Hello, and thank you for sticking with me for episode two. Today I am recording this with a little bit of a migraine, which, we can talk about migraines some other time, completely different story. But, I’m still recording because it’s my second episode, and if I don’t record; you remember that risk bubble? Yeah… I’ll probably start to fight against it to get the motivation to actually do this again. So, until this becomes part of my schedule, and until I do it without thinking, every single time is going to be a little bit of a push. Speaking about schedules, this episode is all about schedules, but not really. Originally, I thought ‘Well, I’ll follow up the episode on ‘risk’ with the episode on schedules.’ Right? Because risk mitigation. But schedules aren’t totally risk mitigation, and there’s some actual physical reactions to not doing things in the right order. So, what I’m going to do instead is I’m going to call this episode ‘Schedules and Expectation Management’. I’m Lya Batlle-Rafferty, and this is Memoirs of a Neurodivergent Latina.

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So, what do I mean by this? Well, schedules start off as somewhat of a risk thing, right? Like, if I know the schedule, then I have a lot less uncertainty about what I’m going to be doing, and that uncertainty is risk, right? So, if I know what I’m going to be doing, my risk levels are lower, I can plan ahead for that, and I can go into the situation with a lot more feeling of control and of calm. However, that isn’t where it stops, right? So, what we were talking about, risk bubbles and doing things ‘right’, but all of that, it kind of causes some roadblocks, it doesn’t really bring out any sort of physical reactions to anything. Like, hey, if I’m not going to learn the keyboard, I’m gonna just stop playing the keyboard, right? Or if I’m really nervous about driving to work, I can always find a way to work from home somewhere, and I can push through it, so it’s not something that in the end brings out all these invisible things about me, right? It’s manageable.

Now, when expectations aren’t met, that’s a completely different story. So, it’s gotten a lot better since I’ve gotten older, what you’re gonna hear from me today is comparisons, maybe of how I was in my twenties to how I am now, but in the end, once a particular course of action is committed to, and in my brain has become kind of this, like, step by step plan of attack. I know what I’m gonna do. When something disrupts that, there is a very clear deer in headlights sort of response, and some of it can be to minor stuff, and some of it can be to major stuff. I only included this with the schedule because it is one of the reactions that I would have if my schedule did not work out, and I had planned it well ahead. Which, by the way, if you heard me in my first show, would lead you to think that I don’t particularly love schedules, and it’s true. Okay, so, what happens? Let’s say I’m going on a road trip, right? And I’ve planned out that I’m going to stop at a certain place at a certain time, and we’re gonna have lunch, and it’s going maybe set us back an hour, and so I know that I’m going to get to my destination at a certain time. As we get closer to that lunch and the fact that maybe we’re driving a little bit slower than we expected or we hit too much traffic or whatever might- anxiety starts to increase, and I start to get extremely stressed. ‘We’re not gonna make it to the place on time.’ ‘Everything’s going wrong.’ Not quite ‘The world is ending’, but I think that depends on my age. I don’t quite remember in my twenties, but it is very anxiety provoking, it is very concerning. It is ‘Oh my god, everything is falling apart’. So, that’s what happens when a schedule is disrupted, what happens when a course of action is disrupted, which is kinda like scheduling I guess. So let’s say there is something we need to do, so I need to fix something that somehow is broken. Let’s pick a issue in the basement. Let’s say for some reason the kids were playing or something, and the wall was damaged, and first of all, of course, you deal with the frustration of having the wall damaged, but then you’re like ‘Oh my god, what do I do?’ and so there’s like this moment where, like anyone else, you panic, and then you go on and you figure out a solution. Whatever the solution is, ‘Okay, I know what I’m gonna do now, I’m gonna go to a hardware store, I’m gonna buy a new sheet of drywall, I’m going to get a little mud, I’m going to get spackling.’ Whatever, right? You have this plan, you’re like, ‘This is what I’m gonna go’ boom boom boom boom, right? And when I have that done, then I’ll come back here and I’ll be able to fix that, and everything will be good. And it wasn’t this situation, but this has actually happened to me, and looking back on it, it’s kind of funny, externally looking at myself, but at the time it was really freaky. So, I’m heading out, I’m like, on my way to the car, and my husband says, ‘Hey, it’s really warm out, you’re wearing long jeans, are you sure you don’t want to change into shorts?’ Yeah, that was pretty much what he said, and immediately, I froze. I froze. I had this plan of action, I had this exact thing that I was gonna do, and he threw a wrench into it. Not on purpose, obviously, he was asking something that anybody would ask anybody, but I froze, and I describe it a lot like, your mind suddenly ties itself in a knot. That’s all I can think about, it’s like you have a knot in your brain, and so you cannot do anything until you find a way to unravel that knot. And that knot is obviously metaphysical or whatever, but the point is: You can tell I’m not nonverbal, in that moment, when my brain knots, I am almost completely nonverbal. If someone pushes me, I will probably scream at them. If someone touches me, I will cringe away, so… we’ll talk sensory overload another time, but my sensory systems are like, off the charts during those moments, and it doesn’t last that long. It doesn’t last that long. It lasts, y’know, five minutes. Used to last a little longer, so once again, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a little better at it, but it is a real, physical reaction that I have and it really can cause me issues.

