In this email:

1. The course had a great start
2. 5 latest videos
3. Beyond Autistic Burnout course
4. Recent popular Tweet
5. Additional resource options
6. Next free workshop
7. Feature article: My Anti-Anxiety Techniques Actually Work (And Saved My Vacation)

Hi Reader,

Saturday was the first day of my six month Beyond Autistic Burnout course, and it went really well.

I got positive feedback from several attendees, along with a general tone of optimistic energy.

There were a few minor technical hiccups, but nothing that derailed the primary experience. And I kept pretty close to on time the whole time, to within a few minutes.

Overall the mood seemed pretty positive, and yet real, not shying away from the genuine challenges. The exchanges in the chat among participants were supportive and thought-provoking, and this seems like a good group. I'm looking forward to the next six months!

There's still about a thousand little things to take care of (or so it feels), and soon I'll be getting ready for next month's workshop day, but I'm really happy with how this is starting and optimistic that we'll make a lot of progress toward getting out of burnout. :)

On another note.

Do you remember back in May that I shared but I had a passport issue with my vacation and almost didn't get to go? Well, I finally got around to sharing that story.

It's a long story, somewhat rambly, and I completely understand if you don't want to wade through it all. ;)

There's also a video.

Wishing you a neurowonderful day,
Heather

P.S. Two people have emailed me asking if they can still join, and yes, since this is designed to be able to be used asynchronously, that's not a problem. If you still want in, you can sign up and have access to the first day's recordings and join us for the live meetings in the future (if you want to).

​

5 Latest Videos

Transcripts are in the video descriptions.
​

​The 3 double binds of burnout​

​

​

​Getting out of the three double binds of burnout​

​

​

​This Isn't The End Of The Story, Just The Middle​

​

​

​Reflections on Making this Burnout Course​

​

​

​My Anti-Anxiety Techniques Actually Work (And Saved My Vacation)​

​

Beyond Autistic Burnout

A practical system for sustainable recovery, without quitting everything.

When you're Autistic or AuDHD, the executive function demands of dealing with everyday life can take a heavy toll. All the peopling, transitions, inertia, the sensory load, and more, can wear you down, even while you're doing what you love and making the difference you want to in the world.

I developed a system to help Autistic, AuDHD and ND adults break away from the burnout cycle.

It will help you:

• Say no to things without guilt, shame, or anxious thoughts plaguing you.
• Make healthy changes to your sensory environment and relationships that you know you need without worrying constantly about repercussions.
• Have the executive function capacity to function on a daily basis.
• Make real-time adjustments so that you don't have to suffer through bad situations.
• Free up energy to do the things you want.

If this seems like it might be what you've been looking for, all the juicy details are here:

(It's a long read, but worth it.)

Recent Popular Tweet​
​

Heather Cook 🦓🖖Autistic Life Coach @hmm_cook The ironic thing, a kind of sad note, is that you actually have to have a little bit of energy to do the things that will help you get more energy. #ActuallyAutistic #EnergyManagement #AuDHD #BurnoutRecovery #AutisticBurnout 9:8 AM • Sep 5, 2024 5 Retweets 48 Likes Read 2 replies

​

Next Free Workshop

Practical Tips for Disclosing Your Autism​

At various points in your later identification autism Journey, you’ll want or need to tell someone that you’re Autistic (or think you might be). But how?

There are so many possible reactions, and you’ve heard of (or experienced) negative ones, and want to avoid those. But how?

In this workshop, I’ll offer a few key tips for approaching this so it is more likely to go well, along with some things to consider and several sample scripts to get you started with what to say.

We’ll cover family/personal as well as work situations.

Tuesday, December 3rd
12 PM PT - 3 PM ET - 8 PM BST

My Anti-Anxiety Techniques Actually Work (And Saved My Vacation)

My recent vacation nearly ended before it started because of a last-minute disaster, but I got through it. Here's what happened, and how I kept myself going.

