An Idea Will Come To Me

I don’t like drama in my life; I get enough excitement from the “prescription roulette” that accompanies getting the medication I have been receiving for the best part of a decade. This week the odds were not in my favour, and the supply chain for the NHS is still as broken as it ever was. Propranolol does a lot of heavy lifting for me, and this time it is one of the casualties of the unique way our NHS is funded.

I am baffled as to why the system doesn’t work, but I take some solace in not being alone in having the issues that I do. What has thrown the spanner deeply into my mental well-being is my ongoing car saga. It was done, RAC inspected with only one item, an ECU code, to be checked. I got the call that it was ready, I test drove it, and checked the ECU code, which, when cleared, unfortunately returned. ECU codes can be minor; this one, an overheating warning, is not.

The Service desk got antsy and were aggressive in their tone and demeanour when I said it wasn’t fixed. I haven’t said a thing about them telling lies that would have cost me over two thousand pounds as a bill, either. If I were a retail customer, this saga would be an actual living nightmare. Luckily, the car is through Motability. I am super thankful that this scheme exists and grateful that they are now mediating this for me.

That said, even with Motability taking charge, the stress is taking its toll. Believe it or not, I don’t spend much of my time thinking about being disabled. I am relatively practical, and I am focused on what I can do and what I want to accomplish. I try to acknowledge the limits disability sets without falling into the drain of “woe is me”. This ongoing car situation makes me uncomfortably aware of my vulnerability and the amount of control I don’t have over my own well-being. It’s not just me, from what I have learned, that is a pretty much universal experience for people with a disability. I am also made more aware of what has changed in the last ten years; the capabilities I have lost, in particular, my resilience and ability to navigate uncertainty.

I was always driven by anxiety, but over the years, that has gone from being a driver which could lead me towards risk-taking, especially with adhd at the helm, to being fear and aversion led, with autism pushing me ever more into risk averse, security driven strategies. The old me is gone, and I haven’t finished grieving his loss. Uncomfortable and unpleasant feel too weak a description, while "traumatic" feels a bit dramatic, yet it's also more accurate.

Much as I would like to avoid all types of stress in my life, that is not going to happen. Life is going to do its thing, and I will experience stress from the awesome events of the start of this month, which were gloriously exhausting, to something like an old (younger) friend’s funeral, and everything possible or unimaginable between grief and joy. The key is to cope constructively and not follow my first instinct to head to the bottom of a tequila bottle.

I don’t have a list of five strategies that will change your world, yep, another missed opportunity for a listicle and a course with a YouTube Video. Instead, I have what I am actually doing, which might not be glamorous, but it works for me.

1) Acknowledge where I am.
 Yes, I can look at how my life has changed in the last five years and be genuinely proud of what I have achieved. However, I don’t stop there; instead, I look at the challenges and opportunities facing me, and reflect on what I do well and what I can do better. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's not doom and gloom either.

2) Recognise this is temporary.
 I find this super hard. I fall into a negative spiral of thinking easily. In fact, what I am prone to doing is called “existential dread”, and it can literally keep me up at night. It is this thinking I am consciously fighting with my journal and sometimes every fibre of my being. Of course, saying everything is temporary is a bit trite and blasé; however, in my framework, it doesn’t mean things will get better; it means they will get different. That different could be worse, but this moment is just that, a moment.

3) A good shot will do just fine.
 I played golf a lot when I was in my teens, and this maxim improved my score pretty much instantly: “After a bad shot, a good shot will do just fine. No need for a spectacular recovery”. You see, I was looking for highlight reels with every strike of the ball, double that if I had been wayward. Golf rewards good enough consistency so that the flashes of brilliance on the highlight reel make for a great score, not just making it to the fairway. My anxiety will try to drive me to an extreme solution, and that is almost never the way to anything but more trouble and even more anxiety. Anxiety loves company too.

4) Do what you have always done; get what you always get.
 The thing about this saying is that it is usually taken in the context of failure; if what you are doing isn’t working, then you need to change. After all, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, is madness. However, for me, it also means that if what I have been doing has been working, don’t change it for the sake of change. This is the battlefield of my adhd and autism. Adhd wants the novelty, autism wants the same. This goes a part of the way into keeping the two masters somewhat appeased. Right now, it means keep on doing what I am doing. Keep my daily schedule, keep my commitment to self-care, don’t give in to the temptation to be a different person because of things that have nothing to do with me. Yesterday, that changed my day to one of zero expectations. I gave myself space, which isn’t what I have always done, but what I should have been doing.

I am not starting a revolution or online course with those four things. They are, however, my principles for dealing with the stress of life. They don’t require anyone else but me, and they don’t need me to be anyone else but me. I take stock, do what works, make changes to what doesn’t, and then all I have to do is actually do those things. I don’t even have to be that good at them; I just have to start. When life feels like it is beating me down, it is this much kinder approach that is helping me through. It’s not easy, I could happily finish that bottle of tequila, but I am not because that is not who I am, nor is it who I want to be. It’s none of the four things that I know will lead to my happiness.

I don’t know what is going to happen with the car, so far, I have been kept mobile without high extra costs, so I trust that will continue to be the case. I don’t like not having control; uncertainty is like an eat all you can buffet for my anxiety. This is not forever. It is not that things haven’t been cancelled or disrupted; they have; the stress has exacerbated some symptoms too. That I cannot change, some things will be what they will be. I am in charge of how I react, my mind will think things, I will have emotions, but what I do with them is my decision. Way back, I had an equation for this: Event+Reaction=Outcome. The only variable I control is my reaction. Back then, there were events I didn’t even have influence over that were affecting people around me and me. This is not like that; in fact, I have a lot of influence, if not actual control, over how things are going to go from this point. I have no idea what that looks like; I am, at least, involved.

PS: last-minute update: Car collected and apparently fixed — we shall see how it fares in day-to-day usage! I still have options, which is nice.