And it doesn’t have to be short term plans, right? A long time ago, I was planning a move with somebody else, I was moving into their apartment, they were moving into a house, and so we were supposed to coordinate moving trucks, and I had a plan in place for that, I was, y’know, we were gonna work through it together, and suddenly I get blindsided with the fact that they had already rented a moving truck and they were moving. And I think they forgot, now looking at it. They said it, but it didn’t register as a plan to them, but to me, that was another big deer in headlights moment, that was panic. I think I was crying. I was utterly and completely freaked out because I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a direction to go. I didn’t know what to do, and yeah, full blown ten, fifteen minutes of panic. Once that settles, so, they say that people with my way of being are inflexible, I don’t think that’s true. Once the knot settles, once it tears itself apart, then you’re okay. You can integrate this new direction. You can determine the change. You can do whatever it is that you need to do. It still leaves you a little off kilter, but now you can work with the new direction that you have. It happens at work, though not as much as it used to. And for those of you who do work, sometimes our first thought is to just be like ‘No. No, I have a plan, if you as my employee, as my peer, as my team partner say this other thing, you’re disrupting my plan and I won’t be able to handle that, so no.’ but usually people, all they say is ‘No.’ That’s kind of the wrong response, it’s a gut response, it’s a ‘protect myself from having to deal with this knot’ response.; The real response, the way I’ve learned to think about it is, ‘Hey, you know what? Give me a few minutes, can I make a meeting with you to talk about this later? I just need to process.’ and it’s hard, because once again, you wanna go nonverbal, right? So ‘no’ is really easy when you’re nonverbal, ‘no’ is really easy when your brain is locked up. It’s like nothing, right? It’s one little word, two letters and then you can go quiet. But it does make the impression to other people that you are inflexible, that you don’t want to change direction, that you’re stuck in your ways. But then, a day later, you’re fine with the new direction. So what we need to learn to do is we need to learn, at least, I learned, to put off the discussion to not sound inflexible, understanding that I was going to be able to absorb the new direction if I was given the time.

Okay, so that’s one type of way to deal with expectation management and how it can affect your daily life. There’s other ways that expectation management and expectations can affect you, and there’s ways that people don’t think about. So, last week you heard about my son with ADD, we’re gonna call him ‘Youngest’. ‘Oldest’ has Asperger’s, right? Or well, what used to be Asperger’s, which technically doesn’t exist anymore and it’s all autism and I could go into a whole rant about that, but the point is: I’ve watched his behaviors a lot, and I’ve realized there’s one behavior that is also expectation management, but that is completely out of our control, and that I have been where he was. This is where you know the right way to do something, you know what the right thing is, but you can’t make yourself do it, and because you can’t make yourself do it, you once again get stuck in this loop. And my example is going to be very simplistic, but I think the fact that an example this simple could cause issues hopefully will also help you understand how big things could also become a real issue.

