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Autistic Processing Time After Your Plan Gets Thrown Out

Managed to get out the house to get to the pharmacy before it closes at 6pm which is hard for me atm… found out it’s a bank holiday. 😑

It might seem silly, but it’s thrown my whole mood off.

Any other #ActuallyAutistic people experience this sort of thing & have any advice?

Observations after this happened earlier.

I:

Allowed myself to sit with the upset & frustration.

Wrote a list of things I wanted to do even though I didn’t feel like doing anything, which made me more frustrated.

Scribbled angrily in the corner of my list & threw my pen.

Vented about it on here, to my gf & to my mum.

Put in my earplugs, played music over my headphones, sat in bed with my weighted blanket & scrolled through Pinterest for a bit.

Said outloud to my gf that I was going to try to put the trampoline together.

Unhelpfully, I don’t know what made me decide to try this. 🤣

But I managed to get up. Possibly having music on my headphones the whole time helped.

I put the trampoline together, and bounced on it a little bit!

And now I feel more like how I did before going out earlier. So it took about 2 hours to process that upset & frustration I was feeling.

Additional thought:

I wrote this thread mostly as a reminder for myself in future, but now I think about it more, I’m reminded of all the times I’ve been upset/frustrated etc & my feelings have been dismissed with phrases like:

“It doesn’t matter”

“It’s not important”

“Just forget about it”

“It’s no one’s fault”

And of course: “there’s no use crying over spilt milk”

It makes me angry that this is a standard reaction many people have when they see someone react how I did to something that seems silly or insignificant to them.

I know if I’d tried to deny myself those feelings earlier it would have impacted me for days.

I’m grateful that I have learnt to notice & sit with my feelings, even when it feels poop in the moment & especially when it’s over something I know many would minimise or dismiss.