Have you ever felt overwhelmed by places and situations? Yeah, I think whether we are on the spectrum or not we’ve probably all been there. To me, it often starts with my extreme sensitivity to noise, light and things like that. I believe it’s called hypersensitivity, but really, my experience of it is very much like other people have a filter that sorts through visual, auditive and other inputs like that and discards whatever isn’t important at that moment – and yeah, my filter seems broken. Even if someone I deeply care about is trying to tell me something super important and all I want is listen to them, someone scratching their arm several meters away can be so noisy and distracting that I can’t hear a word my friend is saying.
Perhaps, the sun is shining, and some white surface is reflecting it so strongly that my eyes hurt, and I am getting a headache. Or it could be something else even more ridiculous, like someone wearing a t-shirt with a bright pink flower on it and for some reason the colour is so intense it’s all I can focus on. I don’t want to be like that, all I want is listen to my friend or be able to sit at work and do my job, but suddenly it’s all of those things and more and then I get overwhelmed, and it is only a matter of time before I break.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t like going out. I prefer doing as much as possible from home. I tried living in the city before, but it’s too noisy and smelly and I felt like I was going crazy. It was like being stuck in a box with the same song playing constantly day and night. So, now I moved to the countryside. It’s a small town, quiet most of the time and really mainly old people live here now. It helps, but it doesn’t help me when I need to go into the city. I work in a big office in a big building in the middle of the capital city of my country, so yeah, even without the added stress of the office and the building, it’s already difficult for me to just be in the city. But… I need to work. I need to meet friends. I need to live life.
Well, I guess I don’t need it as much as I want it. I could live life being broke and friendless sleeping on a sofa at my mother’s house and I would still be content. I can’t help it though. I want to earn my own money, I want to travel and meet my wonderful friends who live all over the world. I want to see the world while it’s still here. I want to climb a mountain and learn how to dive. I want to see the northern lights. I want to see and feel and experience this beautiful planet. The world can be so beautiful, if only we take the time to really see it.
Of course, to do that I need to earn money. Sure, there is also the fact that I have student loans to pay back after spending way too many years at university only to utterly fail in finding a way to use my degree as anything but a very expensive diploma-fan in the not so hot summer days. So, yeah, I really need to earn money and to do that I need to keep a job long enough for them to pay me a salary. Oh joy.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying all work is horrible, but if you are anything like me, you have most likely forced yourself to accept terrible working conditions simply to have a job. You have probably pretended to be normal, because you know as well as I do, that being open about being on the spectrum is not going to make it easy to find a job – at least, it hasn’t in my experience. Even the best places I worked at and the most wonderful colleagues I have had honestly just don’t appreciate the struggle and sacrifice some of us has to make to survive just going to work. Now I am open about my diagnosis, but I am not honest at work about my needs or challenges – I tried to be, but it just doesn’t make a difference. People don’t understand. I am not angry or hurt, like I used to be when I felt mistreated, because I don’t think they always do it on purpose.
Sure. There are bad people out there. Or, if not bad people, then there are people who do bad things. That doesn’t mean everyone is like that. They often just don’t understand or maybe they are suffering too and feel that we all have to suffer a little to get through the day and people should stop complaining.
In my experience, getting a job being open about my autism spectrum disorder feels like Santa Claus coming twice to your house in one night and keeping the job makes it feel like Santa Claus didn’t just come back the second time to take away your Christmas present.
My point is, I don’t feel like I have the same chance to pick and choose a job or a career as neurotypical people seem to have. So, even if no one at work recognises my challenges, even if there is no support from anyone and even if most people act like I am worthless and a waste of space, I will do my best to keep that job as long as possible – in spite of all the things that make work overwhelming or makes me feel like crying under a table in the corner.
Do you know that feeling? Do you feel like that now? It sucks, and even if there is no magical way to fix everything, there is definitely something that I have found helps me and now I am going to share it with you – it’ll sound crazy simple, but why not give it a chance?
Divide and conquer, my friend. Divide and conquer.
That, and excessive note writing.
So, yeah, it happens to me all the time. I get overwhelmed by… everything. Sometimes a situation is too much, and I simply have to leave, but leaving is not always possible. Most annoyingly, we can’t always work in an environment suited for us or even in a place we would like and when that happened in the past I would often simply shut down and zombie my way through every day until I broke down crying and shaking hiding under a table. I don’t recommend that as a coping mechanism, but hey, I was younger and had no idea I was on the spectrum – no one gave me any tools to deal with this kind of stuff.
One day, work was too much and I knew I couldn’t go back. I had to go back, but I couldn’t. So, I did this silly thing. I sat down and wrote down every single little and big thing that was a challenge for me at work, anything and everything from: ‘light too bright’, ‘no wall behind my back when sitting at desk’ to bigger things like: ‘meetings too long’, ‘can’t eat in the cafeteria’, ‘no place to eat lunch’ and even more abstract things like: ‘people don’t talk to each other nicely’.
Next step, I gave them a value as to how much they impacted me every day and arranged them in order of importance.
Then I was sat there with all these things I wished I could change and I started making up solutions. Not just one for all, but at least one for every challenge written down.
Now, here comes the most important thing: start small, start easy.
