You’ve probably all seen an asperger’s or autistic sensory overload without knowing what you were seeing. It may have looked like a small child having a tantrum, maybe in a shop or play area.
It’s not a tantrum.
It may have been a slightly older child having a strop, all flounce and bounce and anger and tears, perhaps somewhere public – a leisure centre, park or even a stately home.
It’s not a strop.
It may have been a teen or adult, frozen in a corner, apparently drunk, or otherwise comatose, barely verbal, stumbling through the evening, not meeting anyone’s eye, leaving as soon or even slightly earlier than socially decent.
I’m not drunk.
I”ve been away this week in a youth hostel with home ed friends. I’ve been doing this for about 11 years I think, Small was a nine month old baby at our first Melrose, propped up in his high chair, and I spent the week either in the kitchen or in the bedroom, rarely sitting with the larger group of people. My blogpost from the week makes passing reference to that fact.
Back then I didn’t know why. I just knew I didn’t want to walk into the room full of noise and conversation and people and eyes. (You might be wondering why I go at all. My children want to see their children. We don’t want to be the people always left out of the remember when conversations. And for several years I kept telling myself not to be silly, these people are my friends.)
Now, post diagnosis, I understand myself much better. I’m still working on what that understanding means though.
This week, I’ve felt my shoulders rise each time I’ve walked into a communal space. There are rooms in this building that amplify and reverberate to the point of a single voice feeling like a physical assault. The stress of saying the right thing, or at the right time, or at least smiling or looking like I’m present (I’m always present. Until I’m very much not) – every one of those things has a price.
(If I were a gif using blogger, I’d be inserting a Rumplestiltskin/ Mr Gold gif right about here. ‘Magic has a price, sometimes a heavy one.’)
And when I’ve racked up enough of those little charges, I start to shut down.
I might panic and hide in my room for a little while. Or put on a coat, wrap up a child and go for a walk along the beach. It doesn’t completely unwind me, but it might get me a few hours further through the day.
And it might not. I might start to struggle to form words. Get grouchy, angry, sarcastic. Or I might start to feel myself fading out, unable to stay awake, shutting down like a robot conserving power. This is the version that I find hardest to combat because it sneaks up on you and it’s so gentle, arms and legs going slower and heavy, brain quietening, world receding, all the noise and business and people going into the distance and blissful silence dropping on me like a blanket, a warm comfortable suffocatingly heavy blanket and I can’t move and I can’t hear myself thinking, wading through mud…
I’m not rude. I’m not anti social. I’m autistic, this is what it is, and I’m doing my best.
(This is not about other people. My friends are doing nothing untoward, they are not unusually loud (except maybe when being musically instrumental), and many of them are very caring people. But even the most empathetic of them don’t experience the world as I do, a constant barrage of sound as a physical onslaught clock ticking, sounds of breath, voices, footsteps a creaking door, smells, touches clothes on skin, SOCKS, light dancing, changing, edges and colours, lost in the distraction. Given I can barely work out what I will struggle with, and I’ve no real idea how to make it better, I can’t do a great deal yet to make it better. And it might be that the ideal for me wouldn’t be a particularly fun gathering for anyone else, which wouldn’t really work in terms of a social get together.)
And breathe. Hold the moment.
Further reading:
The most recent popular post about my experience of autism past diagnosis “Getting up, going on” You can find everything I’ve written on autism by checking out the autism tag, link below the post.
Previous book reviews on related topics.
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