Another Day At A Time
For the record, not long after I posted about my dryer, I did once again wedge something between the back panel and the wall, but it didn’t make much difference. If I wanted to warm up my clothes for the day or my bedclothes at night, I had to stand there with one hand against the top of the machine and lean so most of my weight pushed on that point.
On the upside is it provided good opportunities to get in some of my article reading. The downside is the stance wasn’t especially joyous when it came to my resources levels and risk of fatigue.
Anyway, what I’d wanted was to come back to this in order to compare and contrast to my experience of five years ago.
On his way out, after returning tools to his bag which sat atop my coffee table, he pulled out a leaflet and began to proselytize at me about his lord and savior Jesus Christ. Taking advantage of the fact that I’d been legally obligated to let him into my living space, he made me feel like I was the intruder.
The handyman from then more or less fulfilled what might be the stereotypical handyman. Picture, say, Schneider from the original One Day at a Time but a few decades on. He did what he did because it’d always what he’s done and it’s the way things are meant to be done. That’s not even reaching the evangelical part.
Today’s repairman in contrast was a younger than middle-aged, soft-spoken, and balding guy who put booties over his shoes before coming in from the rainy outside and had a drop cloth that he spread out on the kitchen floor before tearing into the machine. Not exactly new Schneider, per se, but closer to that than to the old.
While the old handyman, even just from being the guy sent over by the landlord within a month after I moved in and so I wasn’t feeling anything other than deferential, made me uncomfortable, today I took enough control to disclose that I was autistic and the sensory component of his repairs likely were too much for me, so if he needed me for something he was going to have to wave me down because I’d be in headphones listening to music.
I spent the entire time using my bar table as a standing desk, writing my earlier blog post, and allowing my cat the safe harbor of the bar stool or table as she saw fit during the intrusion.
To be clear: the impact of the transgression five years ago was sufficiently laid down in my nervous system to send me on a short bout of catastrophizing in advance, all the way up to and including the extraordinary unlikely idea of assault—but that’s what nervous systems do. It only matters to me if I spiral. A passing consideration of catastrophe is no big ordeal.
The bigger lack of ordeal, of course, is the total lack of having to deal with a ordeal at all. If I’m having to force myself out of bed early in order to allow someone into my personal space, today is just about how I need the textbook to go.