Fluctuating Capacity

As I write this, April – Autism Acceptance Month – is drawing to a close. I've been meaning to write about my personal experience for this month since I learned that I'm autistic, but I haven't managed to do so before. Partly because I couldn't settle on a topic, and partly because of the topic I've chosen here: fluctuating capacity.

April has ended up being a difficult month for me the past several years. In 2023 I was nearing the end of my recovery from top surgery; in 2024 I was dealing with a cat conflict; last year in 2025 I was away on a trip to California to see the coastal redwoods and giant sequoias, which was a great experience but also inevitably somewhat stressful (and last year I was moving from Michigan to Chicago, and it was generally an extremely stressful year due to, well, the US situation in general).

So come April, I have so far not been feeling up to getting particularly much done, particularly in terms of writing about myself – which I find significantly more difficult than writing fiction.

This April had been going much better. I'm settled in, I've finally launched Verdant Shadows, I've been back to writing and have been getting out more, and I expected it to be easy to write a newsletter article this month as well. But then the belt on my indoor exercise bike broke, and it turned out to be a very difficult repair job, so I wasn't able to use it for two weeks. And it turns out that getting my regular morning (okay, some would say early afternoon, but soon after I wake up) cycling in is critical to my mental health and also is what keeps my ankle with the screws in it from my injury back in 2012 from going all crunchy. So I find myself, yet again, not doing particularly great at the end of April.

But that just means it's the perfect time to put down some of my thoughts about fluctuating capacity, which is a thing that I need to keep reminding myself is just as real for mental/invisible issues as it is for physical/visible ones. It's obvious how sometimes my left leg and ankle, that were shattered in a bike accident and got put back together with a rod and screws, are stiff and even (very rarely) just twinge out on me. It's a lot less obvious how sometimes I just can't manage to get things together because I've been too consistently stressed or overwhelmed or have already done quite a lot, but it also happens.

This will be a bit of a ramble, and of course focuses entirely on my own experiences.

Here are the main areas in which my abilities tend to vary a lot, and how that affects me:

Too Loud, Too Bright

This one is so obvious that I have realized it for a long time, although it's sometimes hard to notice in the moment (for reasons I'll get into later in this article). Some days I can handle bright lights, loud sounds, and grating textures pretty well; other days, they're fairly unbearable, and getting through the day without huddling up in my nice softly lit, quiet room can be difficult.

The best prediction I've found for how well I'll be able to handle such things is how tired I am. If I've been consistently well-rested, I'm much more likely to be able to deal with a day or two of bright and loud inputs. If I'm poorly rested, even an hour can be difficult. But also sometimes as far as I can tell I've slept well and I still have trouble, so that's not the only thing.

Although I do turn the lights and music lower on days when I'm struggling with sensory issues, it doesn't usually stop me from writing or working on comics or doing most things that I can do indoors and alone. It does make it difficult for me to get out and accomplish outside-the-house tasks, or do fun things. Earplugs and/or headphones and sunglasses do help, but they're not everything. I also tend to be more easily startled on those days. I'm not sure exactly how that relates to the rest of it.

So Many Steps

The biggest reason that I sometimes can't get very much done. Planning and doing things – particularly getting started on them – is always something I struggle with, but some days even simple tasks feel like they have an unmanagable level of complexity to them.

To use a sample task, making myself some hot chocolate, on a good day it feels like just a few steps:

1. Get mug and fill it with cocoa mix
2. Heat up milk
3. Stir it into the cocoa mix, then drink it

But if I'm having a really bad day, it can feel more like ten:

1. Select mug
2. Set mug on counter
3. Select cocoa mix
4. Pour cocoa mix into mug
5. Find appropriate container for milk
6. Pour milk into appropriate container in reasonable amount
7. Heat milk
8. Pour heated milk into mug
9. Mix
10. Take hot chocolate to a suitable location for drinking

And that is, of course, with what is ultimately a simple task. I often end up getting stuck on anything more difficult on bad days (and sometimes can't even manage the simple ones). This doesn't happen as often as my sensory issues getting bad does, but it has more of an impact. I usually can't get any writing done, and only fairly simple art/comic related tasks (inking what I've already pencilled, flats/coloring, but not starting anything new and not anything I'm less confident in).

It also sometimes happens that I'm doing fairly well for part of the day, and then towards the end of the day I get to finding it difficult to make food or hot chocolate or what. I use up the capacity I have too quickly sometimes, I guess, when I'm working a lot or trying new things. I'm not particularly good at remembering to take rest days after I've just done something the takes a lot out of me, but it is something that I'm trying to get better about, because it helps a lot.

Talking Can Be Hard

I always prefer written communication, ultimately, but most of the time talking at all isn't an issue for me. I do normally get overwhelmed by multiple people talking at once and find it difficult to pick out the necessary information when that's going on, which can be a problem if I need to concentrate while that's happening, and I often freeze up when trying to talk to people I don't know, but talking to people I do know is usually pretty low effort.

Not so some days. The more overwhelmed I get, the closer to having a meltdown or shutdown I get, the less able I am to communicate verbally. A reliable indicator that I'm very near to a meltdown is that I get stuck on repeating one phrase, which isn't necessarily that useful in context (like "I need to fix this" or asking where the thing I was looking for is over and over), but less dramatically sometimes I just have trouble expressing my thoughts in a complex way out loud. Writing is far easier. But, especially when I'm tired or stressed, writing emails can also be hard.

I Feel Bad, But Why?

I'm not the best at figuring out my own emotions or why I'm feeling off on any day, but some days it's worse than others and I can miss things like "because I didn't eat breakfast ever" or even "because I probably hurt myself when I dropped that heavy thing yesterday", and then because I'm always anxious in particular about my health, realizing that I'm feeling bad but not exactly why tends to send me into an anxious spiral and then it gets harder to figure out.

This is the least variable of the issues I've outlined here, mostly because my baseline for it is worse, but it's still worth keeping in mind for me that there are days that I just can't figure out if I'm angry or sad or actually just tired. Sometimes I assume I'm tired and instead it's one of the other things. Sometimes I'm angry because I'm tired. (Being tired also seems to affect me more strongly than some people. I always, always feel distinctly off when I'm tired, just strange and irritable and vaguely wrong, and it really bothers me and is hard to work against.)

So it's frustrating the way my ability to do things fluctuates, and it's difficult to predict (although there are some reliable indicators that I'm taking more care to learn and track: lack of sleep, overall stress, and doing a lot of new or socially intensive things close together are all contributing factors), but even simply acknowledging that this is a real thing makes me less frustrated with myself than I used to be. I spent many years getting angry at myself for not being able to do enough, not being able to keep going like other people I knew could, not being able to reliably work even the supposedly-optimum three to four hours a day. It's good to know that there is an explanation, and that I do also reliably (so far at least!) come through a trickier period faster if I actually recognize it and take some time off before it gets really bad. I can't anticipate it, most of the time, but when I can realize what's happening it helps a lot.

For the last few years I've been reworking my usual schedule and how I plan events to accomodate what I know about myself and not try to push through when I'm feeling uncomfortable, but it's been an uphill struggle – especially not to expect that if I get it right I'll suddenly be able to do things all the time. I might be able to do more, in a more reliable fashion, but it's more important that I feel better and am able to enjoy what I do more.

This isn't what I had planned to write, even once I decided on the topic – I was planning on more careful explanations and less anecdotes – but one of my goals with this whole newsletter/blog is to get more comfortable writing things consistently even if they aren't anything like perfect or following my plan (which I don't exactly have in this case anyway). It is still – barely – April, and this is written.