The Spiral, The Meltdown, and The Shutdown

Finding compassion in the heat of it all

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Metamorphosis series by Crystal Marie

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A few days ago I had a doctor appointment with a specialist I’ve been waiting months to see. In the midst of an already challenging week, the thought of driving downtown Chicago and finding decent parking had me hanging on the edge of anxiety. A great big part of me wanted to reschedule, knowing what I now know about the way my neurodivergent brain works—how the everyday pressures of life without a break tend to accumulate until I hit a tipping point, and I was already in a bit of a spiral.

The thought was quickly nixed by my more pragmatic side, rescheduling would mean at least another 3 months wait time. So I woke early that day, too early, as I tend to do when I’m nervous about something important. The drive from the suburbs would be nearly an hour and there was the dreaded task of finding parking.

Traffic on the four lane interstate was heavy, but still moving at a decent clip, when I saw the car two lengths ahead of me swerve, and the truck I was following slam on its breaks. Penned in on both sides by traffic, helpless to get out of the way, I saw a large goose fly out from under the truck in front of me.

With a sickening thud it slammed against the front of my car and with what seemed like an endless number of equally sickening thuds, it bounced against the undercarriage, as I ran over it. Instinctively I looked in my rear view mirror with the last thud, just in time to see a baby goose (gosling?) running in confusion around the now crumpled, still soft body of its mother.

And that was it. My tipping point.

I was at once aware of what was happening and unable to stop it. Like the car, too late to avoid the inevitable, the warning signs had been there all week. I’d been using the language, telling close friends I was in a spiral.

Hindsight: I should have rescheduled that appointment. The spiral feeling is my warning sign. It is the blinking yellow light with only a fraction of a second before it turns red.

Autistic spirals are common. They are a result of added pressures, or sensory overload, or any circumstance that feels overwhelmingly out of our control. When I sense it coming on, I know I need to retreat and spend a few days disconnected and in silence. But the pressures of earning my living are the same as anyone else’s, so it isn’t always possible to heed.

And I still lean heavily towards denial.

Even now, I feel it rising as I remember that scene. A wail coming from somewhere deep inside. I was the goose wailing for its orphaned baby. I was the gosling who lost its mother, about to meet a similar fate on that concrete fairway.

Having a meltdown in the car hand clamped tight across my mouth, eyes fixed on the traffic ahead, but seeing that baby goose in my rear view mirror over and over again, I was at once, aware of what was happening, but helpless to stop it. Like a well loved album with a scratch in it, my brain gets stuck in this loop. The sensation of the thuds against my car, the panic that hit when I knew I couldn’t avoid it, the baby! Oh the baby!

In between the wails my mouth kept forming those words, packed with every trauma I’ve ever experience my entire life.

“BAYYYBEEE! Oh the BABYYYY! Ooooooooooh Baaaaybeeeee! Noooooooooooooo! No! No! No! No! NOoOOoooo!”

I am immediately thrown back in time, connecting to the memory of similar meltdowns early in my former marriage, just after he would fly into one of his rages. Undiagnosed at that time, I could never understand my own behavior. Curled in a fetal position like a helpless newborn, I’d wail and wail. Why couldn’t I get up? Why couldn’t I leave? Especially when my meltdown was met with his utter contempt, standing over me spewing insult to injury.

Such a strange feeling, this juxtaposition between the wailing of the meltdown and the cognitive awareness of new understanding.

Being thrown even further back, another memory, another meltdown, this time I am 6-years old at the feet of my dad. He is removing his belt to punish me, disgusted by my tears, he doesn’t follow through with the spanking and he spews “You are your own worst punishment!” as he leaves me alone to my wailing.

In that very moment in the car, stuck in that meltdown loop, I feel it rising. A deep compassion for my younger selves—the young bride self married to the emotional abuser, the child self who never could understand what she wasn’t doing right, rolling on the floor at the feet of her dad, begging him for mercy. I really was helpless to stop it, AM helpless to stop it, when the meltdown takes over. I know now, what I didn’t know then, all I can do is ride it out, like the tidal wave of emotional overload that it is.

I managed to soothe it to a dull roar, lingering somewhere behind my eye sockets in time to meet with the doctor. When I shared my recent diagnosis of autism as an aside, her shock was visible as she readjusted her perception. Later in her own aside, she confided her concern that her children might be on the spectrum, yet she was reluctant to get them diagnosed because people might be biased and they’d grow up with that stigma.

You all know the fear of what other people think is my specialty.

I explained what it was like growing up not knowing. How people will still be biased, they just use their own labels to identify the behavior they deem weird about your child, and the child will not understand why the same kind of rejection and bullying keeps happening to them no matter how nice, or normal, they try to be. And they are trying. God knows, they are trying inside.

It was more than I could express in passing, the doctor left the room, and once again I felt it rising. Not the wailing, but the compassion. The sadness for my younger self combined with a great compassion and sadness for all the other younger selves out there, growing up not knowing. Worse still, having a parent who suspects, but is too stuck in their own fear of what other people will think to pursue a diagnosis. Those misguided noble attempts we make as parents to shield our babies from being stigmatized.

Shame upon shame.

The more I learn about the true traits of having a neurodivergent brain and hear the stories of other people in the autistic community, versus the common stereotype of what I thought it was, the more I recognize myself and feel relieved. I know in my bones I am the same person as I was last year before my diagnosis. I know in my heart of hearts that everything I have to offer as an artist and a human is still every bit as relevant.

I’m learning now, the strategies needed to take better care of myself. Looking for ways to add the necessary padding in my days to avoid the spiral, the meltdowns, and the subsequent shutdown inside my brain. Allowing those traits that I’ve spent a lifetime suppressing, the ones that are soothing and stabilizing, to come out of the closet. Still, the more I share openly about it, and the more I feel connected to my true self, the more I see people taking a step back, like that shift in the doctors appearance when I shared, looking at me through a different lens. Questioning the validity of my work and words.

There is a tug of war happening between the hiding and the coming forward through this transition to recovering my core self, lost as I was to it so long ago. The cost of the hiding is weighed daily against the cost of being openly me. I’m frustrated with the process. Catching the old thinking patterns of self preservation and need for an income, battling against the desire to live free. Still trying to figure out what that even looks like. It is exhausting and it is messy. It is metamorphosis without the privacy of a cocoon.

Two days later, I still hear that wailing ringing in my ear and I have compassion.

And I grieve.