Autistic Hyper-Focus

I am very good at getting tasks done. I like lists of things to accomplish and I find it extremely difficult to go to bed without finishing my list. I have spent a long time trying to figure out how it would be possible to let go of a task at the end of the day without finishing it. When I was a child, I watched my father (probably autistic) do the same kind of thing. Once he had started a project, nothing would stop him. It could be full dark, three a.m. and he could have a dozen crying, hungry, tired children around him and he would literally not notice any of that because he was finishing his designated task. If you tried to get him to stop, he would get very angry. I have a complicated relationship with my father, and it is sometimes painful for me to realize how very much I am like him, but this is the way that we are perhaps most similar.

Once, a year before he died of congestive heart failure, my father got home from a stay in the hospital in which he had had several stents placed. He spent that night riding his bike for hours. To make up for the days he’d lost exercising while he was in the hospital. He had a checklist in his head and he could not let it go. When my children heard this story, they said, “He’s exactly like you.” This was so true I had to smile. Only months before, I’d been in the hospital with kidney stones. I got home at 4 a.m. and still woke up to my 5 a.m. alarm to make sure I got my workout…