As an autistic person, it can be difficult to put your own needs aside for those who you love. There is also a reality that at times when I may need support there is a family out there who loves and cares for me very much. I know that I am grateful that not everyone is as fortunate as I am to be blessed with such an amazing family. Yet, after many years of shielding myself in isolation, I am starting to experience things with my family.

Yesterday was one of those days where I got to experience such a thing. My sister and mother both have birthdays this week, so as a family chose to celebrate together in a chain food restaurant a distance away from home. It was a unique place that none of have experienced before.

While I had the chain’s website to educate me in what food items they had, it in no way gave me as to what the experience would be. As such, it was further challenging as it was in an unfamiliar area, and I could not sense what the vibe would be. Along the way, as we entered unfamiliar territory, I could sense my anxiety rising because I feared the worst (as I always do.) However, it has been years overall beyond not going to places that I have mostly become unfamiliar with or not knowing beforehand.

There were many factors that were not pleasant for those that have challenges such as myself, but thankfully the music that was playing was from my era and it helped soothe me from the challenging moments of the establishment and be able to muster what I needed to in order to make it a pleasant experience for my family.

Throughout my life, there have been experiences that I have not found pleasurable or that I even wanted to experience. But I made the experience manageable for me because there are expected to be done as a member of the family that I am in. Yes, there is just too much and as such there are some things that I can get out of, but things that are expected by others to be endured are able to be manageable for me in the ways that they need to be.

Being secluded from doing new things over the past few years has made me regress in some ways as far as being able to go places that have changed since the pandemic. Many places have been allowed to make improvements because of government aid and as such they have changed to some degree. I also realize that sitting at home in my own world is not beneficial for my mental or physical health.

It has also made me aware of the fact that my parents are not going to be around forever and that I need to build a better bond with my sister and her family as it likely that she will be the one that will have to care for me in way that my mother does in the future. Being able to expand my horizons of doing things out of the ways that has made me feel comfortable over the past few years has not been easy in addition to the pandemic, not doing things such as being consistent with my medication or getting adequate sleep has been quite a deficit. But when I was at my worst six years ago, my sister was the one that got me starting to see that something was not right with myself and that I needed to start to rectify the quandary that I was in.

Being in that situation and working to restore my menta health over the past six months has allowed me to see the importance of having family and that there are things that I can do before, during and after  the events where I need to interact with my family so that I can be a member of my family and experience things that I could possibly enjoy or even learn from.

As I continue to improve myself, I am beginning to learn and experience that it is better to learn to spend time and get more familiar with my family and get more closer to them before there comes time when it may be too late, and those opportunities are no longer there.