So in this case, we’re talking about a Subway sandwich. Simple thing, right? Don’t want any veggies on the Subway sandwich. Don’t like anything that has vegetables touching any of the meat or cheese, and I’m sure you’ve all had picky kids. And so we get the sandwich, and there’s a piece of lettuce in it, and he pulls the lettuce out. And then you just watch him just start to get really worked up, really frustrated, really upset, and the people around you, other parents, you know exactly how they’d be dealing with this, right? They’d be yelling at their kid, ‘Come on, it’s only lettuce, you should eat it.’ but the thing is, his brain is in a knot, and I can see it. I can physically see it because I have been there. Your brain goes into a knot, and why does it go into a knot? Because you know! You know that it’s just a piece of lettuce, and that technically, you should be able to pick up that sandwich and take a bite. And you know that that’s probably the right thing to do, and yet your sensitivities, which we will talk about, your sensory issues, which we will talk about, these are all coming up in other episodes, prevent you from taking that bite. Even worse, you need to fight that fight yourself, so that sandwich needs to stay in front of you, because the moment that somebody grabs that sandwich from you, they’ve made a decision for you, and they haven’t let you try to win the fight the right way. I don’t know exactly how best to term that, I’m just trying to describe it, but that’s how it feels. It feels like you are fighting against yourself, and you know the part that should win, and as long as that thing is in front of you, you could possibly win it, and the moment it’s taken away there’s no way in hell you can win, they’ve made the decision for you, and the decision was that you lost. You didn’t get to do the right thing. And so getting that taken away is almost as bad as sitting there, having the argument yourself. There’s another hard part about expectation management.

I know I sound amused, but y’know, once again, I’m almost fifty. I’ve dealt with this almost my entire life. If I can’t laugh a little bit, looking back at my own behaviors, then all I would do is fret about them. And so, y’know, I learn from them, I change a little bit, I’m always gonna be me. They’re never gonna go away, but it gets easier, I get a little more flexible. I get a little bit more capable of understanding what’s happening and being able to verbalize it. And by the way, having kids really taught me to verbalize things, but that’s another episode. So that is the sort of tie in between schedules and expectation management. And I’ve given you a little bit of clue of what to do in a workplace when you’re trying to deal with that knot in your head. When you’re dealing with your loved ones, I mean, it should be the same, right? It’s harder, cause there’s a lot more emotional tie-ins involved. There’s a lot more history involved. There might be even a little bit of resentment, y’know, over time, because sometimes it’s hard to understand someone like me. But in the end, with your loved ones, it should be the same. It should be ‘I need this moment. I need to take a break. I need to talk about this later.’ And they should listen. Other things about this expectation management thing, just like with the risk bubble, y’know, I hate it. Like, I hate schedules, I hate schedules a lot. Because they create another cage around me, right? If I have a schedule, I have to keep it. It’s my nature. It’s the way I’m built, but I like the feeling of being uncertain better than I like the feeling of not making an expectation that I set up. So, you could be, I mean, I am neurodiverse in a way that’s supposed to love schedules, and still internally fight a battle against them all the time. You could get really freaked out or really upset or really concerned about risk issues and risk bubbles and all that, and still wanna take risks. There is no right or wrong answer to what it means to have certain types of neurodivergence, and the way you react to them. There’s things you can’t help, and there’s things you can rail against, and like I said in my last episode:

That’s okay.

Thank you for tuning in to Memoirs of a Neurodivergent Latina, this podcast was written, edited, and produced by me, Lya Batlle-Rafferty. All music is by Carlos Neda, and this podcast is part of Labrat Solutions Inc.