My first adult autistic meltdown

I tried to do something good and it didn’t work.

Statue of St Nicholas in Nessebar, Bulgaria.

My first adult autistic meltdown

I tried to do something good and it didn’t work.

I’ve been struggling with depression for about a month due to a series of life papercuts. The loss of a couple of commissions. Rejection from an open call. The pressure to create perfect photography, despite knowing it’s impossible. These papercuts had drained my mental energy, meaning that when the big one hit, I had nothing left in reserve. In this case, the final blow was realising my hearing could deteriorate to the point where I’d lose one of the main ways I connect with other people. After writing about this, and hearing from a friend who reminded me I wasn’t alone, I went to the lake for a swim.

There I found my swimming nemesis, the moon jellyfish.

A gentle sea creature that my nervous system reacts badly to. I know they don’t sting and that they are a sign of a healthy body of water, but I still have massive anxiety when swimming with them. I needed to swim, though. To be in the water and feel like I can do something despite everything going on. A couple of women mentioned how one side of the lake was clear, so I got in there and bobbed about for a bit.

It felt great. I can cope and co-exist with anxiety.

The next morning I returned to the lake and swam two full lengths to challenge myself and prove that the day before was not a one-off. “Do something every day that scares you,” they say. I get it. So I was trying to do exactly that. I got out and took a photo of myself with my hands in the air like I just didn’t care. A record of beating depression, anxiety and wanting to live. I felt good.

That was until I saw a woman flinging the jellyfish out the lake and onto the sand. I tried to explain that the jellyfish did not sting, but she ignored my words and continued. She said her kids/grandkids were scared of them. Fair enough. It’s a normal problem to have, so I told her where it was clear of jellies. The group moved over there and paddled about in the water a bit. I was stunned. Who flings jellyfish out of their home to die on land? Oh I get the fear of them as my anxiety verges on a panic attack when I bump into one, but I never throw them out the lake due to my own fear. It’s their lake. I’m a visitor in their home, with no right to remove them.

Outraged, I put my gloves back on and went to save the jellyfish. I put as many back in the water as I could and then heard, "Excuse me, why are you doing that?" Three women swam over and questioned me. I calmly explained that the lake was their home, and that they were harmless. One of the women said her friend's kids were scared of them and liked to walk the shoreline. "But it's their home," I said. They weren't having it.

The main woman asked me if I was a vegetarian, as if that would somehow explain why I cared about the jellyfish. I saw the trap immediately. If I said yes, she'd have her proof I was some kind of purist looking down on her. If I said no, she'd have her proof I was a hypocrite, defending an animal I'd happily eat a different one of. Either answer handed her the same thing: a reason to feel justified. It was never about the jellyfish anymore. It had become about winning.

I told her this wasn't about whether I ate meat, that she wasn't trying to understand, she was trying to win.

They persisted in asking anyway, and when three people gang up on you, it becomes difficult to think clearly. I eventually answered just to stop the questioning. The conversation had moved away from jellyfish and into trying to prove I was somehow wrong as a person.

“It’s safe. I just swam there.”

“I know,” she replied.

“No you don’t. You just got here.”

“No, I saw you doing your little pictures.”

My little pictures? The comment caught me off guard. I’d simply been taking a celebratory selfie after conquering a swim that had terrified me the day before. It felt dismissive, strangely personal, and I couldn’t work out why.

Whatever their reasons, this had become bullying. I understood their fear. Children being scared of jellyfish is a normal problem to have. But the solution, to me, wasn’t removing harmless creatures from their home. More importantly, the way the conversation turned towards me personally was what I struggled with. As the group walked away, I said “You know you’re attacking an autistic person right now. This isn’t nice.”

Mistake. Absolute mistake.

In an attempt to undo everything and find a way back to talking as normal human beings, I told them I was autistic. Their response was “Don’t bring that into this!” I hoped that by explaining my disability, they might understand why the encounter was becoming overwhelming. Instead, it seemed to make things worse. I expected a response like “Oh everyone’s bloody autistic now.” They didn’t say that, but I was already braced for rejection.

At that point they actually walked off and I started walking in a small circle on the slipway. I kept walking round and round and round. I ripped my gloves off my hands, threw them on the floor and tried shaking my hands to stim like I’d never stimmed before. I never do stimming in that way. I listen to music. That’s my stim tool to calm down. I was so stressed I thought it might help. Unfortunately it didn’t.

