There is always a price.
I suppose that this is as close to being a truism as anything. Every act comes with a price tag, for, I'm going to guess, everybody. Even if it's just the effort required to do the task. What does my head in, is how much more autistics (and others, I'm aware) seem to have to pay. It's why we talk so much about "spoons", or energy levels, or indeed the myriad other ways we have to describe how draining existence is and how important it is to monitor this. Because we know how quickly we can drain ourselves and hard it can be, at times, to replenish ourselves.
What doesn't help is that so often even the easiest task requires a level of planning and micromanagement that would horrify most people in your life, if they could ever understand our need to do it. But how do you explain that you have to plan everything ahead in order to be able to even be able to do it? That even the simplest task has to be battle planned to the last detail in order to be completed. The timing, the preparation, the steps to completion. The process to go through, to even start it. Not to mention the planning and thought and effort that has to go into anything more complex.
And then afterwards the price comes due, for all that work and the stress and anxiety that often surrounds it and we're left again with the thought of, was it worth it? And the knowledge that it never ends and never gets easier.
This slightly venty post was brought to you by me having a paying the piper day, for the work I had done last week and all the weeks of work that led up to it.