Permanent Vacation

Not only am I doing this post on the specific day I said I was going to last time you heard from me, but I’m even writing it a day in advance. You should seriously be proud of me. After an entire summer of not writing on this blog, I’m back into the swing of things very quickly. Actually, not to turn this into a total autism teaching moment before I’ve even properly introduced the post, but I think writing on this blog on Tuesdays has been such a consistent part of my routine for the past four years that it felt weird not to do it during my summer hiatus. If anything, getting back to this now feels natural.

So, hello. Sorry to start you off with that. I guess it was relevant. I’m back on a Tuesday, after a brief interlude for a random post on a Friday. I was honestly getting super restless about not writing on this blog, and I guess I finally cracked. It’s not that I was actively avoiding writing on here; I was just really struggling to come up with things to write about. I was also definitely taking the time (and yes, it wound up being a lot of time) to process being out of college.

It’s been almost three months since my graduation ceremony. I wrote at considerable length about the idea of getting ready to graduate college, and the fact that I very much didn’t feel ready to take that next step into the “real world” and accept my transition into autistic adulthood. I also wrote after the fact, with the post I put up in June, about some of my reflections a month removed from the graduation ceremony. I think that I definitely have a lot more thoughts about the way my autistic brain has handled no longer being an undergrad, and I’ll plan to share some of them on this blog as I get back into writing here weekly.

But for now, I don’t actually want to write about that. At least, not directly. Instead, I want to fill you in on what I’ve been up to this summer. I can’t exactly account for not having written on this blog, because I think in order to do that, I would have to have some big, concrete reason for taking a two-month hiatus, and I… sort of don’t. I mean, I do have reasons. It’s just none of them are really that big of a deal. In the past, if I’ve skipped a blog post, I usually give you some kind of reason for it, the way I did here. Because I skipped, like, eight weeks’ worth of blog posts… I don’t really have a good reason.

But I do have some general reflections. And hopefully, after this blog post is over, you might understand a little bit what I’ve been up to this summer.

I will now address the title of this post. Apparently, Permanent Vacation is the name of a movie, but I got it from the back of one of my brother’s shirts. In reality, the title of this post comes from a joke I’ve been making with my family all summer, that I’m on “permanent vacation.” Given that two weeks from today, I’ll be in classes at grad school, this is not technically true. But this summer has felt a lot more like a “vacation” than most of the other summers since I got old enough to need a job. Bear with me now while I go on a brief digression. I promise that I will eventually tie autism into this post. In true short-attention-span autistic fashion, I’m taking forever to get to the point.

I touched briefly on my summer job situation when I wrote in June, but to give you an idea of what I’ve actually been doing for these three months away from school, I started out with more responsibilities than I have now. I had a remote, work-from-home job for the first month of summer, helping out one of the professors from my college with the last bit of a research grant. Once the money had run out from that, I was sort of “on my own” effective immediately. The only “job” I’ve had for the remainder of the summer has been church music, which I did during the school year as well. And even though that’s a perfectly good job that I don’t intend on stopping, the “hours” for a job when you’re a church musician are… pretty much one hour per day, twice a week, unless you get lucky and there’s an extra church day in there somewhere. For example, when this post goes up, “yesterday” (as in Monday) was an extra church day, so I go to work on a day that wasn’t Saturday or Sunday.

But as you can imagine, even though it is a job, being a church musician doesn’t take up a significant amount of time, at least not when stacked up against actual part-time summer jobs, like the one I held for two summers at a farm stand or even last summer’s eight-week research job.

You might be asking yourself, well, Madison, why didn’t you get a “real job” this summer? And the answer is… honestly? I was really burned out when I finished school.

I mean really burned out. I don’t know if I ever actually directly addressed this, but I was working a lot at my primary on-campus job during the entirety of senior year, more than I ever had before. Coupled with the fact that I was working on senior theses, applying to grad school, and trying to enjoy my last year of college… it made me feel extremely busy, all the time. I think, by the time graduation came around, I was so done with working that I sort of needed the time for myself to “recover.” When I saw the opportunity to take the research job for the month of June and continue doing my church music until grad school started up, I decided that would be a good course of action.

