My PDA Limitations

Persistent Demand for Autonomy--not public display of affection

Since childhood, I identified with the son in the New Testament who said no when his father asked him to do something, then went and did it later. (Probably his own way.) I’ve realized now this is a form of PDA (persistent demand avoidance/persistent desire for autonomy). It comes up A LOT.

My boss bumps up against it now and then and says I “resist change.” I immediately reject demands that I start doing something at work the “new way” that someone from above has decided is going to fix a non-existent problem, but which is really just a new person’s way of making their own stats look good for the company for a temporary period of time until they move on up to a new position where they can make imaginary improvements again. Yes, I resist change that I perceive to be purely for social gains in a hierarchy that I don’t participate in. I don’t like things that are “new” only because they are new.

However, if you can convince me that a new thing is actually going to work not only better for me, but better for other people—or even the company itself, I am one hundred percent on board. At least in theory. There are other problems that emerge later. A primary one is that because I am autistic, my brain doesn’t do things the way that other people do. This means that their instructions are useless to me. It’s not just the pictures only instructions on furniture assembly that makes me insane (as I think it does to plenty of neurotypical people). It’s any kind of instructions, which read like nonsense words to me strung together in overly long sentences designed only to make someone look good.

I’m usually better off looking at the finished version and then figuring out the pattern in reverse, which is why I almost never use patterns in crochet or knitting and I am widely known as someone who cannot use a recipe to save her life. I might MIGHT look at a recipe for some helpful hints and then head off in my own direction. This also means that I can’t tell you how I did a thing even if you ask me, because I *shrug* just went in deep and then came out with a thing I made.

And yes, I see that this also applies to my writing of novels. It’s not that I never read books on writing (I do!), but I don’t read them as instruction manuals. I read them instead as memoir. Like, a really interesting story of how someone else did their life. This is part of the reason why I’m crap at outlining novels (I can do it in a pinch if absolutely forced to, but kind of loathe it because it takes all the fun away from my intensely zen approach to writing and letting the universe speak through my fingers on a keyboard).

I’m looking into this more deeply, in part because for most of my life, I actually believed that I was pretty obedient and that I was a rule-follower. How I could be so blind to the reality is beyond me. Maybe because I was trying really HARD to do what people said, but had to translate it into my own head language and thought that was what everyone else was doing? TO be fair, I think lots of people insist that “following the rules” is what they are doing, even though it looks to me like they aren’t taking them very seriously—or at least not very literally. And how am I supposed to guess at what you meant if you didn’t use, you know, words?

Anyway, I think what is really going on is that I have severe anxiety around demands from others because I can’t do it perfectly the first time. And since I expect perfection (or near perfection) from myself even the first time, I spend all night with my brain churning either behind the scenes or less so behind the scenes, trying to figure out how to do it right the very first time. And yeah, obviously that is very stressful.

In training for races, this same problem comes up. I can’t use a workout plan, even one I make for myself, because then I can’t sleep at night from anxiety. I can only vaguely plan things out for a possible day this week. I can’t plan past a week or so or my brain just nopes out. Which is not really ideal for the kind of steady improvement and increase of load and then rest that the human body is (probably) designed for.

This is really stupid and annoying, but it also makes my brain work things out in really creative ways. Mostly.