Autistic Overwhelm

Hello! I’m Natalie Cassidy!…. I’m not, but I’ve had this earworm of Morgana Robinson impersonating her, in my head, all day, so I’m passing it on to you, here you go enjoy! (Tiktok Link)

What is overwhelm?

Dictionary Definition:

1. verb
   If you are overwhelmed by a feeling or event, it affects you very strongly, and you do not know how to deal with it.

My AuDHD Definition:

1. I can feel the temperature change by 0.1 degree, while a child is screaming in my ear, the sunlight is at that particular angle in the sky that blinds me and I can’t see my phone screen. WHERE IS THE BRIGHTNESS BAR!!!!!  

2. The audio volume between the main show and advert break is extremely loud, while the washing machine has started it’s supersonic spin cycle and starts rattling the cupboard door and your partner walks into the room shouting “Look at this TikTok!” 

And many other similar daily events…

I had fourty years of cosplaying experience as a neurotypical person, with regular overwhelming overwhelm, without knowing I was on the spicy spectrum, and I would be completely fucking my life up at times. I’d like to share some of those unsuccessful times with you today mighty reader.
Now from the outside looking into these senarios, to the untrained eye, it looked like I had my shit together.. Until I didn’t.
However I’m now looking at these situations and moments from life, with the learned knowledge of neurodiversity, but if this was pre-diagnosis I would probably be conveying how much of a complete fuck up I am, full of shame and hatred, over-analysing every detail and in a spiral of negative self talk.
However, for the most part, that is no longer the case, I’m now looking back at these “Fuck Ups!” With a sympathetic, mindful, and often self-deprecating lens. So with that let’s just get to it shall we…

I left a Supervisor/Duty Manager role at a high traffic, city centre, catalogue retail store, all because they changed the uniform.

I know…..Yes it’s true. It sounds ridiculous, I know. 
We went from a a lovely mixed cotton, breathable, comfortable, embroidered logo, lush, ribbed collar and hem. To a boxy, unflattering, synthetic, shower curtain-ish, poly plastic, cheap, man made, short sleeved shirt, that looked terrible for starters, but that wasn’t the main problem.
I’m sensitive to temperature changes and my body finds it difficult to regulate it’s temperature, (I’ve learned this is a common co-occurring problem for autistic people) so as soon as my body produced a tiny bit of sweat wearing this monstrosity, the shirt would stick to my skin like your swimming shorts coming out of a pool. Or cooked sphagetti to a tiled wall. It felt icky and I couldn’t bare the sensation. I can feel it now just thinking about it. Eurgh, OVERWHLEMED!!!!

So what did I do about this small, probably solvable if I talked to management about it problem? I endured. I wore the thing. I masked my feelings and gaslit myself into believing I could cope. It was only a little shirt.

It was torture, I was torturing myself. I would constantly worry about sweat marks. I would constantly be spraying deodorant and drying myself with the display of desk fan’s on the shop floor. I would hide in the cash office for as long as I could as to not have to put the wet shower curtain on again. I would pray for easy days where I could meander around the warehouse, supervising others. But no, just my luck, we would get a delivery of three hundred tv’s to place somewhere in the tiny warehouse at peak summer, with no air con in thirty degree heat. But I endured. 

I could have talked to management about it, I could have said:

“Look Chief, this is my problem, I’m just as embarrassed about this as you are hearing it, but I can’t wear this shirt because of personal hygiene issues..”

And we could have come up with a solution. But I couldn’t do that. Being forthcoming with my own needs is something that I am only learning to express now, in my 40’s. Back then, 20 years ago, I didn’t want to be seen as someone different, I didn’t want to be singled out. oh no I didn’t deserve to take up space in the world. I would play out imaginary conversations, trying to rehearse what I’d say If I did, and my negative brain would think they would react with:

“No one else has a problem with the shirt, why should you be any different to the rest of the staff?” NO!

And I’d crawl back into the depths of my mind and just endure this situation. No one else complained, other than the boxy unflattering fit and overall style of this shirt. I’d just endure. I’d be a sweaty mess with a wet shirt stuck to my back, with a white ring of anti-perspirant stain in the shape of Canada across my shoulders and just endure. Mask my feelings and endure.. and endure…. and mask…..

Until I could no longer… I just quit. Used my staff discount one final time, handed in my notice with immediate effect and never went back. It probably wasn’t just that shirt, probably other things too like the social aspect, which I’ll get to at some point. But it was a major factor. Yep, how stupid of me. It was stupid.