​Read this on my website here​

​

This is going to be more of a freeform post. I wanted to talk a little bit about my recent trip. I went to Croatia on a vacation, and I made some reference in my newsletter to having some interesting experiences with my passport and almost not getting to go on the trip at the last minute. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that and also talk about how surprisingly, shockingly to me, I wasn’t overly anxious during this experience.

The anti-anxiety practices that I’ve been practicing for the last couple of years are really starting to pay off. This is an experience that would have been incredibly anxiety-producing to me not that long ago. And I was really, more or less, just rolling with the punches and going, “Okay, what’s next? Okay, how do I deal with this? Okay, make it work somehow. And even if it doesn’t work, we’ll make something happen. I’ll still live, I’ll get over it. The trip may not even happen at all, but I will be okay. Even if it’s not okay, I’m okay.”

It was very interesting for me to watch that happening in real time.

Alright, so here’s what actually happened. We’ve had this trip planned for about a year. We’ve had tickets, we’ve had Airbnbs booked, we’ve had all of the stuff scheduled. I did all the trip planning, I’m the designated organized-researcher-type person in our group. It was a group of four people, me, my best friend, my mom and her sister, my aunt.

So I go to log in to check into our flights the night before we’re scheduled to leave. It’s 24 hours before our international flights leave. And I log into the airway, and they let me check in the other three people in our party, but they say that my passport isn’t valid, so I can’t check in. And I’m going, “What do you mean it’s not valid? My passport is valid.”

Anyway, I follow a link to a government website, type in my information, and it says that I am not able to travel to the EU because my passport isn’t valid for a full three months after our expected completion of travel. This is a new rule to me. It’s not, however, a new rule.

I did a little bit of research, and apparently, if I had done even the slightest amount of research beforehand, it would have been very, very obvious that I needed to renew my passport well in advance (because my passport wasn’t valid for a full three months, it was valid for about a month or so).

This is a law, they just won’t let you into the EU without three months extra on your passport. And there are some countries that require six months extra. I had no idea of this, but that’s on me because I didn’t look stuff up. Totally fair, I’ll take the hit on that, but I’m still scheduled to have a domestic flight first thing in the morning and an international flight tomorrow evening. This is the night before we’re going to be leaving on our trip that we’ve been planning for a year. So what happens?

So I go upstairs and wake up my mom, because it’s like 11:30 at night, and I was staying up just to check us into our airline. I wake her up and text the others, and say, “I think I might not be able to go.”

Apparently, one of the rules is that if you get to a country and they reject your entry because of passport stuff, that it’s the airline’s responsibility to fly you back at their cost. So airlines generally will not let you on board if they think that you’re not going to be allowed entry, which makes sense to them. So they probably wouldn’t have even let me on the plane anyway.

So I wake up my mom, tell her this. She’s freaking out, and weirdly, I’m sitting there just going, ‘I’m in planning mode. What could we do next? What’s gonna happen? You three could still go on the trip. I can just… I don’t know, have two weeks off. Like everyone expects me to not be around. I could just do my oil pastels. I don’t know. I can have a good time just hanging out at home alone. Wouldn’t mind that. I mean, yeah, total bummer to miss Croatia and that part would suck, and I’d experience a few days of grief and disappointment and all of that. But, you know, it’s not the end of the world.’

It’s really interesting that I was noticing myself thinking that and going, ‘huh, that’s a different reaction than I would have expected. I would expect myself to be devastated like my mom is right now.’

And so my friend calls me because she got my text, and she was also freaking out, and she was saying, “Well, if you’re not going to go, I’m not going to go.” And it was just like my mom was saying, ‘if you’re not going to go, I’m not going to go’. And if my mom doesn’t go, then my aunt isn’t gonna go probably (although she was asleep, she never found out about this until the next morning).

And now I’m feeling guilty because I’m ruining everyone’s trip, because no one’s gonna go up.

