I am glad I made a point of talking about the elements of my life that are surprising sources of support or more supportive than one might expect them to be as today was a day of smashing any hope I had managed to build. This is something that seems to happen every half year of so the way support works here. I should have known to expect it.

I spent part of the summer presumably qualifying for supports for my autism. A novelty in my adult life. A program had been created and I tested in the range that should have gained me entry although I wondered as I had heard many stories of people applying but none of people actually getting it. This program might be one of the all too common variety where it’s head thinks the mission is to guard the pile of money the government hands them rather than to actually help someone. I don’t know.

For me the prospect of help that took my autism into account was exciting. I could imagine so many of the things that had been a source of frustration with help based on other things not being an issue. If someone wasn’t coming around because my mood was low they wouldn’t tell me to solve some problem by simply trying harder. Presumably if I had a problem with a texture support based on my autism would not have a worker telling me what a fuss I was making over nothing. I dreamed of people clearly communicating and making sure I actually understood what they meant not what they said (as the two do not match as much as one might hope) Oh the dreams I had. I don’t know why I was foolish enough to even dream them. I had to fight very hard for the right to finish university versus being put on a shelf in a group home and then having finished there was no one to supply just a little support. So we wound up on a different shelf where we watched time go by and people have lives and where everything that other adults had and enjoyed seemed just out of reach. On this shelf we could be exploited but what we could not be was become a full member of society. We could sit and watch those who’s diapers we had changed surpass us in some areas of development as they grew to their mid teens because we had had no help and support around some sensitive areas.

I am 45. I didn’t have silly notions like I would learn to date, and marry and have a family. I thought I would have some help with organization. Some encouragement regarding getting more education and some help finding suitable housing. Small dreams in a way compared to actually having the full kind of life I see all around me. Still that’s what this program claimed to do and they all seemed reasonable with support. I am more than intelligent enough to have my Ph.d I just need a little push, some help jumping the hoops and so it goes.

Today I learned my doctor has doubts these people will ever get back to him in time to set anything up before my current support runs out. Because unsupported would be catastrophic right now he’s in a bit of a panic. I feel like I live outside of time and space in a way right now. I am not in a panic. I am sad that it seems to be going this way but we’ve ridden this merry-go round of the idiotic ways systems work enough times in the past 18 months to be well beyond panic.

All the same when my doctor said he would step aside as my doctor as he was a barrier to my getting support from another program. I said no. He asked what if it were not my choice and what was left of my world felt like it was crashing in around me. The pressure built in my head. The words caught in my throat. I managed a few more exchanges and I knew I was done. I had wisely prepared my backpack when things started to collapse. I protested a few times that “this is a developed country” not managing to get off that stuck track. Not managing to articulate anything really. Certain my world would come to a complete halt if all this happened.

I don’t know what he will decide. I have no intention of being supported yet again by a program that is focussed on my depression not my autism. I have been depression free for periods of up to 12 years whereas I am never autism free so where is the sense of this? I also know inevitably any program that can’t take my autism properly into account will just get fed up with me. They will reach weird conclusions like the one that led to my current services starting at a very low rate. Service providers don’t tend to ask about what they don’t know about. They will just try to fit me into the mold of their other clients and the way I don’t fit the thing that supposedly causes my depression to be untreatable could be ignored. It might be belittled it might be treated as a curiosity. All sorts of outcomes could happen but what won’t happen is I won’t get support that fits my needs. It is up to my needs to fit what is on offer it seems. How dare I defy the biomedical model by not getting well in the usual amount of time? Why on earth do I have multiple conditions? This makes me too much work. Eventually questions of mandate could get me dumped anyway.

I will never know because I have no intention of seeing an unknown doctor and unknown people. I really though that if my doctor took the consistent failure of the system to support me properly through the proper channels the system might bend they would see that it was probably preferable to spend 400 dollars a month on support versus 35,000 on institutionalization. What sort of crazy society do I live in where that is even on the table? I’ve been sentenced without having actually committed a crime although my doctor did admit the support I would get were I to commit one would be vastly superior to anything on offer now.

