System Failure
There’s a moment in Lost when Desmond is down in an access tunnel beneath the Swan station trying to turn a failsafe key while a recorded voice on a loop warns of a system failure. That loop was stuck in my head for a time this evening as I struggled to remember its source, because today was just such a system failure.
I’ve had one or two days a week for the past several weeks of morning insomnia which erupted overnight into an intermittent but nightlong regular insomnia, culminating in a six o’clock in the morning where I got that feeling I get now and then that my autonomic breathing isn’t sufficient and I’m not taking in enough air. It happens when my stuffiness that is not congestion is just bad enough that I cannot take a full, lung-topping breath through my nose alone and need to switch to my mouth at the end.
After a dose of Afrin, I got a couple more hours of sleep and then lazed and lingered in bed for today’s Red Sox game, followed by my normal breakfast, and then headed out to go read over coffee because I had a “pay it forward” full punchcard from one of my usual places.
Half a block from my apartment, there was a woman with a walker who tried to get my attention. Without going into detail, she had a physical disability which impacted normative enunciation and pronunciation—and here’s where her circumstance collided with my own, to everyone’s detriment.
Conversations can be difficult enough when you’re autistic because of all the things that need to happen more or less at once: listening to the other person, understanding the other person, keeping track of that in your mind while also figuring out your own responses while waiting your turn, and even figuring out wen it is your turn. Normative brains do all of this without little effort. Autistic brains, or at least those like mine, get tripped up by all the rapid task switching required.
At any rate, it’s a known thing to me that I have enormous difficulty, be it somehow related to my autistic brain or not, understanding people with impediments to normative speech. Combine that with the fact that my bodymind has been out of equilibrium for weeks now and I’ve been running low on resources more quickly than usual, and then add in the autistic hurdles in even a normative conversation, and not only could I not understand what they were trying to say to me, but as they became louder and more insistent in their own frustration, I teetered on the edge of a full-on autistic shutdown there on the street corner.
Embarrassed, ashamed, and angry, I had to walk away, leaving them stranded in not being understood, with no one else within earshot who might have been able to take my ineffectual place.
After coffee and a post-breakfast snack, I was feeling muscle weak and somewhat discombobulated and once at home immediately made lunch, and after that it became glaringly obvious that I was going to have to skip my daily walk. I couldn’t even finish what I was watching during lunch because the sensory impact was too much. It’s already the case that over these last few weeks I’ve had a dramatic resources crash by the end of that walk, and between the insomnia and the social stressor of not being able to understand that person, the walk would be pushing it. Unfortunately, I did have to make a shorter trip to the grocery store and back.
Back from the store, I did my lunch dishes and rinsed out my travel mug from coffee out, and had trouble simply holding onto the items I was cleaning. When resources are low, I do have some degree of what I call “motor flubs”, likely because my brain is too tired to calculated all the compensations it runs for the dyspraxia.
For most of the afternoon, I had my electronic devices set to grayscale, another thing I do when resources are low to to reduce the sensory impact of things, but I couldn’t keep myself from doing some more work cleaning up my book data on The Storygraph despite the fact that cognitive work is work and this only was going to put me further in the hole.
Just sitting down to try to get all of this down before the day ends while it’s all still fresh in mind is pushing me toward orbiting a sobbing fit, in part because I just remembered the status I posted to my homepage almost exactly twenty-four hours ago:
It continues to be the case that the matter of resources versus demands is out of equilibrium and I can’t figure out why, but once again after a day of normal rest and normal diet, by the time I reached the end of my normal walk I was muscle weak and swimmy in the head, and this upcoming telephone appointment with my pulmonologist is going to have to be all about will one of my many doctors please decide on some new tests to run and ideas to pursue because this means my stable foundation seems to be collapsing.
None of this is all right. None of this is right. I’ve been trying to tell people for a few years now that all I can manage and maintain is that foundation, and that trying to build atop it—like I tried with that job placement through Vocational Rehabilitation—only serves to weaken that foundation. Now the foundation itself is cracking without any obvious source of additional stress, and without any obvious new demands upon my limited resources.
Something has to give, but at this point it feels like the only thing that’s going to happen is that I’m entirely going to give out. If I can’t find an answer, going to a baseball game is just wishful thinking that’s nonetheless already claimed train fare.