Finding solutions

So, long story short, I started researching all sorts of stuff on the internet like, ‘how restrictive is that rule?’ ‘Will they sometimes let you in?’ ‘Is it kind of on a case-by-case basis?’ And apparently, like, they will. If it’s just a couple of days of leeway, they might let you in. Some people on forums did get in if it was just a short amount of time (like they were close to that deadline, but not quite there), but anything significantly before it, you’re basically not going to get in. And the airline probably won’t even let you get on the plane.

So I’m looking up everything.

‘Can I extend my passport?’ Yes, there are emergency extensions, but you have to be at the passport location in person. And there isn’t one where I live.

Okay, there’s one in Denver. And our plane isn’t gonna go through Denver, but that was one of the options. We were going to go through Denver, maybe I can reroute my flight. It would cost us a couple 100 bucks, but I mean, it would cost less than losing out on our entire trip.

‘So can I get to the passport place in Denver?’ Well, they don’t have any slots available the next morning, at a time where I could get to it. Even if I took the very first flight in the morning, I couldn’t get there in time.

Okay, there’s a passport office in Chicago. We are actually going through Chicago, that could work out. Our layover is an hour, and there’s no way for us to get there, and it turned out that the Chicago place didn’t have any openings that entire day anyway.

I don’t remember how this started, but I started calling different places. I think I called the US Embassy in Croatia to ask them if there was something that they could do, or if they had any suggestions, or if there was any chance that they would let me in. I couldn’t get through because of the timing, but I got up really early the next morning. I called them, and I talked to someone at the Croatian embassy, and they basically said that the rule is pretty tight. They enforce it fairly strictly.

There’s basically no way that you’re going to get in with only a month left on your passport, but what you could do is call the border police at the Zagreb airport (that’s the airport we were flying into in their capital city). So call the border police at the Zagreb airport, and ask them if there’s any exception, if they have any suggestions, whatever.

So I called the border police (I managed to find their number), I called them and talked to someone, and he spoke really decent English, thankfully. And he basically said, “No, there’s absolutely no way. With that little time left on your passport, there’s no chance that we’re gonna let you in. But your passport is good for the dates of your travel and you’re going through London. You could try and talk to the US Embassy in London while you’re on your way.”

British Airways probably is not going to let us on the plane. But that was the next, last piece of hope that I had. So I looked up the US Embassy in London, and they do passport extensions, and we actually had a very long layover. When I was booking the flight, I was kind of upset because we’re supposed to get in at 9:30 in the morning, and our flight doesn’t leave until 4:30. It was going to be a really long time to sit in a busy, crowded airport with my sensory issues. I was not looking forward to that. But all of a sudden there might be a chance.

So I call up the embassy. The time of day does not work, they’re not answering anymore. It’s past their hours. But I looked on their website, and they did have a form in there to submit an application for getting an appointment for emergency renewals.

And there is a thing where if you have a life or death emergency, or if a family member is about to die, you can qualify for a kind of passport extension and get it done within a day. And this is a vacation. It’s not like a life or death emergency, but I figured, you know, worth a shot.

So I filled out their form, but they made it very, very clear multiple times with bold text and underlining that it’s almost impossible to get one of these appointments. Their backlog is huge. You’re probably not going to get it. But I figured it’s my last shot.

So I submitted the form. It was like a half an hour before we were supposed to leave for the airport to get our domestic flight.

Backup plan

And basically our backup plan was London…

The deal around getting to London is that the UK passport rule is that you only have to have your passport valid through your dates of travel. It doesn’t have to be any longer. And I’ve been to the UK a couple of times, and never had a problem with my passport. It’s also not been close to renewal…

But anyways, they might let me in and I might be able to talk British Airways boarding people into letting me on the plane just to London, and if I can get it renewed there, then they might let me on the plane to Croatia. But it was dependent upon all of these things that are highly unlikely events to all line up.

