Autistic Widower

An example of my decision-making difficulties Three of the small music keyboards I still have. Photo taken by the author. Recently, I emptied 27 years of clutter out of my loft, to prepare for reroofing. Despite getting rid of a fair amount, the rest of it is now spread around the house, and I wish it would all magically disappear.  Most of the larger and easier items have been dealt with. Some things were sold on eBay. Some went to the tip. (Sadly, the charity shops are still closed due to lockdown, which does not help.) I feel overwhelmed by how much remains to be done.  I am struggling to identify any particular category. There are lots of small miscellaneous items, which makes for very slow progress.  My mind seems to hop from one area to another, and from one type of item to another.  I started looking at some old music keyboards, which I bought on eBay about 15 years ago. At the time, I hoped to inspire my children to take an interest in music, but that never h...

I provided facilities for hot drinks; they did shoddy work Photo taken by the author. Recently, I had some builders in to reroof my house. Being autistic and dealing with strangers made it a stressful and tiring experience. It will take me some time to recover. I tend to worry about the things that other people might not even think about. In this case, before the work started, I found myself worrying about what to do regarding drinks. I wanted to reduce the risks associated with Coronavirus by not allowing the builders to use my cups. If possible, I didn’t want them coming into the house at all. But at the same time, I didn’t want to be mean. Making drinks for a group of people, and remembering what each person wants, is always stressful for me. So I bought a cheap kettle, and set up a table outside with drinks facilities, disposable cups and biscuits. Sadly, despite me telling them about it, they didn’t use my ‘refreshments table’ on the first day. Toilet facilities was another proble...

Emotional clutter takes me so long to deal with Image created by the author. Over the last couple of weeks, I have completely emptied my loft. The prospect of a new roof being fitted gave me the motivation to do it, because I know how much mess it will cause up there. At times, the sheer quantity of miscellaneous items felt overwhelming. After living in the same house for 27 years, it’s surprising how many things have been kept — ‘just in case’ they might be useful one day! After doing most of the work myself, getting a little bit of help on one or two days made me feel very emotional. One reason I felt emotional was the sense of relief — that I might actually manage to meet the deadline and get it cleared in time. Another reason was having help in making decisions, which stopped me from overthinking everything. I made the decision to sell several items on eBay, partly to raise some money. Some of the things that went included audio equipment that I bought in 2012, when I was making mu...

The last few months have been hard I’ve been offline for a while, so I thought I’d do a quick write-up, describing some of the problems I’ve been facing over the last three months. Image created by the author. Back in October, I was struggling with decisions about things which now seem relatively unimportant. A lot has happened since then. In November, my youngest son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 14. It came as a devastating shock. In the lead up to it, I had heard him getting up in the night to go to the bathroom, which was not normal for him. At first, I thought it was because of a recent cold, which meant he had got into the habit of drinking water at night time. We saw his doctor, who told us to go straight to the hospital — we were not even allowed to call at home to pick up things like pyjamas! He spent a couple of nights in hospital, and had to get used to injecting himself with insulin, as well as testing his blood glucose several times per day. The finger p...