Shutdown

 So today my wife went to work in the office, leaving me in charge of feeding myself. Most days when she works from home, she fetches my breakfast, makes my lunch, and cooks dinner for the whole family. She does all this because I’m physically disabled. I’m not entirely incapable of doing these things myself, but the amount of pain and energy they require is significant for me, so in the years since I became disabled we’ve come around to an arrangement whereby I am in charge of making sure she feeds me - I ask her every time, for every meal - but she generally is the one who actually prepares my meals.

But not on the days she goes into work. Still, on those days, I usually try to make a point of asking her the morning before she leaves to make sure everything I need for my lunch is in the upstairs fridge and freezer. We have a second freezer in the basement, so sometimes something will need to be restocked from it, and in the event we are out of some of my lunch stuff, this ensures I will be aware of it from early in the day and a solution can be found.

A complication to this arrangement, is I’m autistic. I don’t handle change well. So when today, I forgot to ask her to make sure I had lunch stuff, and then when I went to make my lunch, I tossed in a sausage into the oven without double checking we had everything else, I started a ticking time bomb. When I went to turn this sausage into a sausage sandwich and discovered we only had a single butt end of bread and two broken halves of another piece, I could feel myself getting overwhelmed immediately, but I tamped it down and told myself, its fine, I’ll just toast these pieces and it’ll be a bit hard to eat, but its fine.

Then one of the halves got stuck in the toaster, and horribly mangled in my attempt to retrieve it. I now have one and a half pieces of bread for my sausage sandwich. I completely lost it. I snapped at one of my kids, pushed my cat off of the counter with altogether too much force (he’s fine but I was definitely out of line: he however clearly didn’t even register it as negative as he is continuing to harass me for attention), and then proceeded to just stew in the kitchen, locked in paralysis as I could neither finish my usual lunch I eat everyday nor find an acceptable alternative in what other food we had. This whole time my pain was slowly rising as my back screamed out in agony, begging for me to get back to my comfortable chair where it could rest. Eventually I calmed down enough to find a solution - I toasted a bagel and used that instead of bread, which was difficult to eat but at least got me out of my rut - but for a long time I just couldn’t do anything. I was shut down. The only options that I could find was a violent tantrum - which I suppressed with aforementioned difficulty - or simply refusing to feed myself at all. Logically I should be able to just eat the sausage plain, or find some other preparation other than a sandwich, or hell, even thrown it out and made something else - wasteful but at least I could move on - but for a reason I cannot quite articulate, those options were not open to me. I had to find the exact right solution to that would unlock my prison and let me move on with my day.

Generally speaking, I’m doing better. Since realizing I’m autistic it has become much easier to predict, prevent, and manage my sensory needs and thus minimize how often I get overwhelmed. But still, something as small as being out of serviceable bread is enough to send me spiraling. I feel like there should be some easy, obvious way to stop obsessing over things which I know logically are not that big of a deal, but until I get out of the situation and calm down, I just cannot. I generally consider my autism as simply an inextricable part of me - I don’t want to be “cured” and don’t even think I can, its an intrinsic part of me, but boy do I wish sometimes I could figure out a way to get through moments like this without feeling like an unruly child.

Anyways, that was the utterly trivial crisis which ruined my day. How’s yours?