Maxim for (autistic) Christian living (27)

Hopko’s 27th maxim, ‘Do the most difficult and painful things first’, can be both freeing and dangerous language for autistic Orthodox Christians. The danger lies in interpreting it as ‘ignore your sensory limits and push yourself into meltdown’, or ‘start every day with the thing you dread most, no matter what’. Rather, autistics should read it as ‘give priority to the necessary tasks you are most tempted to avoid within your real energy, sensory, and executive‑function capacity for a given day. As far as you are able, you should focus those tasks that are tied to love, repentance, or responsibility, rather than endlessly doing only easy, stimulating, or interest‑based things. For you, the ‘difficult and painful’ thing might include making a phone call, answering one email, beginning a piece of writing, taking a shower, or initiating a hard but needed conversation, rather than anything dramatic.

Because autistic nervous systems fatigue quickly and crash hard, this maxim needs to be paired with awareness of your personal ‘window’ of best functioning. For many, that will mean tackling one or two priority tasks early in the day or after a predictable regulation routine (e.g. quiet, stimming, tea, brief prayer), when your social and cognitive battery is as full as it will be. You can make a very short list each day: one ‘hard’ task, one ‘medium’ task, and one ‘easy’ task; do the hard one first if your body and brain are reasonably regulated; if not, start by regulating, then attempt the hard thing for a set time (for example, ten minutes) and stop. Tools like timers, written scripts for phone calls or emails, and breaking tasks into tiny steps (‘open document’, ‘write three sentences’, ‘send’) are not cheating; they are how you follow the maxim without harming yourself.

This maxim is also a guard against the autistic avoidance that hides behind perfectionism or spirituality: ‘I can’t start until I know the perfect system / feel exactly calm / understand everything theologically’. For you, ‘doing the most difficult thing first’ may mean beginning while still imperfectly prepared, with a simple prayer such as, ‘Lord, I will take the first step; You carry me through the rest’. It also implies a limit: once you have done that priority hard thing, you are not required to keep seeking out more pain to prove your virtue; you can turn to easier tasks, rest, or wholesome hobbies without guilt, trusting that obedience in one concrete difficult step today is precious to God. Lived this way, Maxim 27 becomes a gentle nudge against paralysis and procrastination, not a command to self‑destruct: a way of honouring your autistic limits while still moving, one small step at a time, into the works of love and responsibility that you would otherwise postpone indefinitely.