#then everyone was crowding me and rushing and now im in sensory overload

[acetheta]

bye if one more person irl says smth to me im gonna kill someone

[elliottexists]

My personal experience with an autistic shutdown

So yesterday i went on a school trip to a theatre to watch some people give lectures. There was alot going on for example people were talking, moving, opening food wrappers etc and that was incredibly overwhelming for me and caused me to have a sensory overload in the theatre. I was crying and feeling generally very uncomfortable and i needed to get away to go somewhere safe and quiet but there was no where i could. (Public toilets make me incredibly uncomfortable too so that wouldnt have helped)

When the talks finished, we had to leave the theatre but that meant huge crowds of school children (there were other schools there aswell) pushing and rushing through and i was being pushed and touched way more than i was comfortable with and at this point i was crying and shaking but i had to move through to get on the coach. Luckily, i had a really good friend with me who recognised i was feeling this way and stayed with me so i could just follow them and im very grateful for that because if they werent there i wouldve ended up curled up on the floor and getting trampled by teenagers.

We got on the coach and i was in a very bad place to have a shutdown. I was already finding it difficult to speak but i had to answer to a register and it took so much effort just to say "here".

After that i just broke down. I was crying and breathing incredibly heavily. I couldnt move or talk or focus on anything and i felt stuck inside myself. I was extremely scared something was gonna happen to me and i wouldnt be able to protect myself from it. Im so glad the 2 people next to me were my friends and were also neurodivergent and - even if they didnt know exactly what to do - they knew what not to do and so i felt alot safer with them. But because we were on a coach, i wasnt allowed to undo my seatbelt which was very tight, i couldnt get any fresh air, the lights were very bright, everyone was talking very loudly around me, there were people opening sweet packets, people were shouting and singing, the whole coach was vibrating as it was moving and there was no where i could get up and move to to get away from everything. It was a horrible experience thats never happened to me before, at least not to that extent.

I was unable to speak for most of the 3 hour journey back to school but after one of my friends reccomended i put my headphones on and listen to my music, i began to calm down and come out of the shutdown but not fully. I began to be able to respond to my friends through nodding and gestures and writing stuff down but not speaking and i was able to move and stim again. My friends played a huge part in making me safe in that moment because i know that if i was with people who didnt understand what was going on, they mightve asked me lots of questions or tried to touch/hug me which wouldve made everything increasingly worse. This is why there needs to be much more education on autism and what should and shouldnt be done if you are around an autistic person while they are having a shutdown.

But autistic shutdowns dont just end when you become more able to function and come out of the actual shutdown. Having a shutdown made me extremely exhausted and burnt out. I felt unmotivated to do anything and i still do even though its the next day. Im glad it is now the weekend and not another school day because i need today to recover from that experience yesterday.

i want there to be more education about what can be done to help someone having a shutdown or prevent the shutdown in the first place. Not all autistic people will have the same experience as me but i wanted to share mine to spread awareness. (apologies if i phrases anything wrong)