Balancing work life and social life

Post Reply New Topic

The was always a big problem for me in college and still continues to this day. You gotta set aside time to do homework, reading, studying, etc., and if you're taking 15+ credits, doing all homework and assigned readings can take hours. Especially in classes that you're not interested in (in my case, literature and social studies mainly), it takes a person on the spectrum a lot more motivation and time to do the homework when it's for a class that is not to the interest of that person than it would for an NT, and that's at least 50% of your classes until your senior year. Granted, we also work more quickly than NTs when it IS a class we are interested in, but still for all classes it can take hours to do work.

But then, you also probably want a social life of some sort. You need friends to help you feel better when you're down. You need NT friends who understand and are tolerant of your AS and are willing to help you in the social world. You need study partners. You need friends you can blow up at when you get overwhelmed and they will stand by you. And most of all, you need time to be able to hang out with these people.

Plus, you obviously need alone time to yourself sometimes.

How do you find that perfect balance? How do you get all your work done while still having the time for the social life?

Priority: Work ALWAYS comes first. Without work, life has no meaning.
Alone time comes second. Without alone time, I start climbing the walls.
Socializing? Forget it. It's a lost cause and just hurts too much, during and after.

I have to disagree with that. If you give it a shot, you can become pretty decent at it. I joined 2 clubs in college, and I made several friends while I was there, and I even made one lifelong friend that I still speak to to this day. I never hung out with them or spoke to them as much as an NT would, and when I was with more than one other person, I would almost always get lost and they were engaging in long conversation. But still if you try to make friends, you can do well in one-on-one conversations. There are plenty of people out there who won't think less of you because you're on the spectrum, and will even be willing to help you out if you have an ASD. If you can find at least one person like that, you'd be amazed at how fruitful the conversations can be.

It's either work in solitude, pleasure in solitude for me