesson to get serious about making necessary changes to better ourselves.

Whatever it may be, when you are an autistic person such as myself and do not have continual support that is within your own home, it is essential to develop these skills to be able manage yourself and not let any situation that may come across your path to escalate further and get more out of proportion than what it is. As someone who is autistic and has sometimes crushing anxiety, overthinking happens quite often for me and at times can make me think that the worst possible thing is happening to me because of either some other action or that of something that did not happen. Anxiety is a family trait for me so it has been something that I have become accustomed to and that it should be needed to be lived.

However, it comes down to realizing that I do not have to live in such a way that I feel like a constant way that I need to be supported when things become amplified for me. I know that I have been taught years of coping skills and that supports that when those that I reach out to for support when my brain and anxiety are kicked into high gear are not setting me up for failure, rather they also have lives beyond their professional lives or otherwise and that I am not their only priority. Rather, it can become necessary to try to sit down with myself and take a breath and try to problem solve on my own and not rely on others as little as possible. There will come a time when I must realize that my support system is not going to always be in my life, and I will have to fend on my own.

It is realizing that maybe before picking up that phone or typing that messed to think about what is really happening and look at things with a total lens and see that in essence my brain is oftentimes overthinking and that I need to just relax and put things into perspective and see that it isn’t as amplified as it seems to be. If it cannot be settled by any other means than what coping mechanisms have been provided to me, then it should be necessary to reach out to other supports. But I must realize that I cannot constantly rely on the continual supports to bring me back from acute things because even though at that point I make something is really bad, in essence it is not, and I just need to understand that I have the skills to manage it for the most part.