Slow Build

Eyes open
Click…Tab…Open
Lights switch on
Click…Tab…Open
Momentum carries feet to the scratchy carpet
Click…Tab…Open
Siren of an alarm sets off
Click…Tab…Open
Dog food touching skin
Click…Tab…Open
Moisture, air drying, to a fiery red sheen
Click…Tab…Open
Heater kicks on, coughing sequence commence
Click…Tab…Open
Computer crash, 56 tabs I was using closed
Click…Tab…Open
No coffee in the cabinet, tea doesn’t taste the same with my food
Click…Tab…Open
Questions asked, no time for answers given
Click…Tab…Open
Music just keeps getting louder
Click…Tab…Open
Wrote past lunch, still no coffee, not much else
Click…Tab…Open
Oh, I might have to go to the bathroom
Click…Tab…Open
The fucking faucet, why is every drop of water attracted directly to me?!?!
Click…Click…Click…clickclickclick
Blue screen of death

For those on the outside looking in, an autistic meltdown can look like a temper tantrum or like small or trivial matters set them off. Or they can, over time, look like anxiety attacks when they happen while out or directly proceeding an outing. In actuality, it is essentially a neurological system overload.

One that's been building up for hours, more likely over an entire day or longer, is not a reaction to a single event or stimulus. Many have used the “Coke bottle effect” to explain this. Still, I've had multiple people look me dead in the eye, ignoring everything after the word pressure, saying, “We are all under pressure” because language and experience matter. I am not sure that analogy works when talking to some neurotypical people. The best way I have heard of describing a meltdown, at least from my perspective, is like a computer with too many tabs open.

I know that personally, when I start thinking about something, if I see something, or if someone starts a conversation, that thought doesn’t go away, possibly for days. So conversations, ideas, pieces of poems, meals, television shows, and places I’ve been all get shoved in together, mixing, fighting, and clamoring to be spoken or written about, as the case may be.

Then there is the amplified sensory input, painfully bright lights, overwhelming scents causing nausea and headaches, and indescribably hellacious textures inciting pain, revulsion, and anxiety. Those all get pulled up on their own tabs, some with auto-play videos, if you will. Until I finally overload, shut down, and restart mostly blank though somewhat foggy, and it starts building all over again. 

This is one reason social interactions are so exhausting. They don’t end when I disengage. Untangling and processing all of the detailed information lasts for days.

I can put those tabs in the background and pull one forward at a time, attempting to open new windows, collapse some, and ignore them as long as possible, but background processes still drain your processing power. Then we add trauma on top of all that. If you have ever been working steadily along only to have everything suddenly freeze and find that a program you didn’t even know was on your computer is taking up 90% of your processor, that is what memory recovery and trauma processing is like, at least for me.

I can usually feel the drain starting and get worse and worse for days or weeks, hampering my normal function until the memory causes a total system meltdown complete with flashbacks, much like an outdated depiction of a computer overload. Endless windows of memories pop up on a computer screen, repetitive stomach-dropping donks disparate startling noises, and blue light flashes off the screen in my eyes until it finally shuts down.

The exhaustion afterward is overwhelming; sometimes, I can dump some words out on the page before I pass out; more often than not, I immediately crash, sleeping anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, depending on what preceded the meltdown, before I can resume normal functioning. When I get up, I spend as much time stimming and listening to music as needed, usually heading to the computer to pour those memories and the distress into poetry.

Works Cited

Lisa Jo Rudy. “Autistic Meltdowns and How to Avoid Them.” Verywell Health, Dotdash Media, 8 Nov. 2024, www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-an-autistic-meltdown-260154. Accessed 21 Jan. 2024.