The past five years has been quite a rollercoaster ride for me, but now that I am more grounded and rooted within myself, I am learning to love the old self I was before I began to live independently and start to fall off the right path, I am finally feeling at peace with myself.

Indeed, the past five years have been a wild ride. There are many things I have regretted doing and I was not at many times the person that I knew I needed to be. In the past eight months there have been several personal epiphanies that I have had that have made me realize that there has been so much that has been missing from what has made me the person that I once was. While I cannot change those years, they have indeed taught me what I need to avoid in life along with what consequences I can have if I do not take care of myself.

There is also another part that can be very controversial but very well needs to be recognized. During three of those five past years the world was under the grasp of a global pandemic. This in many ways caused me and others in the autistic community to regress in their ways because of mandated isolation and distancing protocols. Even today, there are still effects that are felt in every part of the world. Regardless, this too has aided in setting myself back from doing what has been needed for me to do.

I am beginning to come out of the shadows of where I have been hiding since then and starting to incorporate many parts of what I had did prior to going down the wrong path. Sometimes, there is a reality that even though things may have improved or change as they very well have over that time, there is a necessity to do what I have done prior to getting astray.

Doing this has made me begin to feel the old self that I once was before things began to get the way that they were. As much as I had believed at first that I could do what was needed to live on my own, there was a fall out from that and I realized that I needed to work on improving myself in many ways along with understanding the necessity of taking care of my mental health, putting it first in my life. I am now able to work on many other aspects of my health including getting to a gym and having an exercise routine that I love more every day.

By loving the things that I did before falling of the course of temptation and realizing that things were fine with many things before that happened that were fine and there are many benefits of keeping those things in place to help me live my best life.