My care needs and selfinvalidation issues
My care needs
The area of life skills is the area where I need the most support. Most of my support needs are caused by executive dysfunction. My support needs in tasks where I “only” need help with look mostly like that someone is with me and does things I ask for.
I need help with the following tasks
(For some tasks not every time but I need help at least once a day in more than 50% of the days)
ADLs:
- Showering (help)
- Toothbrushing (help)
- Dressing (help)
IADLs:
- Cooking and preparing food (completion)
- Managing medications (most parts completion)
- Shopping (completion)
- Housekeeping (most parts completion)
- Making doctors appointments (completion)
- Coming to things like doctors appointments (hard to define. Someone needs to drive to car and know the way to the doctor. I would count it as completion.)
(Short information. Some things are called different than they are called in the official theory of IADLs or ADLs and I also split some stuff to make explanaining easier.)
Care / support needs and care / support helps
I have decided to create a new word for a thing which I and surely also some other autistics experience. There are things, for example, tooth brushing or dressing where I don’t need help every day, but without long-term help, I wouldn’t be able to do these things enough to stay healthy. So they are long term care needs but theoretically there are days where I don’t need help but ask for help or there are days where I “only” would need someone physically with me but ask for more help because I don’t know what it will cause if I do it without help / with less help and this not necessary help also helps my mental health to stay semi stable. Long term I’m MSN because long term I need help with some ADLs, but I ask more often / for more help than I need.
I want to create the word care / support helps for things where a person don’t is unable to do it but help with it helps the person to stay more mentally stable.
Care / support needs are things where a person is unable to do it in a moment and the person is too often unable to do it as it would be needed to do to stay healthy / safe / alive.
Support / care needs also can be support / care helps on some days like in my case. In such cases the IADL or ADL counts to the support needs label of a person if the person long term wouldn’t be able to do the tasks often enough to stay healthy / save / alive.
Selfinvalidation
Sometimes I feel invalid because my care needs are not the same as them of the “typical” MSN autistic person because I don’t need prompting. Instead, I need someone physically with me. I know that MSN autistic people are also different and that the only thing which is needed to be MSN is that a person needs help with some ADLs long term which is the case in my case but although I know this I have issues with selfinvalidation. One way I invalidate myself is that my brain says I would be able to do things if my surviving or health depends on it. I don’t have an exact prove that my brain is wrong but even yet with a lot of help I have situations where I can’t move proberly until a caretaker is physically with me multiple times a week. I also invalidate myself because I need less support in other areas. Like I’m fully verbal with only seldom issues to say what I want to say. I know that it isn’t required to be non speaking or semi speaking to be MSN, but I somehow feel like I would be just lazy because my support needs in other areas are lower. Another way of self invalidation is that I have the feeling that other HrSN autistics want to be as idenpedent as possible, which I wouldn't say fits on me. I want to be independent, but I also want to save my mental health. I’m often scared of talking about my selfinvalidating thoughts because I’m scared that it will cause other HrSN and other people in general to think that I would be faking.
