The New Year is coming fast and that’s a time for new beginnings and endless possibility, right? You might be thinking that this year you’re resolving to learn a language, write a book, lose a stone, run a marathon, get a new job, or something similarly impressive. “Nothing is impossible!” you may be saying to yourself; perhaps you’re reading “inspirational” memes that cover some parts of the internet. In contrast I’d like to say: stop. The things that were impossible this year are probably still going to be impossible next year. Yes – you might well do great things, but if you’ve tried to do something over and over again and it hasn’t worked yet, it might be a good idea not to stake your sense of self-worth on doing it this time. I’d like to be really clear at this turn of the year that what you’ve achieved this year doesn’t determine your worth, and what you achieve next year won’t either. Achievement really does NOT equal worth.
I don’t want this to come across as a lack of ambition for autistic people or indeed anyone else. I’m all in favour of everyone fulfilling their potential and having the absolute best life that’s possible. What I do want to question is the tendency towards toxic positivity that can crop up post-Christmas. There’s a big tendency in our culture to treat Christmas as a time of excess and then resolve to set everything right in the New Year. So round about now (30 December) people are often in that post-Christmas, eaten-too-much, feeling a bit aimless, confused about what day of the week it is and having a sense of non-specific guilt, state. And they may respond to that by deciding that everything that has gone wrong in the last year (including eating their own weight in mince pies) is their fault, and has to be fixed with a major attack of positive thinking. This is the year! I WILL achieve all my goals!
I repeat: yes you may – and great if you do. But equally, you might not. And that doesn’t make you a bad person or a failure. A lot of life is down to luck. I’ve benefitted from a great deal of luck in my life from having loving, stable, highly-educated family to being in the right place at the right time to get some good job opportunities. Some autistic people put a huge amount of pressure on themselves to be perfect and beat themselves up when inevitably they’re not. This blog post is a suggestion that it would be worth really trying not to do that at least some of the time.
My autistic brain looks for logic and patterns everywhere so is quick to attribute things that happen to things I’ve done. But it does that too much. Correlation, famously, is not causation – the fact that I started this blog shortly before Boris Johnson ceased being UK Prime Minister does not mean that I caused that. Honestly. A less silly example might be that the fact I (say) made a tiny slip in a job interview wasn’t the reason (or at least not the whole reason) why I didn’t get a job – that might have been down to there being better candidates – something that wasn’t within my control. I might fail to learn a language because my brain really struggles with heard information, I might fail to write a book because I’m too tired in the evenings from having to spend all day at work, to run a marathon because my body just isn’t naturally good at running etc. I might be able to overcome those things with willpower or I might not. Thinking that the success – or failure – is entirely within my control is a recipe for feeling ashamed when things go wrong.
In the days before Christmas, I wrote posts based on the seven O Antiphons which gave a nice structure, and the days after Christmas are mostly Saints’ Days starting with St Stephen on 26 December so I have been bouncing off them as well. 30 December, however, doesn’t seem to have anything in particular associated with it. Dammit. I have failed to stick to my pattern (which will be back tomorrow) owing to circumstances entirely beyond my control. See what I did there? I could channel my autistic frustration that the current structure for my posts doesn’t work for 30 December (dammit) into self blame for picking it, or I could attempt to do something positive with it.
We’re still in the twelve days of Christmas (30 December is the Six Geese-a-Laying day if you think in terms of the song) so I feel entitled to use a Christian message of Christmas even if it’s not specific to the day. If you subscribe to any religion, you may well feel that what happens in your life is at least partly down to a Higher Power. Christianity puts that in terms of God prospering or blessing some things: so success is caused by God. Human pride in achievement can be sinful – we shouldn’t get puffed up with pride about the things that we do because we can’t take all the credit for them. Conversely, if something doesn’t work, a Christian may conclude that that just wasn’t what God intended to happen at that moment. It’s a fairly simplistic interpretation and has its own risks – such as fatalism and not trying to solve your own problems – but it does remind you that things not working out how you planned isn’t entirely your fault.
So, I realise this is trite, but if you’re working out your New Year’s resolutions, I hope you won’t put pressure on yourself to achieve the impossible. Or even to achieve anything in conventional terms if that’s not appropriate for you. And if your year just gone has been a bit of a dumpster fire, well, you’re still going and that’s success enough.
This post was brought to you by a verses 13-17 of Psalm 90, and I can heartily recommend this musical setting of the whole Psalm by Vaughan Williams.
13 Turn thee again, O Lord, at the last : and be gracious unto thy servants.
14 O satisfy us with thy mercy, and that soon : so shall we rejoice and be glad all the days of our life.
15 Comfort us again now after the time that thou hast plagued us : and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity.
16 Shew thy servants thy work : and their children thy glory.
17 And the glorious majesty of the Lord our God be upon us : prosper thou the work of our hands upon us, O prosper thou our handywork.
Autistic Civil Servant 