It looks like it is time for another Autism quote here on RJsCorner. One of my jobs in life is to help you understand the width and breadth of Autism. The more you know, the better you will understand and hopefully accept those of us who are Autistic.

I certainly have a problem with over stimulation, especially now that I am alone here in my Retcom. That happens when I am in a group having normal conversations. One of my last appendages of socializing here is the “Old Farts” one hour get together twice a month. I have tried several of my speech-to-text apps for these meeting, but all of them have problems due to, among other things, people speaking at once, or not speaking clearly.

Much of the conversation comes out as gibberish on my iPad screen. When it does actually tell me what has been said, I want to put in my 2-cents-worth, but by the time I am done putting the words into coherent thought, the topic has moved on to something else. These sorts of times accumulate in my brain. At some point in this process, I often go into overload and exhaust my brain’s processing capacity. But I don’t always recognize when I’ve reached my limit.

This process often continues well after the meeting is over. I am still trying to fabricate the responses that I wanted to give, even though that possibility has long passed.

After about a dozen meetings now, I’m pretty sure the group is no longer uncomfortable with my presence as they certainly were in the beginning, but I doubt they can even begin to realize what I am going through while I sit in the chair among them. These over stimulation processes seem to be accumulative and add to my overall difficulty of finding my center. I am being so often pulled in every direction with very little control over where my attention goes.

Because of this overabundance of “peopling” my body calls for solitude and calm to decompress and recharge my batteries. That means that I often spend, days at a time, by myself in my apartment puzzling, doodling, and writing posts for RJsCorner. To me, that is a good thing.

Over stimulation, is not the same as a meltdown. In a meltdown, my brain goes into a shutdown and therefore blocks almost all stimulation. Over stimulation is an accumulated thing, not a sudden shutdown.

To get to a finishing point for this post, I have now decided to skip the old-farts meetings, at least for a while. Except for an occasional guest at my lunchtime table, and my frequent discussions with perhaps the only person who even begins to understand me here in my RetCom, this is the last of the social encounters here.

So, here I am, once again, living as a recluse in my RetCom of 200+ people. I spend my days as I want, and have few or no clumsy interactions with those around me. For now, this is what I want. There may come a time that I will once again venture out into the social world of my RetCom, but for now, “I am a Rock, I am an Island” and enjoying the less stressful world around me.