I need to put something down, or I’m going to snap. I’m already fraying at the edges. This is why I was delighted to find this: https://www.volunteeramnestyday.net/

What an idea. An opportunity to reflect on whether something still serves you, or if it’s time to put it down. I don’t know if I’ll wait to the solstice, but I certainly need to think about how much I’m doing.

I’m at the end of my first week in the new work. I’ve had meetings with my team, and meetings with other stakeholders around the team. I’m getting to grips with the landscape and the work that’s in progress. The person I’m covering is across a lot of things, and just understanding all of them is enough to make my brain spin. Still, the person I’m reporting to is someone very cool whom I’ve worked with before, and he’s reminding me that it’s okay to say that I don’t know things. It’s good. It’s really important to hear that from senior leaders.

My voluntary work has been the more frustrating piece this week. I’m fighting the urge to say ‘but’ and give you the silver lining. It should be ‘and’. It is frustrating, and that is true by itself. Folks expect me to fix problems that I don’t own; or problems that aren’t problems; or problems that are rooted in their misapprehension of something that’s not a problem. I feel like I owe all of these people an explanation, or at least a pointer towards an explanation. And it’s frustrating, and quite tiring.

At the same time, one of our key suppliers is being…difficult. I believe for the most part that knowledge-based work basically relies on relationships, but I’m reaching the end of my patience when things consistently aren’t being done. This means having really hard conversations where I have to resort to contractual mechanisms, and I don’t enjoy it: it means outsourcing the solving of a problem to a third party. I really swallowed that agile stuff whole, didn’t I? Sitting here trying to convince a supplier to value customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

In fact, that’s been a theme of this week. Again and again I am uncovering the truth that the people around me don’t have the same values as me. This is absolutely good for me, and it’s one of the reasons I do this volunteering – to get used to this fact. At the moment I have my nice snug bubble, on social media and in my paid work, where we all broadly value the same things. We think in more or less the same way, and we act accordingly. For someone autistic like me, this is really good. It makes the world more predictable, and predictability brings me satisfaction.

Despite this, the world is not predictable. I think for some autistic folks an answer to this is to reduce the world down to a space that is predictable. You develop a routine; a small group of friends; perhaps a job where there are problems that end in a correct or incorrect solution. I think that’s valid, and sometimes I think that’s where I’ll end up.

But I think for some of us there’s a risk that our internal need for the world to be predictable is projected outwards into an expectation, and we seek a way of understanding the world that makes it predictable. Down this path lies conspiracy theories and zealotry. There are people who are convinced there’s one simple answer; one thing that would make the world make sense. If only we could have a perfectly communist/perfectly capitalist/perfectly transhumanist world, then it wouldn’t confuse me so much. It wouldn’t hurt me so much.

A dear friend of mine practices ‘anarchist calisthenics‘. She breaks little rules, at least once a day, so that when she needs to break a really big rule she has the mental strength to do it. For me, these forays into the world of people-not-like-me are the same thing. I have to get my resilience in shape now, while I have a modicum of control over whether or not I do it. The alternative is that my first big exposure to this kind of mental work is when really important things rest on it, and that is not a safe path for me.