If you’ve got the 'tism though, things just don’t tend to work how they should, and there’s probably not much to be done about that.

Saying this from a perspective of someone with autism diagnosis and having done therapy and all that. I have problems with feeling and recognizing emotions (especially my own), and problems with self-regulation, so this cycle of not starting is very real. The advice I’ve gotten from professionals basically boils down to “try to stop demanding things from yourself that you can’t do even if someone else can do it, because it is harming your mental health”. I lack something in the emotional department and you can’t really work on emotions if you can’t properly feel and process them in the first place…

Any diagnosis shouldn’t be an excuse for not trying and things can work very differently to different people, buuuut. Just saying that if you keep banging your head against the wall with this stuff and getting nowhere, there might be some other underlying reasons why things are difficult