It’s Okay Sometimes To Hate Being Actually Autistic
This morning I had to get up early in order to catch a medical transpo service to the Pulmonary Function Lab for a now-routine, annual or so, lung function test. When I’d finally remembered late last week to call to schedule the ride, I didn’t also schedule the return trip, because the last time I did this for this same test, it took much less time than they’d said and then it was a pain in the ass to try to reschedule the return.
Also, it’d been awhile since I took the light rail back across town and since the weather again was going to be around 60ºF it seemed like it’d be a good day for it.
What I didn’t account for is that for some reason the upgrades to the Red Line max at the extreme western and northeastern ends of the network also has shut down a large section of the Blue Line and the Green Line, which meant having to deal with shuttle buses instead of trains.
Yesterday, I’d gone all the way across town in the other direction to go to the zoo, a trip that takes a lot of saving up energy and then a lot of dragging at the end and a day or two of recovering resources. I knew that doing this the day before the trip to the lab and back was iffy, but I’d prepared for that as much as I could, and since the zoo currently is closed Tuesday through Thursday, yesterday was the only day of the good weather that was an option.
What I didn’t account for was being so completely drained by the zoo that the car ride this morning was nauseating, and I only held on to any kind of level by, of all things, listening to the soundtrack to The Fallout. Nonetheless, by the time I got out of the car at the medical center, it took another fifteen minutes to stop feeling like I was still in motion.
The appointment itself went fine, although it does involve sitting in a plastic tube and overclocking your lungs, which isn’t exactly what you want to be doing when you’re drastically low-resources and claustrophobic and just recently existed a car where you were fending off queasiness.
At any rate, in the end it took me over two and a half hours to go from Sunnyside Medical Center to downtown St. Johns, which effectively are at diagonally-opposite ends of the Portland metro area, and the first leg of the shuttle bus portion included a passenger listening to his music without headphones, which required me not to get in some more reading, which is what I wanted to do with this time, but get out the headphones and find music loud enough and attractive enough to me in the moment to drown him out but not so loud to cause me more dysregulation. (For what it’s worth: Ghost of Vroom 3.)
Once finally back in my neighborhood, I had to push just a little bit more in order to hit up the store for toilet paper, which for about five minutes it seems they were out of, and with my resources as low as they are, my skin s thin as it is, was emotionally a five minutes of being on an roller coaster you’d suddenly woken up on and would not have chosen to ride.
At home, dinner simply wasn’t going to happen, which meant having to spend money I’m already running out of because it’s the end of the month and there won’t be more until Thursday, and even that I had to spend on Domino’s despite there being five or six really good local pizza options in the neighborhood but I can’t really afford even Domino’s, or at least having to spend any money on dinner at all means that there’s no breakfast out for me this week, part of the routine that I budget for precisely to do something nice for myself out of the house on a regular basis.
What I’m saying here, in this shittily-written because hastily-written as I run entirely out of steam and orbit a potential sobbing fit because that’s what happens when your resources are drained and your autistically-low stimulus threshold is shot to fuck, and you had to do all of the above things, is that sometimes it’s entirely okay to really fucking hate being autistic.