When things don't go as expected

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Is this just an anxiety thing or Autistsm thing? When something happens that I am not expecting my anxiety level skyrockets. I go quiet and don't say much because that one thing is all I am thinking about. Like when i get a bad grade in school or someone changes what they had originally told me would happen (my boss). It throws me off for a bit. Sometimes the whole rest of the day.

While it happens to everybody it is an autistic trait and happens to us more often and more intensely than most.

It frustrating because I feel like it happens a lot. One thing to add though is that I don't meltdown when this happens.

I am caregiver to a spouse with Alzheimer's disease. Things don't go as expected, big-time. I don't become anxious, it's more like a short-term shutdown - inability to act, to plan. About when I start to recover, something new happens that I wasn't expecting.

If it is early in the day I can usually manage. At the end of the day the smallest thing can lead to a train wreck.

It's more of an anxiety thing. Anxiety is just common with autism, and thus easily mistaken the same thing.



In my own case, I'd likely get frustrated at worst -- on split second, I have to choose between acting out on frustration from holding it back and see what may come up as to why things don't go as expected.


It also more or less help that I myself am not the most predictable person. I could be competent at the moment, incompetent at next -- to say when things don't go as expected, it doesn't seem to be always a negative thing overall. Sometimes things don't do as expected indeed, when it turned for the better.
Instead of frustration, I get a form of overconfidence that either I have to indulge to or have to keep in check.

Suspicious on the outside for a minute, then all the sudden people would approach me for some reason -- and how I expect people towards me or how I might be towards people may be a good and not always a bad thing.

It's like me taking chaos and making sense of why is this. Yes, that sentence may not make any sense.
This might be why I don't suffer from anxiety. Because most forms of perceived unpredictability, uncertainty and the unexpected -- likely is the autistic thing part -- doesn't automatically come off as something overwhelming, panic inducing, a 'threat' or negative -- sometimes it just makes sense, sometimes I even relied on it.

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I have seen places I enjoyed as a child and young adult destroyed. There was a place called chatfield lake, but they cut down all the trees and ruined tons of habitiat to increase the size of the lake for the use of incoming housing developments. Like a place I had loved going to as a kid, was torn up and changed. There were underground toads and other wildlife. All the animals like that were likely grinded up and killed to make way for a bigger resivior to support wealthy people moving in and their ability to water lawn all year long even though lawn is not sustainable in the front range prairie. People really need to get over their lawns made of grass that is not native to the area they are growing it in.

Some scenarios in which I would/have react/reacted badly:

- Finding the fridge or freezer door open when no one has been using them for hours.
- Doors in general not 'behaving themselves'.
- Wifi disconnecting at random, as well as impossibly slow wifi.
- Food or drink falling onto the floor.
- A cup or mug breaking.
- Local ATM machine 'out of service', and continuing to be so for weeks.
- Someone storming into my room, particularly when I have earphones in.
- Ad on a YouTube video appearing at a crucial point within the video.
- Someone (either in person or online) failing to grasp the most basic of points or facts. This is also the case when I'm watching certain television programmes.
- When the weather forecast is hopelessly wrong on the hot side (i.e. if the actual weather is hotter than forecast).

Almost all surprises are bad

Once in a while, good surprise

Some idiots love to laugh uproariously at the slightest surprise

But I don't find many things funny

Maybe I am too uptight

But laughing is not all it's cracked up to be



Pun intended