Like rats teeth, the feeling of being overwhelmed gnaws at me.

It’s a subtle sense of overwhelming.

Where I daren’t say aloud the things that are making me feel that way.

Because they are surface things. They are stupid.

One of them is a pretty narcissistic thing, something to do with my looks. I’m not one to obsess that much about how I look. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you I often go out with my hair still messy. But there are a few things, niggling things I have a complex about.

The other thing, well I guess the fact I saw a rat in the garden for the second time today is on my mind.

I keep having conversations in my head with support workers and managers and the manager says to me, “Matt, you need to stop feeding the birds.”

And I…

This is how pathetic I am. I guess.

I had always wondered why I often found it so painful, so odd a feeling, so stressful to some of the smallest of changes.

I guess now I have the autism diagnosis it makes sense.

The idea I might have to stop feeding the birds makes my brain feel fried. It’s a hard feeling to describe. But it hurts.

Not to mention that my key interest in life is… yea, you guessed it…Birds!

To an obsessive degree.

Do you know what I spend the majority of my time doing when in my flat? Talking to my budgie and looking out the window watching the birds feed at my feeders.

Do you know what I do when I notice the feeder is empty? I clean it and then refill it.

And do you know the action of cleaning it, then leaving it to dry makes me a bit angsty?

It does.

I always wish I wasn’t this way.

I’ve always wanted to be one of those men that exudes competency with a really calming, laid back appeal to me.

But my brain doesn’t allow it to happen. It’s not wired that way or something. I don’t know.

I’m the kind of person that watches western movies wishing I could be like clint Eastwood silent characters or like Shane from the book Shane written by Jack Schaefer.

Read books about how to be more ‘stoic’ etc.

But inside my head, it’s too painful to be that man.

It’s funny in a depressing way because I’ve searched about autism and stoicism together, trying to find ways to group the two together. To find ways to make stoicism a way of coping with being autistic.

And I’ve found a few posts on Reddit and one or two on facebook where people claim that as autistic people stoicism seems to come naturally to them.

Yet I can’t figure out how they’ve found it to be so compatible. Given the anxiety that often comes with autism, the tendency to meltdowns etc.

I can see how visually I may seem like a person who it would be compatible with. I don’t have as many expressions on my face as others, I can say very little and seem relaxed. But often inside I’m the exact opposite.

But eventually, that silence cracks and I become overwhelmed and show my hand for what it is.

Often broken.

Stressed.