@autistics A number of different conversations on here recently has prompted me to remember something. When I was a teenager we had a next door neighbour who was in her 90's and still lived alone. Sometimes people would comment on how great it was that she could still be independent at her age and I would always completely agree. Despite knowing that, Long before home deliveries, I did her shopping every week and picked up her prescriptions. My mother would help her with any official correspondence that needed replying to and any phone calls that she needed to be made, (mostly because the old dear was profoundly hard of hearing.) Another neighbour took her to church every week and to any appointments she had. A friend from church looked after her garden and another one would do any DIY jobs, or heavy lifting that needed doing. And yet, everyone still saw her as living independently and this is because independence has always been health and age related and by those standards she did. And because hardly anyone lives truly independently of everyone else. There is always occasional and more than occasional food, or help, or just someone you can call on, whether that be a neighbour, or friend, or relative, for baby sitting, or lifts, or whatever. Independence as an absolute doesn't really exist, and hardly anyone views it that way. Except, perhaps, us. I don't know whether it is our tendency towards black or white thinking, or perhaps the perfectionism we often view things by. But for many of us, and perhaps more so for those of us realising we're autistic later in life, the trap of viewing our desire and need for independence by the absolute standard of all or nothing, is something that we are only too prone to fall into. And then, of course, end up wondering why we can't live that way and blaming ourselves accordingly. #Autism #ActuallyAutistic