Anything we can fix ourselves, like: ‘environment is too noisy’, I try to fix myself. I bought noise cancelling headphones and earbuds (I can’t wear one too long before they hurt my ears and my head, so I switch between them whenever possible). This isn’t a complete fix – I can still hear people and I hate wearing headphones all day, but I use them when I can and it makes a small difference. That one thing on its own is nothing, barely a drop in the sea, but when we keep doing this – fixing small and simple things, it starts to add up.
Some things I needed to know more about before I could figure out how I would make it better, some I could guess. I asked for advice with some things first by talking to my friends and family before bringing it up at work – they didn’t react too well when I started asking about things like that, so now I know to choose my ‘battles’ carefully at work. Even asking about it could be a problem, but I suppose some people don’t even want to know if a problem exists.
‘Light too bright’ I couldn’t fix on my own, but I had assumed it was a little thing. It wasn’t apparently, because our office had these crazy power lights that we were (at the time) not allowed to adjust because they were automatic. There was a lot of talk back and forth and I had to go back to my notes and re-think my solutions. It was far more troublesome and people actually got a bit upset with me and my odd obsession with ‘bright light’.
In the end, one of my ideas was to just cover the lamp above my desk with paper like a makeshift extra lampshade to dull the light a bit. At first the idea was rejected, but one day when I came to work my boss had thought more about and actually – as a kind of friendly surprise, maybe – made exactly the change I had suggested and the paper did work to dull the light.
Of course, I don’t like surprises at all, so that bit of it stressed me out a lot, but once I got over that, the change in light has truly made a difference and I started having fewer headaches. Other people in the office started noticing the change in brightness over my desk and one guy even used coloured post-its to make a wannabe lampshade too.
All the changes I wanted didn’t happen right away – in fact, I am still working on improving my work environment. Starting small and fixing many little things made a huge difference though, so it is easier to start trying to fix the bigger things – like how I want to help us all communicate better and talk to each other politely and friendly in meetings. That is probably going to take a lot of time, if I ever succeed. It’s not really something I can control and I am still trying to find other – new – solutions to that one.
Say you have 2 or 3 major things, 4 medium things and a whole bunch of little things. Once you’ve dealt with all the little easy things you can, all those things add up to maybe the same impact as dealing with one or two major things. Then, when you tackle the medium things you are already starting from a different place – a place of several successes and a place that feels better, because fixing part of all the things that bother you will make you feel better and less pressured, you’ll have learned more about how to deal with all different kinds of challenges and hopefully will be able to approach the more difficult things with more creativity when looking for solutions. At least, I hope so. It was how it happened for me.
Who would have thought that something like solving too bright light in the office, something I struggled with getting fixed at work for months, ended up being solved by one of my sillier ideas like making a paper lampshade? Sometimes, solutions are difficult to find and far simpler than we originally thought.
What I am suggesting is really just to separate every single thing that is a part of a situation that overstimulates or overwhelms and then train ourselves to see solutions instead of focusing on what brings us pain or makes us suffer. Isolate everything, think and feel about how something makes us feel and start small. Sure, something we think is an easy fix might not be and vice versa. Something that impacts us a lot might have a somewhat silly, but simple, fix. It’s still a fix though.
I don’t even have to write down everything like this anymore – I have reached a point where I have trained myself so much to isolate every issue I am facing, that I can do so in my head and evaluate my options quickly on the go. A possible situation that overwhelms me could be something that happens on a train, a sudden and unexpected thing that overwhelms me and push me beyond my limits. Then I do just this; evaluate all the stressors, isolate and feel the impact each one has on me, and I start with the easiest thing to fix and work my way up.
By the time I get to the really difficult stuff I have already worked my way through several issues and feel not only better than I did before, but the many little successes I achieved from repeatedly fixing all the little things that overwhelmed me makes me feel more confident and capable of making myself feel safer and better.
In the past, when I got overwhelmed or over-stimulated it was impossible to separate any of what I was experiencing. It was all just too much. Everything hurt. Everything was bad. Noise, light, people, voices, feelings, touch, smells and everything else just mingled inside me and all I could do was cry and wail crouched and shaking.
When I have meltdowns or something, I feel like I have no control, no choice, I feel so very lost and sad and hopeless sometimes. When I learned how to deal with my meltdowns, I stopped feeling that way. I accepted that it was a part of me and as I worked on learning to handle the meltdowns, they became less frequent and less straining on me and those around me.
This is the same. I haven’t fixed all the problems I have with being at work, far from it, but I am working on it. I may not stay working where I am now forever, but everything I fix – every little thing that makes my life even just a tiny bit better or easier – I can take that with me wherever I go in the future. I feel a lot better at work, even though I am not happy yet. That’s fine. As long as I am working here, I will continue to making my list shorter and maybe some day I won’t even need to write a list ever again.
Maybe the next place I work, I will have the tools to handle every challenge I am faced with and writing lists like this won’t be necessary. Maybe I will have to start over and make a whole new list. It doesn’t matter. This is like a life skill, teaching ourselves how to figure out how things makes us feel and what really matters in life.
If you struggle, why not try to make a list like this and start small? Ask the people who care about you if they have any ideas and think in terms of possibilities no matter how silly they are.
If you feel better because you wake up at 4 in morning and watch the sunrise it’s worth it even if people say it’s too early to get up in morning. If it makes your whole day easier and better, not only will you be happier and feel better – so will everyone else because YOU do. Just don’t force anyone to do anything that makes them feel worse or bad. Just because some of us enjoy the early quiet mornings it doesn’t mean everyone does.