So we basically have a backup plan. Instead of canceling the trip, and losing all of the money – we weren’t going to get anything back from it – we would try to see if it works out, and at least get to London. I can talk them into letting me get off the plane to London. Then, my friend and I, we can have a vacation in the UK.

And my mom and aunt, they can go on to Croatia, and they can have a lovely vacation in Croatia. All their reservations are done. They just need to show up and they can have a great trip. My mom would spend the entire time thinking about how I’m not there with her, but I was hoping that she would get past that in a couple of days and actually have a good time anyway.

So we get on our flight to Chicago. My friend and I, we’re texting back and forth. Her flight is through Denver and we’re gonna meet up in Chicago. No… hold on. We’re meeting up in Boston. Yeah. So anyway, we’re texting back and forth, and we basically decide, ‘okay, if we can’t go to Croatia, we’re going to go to the UK’.

She’s always wanted to go to Scotland, I’ve always wanted to go to Scotland. Scotland sounds lovely. Last minute vacation in Scotland. It’ll be a lot more expensive doing everything last minute, and also, the prices in Scotland are way more than in Croatia. But I don’t know. We’ll pull it from savings. We’ll make it work. Something.

It’ll still be a vacation.

And so I’m at the airport, waiting for flights, looking up Airbnbs in Scotland and rental car prices versus bus prices, versus train prices, versus flight prices, to try and get us from Heathrow to Edinburgh. And it’s all really expensive, really expensive on like one-day notice.

Anyway, so we get to Chicago, and I’m checking my email and I get an email from the US Embassy in London saying, “You have an appointment at 12:30 London time to get a passport extension.” And I’m all like, “Oh, my goodness! This might actually work.”

I have an appointment, and we’re getting in at 9:30. I have time to get there, and then our flight is at 4:30. If the passport, if they’ll actually renew it – and that’s a big “if”, because it’s not a life or death situation, like no one is in my family is dying, or I’m not dying – if they give me the renewal, and if it only takes about an hour or less to get it, then we have enough time for the transfer to and from the airport and checking in and going through customs both times, and, like, all the airport stuff that takes forever. So this is a really big if, but it might work.

Trying to get to London

So we get to Boston and they don’t want to check me in to let me on the plane, because my flight is through Croatia. And I mean, Croatia’s not going to let me in because it’s in the EU. But I show them my email from the embassy, and they have to call a manager. (I told you this was going to be a long story short, it’s not. It’s like this is the whole thing anyway.) So they call the manager and the manager sees my email, this is from the embassy, and I have an appointment with the embassy.

So he redoes our entire flight reservation, basically breaks me off from the rest of the group and creates a completely different reservation for me, and makes it two one-way flights from Boston to London, and then from London to Croatia. And so they will let me on the plane to London, and they put a bunch of notes in my file about the passport deal and about the embassy’s appointment, and so they do let me on the plane.

And while I’m in Boston there, I’m looking up on my friend’s laptop. We met up with her in Boston and she brought her laptop with her. And so we’re looking up the passport application form so that I can fill it out in advance. And I’m filling this out online, but I don’t have a way to print it, but their application process says that they highly recommend that I have the printed passport application in hand when I arrive. And I really need to compress the time of my visit as much as possible.

So I go to the British Airways people, and the manager who checked us in and who did all those reservation changes with my schedule, he happened to be at the gate. When I walk up to the gate and I ask, “Hey, I need to print something. Is there like a business center in the airport? Is there somewhere that I can print?” He’s standing right there.

And he says, “Oh, I know her story. Just take her to the lounge.” So they take me up to the British Airways fancy lounge – I forget what it’s called anyway, like the first class lounge – and they have a printer, and they let me print for free. They’re very, very helpful. And so I actually was able to print my passport application and have it in hand!

So that when I get there, I have everything that I need, and their email instructions said that they require a passport photo, which I was not gonna be able to get an official one beforehand. They didn’t have that anywhere at the airport. But they said in the instruction that they had a photo booth for passport photos at the embassy, and I can pay for that separately.

