Describing what I believe to be a partial shutdown...

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Mountain Goat
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Joined: 13 May 2019
Gender: Male
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31 Jul 2019, 5:45 am

I was writing a reply to someone on a forum and I never posted it. In the reply I was able to accurately describe what I get. I thought it may help someone who may get the same. I believe it is a partial shutdown, but as I have not been assessed yet, it could potentially be something else!
"He may have had a long term shutdown. I hope he hasn't had that. I know what that is and it is not nice. It is enough to be in a panic when one feels a partial shutdown coming and one can't find a suitable quiet shady place to lie down to recharge from having it. (Think of an electric car on a fast charge after it has been on a go slow so needs a recharge and you get the idea of what happens to me, and having people around trying to ask what is wrong is like having someone unplug the charger and all ones remaining energy has to go into trying to answer them, so it makes things worse and delays the recovery. (One can give out of character shirty replies to loved ones just to try to get time without talking so one can recover)."
Now I am not 100% sure what causes it other then a build up of stress, or a moment where someone says something which triggers off stress that I can't cope with... Or if I have to deal with crowds which is soo annoying as to partially shut down in a crowded area is the worst place to get it, as one doss not have the strength to reach somewhere more secluded, so one is risking a much deeper shutdown with (If those in the crowd see me and want to try to help) a much longer period before I have a chance to recover.
While I am not sure if I am effected by bright lights or not, though I have always found a flickering tube type light in a shop or school etc to be not just destracting, but almost unbearable enough for me to have to cover my eyes or want to avoid the shopping isles of the flickering light altogether, I do find that if I do get a partial shutdown, I need to get out of direct sunlight if I can. In other words, I will seek the shade of a tree to lie down under so that I can recover.
I find I usually need to lie down if I need to recover. I can "Feel" if I am starting to recover or if I am going deeper into the shutdown, so I can usually respond to the situation. For example, if I feel the fringes of a shutdown coming on, I have a bit of time to find a quiet place not too far away to sit down. I also find that eating something chocolaty or drinking sugary cola can speed up recovery or, for a while, delay the effect of the shutdown, or if I catch it in time, and I have found a quiet shady place to recover in, then a small bar of chocolate will give me a physical boost when my body is starting to deplete itself of energy as it is as if my brain needs this boost of energy... In the past, many times over the years I have assumed I was diabetic, but whth many blood tests coming up clear I used to be very puzzled! But I never linked the symptoms to being a partial shutdown (It is only from about the age of 45 onwards that I started to think that the people who told me they thought I had asperges or autism were not joking... As I never would have thought it. I just assumed I was a unique character, and it took me two years to be able to ask one of the doctors if I was on the spectrum because I would get mind blank situations due to the panic of seeing a doctor and to get my mind out of mindblank, I would need to switch to default settings which meant changing the subject to do this... So I am on a waiting list to be assessed. It was only then when I thought "Could these energy loss type situations where my body goes limp and I end up on the floor (It almost feels like fainting) be anything to do with autism or asperges?" This question led me to take the brave unusual step of joining a new forum (Relatively rare for me as I just keep to one or two forums and don't have a wide range of internet useage) which happens to be this forum, so I can try to get answers...
Partial voluntary shutdowns describe what I get so accurately, that I read the description a second time and looked to check the author who wrote it wasn't me! I was gobsmacked, as all my life of searching I had never expected to find a description so accurate that I could pin it down to at least 95% of what I believe I experience... and the realization that my brain effects my body and it is not what doctors had told me that it was my body effecting my brain (Doctors said I was getting mystery allergies, which though I need to keep off certain things like artificial sweetners, wasn't the real picture if what was going on, and I couldn't explain my feelings in an outward way as I didn't know how, as I couldn't fathom my feelings out myself...If that makes sense?).

[I apologise if my spelling or typing is full of mistakes, as I keep needing to correct things as I keep typing the wrong letters or type the wright letters for words, but put them in the wrong order. It seems to happen more when I write about things like this then if I write about other subjects].


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