Providing care for people  can add to my self-esteem in some ways and lower it in others. I was raised to see caring for others as a value, so providing care can help me feel satisfied with my sense of self: I can see myself as a good person. Moreover, I genuinely feel distressed when other people are distressed, so helping people feel comfortable and safe helps my sense of self at a nervous-system level. I feel better when the people around me feel better. If I'm one of the reasons they're feeling better, I feel good about that, too.

On the other hand, providing care for others can become unmanageable if I'm not careful. Providing care can involve many tasks, with multiple steps within those tasks. If, as often happens, I struggle with the executive side of providing care, or run out of spoons, I might end up masking, feeling overstimulated/overwhelmed, blaming myself for not being able to provide better care or for putting myself in an unmanageable situation, or even resenting the person I am caring for, even if my overwhelm is not their fault. My self-care, sense of personal values, and my relationship with myself and other individuals can suffer as a result. That can hurt my sense of self and self-esteem.

I'd like to think that there's a happy medium where I can provide care for others in a way that's manageable for me and sustainable in the long run, but I don't have enough experience yet to know what that is. How about you? What is your relationship with autism, self-esteem, sense of self, and providing care for others?

Share questions:

• Have you ever been in a position of providing long-term care for other people, like children, older folks, disabled folks, or someone else? What was/is it like? 
• How did providing care affect your sense of self? Self-esteem? 
• How did it interact with your self-care, personal values, or relationships with other individuals or communities? 
• How did providing care interact with your inner experience as an autistic person in terms of your sensory life, executive function, spoons, social differences, special interests, processing differences, perfectionism, black and white thinking, other? 
• Do you understand care giving differently since you learned about autism?
• Any tools, resources, or strategies to share?
• Anything else to add?