I can never remember if it’s getting on the wagon or falling off the wagon. Anyway, long and short of it, yesterday I had a wagon based event.

It all started out innocently enough. I was working–the literal kind one does to earn their daily bread–on a project that should have been complete a month ago if not for the fact that I, like everyone in the technology industry, am imperfect and had missed one tiny thing in one line of code that ultimately had a huge and largely embarassing, humbling result. I’ve spent a fairly significant time since doing as much due diligence as time and energy would allow and yesterday, as per usual, I recognized even more areas of improvements, one, two, three, and as dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s I started to become more and more anxious. I suppose this is normal for anyone, but when you’re (likely) a high functioning autistic your tendency towards perfectionism can be, well, potentially paralysing.

So there I was working, working, working. Making good progress. Knowing, intellectually at least, that I was doing all the right things. But emotionally my insides were going in a twist. No matter how much I tried not thinking about it, like a rubber ball being dropped from a ten story building, the thought, “Oh, I’d love a smoke, God, I’d love a wee nip,” kept bouncing into my mind. Solution? Once I was confident I’d wrapped everything up for the day I decided instead of going to the gym I’d go on a 2+ mile walk in the park and listen to my book on tape. The walk was good, but even so, every five to ten minutes that goddamn ball would be back, despite it not being present for the last four or five days. I couldn’t help examining my thoughts, as I always do. Why was it, when this happened, my brain would strategize, plan out the rest of the evening. Yep, take off the patch, have one smoke, get a wee nip, watch some tv, goto bed. Then I’d say okay, time to reprogram, what if I put another plan in place, like this plan to take a walk instead of use the treadmill. But it wouldn’t stick. I got home, shrugged my shoulders, had my smoke. Well, more than one. And today I’m back on the patch again and feeling okay. Not upset with myself. But reminding myself that it can’t be a pattern. Once it’s a pattern it’s right back to smoking first thing in the morning, smoking during work breaks, and smoking before bed. All the while swiping through Facebook because that, for what it’s worth, is my social life.

On an unrelated subject, I do apologize for my many spelling errors. I’ve decided to write my daily entries on my old IBM Thinkpad running Ubuntu Server, so it’s a basic text editor where I’m manually adding HTML so things look okay after publication. Besides, spelling isn’t the point. Ideas are. Having a voice is.

G’nite,

…asm…