There is a point in life where you start thinking about boundaries. No matter what you do, the hardest thing is saying no. And its doubly so when you're used to being criticized. And that's something I've been struggling with a lot lately, especially as I try to get back into content creation and ramp up how much I'm creating. I struggle with telling people that I can't help out because I have an intense desire to feel needed. And because of that, my own work tends to suffer, mostly because I will put myself last. And then when I don't see progress in my own work, I get extremely frustrated since I have all these expectations that have been placed on me that I'm not living up to. And because I tend to have issues regulating my emotions, I tend to over react to everything because of that frustration.
And that's why I have issues reconciling my need to be needed and helpful with my need to be successful in what I do. As much as I do want to enforce my boundaries, I'm too scared to upset others. And that always ends up blowing up in my face. I think when you're scared to voice your opinions, it gets hard to enforce your boundaries. And if you don't have someone who can help you enforce your boundaries, then it gets extremely hard to get them up. And that's sort of the process I'm going through right now. Getting to the point where I can just say no because I need to do my own stuff and not feel guilty about it.
I feel people don't entirely understand the need for NDs to be able to control their own schedules, especially when it's an ADHDer or Autistic because of the assumption that we kinda just do our own thing and are using our diagnosis as an excuse to be lazy. That just isn't the case, because we often struggle to switch between things. That means we often have a "pause" whenever things need to be switched. And for me, that means that if I'm already supposed to be doing something, I can't really do anything else because my brain hyperfixates on that one thing. So what might seem like me just sitting around doing nothing is really my brain waiting for an event to happen so it can move on to something else. Multitasking for me is easy when the things I'm doing are relatively close or similar to each other. But the bigger the difference, the harder it is for me to multitask.
So ultimately, despite everything, I still need to figure out how to put myself first. No matter how useful I want to be to others, it won't matter if I can't help myself. Allowing myself to work on myself is easier if I could enforce my boundaries better. But that's something I just need to work on.
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