Meal Planning at the End of the World

(or: How an Autistic Person Stays Alive in 2026)

Living as an autistic person in the year 2026 feels like trying to breathe in a house full of smoke while everyone else insists the air is fine.

The world is loud. The cruelty is casual. The corruption is open.

Image created by ChatGPT: Trump as a rock.

We are watching literal criminals occupy the highest offices in government, committing crimes in front of our faces without consequence — except, occasionally, for the few judges still trying to hold up the Constitution with their bare hands.

It feels unreal. Surreal. Like living inside a dystopian novel where the plot has stopped making sense, but everyone keeps pretending it’s normal.

And autistic people… we don’t do well with that kind of pretending.

Autism comes with pattern recognition. With justice sensitivity. With an almost physical inability to ignore what is happening just because ignoring it would be more comfortable.

So when I read about the unimaginable terrors buried in the Epstein files — when I see the way powerful men continue to walk freely through the world, protected by money and silence — I feel like I’m staring straight into the abyss.

I know so many people are too overwhelmed to even look.

I don’t blame them.

But I can’t unsee it.

I still use my voice. I still speak out. I still share what I find, even though I’ve learned the hard way that speaking is dangerous.

My Facebook page is limited now — only family and close friends I’ve met in real life. Even then, it’s anonymous. I don’t use my real name or identifying information because a colleague once took screenshots of my posts and shared them with my supervisor in an attempt to get me fired.

It didn’t work, thanks to that little thing known as the First Amendment.

But it taught me something: even truth has consequences in a collapsing world.

So I do what autistic people have always done.

I fall back into patterns that keep me alive.

The Patterns That Save Me

When the world becomes too much — when despair starts pulling at the edges of my mind — I return to the rituals that have held me together for years.

One of them is meal planning.

That might sound small. Ridiculous, even.

But autistic survival is often built out of small, repeatable acts.

Meal planning is structure. Meal planning is control. Meal planning is proof that tomorrow exists.

I find recipes depending on:

• the weather
• our budget
• what my daughters have requested
• upcoming holidays or events
• what’s on sale
• whether or not my husband will be home to help me cook
• doctor’s appointments that will steal the day
• whether I have the physical ability to stand at the stove

And then I build the grocery list.

It is one of the only places in my life where the steps still make sense:

1. Choose meals.
2. List ingredients.
3. Order groceries.
4. Feed my family.

A simple arc. Beginning, middle, end.

Unlike the world outside my kitchen.

Disability Changes Everything

Because I am disabled now, I can no longer grocery shop.

So I rely entirely on Instacart — making sure the delivery happens after my husband is home so he can bring the food inside and put it away.

That means balancing cost constantly, because delivery prices are higher, and I always tip generously because someone is doing labor my body cannot do anymore.

But we are not rolling in money.

Not after three layoffs.

Not after more than three years of unemployment.

Not after even longer being underemployed.

Not after an entire year unhoused with two babies under two years old — a year I do not want to relive, even though we did have many good times during that year.

Not after decades of paying for doctors, surgeries, medications… costs in the hundreds of thousands, with no assistance beyond the insurance we’ve been responsible for since we were 22 years old.

And my God, that has been expensive.

Especially with pre-existing conditions.

The Things People Don’t See

My youngest daughter needed lung surgery before she was even a year old.

Tumors she was born with had to be removed because she was going into heart failure. She had a rare condition that was not caused by anything we did or didn’t do (I know because I asked every specialist we saw).

That was the scariest thing I have ever experienced, and one of the most expensive (not the most because we also ended up at Emory twice — once for brain surgery for my husband and again after my stroke).

And it began when we were unhoused and unemployed, paying for COBRA out of our meager savings until it ran out.

My husband took a job outside his expertise — insurance adjusting, of all things — because we needed health coverage.

My youngest at CHOA Egleston. Yes, she had just eaten her first ever bag of chips. She loved them! Her little face was so swollen, but she was still such a happy little thing. I let her get away with anything because she had just had major surgery. You’d never guess that she’d just had her lung deflated and a tumor removed that was literally connected directly to her heart (Bronchopulmonary sequestration (BPS), which is a mass of fetal lung tissue that receives its blood supply from the aorta). We spent a few nights in the PICU, and she recovered like it had never even happened. My heart, however, never fully recovered from the stress. They left behind a CCAM (congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation) that was too difficult to remove, so she goes to a pulmonologist annually to have her lungs checked.

He was undiagnosed autistic then, barely hanging on, trying to survive in a world not built for brains like his. He’s also agoraphobic, and at the time, he was untreated. It was a literal nightmare for him to go into work, but he did it because he didn’t want to let his family down.

Before that, he worked at Publix, in the produce department, holding out for the insurance they promised would come after enough time.

It never came.

It was a lie they used to trick people into staying.

So he sucked it up. Kept going. Kept suffering.

Until academia took him back a year later.

The insurance adjuster job did come with insurance, thankfully.

But it paid $30,000 a year.

Thirty thousand.

Try living on that while keeping a medically fragile family alive.

And this was in 2010, so it’s not like it was long enough ago that $30,000 would have been enough to live on. We were so poor, but we had credit cards to make ends meet. And we did. Barely. We are still paying for them.

The One Thing That Still Makes Sense

It’s because making food is safe.

Making food is comforting.

Making food keeps my kids alive.

It makes my husband happy to come home from work to a good meal.

And to have leftovers to take to work for lunch.

And for now, I am still able to do that.

That matters more than I can explain.

So much of life in 2026 feels unstable — like the ground is moving under our feet while the people in power insist we’re imagining it. The price of food is rising. The price of rent is rising. The price of utilities, insurance, prescriptions, everything is rising.

And meanwhile, the billionaires in office are flying Air Force One around the globe, telling us these prices aren’t rising at all.

As if we don’t live here.

As if we don’t open the grocery app and watch the total climb higher every single week.

I’m working full time.

And part time on top of that.

My husband has four part-time jobs in addition to his full-time job.

And for the first time in years, we’re not making a dent in the debt we’ve accumulated just to stay alive — debt from medications, surgeries, insurance premiums, the endless cost of having bodies that require care in a country that treats care like a luxury.

We are doing everything we were told to do.

We are working ourselves to the bone.

And still, it isn’t enough.

That’s the part people don’t want to say out loud.

So I Hold Onto the Weekly Ritual

But as long as I have this one weekly chore — meal planning — I have something consistent.

Something predictable.

Something that does not lie to me.

Every single week, I know what I have to do:

I have to figure out how to feed my family.

I have to make the list.

I have to place the order.

I have to turn ingredients into dinner.

It’s not glamorous.

It’s not inspirational.

It’s not a lifestyle aesthetic.

It is survival.

Meal planning is one of the last remaining patterns that still makes sense in a world that doesn’t.

Because even when everything else feels lawless…

Even when the news is unbearable…

Even when the future feels like it’s narrowing…

My kids still need to eat.

And as long as I can do that —

As long as I can make food —

I am still here.

And sometimes, for an autistic person in 2026…

That is what survival looks like.

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