In the autism community support is the hot topic always. The lack of it contributes to tragedies.  I am very intelligent yet I always need some degree of help to function effectively. In times gone by oddly enough society would have accepted that better than it does now. In non-developed countries outcomes are better so my protest that Canada is a developed country while I meant it to mean they could act more sensibly towards me actually makes no real rational sense.

I have worked hard the past month to rebuild some of my life. The things I can rebuild on my own I have but without some external help it is too tiring. There is so much going on with me beyond the autism but the autism dictates a lot of how I react to those things. We had a care plan in place for my knee operation on what to do if I wound up too stressed too speak. It wasn’t as good as it should have been because although I had mentioned the slowing of speech and the difficulty with it as a more likely outcome most people didn’t recognize it. Nurses sometimes flew out the door before I could get fairly important words out but that is the life I have lived for what has to be considered at least half a lifetime at this point. Some older nurses especially seemed to come on shift wanting to convince me I was just fine as far as the autism went. A lot of nonesene and labels don’t you know?

All of that is behind me. What is in front I don’t know beyond the next few hours. I feel too ripped apart by the news today to trust any health type person. I feel smashed and gutted and simply fed up with all of it. I did everything I was asked and in the end nothing changed for the better at all. The only thing to change is I was almost half a year older.

Was I naive in the first place to think support was obtainable? I am not sure. A lot of my experiences lately make yes the right answer to that question but when I was a young adult I had a period of my life where I actually had too much support so it makes sense especially given the very nice brochure they gave me when I did the tests that I would think okay this could happen doesn’t it?

What actually happened is I hobbled, blinded by tears as fast as I could away from the source of the news. I am a klutz so the walking into several glass doors was a given. I will never understand why they even put those in places where people might cry but they do. I shouldn’t have walked as far or as fast as I did so my knee was not exactly doing well. Five weeks post op seems like a lot but not for a knee operation when you have bad arthritis.

I got home and in this bizarre interlude when I was barely able to keep from crying someone from my congregation came by with meals and groceries. If she suspected how close I was to total collapse she did not say.

I walked the dog and foraged for blackberries.  Sometimes foraging makes me feel better since it says I can take care of myself (although I doubt you could live  on blackberries alone it can be empowering) Tonight it didn’t help. Tonight nothing will. I will do some work and spend hours trying to sleep probably. Tomorrow will be interesting as having concluded the health authority will never actually produce meaningful help my avoidance of the useless and very time limited stuff currently in place will probably aggravate someone. They won’t see it the way it is. That right now the “system” feels like such a source of wounding that anyone sensible would stay away. That in my own way when I don’t answer my phone when they call or am not here if they show up I am protecting myself from further destruction.  Further destruction being hard to imagine actually but that is how it will feel.

As for my doctor I don’t know. He is spread too thin and while he was the best doctor I ever had he’s also become the main deliverer of news I can’t bear. News that seems to seal my fate in ways I don’t want it sealed. I suspect then although I said I would not be okay with him not being my doctor he won’t have much luck being it either,

My case manager asked me earlier in all this as she could see it coming if rigidity was part of autism. It’s rigid on my part that knowing services exist that would help me, and knowing how poorly I function without them, and knowing I qualified for those services that I should get them at some point in a reasonable time frame. She may be right and certainly if I could have been flexible enough to adopt the more hopeless viewpoint all along that I was very likely going to wind up with 100 minutes of cleaning as my only formal support maybe I would feel less smashed to pieces now. Silly me to think when everyone acknowledged that wasn’t enough support that they wouldn’t repeat something that totally failed me again. But they will.

That’s what being an adult with autism can mean some days. With no one to fight your battles for you off you march stupidly trusting that things will be as you think they should. Later you emerge metaphorically bloodied and so distant from the world around you that you are not entirely sure you would notice if a bus hit you. You emerge with no one to send in to battle again for you and want only to get away. You’ve been totally crushed and what it would take to undo that is the very support they have made it clear you will probably never get.

And now to work I suppose. It won’t change anything about my situation but my colleague has expectations of how much work he will se when he wakes up. Unlike the system I meet my obligations.