so this is a little sad, but joining my partner on a slow day yesterday sucked for me, even though they had the perfect time, exactly what they needed. we had few "together" activities, i didn't have to join them, i could have done whatever i wanted, but i fell into the story of it being a luxurious treat i wanted to partake in. alas...
i did plenty of things i liked, including a very interesting guided meditation combined with tarot reading, so i got to dabble in my special interest. cooked a nice lunch from scratch. but most of the day was repetitive in switching between familiar nice activities. i didn't even think to run the laundry in the background or anything like that. it was raining all morning so i didn't go outside. and since it was a "mini holiday" sort of day i thought i'd see how much of tumblr i have to catch up with before actually reaching the official weekend tumblr time-slots.
for sure it had something to do with getting up late. i know that my brain is at its most energetic in the morning. and morning isn't just "whatever time i happen to wake up", it's "objective" morning. my brain and body considers the day mostly done just about after lunch. (would a nap change that? would it reset the timer?)
after lunch i'm capable of not-too-difficult things, fun things, anything that positively engages the autism. but i can't for the life of me motivate myself to do anything bigger, even if it's a very familiar chore. if i get up early, knock a few things out straight away, the momentum can sometimes carry me farther than lunch. but even if not, the day just feels good. even if my mood was crap or i was hurting, there's a satisfaction.
and definitely scrolling tumblr was a big mistake. it just felt bad. i had more than one point when i thought "i don't want to be doing this" but then convinced myself to go on, because "it's only going to be worse on the weekend if you let it pile up even more". but - i don't have to be reaching the end of my dash at all. that was fine when i was checking twice-or-more daily. but if i visit every couple of days or once a week i'll have to be satisfied to just sample some posts "off the top." i already radically cut down my following list. it's just not feasible.
(you know what would be cool, although idk how you'd implement this, i wouldn't trust anyone to do this. if you could filter your dash and see only a certain type of post. i don't mean image vs text. i mean: informative posts, current events, aesthetic posts, fandom posts, shitposts - all from the people you're following, no algorithm. then i could get more of whatever i have the capacity for. but of course the fun is in having it all mixed in...)
i know prolonged inactivity (or passive activities like scrolling or reading fiction) make me feel extremely lethargic. maybe i should clarify that "feel" doesn't necessarily mean an emotion here. it's in my body. or maybe it's an emotion in my body? but "negative feelings" i'm having here aren't guilt or shame, or any sort of thought-story about myself as insufficient, lazy or wasteful. it's more like allowing sand or rocks to bury me, when i could have been moving to shake them off.
inactivity/that passive state also makes the day disappear. time goes slower when you do a variety of things, or new things in particular. so those other activities basically delete the day for me.
i can get up early all i want, and i did today just to avoid a repeat. but with partner sleeping it's not like i can launch myself into an energizing flurry of activity. most things make noise. so i'm spending it being introspective and doing some quiet self-care. hopefully i'll be ready to Go by the time they get up.
other things to try in the future aside from guarding my wake time:
