Last updated on December 18, 2023
November 19, 2023, everything came crashing down on The Autistic Me… and our other web projects. What was meant to be a minor clean-up of our web server became a complete reset. We’re back online now. Things aren’t perfect — but they were far from perfect anyway.
I am so far behind with the podcast, this blog, and everything else that at least the reset is forcing me to set some priorities. The winter break will give me a week or so to get aging podcast interviews edited and online, for example.
Teaching takes most of my time, as it should, but I hate knowing that The Autistic Me has been collecting dust. Teaching and producing scholarly research pays the bills. My creative writing, blogs, and podcast do not pay. Yet, I feel obligated to maintain what I started years (decades) ago.
Having a career matters to me. It means I’m helping the household. It gives me a sense of value. I like being employed. However, there’s also value (or could be value) in my personal projects.
Is it the autism or the ADHD or something else that causes me to leave so many things unfinished? Then, there’s the anxiety and sense of failure caused by all the abandoned content.
I want to finish everything, so nothing gets done.
Yes, I know the logical approach. Create a checklist and finish what I start. The result? I have lots of incomplete checklists. I spend so much energy worried about my to-do lists that the lists become a source of anxiety.
When I pause to think about my to-do list, I get overwhelmed. That’s been a frequent topic on this blog. I have a long list of incomplete works I want to finish. Short stories, plays, novels, and academic works all need attention. I spend time working on something and then move on to the next project, or back to something else that’s incomplete. That happens to all these web pages, too. I start updating one set of pages or blog posts and cycle back to another site that has been neglected.
Moving all our web content to WordPress should help me create and edit content from anywhere. Yes, this entire mess was caused because I wanted to make it easier to check off items on those to-do lists. The irony doesn’t escape me.
Every project is a work in progress.
Anyway, I’m trying to get back on track. It would be great to get at least a few projects done in 2024.