When I was in residential placement over two decades ago, we were often reminded of what the expectations were for each and every thing we did. I never made sense of it until I had to start to get myself into a better frame of mind. I understood that there are expectations that need to be followed everywhere we go and how important they are to making sure that I still have the opportunities to do the things that I want to do.

When I navigate the world, there can be moments that cause me to want to react to others for things that are mostly out of my control. Over the past few months I have learned what my role was and that it often was not the place or even my concern to be thinking the things that I thought of. I had to focus on making myself and my needs a priority. One of those benchmark moments was understanding the need to follow expectations when things have to be done.

The world has so many expectations, rules and so forth that it can be hard to understand what they all are. In reality I have worked extremely hard over the past few decades to get to where I am today. The moments when I was not my best self was often when I did not take my medication or when I had excessive amounts of caffeine. I had to slowly learn to put my life in order and do what was right as I was not being the example that I needed to be or the person that deep down I knew I had could be.

Yes, over the past few years I have seen the signs and the stares by strangers. I did not like what I was seeing when I was acting inappropriately even when I knew that I needed to do what was right for once instead of blaming others or hiding what I was not doing from others when they really knew but didn’t say it. I had to learn to apply my filter and hold my feelings from blowing out of proportion and just do the things that were expected of me even if I did not want to do them, because others needed me to do what was needed for them and that in a way started to feel good seeing it that way.

I knew that I would never get further in life if I had not taken the steps to understand that I needed to understand the expectations, rules and understandings in life if I was going to the best that I could and know how to act in the outside world because I was no longer a kid and I decided to start and mature for once.

Now I am not saying that life is perfect. We are all going to have our moments. But for me I have been living this life of being autistic and having mental health challenges for some time now and continue to learn more and more about myself everyday.