Greasy Pelicans- on Meltdowns and Shutdowns

Imagine you’re in a room with three screaming toddlers. All of them have dirty, stinking nappies, you are dressed entirely in Velcro that keeps catching on itself, and one of the toddlers is turning the lights on and off over and over again. I think you can imagine that would not only be uncomfortable and stressful but that it would also physically hurt your ears. This is what sensory overload is like except that all it takes to push me into this level of stress and physical discomfort is a couple of beeping horns, the bright sun, and a crowded environment.

 

Sometimes, when I’m in sensory overload I feel like I’m full of greasy pelicans (like Mae Martin in their sitcom Feel Good). Every new insult to my senses, every beeping horn or flashing light, pours more oil onto the birds until my chest is full and it travels up my throat to my mouth, stopping me from speaking. It feels heavy and uncomfortable but also full of movement and suffering. There is a sense of immediate danger that I would do anything to stop but also a profound feeling that it is unstoppable; I am in shutdown now, and this will be how I will feel, at least for the next little while.

 

On this particular occasion, the quietest place I could get to quickly was the library. It is not the ideal environment, but it was close enough for the time being. Quiet but busy, it stems the trickle of oil but does not stop it. I contacted my friend in a panic that I punctuated with the occasional meme. I needed to be picked up before the shutdown became a meltdown and the danger would trickle out of my chest and into the visible world.

 

Meltdowns are much rarer for me than shutdowns. A meltdown is the lovechild of a panic attack and Satan. It is when I become the greasy pelican weighed down, terrified, doing whatever I can to stop the suffering even if that means that I hurt myself. I start crying and hyperventilating. In my head the words ‘I need this to stop’ circle and circle all the way down forming a hurricane that powers through any self-control. When it is over, I am ashamed, embarrassed, and shut down. It hasn’t stopped just slowed down and slowed me down in the process. I embody the sort of mind-numbing slowness that leaves me vulnerable to more considered (and in some ways more dangerous) harm.

 

All that it took to push me into the oil spill was a day of trying to do too much, too many tourists, and a car that beeped at me. On that occasion and, unfortunately, often, I can find it difficult not to blame myself for my sensory overload. Why had I tried to do too much? Why had I crossed the road in a hurried panic? Why had I ever dared think that I was allowed to exist in the outside world? After all, I have always been painfully aware that the world was not made for people like me.

 

‘The world was not made for people like me’- that’s another one of my downward spirals that can hurricane through my soul. It’s a difficult one to intercept though because there is some truth in it. It is true that most of the world was made with the dominant neurotype (so-called neurotypicals) in mind- but not the whole word. There are corners for me and I can and will find them. If I look back on how miserable I was a year ago pre-diagnosis, the progress I have made would have been inconceivable to me. Part of that is, of course, the mental health care I have received, but another part is the fact that I now know that niggling feeling of never fitting in, feeling like the world is alien, being the only sober person in a room full of drunks has a name: autism. Sure, I’m still lonely occasionally. Sure, I still feel out of pace, hurt people accidentally, sometimes feel like I’m fundamentally broken, but I now know that there might be a community for me. I have some of that ‘thing with feathers’ (as Emily Dickinson put it)- hope.

 

In the group that I attend for my mental illness, one of the facilitators particularly likes the sentence ‘what can I do with this emotion?’- the point being that emotions are not there to be suppressed but lived with, accepted, and validated. Well, when I’m in shutdown and meltdown, the separation between self and emotion becomes invisible and therefore I can’t work with the emotion- I feel I am the emotion. I embody fully the distress I endure inside. The separation is still there though; I am not my meltdown, I am not the greasy pelican. I am Joy- the penguin-loving, nerdy woman who dresses in metallic pink Doc Marten’s and loves Taskmaster. I am Joy and I value kindness and community and music. I am Joy- the woman who replies to tweets with cute animal pictures whilst drinking a chai latte. 

 

Somewhere between being scooped up by my friend outside the library and Uptown Girl by Billy Joel, the pelicans free themselves from my chest and I feel like me again. I hope I remember the next time I feel oily and inhuman that the feeling will lift and the barrier exists. I am not my thoughts, I am not my emotions, I am not my meltdowns; I am Joy, I am Joy, I am Joy.