But in my own defence, I didn’t have the knowledge, language or understanding as to what was happening.
“You were burnt out going home everyday after enduring sensory overload. In the end, you were overwhelmed and having an internal autistic shutdown/meltdown.” – my brain just rationalising the situation for me as I write lol

I’ve never been vocal or outwardly expressive when I have meltdowns, they are always internal wars in my body and brain. Even to this day.
As a child I was raised with the mantra ‘Children should be seen and not heard’, which was common among parents from the ‘silent generation’.
I believe this grew into me internalising everything. When I was confronted with authority as a child I’d go mute too, so the two combined was not healthy.
In adulthood it developed into low self-esteem, self hatred and loathing, never feeling good enough for anything. Those feelings still return sometimes. Probably more often than I like to admit, but we are all works in progress right? We live and learn, however, when your not self-aware, the lessons take longer to learn, hence being late diagnosed. 

I got a promotion at probably the best job I ever had, and I quit. #OVERWHELM

Strap in, this one is long. 

For context, every job I have ever had has lasted slightly longer than the last. From two days, to one week, from two weeks to a month and so on and so on. I had built up an array of coping mechanisms (unconsciously) to stay in employment longer each time, up to eighteen months. Until this one. This job lasted for five years. This is a complete anomaly.
Looking back I believe this one was an anomoly because I was, for the most part, left to my own devices. I was pretty much allowed to do what I wanted within reason, manage my own time, take my own breaks, etc.
I was a team member of a small eco fashion brand, I started out as a Christmas temp working in the warehouse packing orders, with a small team of eight people with some who worked remotely. I’d only needed to interact with a small amount of people per day. It was a great company to work for, with some fantastic characters. Because it was small and because it was growing, all input was valid, all improvements and suggestions were implemented quickly and for the most part everyone was chilled and laid back. (But me, lol)

I fell in love with this job and the people, probably too much and to my own detriment in the end, but this place became my hyper focus, most favourite thing in the world, and I will die for this company. lol. I almost killed myself through pushing past all my social anxieties, demand avoidance, time management, over extending myself etc, however throughout my tenure, I tried to present a person who knew what they were doing, when really by the end, imposter syndrome and overwhelm took over.

As I said, I started out as a temp, but very quickly got my foot into every corner of the business, because I was excited and I wanted to learn. All the skills I had learnt throughout the years at many different jobs, my enthusiasm for technology, my need for routine and order, my can do attitude, my ‘YES’ mentality, really propelled me forward. But what cemented me as an invaluable member of staff happened just by chance. 

It’s post Christmas, nearing the end of January sale time, and my permanent position within the business is still not determined, but I was confident they would retain the few of us as this was a growing business.
I had been prodding about the state of the website among members of the team and they were keen to pass the housekeeping of it on to me without any hesitation.
It was 3pm on a Friday and there was nothing to do and we were all winding down, we had a team Skype call with the owner and they ended asking for me to go into another video call. For a business owner, this man, is a beautiful human being, his aura shines bright, probably the kindest and most respectful, eager and enthusiastic person I’ve ever known, really interpersonal as a boss and he made me and everyone he meets, feel at ease and welcome. As we chatted he asked:

 “Have you heard of the e-commerce platform Magento?”

At the time I didn’t know what the term e-commerce meant, let alone Magento, a superhero I thought. But I shook my head and carried on intrigued. As the conversation went on it was apparent that new software or platform for the website was needed. The website at the time looked very dated for 2013, this I had already expressed multiple times during my initial few months. It was built 8 years earlier in 2006 when the company formed. The (practically non-existent) web development was outsourced to an independent web developer, who really had no time or resources to improve it. It didn’t have a content management system and barely had a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which was pretty standard at the time. This was the company’s store front, Both aesthetically and functionally didn’t portray the excellence, ethos or professionalism I had come to know this brand was capable of. If Amazon is the gold standard, we were local charity shop.
The conversation was just a general chat about where the website needs to be for the future, I wasn’t asked to do anything, I wasn’t given a task.

(Oh I just remembered, I was using this Scandinavian web e-commerce platform as a side project for my partners crafts at the time, this was before all your Wix, Shopify and Squarespace e-commerce web platforms had become popular. It was all very code heavy, no drag and drop features that are standard today. I’d shown the team my site which must have scored me brownie points.)

Anyway, I left work that Friday and as soon as I got home researched e-commerce sites and e-commerce software. Now for me, with unknown learning difficulties, I don’t learn by reading, YouTube tutorials were not as big then as they are now. I can’t learn anything if it doesn’t spark that dopamine in my brain. I need to play with something to learn about it. I need to break it, rebuilt it, diagnose and investigate to gain an understanding. I believe this is called ‘bottom up thinking’ for neurodiverse people.
I bought a cheap domains and webspace and spend the whole weekend playing, learning, discovering other platforms, building another website, identifying issues, creating products, replicating the current site on different platforms. Using plugins, breaking plugins.

Now to me this wasn’t work, this was fun, I was learning, it involved tech, the dopamine and flow state was streaming and tingling through my brain and I absorbed as much as I could. Nothing else existed in the world. ADHD activate! 