So we get on the plane. They let me on the plane to London. I had to show my email from the embassy to check onto the plane. I had to show that thing to so many different people throughout this process. Anyway, they let me on the plane. I got to London. Flight went fine. Get there, and I had to go through customs, pick up luggage, whatnot.

And my friend and I, she decides to come with me and babysit the luggage while I’m in the embassy, because they have rules that you’re not allowed to bring luggage in with you. You can’t have basically anything besides you and a small handbag, and they have airport-style security in there. But I had to go through customs, which means I had to pick up my luggage so I would have this with me. So she took care of that.

So anyway. We took the underground from the airport all the way into London, make sure that I had the directions. This whole time, there’s a lot going on; a lot of details and transfers and things that need to happen. We take the underground and then take the bus, and we had to walk a couple more blocks to get to the Embassy.

All of this stuff is happening, and I’m actually kind of watching myself not be freaked out about it, not be overly anxious. And there is a little bit of low level anxiety of will they consider my reason for wanting a passport extension valid enough now that I’m there. Or are they just going to say, “Okay, fine, you’re here. We’ll give you the passport extension even though it’s not a life or death emergency.” Or will they say, “Oh no, it’s not a good enough reason, so sorry, you’re out of luck.”

There was a little bit of anxiety about that. But in general, there really wasn’t much. It was like this much (very little). Normally it would have been this much(a lot), if not like this much(a lot, a lot). A couple years ago, honestly, a year ago, months ago, I would have been really, really anxious about this whole process. And it was just, “Okay, what’s the next thing? Okay, well, maybe they’ll let me in. Maybe they won’t. I’ll deal with it when I get there. Right now, I can’t do anything about it, so I’ll just deal with what’s in front of me right now.”

This is really interesting for me.

Anyway, I get to the embassy, go through the airport-style security. I wasn’t on their list of people who had previous appointments, because it was a last minute thing. But I showed them the email to the security guard at the door. (I was showing so many people this email.) Showed them that, they let me in, and went through the security, get into the office, go up the escalators, get to the right place, and it’s like this long booth of windows. It looks very much like an American-style DMV. And you take a ticket, and they call your ticket number, and you just wait there.

And I went and got my photo done at the booth while I was waiting for my ticket to be called, and got that taken care of. And I was sitting there. There was a little bit of nervous energy, but I still wouldn’t call it genuine anxiety. Yeah, nervous energy is a good word for it. It’s like something’s about to happen, like, I’m about to find out the end result of all of this to-do: am I going to be able to go?

And so I get called up, submitted my application. “Okay, take a seat and wait for your number to be called again.” And I get called up and “pay for your application.” They didn’t actually tell me yes or no. They just said, “You need to pay for it”. So I paid for it, hoping that that’s a yes. “Okay, take a seat and wait for your number to be called again.”

A little while later. Get called up. They say, “When do you need this by?” And I say, “My flight’s at 4:30.” And she said, “Today?” I’m like, “Uh huh.” It was like one o’clock at that point. And like, she says, “The person who does that, he’s at lunch right now. He’ll probably be back about 1:15.” And I’m like, “Well, will that give us enough time?” She said, “I’ll try and make it work.” “You want to see my tickets, proof of my ticket?” She said, “No, no, no big deal.”

They never asked me why I needed the extension. They never cared. I needed no proof that it was a life or death emergency. No proof that my plane was about to take off, nothing. They never asked me about any of that. It was just, ‘give me your application’.

So she said, we’ll try and get it done before then, and take a seat, wait for your number to be called. And then half an hour or so later, I get called up one more time. Here’s your passport. I got my passport! I got a real passport! I got an extension. It was a 1-year extension.

