In late 2023 I identified I’m probably autistic¹. I really dived into the topic; I read and watched loads of experiences of autistic people, joined communities, made new friends online, and learned a lot about myself. In January 2025, I did get a formal diagnosis, letting me mostly put to rest the self-doubting voice in the back of my head. Realising this and reframing my life with this information continues to be quite impactful to me.

I initially thought I’d write a big personal post detailing all the bits about my life that pointed toward this conclusion, and going in depth on the whole journey, but I decided against it. After all, I already kind of did, in the form of a 53 page PDF I sent to the assessment team ahead of our sessions.

Moving on though, I’d like to write about more particular areas of the autistic experience. The usual disclaimers apply; I can only really write from my own perspective, even if my reflections are partially informed by other people’s accounts. If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.²

An Upcoming Thing

Onto the subject matter; what do I mean by having an Upcoming Thing?

Well, this can be many things, but primarily it entails:

• An event is happening in the future. This can be later today, in a few days, or even months from now.
• The event is something I have to take some action for in preparation.
• Usually, it involves other people.
• The event has one or more aspects to it that are hard or impossible to predict.

Concrete examples:

• Doctor’s appointment
• Someone coming to visit
• Planned trip
• Important scheduled phone call
• Non-trivial delivery
• Contractor coming to do some work
• Exam
• Job interview
• Date

When any such thing is coming up, it becomes nigh on impossible for me to put it out of my mind and focus on other things. It feels like it takes up a sizeable part of my brain capacity, right until it is over. The closer the Upcoming Thing gets, the more intense the preoccupation.

It’s not merely preoccupation, but stress and perseveration. A common difficulty is “social imagination”: finding it hard or impossible to imagine how social situations may go, and being unable to prepare for them. The closer the Upcoming Thing gets, the more I’m trying to think up potential scenarios. I’ll consider how conversations may pan out, and plan my actions and responses in each of the scenarios. Going in unprepared is terrifying.

From experience, I know I struggle in stressful environments where I have to come up with things on the fly. To offset this, I try to plan for everything in advance. For trips, I’ll have written down all the details of the public transport + backup options, so that all the figuring out is done and I can be fine by simply referring to my notes. In the real world, unplanned things can always come up of course.

It’s exactly this last bit that make Upcoming Things so stressful. Even when I’ve invested a lot of time in making the thing manageable, I cannot know that it will be okay.

Interfacing with other people

In most cases, people involved in the Upcoming Thing won’t consider the thing having more of an impact on than just being a calendar entry—a thing to simply show up for at the time. They might not think much of making “small” changes, communicating details, or being punctual. That is, unless they’re themselves acutely aware of what it’s like.

Unfortunately, things like waiting for someone to show up in a window of time just drives me up the wall. When I was taking driving lessons, I’d often pace by the window for 15 minutes waiting for the instructor to arrive. When I have a large delivery happening in some 8 hour window, I can’t get into any task requiring focus because I know I may have to drop that at a moment’s notice. If a company gives me an 8 hour delivery window, it’s equivalent to sending me on an up-to-8 hour errand to go collect the thing myself, seeing as my productivity is shot anyway.

Meanwhile I’m so conflict-averse that advocating for myself, asking for any way the Upcoming Thing could be more predictable, feels like an insurmountable wall in itself. I want to cause the least friction possible and not cause anyone the faintest nuisance, even at the cost of destroying my own wellbeing.

Everything is on hold until the thing is over

When I have an Upcoming Thing in my life, the mere suggestion of planning an additional thing is prepostorous.

Having an Upcoming Thing a fairly long time away kind of puts life on hold. Things keep coming up that make me go “yeah I should really do X / deal with Y” but they immediately become “I will plan that after the Upcoming Thing is done”.

The last such thing that’s behind me is my autism diagnosis; I didn’t start planning new things until after that was finally done. When I was working up to my 2nd attempt at the driving test it was the same.

I think there are multiple reasons for putting everything on hold:

• No space in my mind to hold onto multiple Upcoming Things (stress, etc)
• Uncertainty about how the outcome of the earlier Upcoming Thing might affect the viability of the next one
• Attempting to plan for the later Upcoming Thing, building on top of the imagined possible scenarios of the earlier Upcoming Thing multiplies possible scenarios to an unmanageable amount.
• Having another Upcoming Thing may mean I’m unable to be present enough curing the earlier Upcoming Thing.

In my experience, being autistic means living with a much higher baseline stress level than most people. Upcoming Things add stress (and, given above descriptions, a lot more than they would for most people). It grinds away at my energy levels. So if I’m at least a little bit aware of those energy levels, the prospect of adding another thing to deal with easily sounds like more than the energy balance allows for. Nope, no thank you, maybe later.

Brain housekeeping afterwards

As I’ve mentioned, getting closer to the Upcoming Thing means that stress levels mount, and it takes up essentially all of my attention. By the time the Upcoming Thing actually happens, I’ve grown accustomed to it being the only topic that’s constantly bouncing around in my head.

So, once the Upcoming Thing is a past thing, there is some relief, but I also have to recover for a while. I need to rest after having been under increased stress, and I have to adjust to that thing not needing to occupy my mind anymore. It still will, for a while. I’ll be thinking about how it went, ruminating on things I should’ve done or said differently, etc. To get through it and move on, I really need to do something that’s relaxing to me. This can be something that looks incredibly tedious or repetitive to you like gathering and organising information about an interest. I might sleep some more than usual too, to recover that energy.

I may need some time where my days are entirely routine, no decisions to make, purely sinking time into things that come easy. I used to berate myself for this, not “having a life” etc. But I’ve come to accept that this is a form of resting I sorely need.

Finally, after I’ve distanced myself enough from the thing, I might gather up the courage to begin considering the next thing, taking some steps toward planning it, and then finally organising it to make it an actual thing. And then, there is a new Upcoming Thing.

Wrapping up

I appreciate this might be a somewhat distressing read. I could have inserted a bunch of notes and mentioned that the severity of these experiences depends heavily on many factors, to name a few:

• How difficult the thing is
• How far in advance it’s planned
• How many factors making it unpredictable there are
• Whether it’s something I’ve done before

I want to emphasise one important thing: When you are not the person experiencing this, try not to assume how much of a pain the experience around the Upcoming Thing is for the person that is.

Something that is trivial to you may be immensely taxing to someone else in ways you may not recognise. And it is not their fault. So please try to be mindful when arranging things with people. Help make Upcoming Things less unpredictable in little ways that may have a big impact. Maybe get into the habit of asking people what can make things easier for them, because chances are, they’ve been conditioned out of advocating for their needs.