I managed to build three websites with self hosted e-commerce software, basic functions, couple of products etc. And tested a few e-commerce platforms. I listed the pros and cons to everything, costs, limitations, usability etc and within a weekend, without knowing at the time, map out the next five years for the direction of the website.

At work on Monday, asked to have another Skype call and I presented what I had done, just casually. I didn’t really understand how important this was at the time, and I probably came off a bit indifferent, as I am direct, to the point and always try to base my opinion on facts. Shortly after I started to explain each platform, show the functions, show the back-end features I could see the owner, in a small square box on my screen, get more and more excited, enthused, animated and delighted at what I had achieved in a weekend. It was a reciprocity with someone I had never had before, they were listening to what I had to say, took everything I said on board and for the first time in my life, felt respected. For once, I felt part of something. 
By the end of the call, I was given ownership of all the housekeeping of the website, I was to explore what I had already done, play, break and continue to iterate.

I’ve gone off topic, however, in terms of the relation to the subject matter, overwhelm, context of the starting point is needed. It’s also a reminder to myself that despite my disability getting in my way sometimes, It does have good sides, and this was one of them.

Throughout the first few years at this job, because I was ‘just the website guy’ with no real daily demands, I was asked to do other stuff within the business and be a backup person at busy times.
Occassionally, the dopamine would deplete from web stuff and the boring housekeeping jobs would be left to last minute. But I would shoehorn myself into the thick of things in other areas of the business that sparked the dopamine. I asked questions, suggested improvements, asked why things were done the way they were, improved processes, I made myself indispensable as the company grew.
Over time, departments grew and became sustainable, processes in the warehouse and customer service were streamlined. I worked with everyone, including the graphic design team of one, to hit catalogue and website imagery deadlines, attended and help organise photoshoots, all on top of my own things that felt boring after I streamlined. I once spent a weekend, off my own back, updating all the company computers from Windows 8 to 10. Something new and shiny lol. I made myself indispensable. I loved the attention, I loved that people relied on me, I loved being part of something.

That attention and demand was sometimes overwhelming, my autistic eccentricities would raise their ugly head at times. If we had a staff event or team building activity, I would be exhausted from the day and use alcohol to mask, but I didn’t actually mask, I would blackout and hear stories about myself where I acted like a child the next working morning. Urgh Beer Fear!

Sometimes I just didn’t gel with new team members and I would not treat them very well or not with the same respect as the team I had worked hard together with, created routines and celebrated the wins with.
“Who do you think you are making changes to the routines I helped create, you’ve only been here 5 mins” was my train of thought.
If you didn’t live up to my level of dedication you weren’t worth the time. Completlely immature of me looking back now.
I really don’t have the social skills anyway, but teamed with a 60+ hour week with burnout and deadlines, while trying to manage this perfect persona I had created, where I could not say ‘no’ to people.
Instead of saying no, I would be really defensive and stand offish sometimes and make their day shit, I for some unknown reason, reverted to childish bullying. I hate bullying, I was bullied incessantly at school. Maybe I saw some as a threat to me and my job. I think so. It was wrong. I was wrong.

Two years into this job I had crippling imposter syndrome, burnout, periods of hyperfocus on the website then stopping and starting projects, not feeling qualified, I wasn’t qualified, no prior work experience in web design or e-commerce marketing, I was learning and making mistakes on the job, in perpetual fear, waiting to be found out because I didn’t know what I was doing. Google search became the answer to most of my stumbling blocks. All the while saying yes to everything asked of me. It was a lot. But I endured. I continued. I struggled through. Sometimes the pay off and celebration of completed projects help relieve the struggle I was going through, but only briefly, onto the next thing. 

I wish I had confidence and self-esteem to put my hand up at the time and say ‘no’ respectfully. There were times, where I may have manipulated situations in my favour, made people uncomfortable, said things and did things that I’m not proud of. I hold myself accountable for that. I didn’t know I was AuDHD. I didn’t know the triggers, the solutions or was even self-aware of my own pattern of behaviours.

My boss would say to me sometimes, “Just do the right thing.”
Hand on heart, I would do what I thought was right for the business.
The job and the brand had become a part of me, it was like my child, I would protect it, rightfully or wrongly with all my heart, with all the energy I could muster. I poured a lot of energy into my work, but it was to my detriment. 

Fast forward to the final year of my love/hate relationship with my job and work environment. The web department finally got a developer, along with a new website, the process of it all was another great time, all the work throughout the years in understanding what the company needed in a website and make it future proof, with in-house development was coming to fruition and it was another glorious time. The developer and I were worked our butts off and when we finally switched over from the old site to the new, and we were scrambling to test all functions and make sure everything worked. It felt like another joyous time, just like the beginning. I continued to push myself.