And they said, “That’s it. You can leave now.” So I am rushing out the door. My friend has already gotten an Uber for us. So when I get down, it’s almost there. We get in the Uber, and we just didn’t have enough time for the underground. Maybe we could have, but it would have been cutting it really close. Every single transfer from walking there, getting the bus, getting the underground, it would have all had to have been just perfectly lined up in order for us to get there. So we decided it would be easier and safer just to take an Uber.

So we get to the airport and have just enough time for us to rush in, get through security, get through the long line and find my mom and aunt, and then it was just about time for us to go to the gate and start boarding. And I was able to get through, get into the airport with my new passport and to board the plane with my new passport.

New passport!

I want to show you my new passport. I didn’t think of getting it earlier. Found it. Okay. Okay, so my old passport, it’s got punches in there to show that it’s no longer valid.

And my new passport!

It’s a different color, it’s maroon. And it’s an emergency passport. So I was thinking that it’s good for another year. Maybe I could keep it for a while. But to go pretty much anywhere that I would want to go with a passport, I would need it to be valid for at least three, maybe six months after the expected completion of my travel, which basically means that it’s not a year passport. It’s a nine months to maybe six months passport. And I’m not taking another international trip that soon. Can’t afford it.

But also it turned out, every single time I went through any customs or any part of the airport with this passport for the rest of the trip, on the way there and on the way back, it took me like two to three times longer to go through every single customs thing, every border police, every place where they check your passport. And I couldn’t do any of the automated machines where they scan your passport. I had to go up to the window and talk to the person live, and they took about three times as long.

There was never actually a problem with it. It was just they had to check stuff, I guess. I wasn’t really sure. I was a little bit nervous about asking what they were doing, because I didn’t want to make it a problem if it wasn’t going to be a problem. So it was just sort of something here. So I didn’t really want to go through that again. So I’m going to be exchanging this for a real passport in the next couple of weeks.

It was a lot more expensive to do this, but it was a whole lot less expensive than canceling the trip, or rebooking another trip at the last minute. Total, the passport itself cost $130 and it’s usually $50 for renewal, but it was like an extra emergency fee.

Plus, the transportation to and from the airport, the Uber, the underground, the bus, for two people, plus the passport photo. That was pretty much like the only things that actually cost extra money. It was a little bit over $220, $230. So not extraordinary for saving my entire vacation. Not what I was planning on, but I’m okay with it. I’m genuinely okay with that because it saved my vacation. So anyway, I have a passport.

Oh, last kind of funny thing on the very last time that I needed to have it checked when I was getting back to the US in Boston on our way home, the US security guy, he checked in everyone else, and I was last in line of our party. And he saw my passport, and he held it up and gave me this look like, and he said, “What happened?”

And then he smiled, and clearly he was kind of joking, but also he wanted to know. And I said, “My passport wasn’t valid long enough, I had to get an extension.” He was like, “Okay.” And he also had to look up a few things, and he took three times as long, but he let me in, so I got to come back home.

I was so excited on our Uber ride back to the airport, I was like, I have my passport! I have a passport! I can go to Croatia! I’m texting my mom and aunt at the airport to let them know that I got it and that we’re all going to be able to go, and everything’s fine.

In the end

It actually turned out that all of the travel plans that we had booked in advance, none of it actually changed. We didn’t have to schedule any different flights. We didn’t have to go to anywhere else than where we were intending to. Nothing actually got delayed.

It was a day and a half of high drama and a lot of uncertainty and not knowing what was going on. Some mild anxiety, at least on my part. Other people, I think, were a little bit higher levels of anxiety, especially my mom and my friend. But it didn’t actually affect our travel plans, and that really, really long layover in London turned out to be the perfect amount of time, exactly the amount of time that it takes to take a trip into the center of London, get a passport and get back in time to check into the airport for an international flight.

