Autism

I'm trying to prepare for a museum trip tomorrow and I'm anxious. Adults are allowed (it's a children's museum but not like strictly so) but like. Hhhhh. Anxiety. Social things.

We're going to take snacks, also okay as far as I can tell. Just must not make a mess.

I've been struggling with mental health as an ADHD male and feeling like a burden and like I'm not allowed to have these feelings because I don't want to be annoying to my friends and family. I recently missed my therapy appointment because my sister had a baby and I was at the hospital but they still take out the money and my card got declined. It's been hard to stay motivated at my work because I feel I'm not appreciated enough and the work I do is not always interesting which makes my ADHD want to do anything but that task.

That being said, I am so grateful for my family, especially my wife. And I'm grateful for a community where I can vent here and I know like minded people will understand my struggles. The news cycle has been so bad lately but in the real world, people do care about each other and I need to remember and hold on to that.

I'm on my way to my therapist. We are doing EMDR therapy to process a recent trauma (ugly car accident). I'm both excited and scared.

We tried one session already with the least traumatic image of the accident and it was both effective and tough. I need to go through this, but it's also scary how it works on your brain.

Also, apparently I have aphantasia, we discovered it during the pre-EMDR preparatory sessions. Makes sense, but it's shit. 😅

I haven't listened to these yet but this podcast was mentioned in some video I watched and I thought it might be of interest to folks: https://www.everythingisalive.com/about

A person interviews objects about themselves. From the clips I heard it's very podcast conversational which I think is such a cool treatment for the subject.

Weird AuDHD bragging rights: Picked one of these for the first time and ended up having to completely disassemble and reassemble it. I wasn't ready for it and over-rotated the core, which dropped pins into the lock body and seized the whole thing up.

Not sure how I pulled it off, but the autism and the adhd really came through for me. I'd never taken a padlock apart and I didn't have a plug follower of the right diameter to take the cylinder apart. So I improvised with a hollow pen tube. I ended up dropping all the key pins (variable-height pins that match up with the key blade) in a pile, and managed to get them all in the correct chambers after a few false starts.

I couldn't fit a shim in, so I used an allen wrench + tweezers + the hollow pen to put the cylinder back together; it's basically putting seven tiny metal pieces into spring-loaded chambers that really don't want tiny metal pieces in them. The padlock itself has two ball bearings that have to fit into the left and right of the chamber and roll all over the place and onto the floor, but I found a way to hold the lock body that kept them both in place long enough to put the lock cylinder back in.

It was a chaotic mess throughout and I shudder to think what any decent locksmith would think of the attempt, but I got it back together again before the anxiety completely seized me up. Now I'm afraid to pick it again, although I also want to take it apart about 50 more times.