More than anything, I think the reason I’ve spent this summer the way I have is because I was really desperate for some “me time.” This was especially the case on the heels of the last two or so months of senior year, when I was feeling really inspired to work on my hobby of creative writing for the first time in awhile. I think I wanted to really take advantage of feeling inspired to work on that while I knew I had the time to do so, and this summer felt like the perfect opportunity. I’ve written a little bit on this blog on the fact that I stake a lot of my worth as a ‘creative’ person on whether or not I’m producing anything creative, and when it comes to my writing, I always feel really good about myself when I’m actually able to write, and brain block doesn’t get in the way.

On that count, I would say I’ve succeeded. I’ve written almost every day this summer, and not even just random stuff that I hate but stuff that I actually enjoy writing and reading back when I’m done. Up to this point, I’ve pretty much kept my writing as a concept off of my blog because I haven’t felt that it’s necessarily directly relevant to my autistic experience, but I want to change that moving forward. This isn’t to say that I’m going to turn this blog into a “writing blog,” but I think there are many situations related to my writing that make me very aware of how autism impacts my life.

I’ll say more on that later, but for now, just know that I’ve really felt fulfilled in that sense this summer. And that honestly means a lot to me, because this is an area in which I’ve really struggled in the past, especially while I was going through undergrad and often felt like I had all the creative energy sucked out of me by the academic, social, and emotional pressures of being a college student. Moving forward, I feel a lot better about being able to balance writing with my life outside of writing, and I think that this summer has really been the reason for that.

But anyway. I’ve written two entire pages in Google Docs and haven’t really gotten to the point of why “permanent vacation” is at all relevant to being autistic, except for the digression about writing. The point I’m trying to get at is this. I’ve written it before, but it’s worth repeating: “me time” inherently leaves room for a struggle with executive dysfunction.

And, look: I’ve had a little bit of that this summer. There have definitely been a handful of days where I wallow in self-pity at the end of the day because I realize that I haven’t been nearly as “productive” that day as I would have liked to be. Executive functioning difficulties mean that you can sometimes lose an entire day to your brain’s chronic delay on functionality (not a clinical term, but my attempt at explaining), and it’s frustrating beyond words. I think I’ve been a little better about avoiding it because I’ve felt so inspired to work on my writing this summer, which eats up a lot of time and very much feels “productive”… but even that isn’t foolproof. I still struggle.

The issue, of course, is that having all of this precious time on my hands has made me reluctant to give it up. After all, it feels great to have a lot of free time, and my impulse as a creative person is to fill that with working on creative things. To an outsider, such as my family members, this can look like being lazy or simply “not wanting” to do anything. In reality, I think that my reluctance to structure my schedule this summer has come from a place of wanting to spend as much time as possible working on my writing and other things which I normally would have less time to do. I don’t know if this makes sense the way I’m explaining it, but it definitely makes sense to me.

Something that has cropped up more recently, though, which I’d like to continue writing about in my next post, is the idea that having a lot of free time leaves your brain open to emotionally overworking itself. My latest fixation has been stress. Since pretty much the start of August, I’ve been extremely stressed out about a number of things, among them starting grad school soon (which will be a gigantic transition), fear of the dentist (it’s a long story), consciousness that I’ve been completely socially isolated and not necessarily wanting to change that but feeling very guilty about it, and the process of trying to pursue publication with my writing, which is a whole can of worms I won’t open today. All of this has been building up in my head, and I’m aware that it’s probably going to get a little worse before it gets better.

My current state of mind can probably be chalked up to this: trying to avoid executive dysfunction as much as possible, while also trying not to let the building stress in my head get in the way of me enjoying my last two weeks of summer before it’s time to get back into a structured schedule. I’m only marginally succeeding. I guess, at least, that’s something.

So I’ve left you with a lot of thoughts in this blog post, probably not all of them coherent, but I hope this might give you something to chew on until I write my next post next Tuesday. And I actually do mean next Tuesday. Unlike my false promises in June. Now that I’m back into the swing of this, it definitely feels normal again.

And who knows? Maybe this small return to normalcy will help with my upcoming transitions. Which I’m still scared about, by the way. But here’s where else you can find me, and I’ll see you next week.

Next Time: The stress of starting grad school is really starting to hit me.