I hate our brain sometimes

So. Our brain is really stupid. We have to parse out our tasks into very tiny little steps, and organize those in a way so that we can accomplish them without being overwhelmed. (We have been told repeatedly when we’ve explained these situations that it is a common thing with ADHD, but we do not have any official diagnosis of such)

But this can create unexpected problems. If our carefully structured order of steps gets jostled in ANY way (positively, neutrally, negatively…doesn’t matter), we can become absolutely unable to accomplish the things.

(We have been told that how disruptions or alterations to plans where do not have an adequate amount of time to process and readjust–which of course varies depending on the situation and various other factors such as stress levels and other tasks “in queue”–is a common thing with Autism…but again, we do not have any sort of officially diagnosis)

I really want to be thankful and happy when people are being kind and trying to help us out…but a lot of times, it feels like someone has thrown a tire at us and knocked us onto the ground.

This happens a lot for us at work. We get a plan in our head as to how we’re going to do each step to be as efficient and smooth as possible when preparing multiple items (and even multiple orders) at the same time.

We’ll be in what we feel to be a really good groove, and then a coworker will assist us. They’re just trying to be helpful. And a lot of times, it would help speed things up. But they just…do it without informing us of such.

I think a couple people are picking up on letting us know that they’re helping us as they’re doing it now. And I know we sometimes do the same thing too, especially with a short attention span (thanks probable ADHD and switches /sar)

But it can throw our groove off in situations really badly…and make us even slower than we were previously, because we now need to restructure and reorganize the steps in order to accomplish the things all over again.

As I’m typing this, I realize that the coworkers who throw us off the least in these situations are the ones who have expressed that they have similar experiences of “getting in a groove”

But anyway…this is especially sucky when it comes to our system and food.

This morning, our partner system was trying to help us. And we really do appreciate that fact.

They informed us that they would start the microwave meal our system picked for breakfast. So we went about organizing the steps we had to accomplish for other task around the fact that we needed to stir the meal and put it back in the microwave for the final stretch.

Unbeknownst to us until we got into the kitchen, they stirred it and put it back in for us.

Again, I want to stress that I am very thankful for our partner system wanting to help us and make our life easier.

It has thrown us into utter disarray, though. Partner system used a fork instead of a spoon (not necessarily bad…but we NEED spoons when dealing with bowls and bowl-like things of this nature). And there was some of the “cheesy goop” (our fave part of this meal) growing cold and sticking between the tines of the fork. (Sensory nightmare of cooled cheese goop, plus that fork with cheese goop was just…sitting on the counter, so germ-focused brain says “ew, gross” even though it should have been fine.

And brain now doesn’t know what to do, bc we had specific things we were going to grab before the food was fully done (during the final stretch in the microwave), so that everything was a good temp for us and we could really relax.

We are also very particular with how we stir this microwave meal, to ensure the best texture and consistency throughout. Partner system is likely unaware of this, so it’s no fault of theirs.

But we don’t know how they stirred it. How the fork looked, as well as our whole thought process on why we need spoons with these meals instead of forka makes me hesitant on the fact that it is going to work for us.

But we don’t have the money to waste food. Especially when we got several of these because they were/are a safe food.

But our brain is stuck in a loop of “it might be gross…and I don’t want to deal with it if that’s the case. But I’m also hungry and don’t wanna waste food. And also, partner system was helping us and trying to make things easier, so we should eat it and be thankful”

If a food is a bad texture or something, we have a really hard time eating.

We’re stuck.

So…the microwave keeps beeping now over a half an hour later.

The texture and temperature of the food is almost definitely all wonky now, even if it wasn’t before. So the guilt and fear of wanting to eat but being terrified that we literally won’t be able to and also not wanting to waste food keeps at us.

We’re only getting more hungry. The food is only going to get more wonky. The worry that partner system might feel like they did something wrong or bad keeps making us feel pressure to just “hurry up and resolve the situation” but we can’t just simply resolve the situation without restructuring the steps in our brain…and we don’t know what steps we need to take because there are unknown factors now and we still need to do the other steps and things we were going to do, but now we don’t have the initial structure for them, so we have to create a whole new structure from scratch…which is really fricking hard to do when we just keep getting hungrier and more stressed/scared of hurting partner system and/or wasting food.

I hate this so much

Anyway…rant about stupid brain over. I really need to figure out what we’re doing with this whole thing.