AS views on accepting reality?

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This is not a particular rant about how my current life is meaningless, sad or despairing. I kind of understand my isolation away from other people has its consequences and that generally hiding under your bedcovers for enough time- makes anyone go really crazy.

However I hope you could help me perhaps with the greatest dilemmas I’m facing. I also hope you can decipher my horrible grammar and streams of endless questioning too.

My main problem is that I struggle to find any value that other people have in reality that I can really connect with too.

In the past even though it drains me so much I have had friends… I have no idea why they liked me but that’s the case. Now I am into 6 month period where I’ve only seen my dad, I’m at the family home again and I have thought processes and functioning that is so much lower than a year ago. (2nd year Uni last year was too much for me so I left)

In this burnout phase I have had trouble with talking, planning, routines, senses routinely overloading, breakdowns, sleeping and eating badly– and the aftershocks of prolonged negative, depressive thoughts spinning around my head like it was a tumble drier.
In general my main problems seem to point to the Autistic umbrella of traits that you find. I hopefully will find out if AS is the proper diagnosis by July.

As you can imagine my mind is working like a noisy jet engine and clear thinking hasn’t happened for a long time. So bear with me. (I know I hate that metaphor!)

a)People concoct their values and meaning out of life and tend to believe in them….

I have pretty much no emotional intelligence so generally i have mimicked the values of others so not to stand out…. and I have never really believed in anything.
Some people find Saturns rings hard to believe but my whole senses haven’t got normalised to anything on this planet which leaves me really annoyed. Did anyone else grow up presuming that the great secret kept, was that everyone found every touchable thing and their environments a nightmare but they had to keep it quiet? (Just me then?)

I am the definition of the “silent observer” so I don’t know why stimulus effects me so much that I have to hide in dark rooms with covers of my head after things get unpredictable. But I just thought that was linked to mentally ill people so I didn’t bring it up to anyone around me.

Anyway…
I am not that interested of how people got through tough static times in their lives but why …. What was their reasoning for accepting reality and facing consequences of such an unpredictable world?

Living under the bedclothes wasn't good enough for me.

My reasoning is that trying to take small steps to make myself feel better is less painful than the alternative, which is giving up. This is not to say that I am a positive person, I am generally not, nor that it's easy to try to do small things (including reading and posting on WP), but that not doing them is worse.

Even when I'm too tired to get out of bed (I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) I use that time to make up stories in my head.

reality is way overrated.

Just to have something to do.

I did it because after a point, being miserable no longer seemed like a valid or useful option.

I started to face reality when I realized I was in a deep depression and needed help. The primary causes of that depression were my repeated failures at school and work, as well as the years spent in an abusive relationship. I couldn't let go of all those things, and wondering why I had sabotaged everything I set out to do. I preferred to think about how I could relive them and make things turn out differently until I found out I had ADHD.

At that point I realized that my neurology caused these things, that I was not some kind of sinister mastermind out to sabotage my own achievements, and I let go. Learning for sure about being on the spectrum just reinforced that. I am much more interested in reality than I am in reliving everything I couldn't manage before.

At some point, I realized that I might be depressed, but I would not be depressed about being depressed. I figured that life and a lot of sick people did everything that they could to mess me up, and I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of winning. I came to the realization that you only have one life, and that the 70 or so years that you have are all that you have, and once you are gone, there will never be another you. I came to understand that the universe existed about 15 billion years before you were born, and it will continue to exist for billions of years after you are gone so nothing is that important; you might as well enjoy your time here, and don't spend time worrying about doing things.

I've lived with serious depression longer that most people on WrongPlanet have been alive. Every day that I survive is a victory. Every minute that I continue to breath is one minute that I haven't wasted. Every day that I get out of bed is a success. If I do spend a whole day in bed, it doesn't matter anyway.

The main thing is to focus on the small things. Don't worry about the big picture. Just try to spend the next minute doing something. Don't worry about the rest of your life. It will come soon enough, anyway.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but I'll try my best. What do you mean by accepting reality? Everything but what is imaginary is real. You want to know a reason to accept what is real. But what do you mean by accept? To become aware of reality and face it? So, if my understanding is correct, you want to know why do people have a reason to face the facts in their life, and more specifically, what that reason is. Wow, that only took 15 minutes.

And of course, that's not something I can easily answer. I think the answer you're looking for is problem solving. If you have problems in your life, you have two options, you can either ignore them or solve them. If you do not wake up from your dream and confront the problems in reality, they will never be solved.

If I'm understanding the question (I'm coming down with a virus and feel pretty out-of-it, ATM), then I guess I don't have a great answer. All I can think of is that at a certain point not putting one foot in front of the other would've required an additional expenditure of will/energy which I didn't feel like I had left, so it was easier to just keep trudging. The trudging was at least familiar, and comfortable in a way (or, less uncomfortable than than doing anything else, since that would've required thinking).

That, and familial responsibilities (elderly parents with cognitive impairment, with no one else to look out for them).

Yes!

That's almost word for word something I tried to explain to someone years ago -- that I might feel bad, but I wasn't going to "feel bad about feeling bad", because that kind of recursiveness is harmful (and the very definition of self-pity). From then on, once I caught myself doing that, I'd pretty rapidly stop feeling bad about feeling bad, and often that alone meant I felt a lot better, much better than I could have possibly expected. I developed a way, in most sorts of bad situations, of simply dropping thinking and expectation out the window, and suddenly (except for, say, 8-out-of-10 physical pain, where this sort of thing breaks down) even though I was highly uncomfortable, I was surprisingly okay with it for whatever the duration was.