Over the past several years, I have been working hard. I am now coping with things that I used to react to several years ago. Often, I ruminated about having the power to make things go my way. But, it only resulted in me reacting. I realized that was not what I wanted. I did not achieve what I wanted. I learned that I had to work more on coping rather than reacting to life and its many challenges.

I couldn’t see that reacting for all those years was not the right way to act. It didn’t help me get what I wanted. My mental health was not the best. It just made things worse. I scared others and caused them concern. Decisions were made a few years ago. I wanted to react and prove that it couldn’t be done without my approval. I didn’t get the reaction I wanted. People did not feed me the attention as they did in the past. As much as change is hard for me being autistic, I had known to be more private about my frustration. I realized that people were not matching my energy. This realization made me understand that things were going to happen, whether I liked them or not. False threats as a way of things backing down did not work either.

When they first happened, I wasn’t happy that things were different and I had to adjust to something new. I wanted to be angry and react at anyone who I thought was going to sympathize with me. But I learned they weren’t going to sympathize with me. It was best to learn how to cope with things in the most helpful way for me. It took some time for me to fins the ways that helped me at those times I wanted to react. Some of those times I still reacted in the privacy of my family. I did this because I had known they would put up with me even though they were tough. I had to finally realize that they don’t deserve that childish behavior at that age.

The biggest realization was wanting to stop reacting to things I didn’t like. I recognized that it is a childish thing to do at my age. I understood I would not get the outcome I thought I wanted. I had to see that others had needs too. Making sacrifices for the comfort and needs of others was hard. Despite the difficulty, I sometimes did that. My needs came second without reaction because it was the mature thing to do. I aimed to be the friend I needed to be, even when things were difficult. Reacting to others when things don’t go my way doesn’t solve everything. Coping requires getting through hard times without reacting.

I have spent several decades reacting to things. I also spent a considerable amount of time not reacting to things. More and more, I want to work at being better at not reacting to things. This is the right thing to do. I am also focusing on working more at finding healthy coping skills that are proven to work for me.