And I spent about an hour at the US Embassy total, just a smidge over an hour. When I was originally booking the flights, I was thinking, well, maybe we could spend some time in London, like looking around. It was not enough time to sightsee in London. It was just enough time to get into the center of London, spend an hour there and get back to the airport. It was not going to be a sightseeing layover. Anyway, all of that’s basically to say, make sure that you have time on your passport before you go traveling.

And also this anti-anxiety stuff really works.

I have been experiencing good positive effects for it for a couple of years now to the extent that I’ve noticed myself, in the moment, being able to work through things, to work through the anxiety. To be able to deal with it better, to be able to handle it, to be able to not give into it as much. To be able to feel less like I’m being beaten about by the winds of change and chance and the whimsies of the universe.

But this time, this experience was more of it just wasn’t as much there. Not completely gone. There were times, especially wondering whether the embassy was going to accept my reason for wanting the extension at the last minute, although apparently they didn’t care. They never even asked.

There was a little bit of low-level anxiety about that. But the rest of it, what I would describe was shock, disappointment, grief, or impending grief over losing a trip (it turned out I didn’t actually lose it), sadness, nervousness (occasionally some nervous energy there), hope, excitement. There was a wide range of other emotions, but not really much anxiety.

It was just more of like, “Okay, here’s the situation. What am I going to do about it?” “Okay, here’s the next evolution of the situation. What am I going to do about that?” “Okay, here’s the next evolution.” It was what I’ve heard Martha Beck refer to as ‘being in constant creative response to the present moment’. And I’ve done that in much smaller areas of my life and in much lower stakes situations.

But this was the first time where it was a really big situation.

Again, it wasn’t life or death, but it was like a very expensive planned for a year trip that was on the line. And it was really interesting to watch. I didn’t have to work through the anxiety very much. It just wasn’t as much there. That was really new for me, and I’m absolutely convinced it’s because I’ve been doing so much anti-anxiety work for so long. This is just the next evolution of that.

And I don’t think it’s probably ever going to get to the point where there’s none in my life ever at all, but this is cool. I’m going to enjoy this. And probably it’ll vary in different situations. This isn’t my new permanent. Some places, some times, or whatever, it’s going to be more or less. But still, it’s like, I’m enjoying this right now. I’m enjoying this.

Getting better

And also, here’s one last thing that I want to mention. I’ll wrap this up. I am so much of a researcher, I like to pre-plan everything. It has great strengths when planning a trip, but it can sometimes get a little bit much, especially for other people, like when I need to know all of the details in advance, otherwise I feel crippled by anxiety. Not at the moment, apparently.

But in the past, I know that those voices in my head that need to plan, not just because I have a brain that works that way, but that need to plan in order for me to feel safe, more for me to feel like I can manage life, that part of me would have said,

“Oh, this was proof. See, you should have looked up your passport info in advance. You had that niggling thought about, what if something happens and you need an extension. You should have looked this up. And if you had done even the smallest bit of research, even looked up one website, you would have found out that you needed to renew your passport well in advance, and then you wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this. It wouldn’t have been an issue if you had done your research. And therefore you need to double down on every bit of research that you can possibly do forever in order to never, ever have to deal with this kind of situation again.”

I would have gone there. I probably have gone there many times in the past, before I was aware of what’s going on. That’s probably part of why I have this intense need for researching, even just beyond, I like to know what’s going on, and I kind of thrive on planning. It’s fun.

But this time, I see that voice coming up, and I do see where that voice could lead. And I’m just very gently, have been talking to it and saying, “I know you’re trying to help me. I love that you’re trying to protect me. And you know what, you’ve been doing a really good job at protecting me for a long time, and that’s part of why I do so much research.”

That’s why I was able to plan this really lovely trip for all of us and have all of our ducks in a row, and have all of the places taken care of, and all the places we’re going to stay, have all of our transportation taken care of, like, why I know places that we want to go, things that we’re going to do and see over there, and the things that could trip us up. I’ve done a lot of research. I’ve done a really reasonable amount of research.