Soon enough after, my importance in the company had started depleting. For the first time, a manager was hired for the web department. Maybe it was luck or maybe it was because of my previous work ethic, I was involved in the final stage of hiring selection and helped choose the person who would manage me. How often does someone hire their own boss? Ha ha, crazy now I think about that. In hindsight it was the perfect thing for my autistic brain. I had a voice for this major change.
The candidate was chosen. We hit the ground running together and implemented improvements to the website that either I wasn’t confident to do on my own and needed the back up of experience to initiate. Or where my knowledge fell short and they filled in the gaps. Another good time. We bonded. I continued to push myself.

Then the company had another spurt of growth with more staff, more departments being established. We had gone from sales of £500k in 2013, to £14M in 2018. Of course as a result we needed to grow up, and grow the team and streamline. It was the natural order of things. This was when I started to struggle real bad.
The systems and routines I had established with the core team were eroding, and rightfully being unloaded from me. My autistic brain didn’t see it like that, my brain saw it as theft, I was being stripped of my comfort blankets, everything I was familiar with was dissapearing, the ego took over and launched into defense mode. I would lash out here and there in childish stupid ways.
I was resistant to the change, another autistic trait I had no idea I had. Even though my rational brain would pop in and know this was the best thing for the business, I couldn’t cope. It was everything I was striving for and bleeting about for years. I pushed for departments to be built, I pushed for new processes, I pushed for streamlining, I pushed for managers. Along with the team, I helped to grow this brand. Yet when it happened my brain and body really struggled to cope and I was in overwhelm. I didn’t understand it at the time, probably still don’t fully. I struggled to process everything. It was a lot to take and I was starting to take sick leave off work for my mental health. A week here, a month there. I was falling apart mentally. My perfect persona had completely fallen off by this point.

I started to disassociate from life. I was a burnt out mess. I struggled to even do the simplest of tasks. The more time I took off, the more guilty I felt. I was back and forth the doctors, I had a misdiagnosis of Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder during this time, which was another stress and anxiety canon explosion for the brain. It was a rough time. I tried to continue on.

I believe the team wanted me to succeed and wanted me back in the office full time. I believe they wanted to nuture my natural talents to my advantage, take the stress of daily crap away and give me one sole job role.
I was promoted to UX designer. All the housekeeping duties were passed to another new member of the team, more comfort blankets taken away. I had to regurgitate all the knowledge that I was gatekeeping into training documents. Procrastinating hard while my brain was overthinking and ruminating on my new job role. “What the hell does UX designer do, I’m not educated in that!” imposter syndroming hard!

I knew I could no longer carry on like this, I had started to feel a disconnect from the job and company I once loved, I felt nothing. I was done. Dopamine exited the building. I couldn’t rationalise. 

My lines of communication with the owner at this point had become less so, we now had line managers and senior people to report to. I tried to reduce my hours and go part time, work from home maybe to at least cut out some of the social demands of the job, but it was at a time when the company was growing up, where they needed as many colleagues under one roof for productivity, so was advised against suggesting it.

I know now, that if I just picked up that phone and expressed everything that was happening to everyone, I would have been supported. I was already supported, but I couldn’t see that. I was in a constant overwhelmed anxious state, I had shut down internally. I went mute. I couldn’t express myself. I didn’t understand why I felt the way I felt, I didn’t understand why everyone else around me seemed to be coping at life and I wasn’t. I didn’t have the language of neurodivergence to express the social anxiety, the resistant to change, the need for isolation, the need for help, the need for reasonable adjustments. A little cupboard office for myself would have helped massively. Somewhere to just close the door and be alone to work. But I couldn’t ask for that, the imposter monster would revere in telling me:
‘What makes you think you are so special that you deserve your own office? No one else has there own office, what makes you so special?”

It got too much, I left the best job I’d ever had.

Do I regret it? ………. No.

Occassionally I think things could have been different, but that’s with hindsight. At the time, it was the only solution my burnt out brain could materialise. You can only make a judgment based on the facts, and if you don’t have all the facts, you go on instinct. My body was telling me to run! I think I had a breakdown. I don’t think I’d be alive if I didn’t leave. My whole world needed a reset.
Some other life changes happened at the same time which definately contributed, like moving two hundred miles across the country, but that’s for another time. At that time, my brain didn’t know how to operate my avatar, it’s only with this knowledge of my disabilities that I can see where I went wrong, how I overstretched myself, how change affects me, how important routines are for me, how important newness and variety is to me. How important noise cancelling headphones and loop earplugs are to me.

As a wise man said to me on many occasions, “Do the right thing” and it may not have seemed like the right decision from the outside. For me, it was.

This was such a hard blog to write, I experienced it all again while writing, reliving the words. Thank you for reading, in conclusion, overwhelm sucks!

Until next time, be kind to yourself. 🙏