How I Want to Spend My Days

This blogger once posed a question in a newsletter — how do you want to spend your days? — and it’s stuck with me ever since. In autistic burnout, this question keeps popping into my head in the form of answers.

I know now, after all this time, how I want my life to look. Problem is, executive dysfunction complicates things. I keep thinking about the end result, wanting to skip to the good part. I don’t know how to do the journey and keep losing patience, but I know it will make the endgame all the more glorious.

People like me need to know a life of their dreams is possible, and this is why I blog about my life the way I do.

What my dream life looks like

I was never a morning person, but something about the jade green kitchen cabinets and enjoying traditional breakfasts outside America makes turns me into one. The warmth of the sun peeking through the windows helps me feel like there’s meaning in life, though it’s not like I survive on photosynthesis.

The pantry, fridge and freezer are full of food. I don’t experience food insecurity, and I never will again. I take comfort in this, and the kitchen is a welcoming place of solace where I read paperbacks while food cooks on the stove and Galaxy spreads her scent against the cabinets.

Some days, I go in to work or work from home. Most days, I don’t work at all. My needs are met, and I’ve all that I want — which, despite how it sounds between the lines, is not as pretentious as it sounds. I save and spend well, as I know what it’s like to have zilch.

My primary, digital business allows me the time away, set up on autopilot. It sounds pretentious, but in actuality is the complete opposite.

My secondary, physical business enriches and innovates my community, bringing to rural Texas technology that many kids mightn’t ever have the hope of seeing otherwise. Ad copy: Your internet sucks. Come use ours. (We have snacks.) No childcare? No problem!

‘Tis not a handout, but a hand-up — as is my garden full of veggies I’ll never eat, that I give to those who will.

I get to live my life, and I pay my employees well so they can live theirs, too.

I live my life on my own terms, per my standards. It doesn’t make sense to everyone, but it doesn’t need to. The people who take issue with how I choose to live my life, or how I seek to live it, aren’t people I want in my space. Everyone has a particular aura about them, and negativity radiates like a viciously cold, red apple bitten by Snow White.

Maybe it will happen in Texas, maybe it won’t. I hope the future of US politics is not as bleak as it is now, threatening the livelihood of minorities, for I caught but a glimpse into the life I wanted earlier this year — the life I only ever dreamt of, but didn’t dare think I could actually have — and I long for the days I can spend precisely like that yet again.

I’d started to create for myself a life in Kaufman County. Despite its conservative lean, I want to return. Development is underway, and you know what they say about small towns/rural Texas? The city could not be gay than this place.

The co-working space is the biggest pipe dream of all these things, especially if I move outside the States, but it’s clearly not required if it’s meant to be unrequited love.

I know not what it says about me to imagine my life like this — me, a woman, with my cat — and not imagine my future wife. I’d love a wife, but she’s not required, you know?

Every time I have a dating match, I forget to respond and they think I’ve ghosted them — and, really, the truth is that I’m a neurospicy gal who would rather meet up for a smoothie or frozen yogurt than chat through an app.

It’s easier to decide in person whether someone is going to be okay with me, an unmasked autistic, than it is to chat with someone via my phone. Stimming in public around people makes my autism “real” to some people, and I’d rather get that “test” over with sooner rather than later.

Working through autistic burnout, I’ve realized many things about myself. For one, I’m not anxious — just autistic and introverted. Two, I have an appropriate level of self-esteem and confidence, which makes socializing easier.

But most of all, I’ve realized what I want — and that no one on this planet is going to prevent me from achieving it. (Except maybe me, but I’m workin’ on it!)

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How do you want to spend your days?