If you are autistic or are in any way connected to someone who is autistic, congratulations.
One advantage of such a wiring is that it is likely that you won't often be bored. Okay, I admit there will also likely be times when you wish boredom were possible, (and I mean the kind of boredom where there is a lack of current crisis to deal with rather than the boredom that is more about sitting about doing nothing or the boredom of having to deal with the predictability of the responses or actions of other people) but maybe, just maybe, that’s a kind of weird protection. Maybe the near constant crisis state (on one level or another) saves us from dealing with all manner of other things (including dealing with the boredom of the predictability of responses or actions of others, or indeed the boredom of sitting around with nothing to do). Maybe.
If you’re looking for a cure for being a strong-minded individual with highly attuned sensitivities who is often insightful and has an incredibly well-adjusted (please excuse the following) “BS” detector, good luck in your search, but I’m not sure we need curing.
If you are hoping that by using a list of strategies, suddenly all our idiosyncrasies, quirks or difficulties will vanish and not affect us anymore, good luck in your attempts, but I do suggest is it a futile one. Instead, I ask a question: Do we need them to vanish? We may need help to manage them (I do, anyway. I can’t speak for you) but the expectation that they will one day go away is unrealistic and simply setting us up for failure, I suggest.
If you are looking for strategies to help you navigate each day and maybe overcome some barriers on any given day so that you know you were not beaten by whatever the difficulty was, you might find a few of those. They’ll likely work for some times but not all times and that’s okay. In fact, that’s good. It saves from further boredom, right?
We (thankfully) can’t be ‘cured’ and then become ‘non-autistic’ any more than a PC can become a Mac. And this, I suggest, is a cause for significant celebration. Why would we want to become non-autistic? I see it as a gift (I realise many don’t and there are times when I agree with those people). I’ll adjust that previous sentence. Mostly, I see it as a gift. Yes. That’s better.
If you want a cure, this website will be of zero use to you and will likely only frustrate you. There may be other websites or people out there who have found a cure, but I can’t direct you to them, because A. I’m not sure they exist and B. I’ve never bothered to look for them and I won’t be doing so.
That rules-out ‘cure’, at least, from the perspective that I approach this. You will have your own thoughts and come to your own conclusions.
Which leaves us with the potential strategy aids for particular experiences/difficulties we might experience. Shall we explore some options?