During the argument I wasn’t trying to win. I was trying to make the confrontation make sense. When it didn’t, my stress kept increasing instead of decreasing. Before I knew I was autistic I would probably have called this a panic attack or a breakdown. It wasn’t just a panic attack. I wasn’t choosing how to react. My nervous system had effectively overloaded. After weeks of trying to deal with depression and finding the courage to get back out into the world, my nervous system simply couldn’t cope with that confrontation.

A moon jellyfish floating in the water just above the sand. — A moon jellyfish floating in our lake.

What is clear is that this was a moment of autistic meltdown. I’ve experienced autistic shutdown before, where I cannot think or speak. A fog descends over my brain and I am of no use to anyone. This usually happens when I’m trying to make a decision in a high-pressure moment, like which brownie to buy while holding up a queue.

This meltdown was different. It was external rather than internal. I needed to move about and do something physical, as if I was filled with too much energy that needed to burn off. Crying seemed to be part of that process too. I needed to get the anxiety and the situation out of my body.

I sat down and managed to phone my wife. We never call each other, but I needed to talk to someone. She answered with “What’s wrong?” I managed to say “I tried to do something good and it didn’t work.” It was a struggle to get the words out and after I managed to say how someone was throwing jellyfish out the lake I just broke and started crying.

I’m 47. The last time I remember coming close to crying was when a tooth removal went horribly wrong and it fell apart in my jaw, requiring the dentist to violently pull the pieces out of me. That felt like I was being attacked, but it was just someone doing their job. This felt like school-level bullying. I don’t think I ever cried at school when bullied. While stressful, it was more annoying than terrorising. The shock of this entire situation just destroyed me. The act of killing jellyfish, and being attacked for defending them by people who actively swim in the lake, was just so overwhelming.

Broken, I managed to explain everything to my wife. She was too far away to come and help, so I sat there staring at the floor and crying for about 20 minutes. I was only metres away from the people involved, but they had no idea what was happening inside me. To them, it was probably just an argument they had walked away from. To me, my entire nervous system had collapsed. I felt traumatised by the experience and realised I needed to wait before driving.

Eventually I got home safely. When I did I noticed my wedding ring was missing. Had it come off when I ripped my gloves off my hands in distress? It must have. I couldn’t lose that after everything that had happened. Luckily it got stuck in the glove, but I was done. Absolutely done.

I have never felt so overwhelmed. The strange thing is that the jellyfish had been my biggest fear before then. I had spent weeks learning to coexist with something that frightened me, only to discover that a human confrontation was much harder for my nervous system to handle.

The part that scares me the most is that it happened at all. Despite all the work I’ve done over the years to understand being autistic, manage my anxiety and overcome my fears, I could still reach a point where I was completely overwhelmed.

For a moment I wondered: have I misunderstood myself? Have I been pushing harder than I should? Is the reason I struggle sometimes because I need more support than I’ve allowed myself to admit?

I don’t know the answers to those questions yet.

What I can say is that I posted on my swimming group’s WhatsApp about this situation and everyone was incredibly supportive. The next day I went back to the lake to reclaim it. I didn’t want these women to take it from me. I don’t want to be concerned at 8 am each morning in case they turn up and something happens. I need to have my happy place remain a happy place, despite the anxiety it can cause sometimes. I arrived and the weather had gone from summer to autumn, and for some reason I loved it. The water, choppy and chaotic. It was a fight to swim against and it felt great to be in that fight. Nature doesn’t judge. It’s just physics. I was fine with that and managed 2 lengths of the lake, about 500m.

I did one of my “little pictures” as I was happy to be there. A rainbow appeared and it reminded me that it is genuinely good to be out in the world being wowed by it. The woman from the previous day arrived as I was leaving. We saw each other. Neither of us said anything. I went for coffee with friends and had a laugh. Despite everything this past month, feeling low, listening to the wrong voice, and being berated for bravely saving the lives of jellyfish, I am doing OK. Currently, OK.

Looking back, I don’t think I melted down because of one argument. The argument was simply the final straw. My nervous system had been carrying weeks of stress already.

I’m still processing what happened. I relive it when I go to bed and it’s often the first thing I think about when I wake up, but I haven’t let it stop me going out. So that is something.

For now, I’m going to keep swimming with friends and take it from there.