And, okay, so I didn’t research this one thing, and it worked out, even if it didn’t work out, though, it doesn’t mean that I’m not good at research. I’m actually really good at research. I’m really good at preplanning and anticipating things that could go wrong. So I missed this one. Yes, it would have been nice if I had found this information earlier. It would have been a lot easier and cheaper and saved us all a lot of stress and drama.

But I can’t anticipate absolutely everything in life that might possibly go wrong, every rule that I might not know about. I know that there’s a part of me that really, really wants to, that strives to, that feels that need to. But you know what, I’m gonna be okay, even if I miss one occasionally.

Even if this didn’t work out with my passport, even if I had gotten turned away, even if the embassy didn’t have time for me, even if it didn’t work out, I could have had a lovely vacation in Scotland. Even if they didn’t let me on the plane to even London, I could have had some time to myself at home.

Even if everyone decided that they weren’t gonna go because I wasn’t gonna go, that’s their decision not mine. I was encouraging them to go, even when I thought that I couldn’t at all. If they decide that they simply can’t go, I get that. I do understand that, but that’s also not entirely on me. I don’t have to feel guilty about all of that. That’s their choice.

So I’m also getting better at figuring out what’s my stuff and what’s other people’s stuff. (That’s kind of a whole different subject and I do want to do other videos about that.) But my point is that even if the whole trip didn’t work out for all of us, you know, we would have been okay. The trip wouldn’t have been okay, but we would have been okay. I would have been okay.

Life goes on. It’s one blip in life, possibly an expensive blip, but you know what? It can work out. Life will be okay. It’s just one chapter of one of my life, one chapter of all of our lives. There’s still a lot of other really good parts to our life…

I’m just gonna talk to myself and not to talk about what other people, how they would have taken it or not, because I don’t know. Yeah, so I’m not gonna speak for them. But for me, it’s one chapter of my life, and a few months from now, a few days from then, I would have been on to other things. A few weeks from then, I’ve been totally back in the rhythm of my normal life, and have been looking back at this and going, “Well, I still got a vacation. It wasn’t what I was planning. I still got time off, though.” And I would have just been back to my normal life, and months later, I’d just been on to the next thing.

I’m not really expressing this well. I’m just kind of repeating myself at this point. Please forgive me for that. This is not one of those nicely edited, scripted out videos. This is just sort of me speaking off the top of my head of what’s going on inside.

And a lot of what’s going on inside is essentially noticing that I’m in a different place in my life now. I’m at a much calmer place in my life, where things can happen to me without feeling like it’s going to upset absolutely everything that exists, without feeling like everything is ruined, or feeling like this is going to be the end of the world, sounds dramatic, and sometimes it feels like that.

(Sometimes it doesn’t feel like that, like that’s not exactly it, but it just feels like I’m not gonna be able to get past this, like it’ll always be hanging over my head. That’s closer to it.)

I don’t feel like that, and I am pretty positive that even if the trip didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have felt like that. Yeah, it would have been disappointing, and I think that I’d have every right to be disappointed, to experience some grief over the trip that I lost.

That’s completely reasonable, and it would be sad, and I would be okay to feel that sadness for a while, and I would be able to feel other things later. When other things happened, I would feel other things. I wouldn’t be stuck in that feeling of, I can’t get past this. I think that’s more of what I’m trying to say.

Okay, if you stuck this long through this wandering, rambling video, wow! Not sure whether to applaud that or apologize for your time, but I’m hoping that you’re getting something useful out of this, some vision of what could be possible. I don’t know. Or at least, this is kind of where my journey is heading. Alright. I’m going to leave it there. And I wish you a very neurowonderful day.

​

About Heather
​

Hi, I’m Heather. I’m Autistic, ADHD, disabled, and building a life I love.

I coach Autistic and other neurodivergent humans on creating their own neurowonderful lives.

Want personalized support in making your life more autism-friendly? See if 1:1 coaching is a good fit for you.
​

​​​​​