I am almost thirty and autistic, and I've had a problem with hoarding all my life. What are some daily habits, tips and tricks to help me maintain my own household?

Wow. You've almost described my own problems to a T. I have always experienced extreme irritation by certain stimuli - people jiggling their leg, chewing gum, clicking a pen incessantly - all these 'little' things which rarely seem to bother other people. I have strong aversions to smells I find disagreeable - certain perfume profiles, for example. I simply couldn't stand the unisex Calvin Klein fragrance CK One. It was extremely popular in the 90s, and even a lot of everyday toiletries copied the fragrance, except it was always worse. It was like an assault on my senses, and being exposed to it meant I couldn't really think about anything other than how unpleasant I found it.

I'm also a very slow careful thinker, so do better in text conversations rather than face to face. If I don't have sufficient time to gather my thoughts, I'm extremely impulsive about things I say to people, often blurting things out I'd have been better off keeping to myself. I think I get nervous about pauses in conversations, and my anxiety prompts me to fill the gaps with whatever I can come up with at the time. Often, my frank observations have been perceived as a blatant lack of tact, but I never really intend to deliberately offend anyone. It just seems to happen.

My mum always used to harass me to look people in the eye when speaking to them. As a child I was often literally 'painfully shy' around unfamiliar people, adults especially. My voice could fail me altogether, as it just took too much energy to push the air out of my lungs with enough force to make any audible sound. I got better as I got older, but having suffered serious bouts of depression for most of my adult life, I was quite interested to notice that when I was taking a low dose of antidepressants, but started feeling like I needed more, one of the significant signs alerting me to this was my flagging ability to project my voice in social settings. I just couldn't muster the energy to respond in the bare minimum acceptable way to greeting from sales assistants, for example. My voice seemed to get tinier, and tinier, and my eyes increasingly stared downwards.

Once I started taking an increased dose of AD medication, these symptoms were usually the first to dissipate. My more deep-seated mental state of chronic dysthymia is rarely affected by changes in medication, but I can deal with that as long as the everyday grind is taken care of.

Oh, yeah, and my house is in a chronic state of disarray. I can only manage periods of area-specific tidiness before it eventually all comes apart again. I keep working at it, though.

/r/declutter Thread Parent