A Week, Actually!

It turns out to be exactly a week since I wrote the poem in the previous post. I got as far as putting that post together yesterday, but never managed to post it because my functioning let me down and I ended up with a sort of partial shutdown followed by a sort of partial meltdown and abandoned plans to do anything at all except survive.

A pattern is starting to emerge. After some big step up in activity, to a big thing that takes so much energy and generates so much anxiety, the first recovery day is reasonably OK as I’m still just pleased I managed to do whatever it was and I’m still, to an extent, hyped up by having made such a massive effort.

However, the second day is usually the worst, and yesterday, around mid-afternoon, having turned on the laptop to post what should have been yesterday’s blog post, I suddenly felt dreadful and overloaded. It became obvious that I wasn’t up to doing anything at all (by that stage I’d still not even been able to get myself a drink) and I abandoned the notion of either posting on the blog or, indeed, doing anything else on my jobs list. I tried to put it into words and ended up with this:

There’s a certain relief
When I just
Give up.

When I stop trying
To do jobs
Or write blog posts
Or “achieve”
Anything.

I then fell asleep on the sofa for a while, then woke up feeling disorientated and only semi-verbal (I could have spoken if necessary, but forming words was massively hard work).

And I felt low. Not generally low, like some sort of long-term depression, but suddenly low and exhausted, like a shutdown, though it wasn’t a full shutdown of the type I often experience. And I had one of those moments that I’ve not had in a while now, but that were much more common several months ago, where I suddenly felt that life was so very very unfair and I didn’t want it to be like this.

In the absence of anyone I felt I could bother, I ranted into the “Notes” bit of the iPad.

Why me? Why do I have to miss so many opportunities? Tonight I just want to be normal. I want the career I was supposed to have. I want to be able to go out on a Saturday night with friends and not need days to recover. I want to be able to “work hard” and that work to produce success rather than exhaustion and failure. I want to earn my own money. I hate hate hate hate being dependent on other people. I want a proper life. I don’t like having to sit in a darkened room for hours on end in order to recover every time I do anything. I’m bored. Maybe I’m even lonely. Though to be honest I’m so fucking alexythymic that I have no way of distinguishing between boredom and loneliness. I’m so fed up with having so little energy and being able to do so little. I want to work hard at stuff and I just can’t.

And so on and so on and so on. Lots and lots of thoughts of that nature.

I tried desperately to pull myself together and finally got myself a glass of water and a snack, hoping that if I ate then I’d start to feel a bit better. It sometimes helps. But it didn’t really at that point.

I then scrolled through facebook a bit more, hoping for something to distract me. I joined a conversation on a group and because my words weren’t up to much I posted a link to something (on topic) from this blog. Next I knew, the message thing pinged and I had a message from some stranger who was a mod or admin or something on the group – telling me off because hadn’t I read the pinned post and blog links were not allowed and would I go back and edit my comment.

Already low. Already struggling. I burst into tears. I messaged back telling them just to delete me and have done with it. I couldn’t find which group. I probably read the pinned post when I joined, but so many groups, so many pinned posts, so many screens of compulsory trigger warnings, content notes, worrying about pronouns, blog links, not links, this sort of post, not for this group, and so on and so on and so on. I know these things are important for so many reasons, but at that moment I felt old, I felt like someone who grew up before the internet was invented, and I’m still learning, and I can’t learn all this stuff fast enough because my head is so overloaded at the moment. Maybe I should stop posting on the internet at all because I’m clearly an incompetent idiot who can’t even read the fucking instructions properly. I’m wrong wrong wrong. Even online I’m getting the social codes wrong. What hope do I have out in the real world. Maybe I should just crawl under the duvet and stay there until I starve to death?

Remember, this was all going through my head when was basically in meltdown. Too tired even to meltdown properly I just sat and cried.

My brain, meanwhile, was reminding me that this was day 2 after doing something big. Some sort of meltdown in whatever form was inevitable. The incident with the facebook page was actually just the straw that broke the camel’s back (by the way, does anyone else literally have a little snippet of video in their head, like a GIF, of someone putting a single straw onto an already overloaded camel, in which the camel then falls to the floor, its back broken? And does anyone then imagine the work a good vet would have to do to rehabilitate the camel, all for the sake of one measly straw? Or is that just me?), and everything had been building since the weekend, and gradually getting closer and closer as time went on. I’d spent the morning stressed about a post concerning cooking from scratch, which made me feel incompetent and stupid, I’d read another post about how life was too short to moan about things changing, which made me feel disabled because my brain struggles with change, I’d read something about women wanting motherhood and careers, when I have neither, which again made me feel useless to society, I’d failed even to be able to fill the kettle to make a cup of tea, and so my bloody camel was absolutely at maximum loading capacity.

Eventually I calmed down. I hid the group from my feed, poured myself a beer, and sat quietly on the sofa. I had a couple of short chats with a couple of people online, both of which calmed me. I watched the telly. And by the end of the evening things were pretty much OK again and I eventually put myself to bed, having had a couple of longer chats with a couple of friends online (my husband was away overnight, having been out for a late evening).

And this morning my functioning level is improved. I’m in the midst of making a cup of tea, and feel like I probably need to eat something reasonably substantial, having hardly eaten at all yesterday. I might even start to get a few things done.

And I now ask why I’ve written up what happened yesterday. Why have I spent the energy basically recounting feeling a bit rubbish, when my general approach to this whole “being autistic” thing is to be positive?

Maybe just to indicate that it’s not all sweetness and light, so that others who have similar experiences can relate? Maybe to try to convey to those people who see me at my most functional out in the world, and might be tempted to think that I’m absolutely fine, that there is a price to pay for doing the things I want to do? Maybe just because it helps me to sort my head out a bit and to process what happened and to move on? Who knows?

All part of life, I guess. And I said at the start of this blog that I wanted to be as honest about it all as I could. So maybe that’s why? Shutdowns and meltdowns (or the partial versions thereof that I experienced yesterday) are part of the deal, part of the autistic life. For me, they always have been, but now I have the vocabulary and knowledge to analyse them, so that is what I do. And it helps to put a day like yesterday into perspective to be able to look at it rationally now my thinking abilities have mostly returned.

Now I just have to gather enough energy actually to post the posts on the blog! And to put them onto facebook and twitter. And to start to reconnect with the world once more. Then I need to see what are the most urgent jobs that need doing from my list because, as is becoming all too apparent, I have to do what I can when I have the energy in order to get through days like yesterday when the energy simply isn’t there!