Meltdowns Part Ugh

I hate meltdowns. I have worked so hard on trying to lower the risk of having a meltdown, especially in public. I have a list of things I don’t do anymore: press events, news shows, radio appearances, book signings, writing conferences. I can do any of these. I’ve done them before. They just cost me a lot and no one knows about the cost but me because I spent my whole life making sure that meltdowns don’t happen in public. I just go home and am immobile for several days, unable to get out of bed or speak.

When I talk about this, it feels like people think this means that I’m not social, that I don’t like talking to other humans. But I do. I really like people. I like them mostly in small doses. Groups of more than four or five are really difficult for me to manage without a meltdown later. It’s a lot of faces and I try to give a lot of attention and then my brain hurts a lot because I am doing too much. I do a lot of too much, even still. I keep trying to stop and then I apparently don’t know how to do that. Like, there’s no off button for my brain. It just spins, and sometimes trying to decrease the noise has the opposite effect and makes things worse inside there.

Large groups of people are a special kind of problem for me because I like to talk and I like it when people see me as an expert. I like preparing beforehand and there is a strange pleasure in knowing that I have to perform normal, to mask, and being able to force myself to do it. It is a little like a triathlon race, the kind of intensity that actually helps me to focus and get my brain quiet. At least, temporarily. But I do it less now because since my diagnosis, I know that there is a connection between me forcing myself to perform and how bad it is afterward, privately.

Other people don’t see this part and so when I try to tell them how bad it gets, if they’re not autism-adjacent, they assume I’m exaggerating. Because that’s a thing that neurotypical people do. If I exaggerate, it’s usually the other way. I underplay stuff like how bad my toenails are if I run a marathon or how much my shoulder hurts lately that I can’t sleep at night even with the strongest meds I can get. Sensory overload is actually really bad inside an autistic brain, or at least with certain parts of my body, like my teeth and my toes. But yeah, I learned as a kid that you don’t speak about that part of your life. People get really, really upset about the truth. So we keep that private. And yes, that is an abusive home, but also when you’re autistic it’s hard to tell what is abuse because sensory overload that is constant and expected is also abusive and you can’t avoid it, not really.

I like my new life. Most of the time. I like being challenged on a professional level. I really like being good at math and being an expert at particular weird tax topics at my new job. I even like calming angry customers down. Most days.

But being autistic also means that I don’t often pay attention to my body signals. Because if I did that, I wouldn’t ever be able to do the stuff that I have to do to, you know, work in corporate America and make a decent living. So I don’t pay attention most of the time. And this can lead to meltdowns, sometimes even in public. I am very embarrassed about this. I was trained not to do this as a kid. We don’t do that in public. And we don’t talk about it in public, either.

So now I have to deal with the aftermath of a public meltdown and also with my embarrassment and then, following shortly after, my self-hatred. I don’t want to be autistic. I don’t want to struggle with noise and lighting and being yelled at for my job. I hate asking for help, and this increases the number of meltdowns I’m likely to have. Again, double whammy of autism and growing up in an abusive household. Asking for help means being vulnerable, and that’s a struggle.

But worse than that is the constant monitoring of the systems that go haywire. That is unbearable, being on alert like that all the time. And knowing that my body won’t just do what I tell it to do the way that it used to, or at least the way that I thought it did, before I was diagnosed and started to see that I had been having meltdowns all along, just not calling them that and thinking that the problem was outside of my body, not inside. It feels somehow less embarrassing if the problem is the weather or politics or that person who was mean instead of the problem is me not taking care of myself because I still hate myself.

Yes, still. Always. That is in the background of my choices around my disability which my brain shouts at me isn’t a disability and I over function and that makes me have more meltdowns. Someday I’m either going to learn how to stop pushing myself like this, or well, I guess I will just not learn how to do that and keep doing this over and over again.

Sound familiar at all? God, I hope all y’all are doing better than me.