Recharging…a word that I have not been able to comprehend or understand until I have been visiting my father in the veteran’s facility. There is a room called the recharge room. While not for visitors, it is room for staff to go and take a break from the hustle and bustle of the unit and mentally recharge from the stress they are experiencing. Recharging has been something that I have been doing for an extended period but never put words to doing what I have been doing.

Every day I recharge. It is coming into my home or sacred space when the outside world is just too much for me as a neurodivergent person. It is no lie that there are many factors that can make me overwhelmed or must experience things that can be too much. The reality is that I must face them and when I must, I autistically mask how I want to be from others around me because there are expectations that need to be met and adhered to.

But when I come home, that among other physical layers of things comes off and I can just take the time and relax or recharge before doing anything else. Sometimes the transition can be easier than others, depending on what I experience that day. Sometimes I recharge for just a few minutes and others I recharge for an extended period. It just varies on how intense the day is for me.

There are things in the world that I as an autistic person must do. It has taken a lot of courage for me to do these things, and it has been a long road in getting where I am today. There was a time when I could not even get out and do my job because I felt uncomfortable. Yes, things have changed in the practice that things are done. It takes getting used to doing things in the way that things are done, or the people with which you must interact.

Nothing is ever the same. Things change and this can further complicate the issues that you have to face because you must have a heightened sense of what to expect or not expect when you do things. I have been fortunate to have little change in years past along with having the ability to flex things out. However, 2023 and 2024 have been years of changes and when I have not been able to take care of myself it has been too much.

However, when things are too much when I get through the door, there is just the need to sit, recharge and relax from the days events because they are overwhelming along with the other factors that are involved in getting to and from the places I must go and so forth. While the latter has been harder to accept, I have been more forgiving of it in recent weeks. Sometimes you must work at letting go of the things that you cannot change or know that others do not care in the same regard as you do. It is making peace with what happened and moving forward with life as it is, thus making it easier for recharging each day because that burden is no longer on your mind. Recharging…A constant essential in a world that is always changing.