How overwhelming and challenging it can be when your an autistic adult and can not follow an unfamiliar route

Being autistic,  one of the hardest thing I have to deal with is not being able to understand quickly what I feel, or express it to others, and  having to deal with  most Nero typical people not being able to understand  just because they can do something easy I can't, so nobody  knows or is aware that I'm in high levels of distress.  For example as I cant understand or follow unfamiliar routes or maps, this week and had a training session is Nottingham.  I do not feel comfortable being in Nottinghamshire as I find it an unpleasant place to be in. For most people it is an incredibly easy journey to make but this is what  I experienced:-

 

My training session began at 9.30am  so I  arrived at   Nottingham bus station just after 6am,  armed with pictures, notes, maps of where I had to walk literally drawn out on a pieces of paper.  What should have been a 15 min just around the corner journey, took me over three hours of walking around many streets lost trying to find it. ( which is why I prepared and went early  because I know how  much I struggle with it).  I didn't feel upset, as my opinion was a simple factual one.   I was lost on my own so somehow I would either find it  and if I cant find it I just back home.

 

 Even trying to find my way out of the shopping centre took a long time, because it doesn't matter how much someone tells me just walk to a certain shop and the exit is there, it doesn't process in my brain and i cant do it. The only way I can follow any journey is by walking it for months and memorising it off my heart until I automatically  do it.   I did managed to find the place I was meant to be at and got there at 9.10 am well before the training session started,  because a very kind  work man noticed I had wandering past him  many times and  he asked me if I need help,  he then kindly escorted me to where I was meant to go and i returned the favour by giving him some of my cigarette as he didn’t have any until he  could go to the shops later.   So to others on the course I looked like I had arrived promptly before time and well prepared.

 

I took part in the training session,  I enjoyed it,  i smiled, I chatted to everyone and I  lost count of how many times it was mentioned at the training session how calm I was during demonstrating things during training, as  I displayed no visible signs at all that anything was wrong. However during the training  I started to feel wobbly, dizzy and felt like i was going to blackout, my head starred hurting,  my heart was beating funny and not in its normal rhythm. I started to itch, and my eyes starting to hurt like they was being stabbed, to many people on the course  where laughing and taking at the same time over the top of each other  and all I could hear was loud noise to the point my head felt like it was going to explode, I started noticed small things that then became overbearing,  such as uneven patterns in the over bright coloured stickers on the windows, a person shoelace was not tied, someone on the next table was rustling some paper that sounded to me like it was 100 decibel loud, but I still didn't display this in any way i continued to smile, chat and activity take part all calm and collected way.

 

After training finished a lady on the course had to walk back to Nottingham,  so thankfully I walled with  her and let her choose which way we went.  In-between myself wondering if I was going to be sick on the pavement or not,  we walked along  chatting about how much we enjoyed the course and how good the trainer was, which was true because it was a really nice course, and l still did not display any signs at all of anything being wrong.   I got on the bus to go home,  the bus was loud and packed with way to many people on it due to  it being  busy rush hour time, there was to many people in different brightly coloured cloths or hair all stood together which was overwhelming to me,  it was  uncomfortable to sit on the bus, and i started to feel trapped, couldn't breath and that   I was suffocating, so I closed my eyes and  turn the music  headphones up in the hope to block it all out and hung onto the seat rail  to try to sit comfortably.

 

I was meant to be staying on the bus and going straight home. I  managed to resist the urge to get off the bus half way through the journey  just to get away from it , but as the bus approached a stop near where my mother lived  I knew I couldn't stay on the bus for the 4 minutes further I  needed to go for me to get home as I just couldn't cope with it any more and  had to get off the bus. 

I  went to my mums house at 5pm. I didn’t speak when I go there,  I walked in, lay down on  her sofa, and as my mum already knew what would be wrong and what I would need,  she didn't ask me any questions,  she simply  covered me up with a thick duvet cover, tucked me in and let me sleep and I slept for 4  hours curled up in a ball with my head hidden under the duvet.

 

 When I woke up  still without asking me any questions,  my mum popped a coffee and two paracetamol at the side of me, turn the lights down and put music on in the background and without even speaking to me she  carried on doing the crossword puzzle she was doing, because she knew if she bombarded me with questions of " how did it go?”  “Did you get there?”  “How do you feel?” “What's wrong?”  as that  would be  to much drama for me to cope with and would have been the touch paper that lit the fuse, so she just let me be still, and she gave me the time I needed to process it all  and to get all the sounds,  the  colours, the pain, the weird sensation out of my brain in my own time so that I could understand what i was feeling.  Once awake I then sat for an hour and a half  zoned out, staring at the wall and listening to music for an hour, roughly at  10.30 pm. I told her how much I loved her and thanked her for always understanding what I need without me having to explain it, it was only that my mum spoke and she asked me “if I was alright and did I wanted anything to eat or another drink?”  Which I  opted for a another coffee and headed off home afterwards.   When i got home my son had made his own dinner, loaded the dishwasher, left the kitchen clean and tidy and  was gaming in his room on his pc, and after checking he was alright,   I went to bed, had a nice sleep and carried on the rest of my working week the following day.

 

Now 3 days later relaxing at home for the weekend. I have a headache that just will not go away, my scalp and skin on my body  is sore and red raw from scratching, as my entire body is itching.  My hair is falling out,  my face is burning, I feel sick and wobbly,  I have electric shock pains running all over my torso and in my eyes sockets, my face neck upper body and arms are numb and I feel generally run down and ill.   It  has  taken me 3 whole days to finally be able to  process that the reason my body is feeling these things is because I'm distressed. I am still not display in my face any signs of being distressed at all and I'm not crying or feeling upset, because the way my brain works is distress doesn’t show on my face it shows by my body experiencing strange sensation that combined together make me very ill. It’s only when I become ill that I am able to process that it is stress. It then  normally takes me  roughly  several months  and sometimes even longer for all these symptoms to go away. So would I go to that place again?

 

 Yes I would definitely try to do that again, because that's how you overcome challenges and by doing something again is how it becomes familiar and stops being something you can't do. It’s very important to overcome things that are challenging and difficult to do.  Also it was an enjoyable course and I like doing course, but it would be something I would only be able to do again 3 months later.  I would not be able to do it again,  this week, next week or even a month later as not allowing any  recover time many  symptoms it causes, would have a massive  negative impact on my health that would  causes me harm.

 

Because autistic doesn’t mean you can’t do things, because I can assure you that any autistic person can achieve absolutely anything and they can all do things that they find challenging and autistic people can change to because when I was 14 years old I would have punched, kicked and lashed out at every single person on that bus to the point I would have needed to have been zapped many times with a Taser gun to stop me,  as I thought back then that  was the only way to get away from the horrendous and very painful  over stimulation I was going  through, but as an older autistic adult I’ve learnt that doesn’t help and causes more distress, just the same as people stopping you from doing the things you find challenging also causes more distress, so I learn over the years better ways to cope with it, which is doing these things in my own time when I feel able to do them, learning to stop when it’s to much and trying again when your ready to rather than doing it because someone else can or because someone else expects you to be able to.