#stimulus overload

Whenever you get a few moments of silence to sit with yourself, with your own thoughts and uncomfortable emotions, you reach out for something to distract yourself from them. You reach out for your phone. You reach out for a snack. You reach out for company. You reach out for anything that will help you drown out the loud voice in your head.​ We want to distract ourselves because we have…

Using your PC to explain autism to people who don’t get it.

My brain tries to acknowledge literally everything, and I have to decide whether to click “yes” or “no’ when it prompts me to acknowledge or ignore stimuli. 

Clock ticking? Y/N ... N Cat running wildly through the house? Y/N ... N Telephone ringing? Y/N ... Y Name called? Y/N ... Y

I might click ‘no’ without ‘reading’ the message, but I’m still acknowledging it long enough to discard it. 

Stimming is me idling as I decide what to do if there is more than one alert popping up. It can also help me close a lot of alert boxes at once as long as more don’t pop up while I’m trying to close what’s already there. I’ll probably develop a lot of lag if more alerts pop up.

Meltdowns and shutdowns are the program freezing and crashing because there’s too much popping up at once and not enough RAM. The system can’t handle all that data.

If I’m sick, hungry, tired, injured, or dealing with monthly female stuff, my body will be generating its own stimulus popups to compete with popups from outside. Internal popups take up RAM normally allocated for handling external stuff, so my program will lag more and crash faster on fewer external popups.

And that’s it.