Struggling to cope with feeling that, no matter how hard I try to do right, I'll end up in the wrong anyway. Old old feelings of being backed into damned-if-do-damned-if-don't corners & no-win situations. Situations where right is impossible and failure inescapable. *shudders*

Goal-posts dancing & waiting to be crushed under a landslide of moral residue. Suffocating fatalism. Loss of agency. Try & try & never stop trying, always navigate by ethics & sense of moral responsibility, but still, always, inevitably end up BAD.

Where autism meets depression.

When I can't fulfil an instruction because an instruction is internally inconsistent and logically IMPOSSIBLE to fulfil... It's the worst. It triggers the most dreadful nightmare-ish feelings.

I remember when I was young, I got a job handing out advertising flyers. Then littering by-laws were passed making it illegal. I quit the job. DWP wouldn't accept "because it became illegal" as a valid reason to leave.

I feel in a similar position now.

Similar example: The lockdown laws do not contain "travelling home in order to obey laws that were brought in subsequent to having left home" as a valid reason for travel.

So if someone isn't allowed to remain away from home AND isn't allowed to return home... WTF *can* they do?

And this is what being autistic means to me: it means a lifelong struggle to obey internally incoherent rules or multiple mutually exclusive rules. Combined with a terror of failure. And a heartbreak that no one else even seems to see what any problem/issue.

It's like being Alice in Wonderland, but with no sense of internal security. An Alice *defined by* Wonderland. An Alice whose self-belief is no match for the self-belief of Wonderland residents. An Alice who, deep down, BELIEVES that it's actually HER with the problem.

And always feeling STUPID. I have a very high IQ (apparently!) yet so many things that seem simple to others seem brain-meltingly & irresolvably complicated to me.

I feel I'm always sobbing "I don't UNDERSTAND!" & that people are always assuming this is insincere & disingenuous.

I should have been putting hashtags on this thread, as best way of finding readers who might share the experience & make me feel a bit less alien (I'm desperate for that atm). So... A retrospective hashtag #ActuallyAutistic