One of the hardest thing to live with autism is that you create rules for yourself nobody else cares, or nobody else even knows about it, but you stick to them like your entire life would depend on it. And breaking these rules would bring not only some big misfortune, but also a public humiliation to you.
Because that stupid, annoying misconcept just stuck in your head that if people find out you broke your own rule, they would mock you, call you a pricipeless, spineless, stupid, inferior creature, who is unaoe to bring through even a single idea.
They will bully you, humiliate you just because you did something what seems important to you in your own little inner universe, but most of the people, even who are claiming, they know you, would even notice such a tiny little detail, a nuance, of your life.
And definitely not those people occasionally interact with your content in the chaotic stream of information on social media. (Being aware of the level of vulnerability caused my neurodivergency is one of the reasons I use social media, as a necessary evil, only for sharing content related to my professional life, while try to keep away my private life as far from it as possible.)
And yet, there is (or I should say there was) the dilemma with my Vintage Road Cycling Stories (formely PelotonTales) project that I decided at the beginning that I would share black&white images only. I just can’t share coloured pictures, pictures from the most recent history, nope.. never… I just can’t…no, and no again. People would notice I broke my rule, they would mock and humiliate me publicly for being such a weak and inconsistent person. And that would mean surely, the end of the world. (No, it wouldn’t of course.)
But recently this other problem occured (I created it, nobody else cares), that I need to reach the 10k mark as soon as possible. Like having not a round number of followers would be some kind of an obstacle, a problem I really must fix immediately. Yes, another typical autistic behavior, creating, or rather would say imagining absurd, nonsense problems just to feel the weird joy of fixing it. But not on any way, just the way I imagined for it. (A.k. a, by creating more and more rules only I know about it.) Like I know this “problem’ would be easily solved to advertise on Insta, with a rather small sum (as a business owner I know how ridiculously small sum would it be comparig to other necessary costs in business life), but no, because here comes another rule I created to myself. I always wanted to prove my wit and creativity with a real low (almost zero) budget project. And that is writing about road cycling for me. Because what kind of life it ould be if you would do always on the easiest way?
But then I reached the point when I had to break one of my self-created rules to solve one of my self-created problem.
And I did it. I finally posted a coloured picture on Instagram among all those black&white vintage road cycling images I used to share.
Of course, tematically it fit into the stream of photos I recently shared. It’s the weekend of Milano-Sanremo, so people would not find anything strange in sharing an image of a recent edition of the race, but in my messed-up head it’s a totally different story.
It’sa betrayal.
What’s going to be with my plans now? My visions? My principles?
As smarter people would instantly recognise, at this point I’m just mocking myself. So probably it’s time to conclude this post.
Anyway, I’m curious now, how this only one -by the way, quite famous – image will affect my project’s social media performance.