Thought Cascades

I get anxious.
No. More than that.
I get agitated.

I get waves of overwhelming fear and anxiety and I feel like I have so much of a desire to run as fast as I can away from something that I can barely hold myself still.

And it can be set off by a tiny thing.

It's been a long time of trying to get the words right to explain, even to those that know me, what goes on when I have 'a mood swing'.
Because for a long time it seemed so random and I didn't have the words to explain. And even now it seems like I over-react to tiny things that should be insignificant.
But the problem is that the way I think doesn't see things in isolation. Everything that I experience is experienced in a bigger context, whether it's obvious to other people or not. So; my computer not starting up fast enough feels like it's trying to spite me because I've had people deliberately refuse to do what I NEED them to do because they don't believe it's a NEED, it reminds me of people deliberately ignoring me or actively making my life harder because I'm not 'normal' in their eyes and they wanted to bully me into fitting in. It reminds me of the feelings I have that I'm in the way, that I'm not wanted, that I'm a burden, that people want me to go away, that I'm not liked, that people hate me.....
But all you might see is that my computer isn't starting up fast enough and I get 'disproportionately' angry with it.

But one little trigger can set off a whole cascade of memories and emotions that I can't always predict.

Everything in my mind is connected to something else.

That's one of the curses of having a good memory. It feels like the past is right up close behind you and something that happened ten years ago hurts like it happened yesterday. So when something reminds you of something negative that happened, that hurt, that upset, that trauma is still there, still feels fresh and I experience that and anything else that gets triggered by the tumble of memories, all in response to an event that is sometimes tiny. It's like a tiny spark whizzing down a stream of gunpowder and setting off numerous louder cracks and bangs: the spark itself was tiny, but what it sets off is not. Only problem is that I react to the cracks and bangs which no one else sees or hears, so they think I'm reacting to the spark.

It's no good saying to autistic people that our reactions to things that upset us are somehow 'out of proportion' it's no good telling us we need to stop having mood swings. If your brain worked the way ours often do, if you experienced the world in the way that we do, I think you'd react the same. It's fully proportionate to react in the way that we do to what we do.

We can learn to manage the thoughts better, to remind ourselves that they are in the past, that what we are dealing with in that moment is the little spark, and the cracks and bangs are in the past and not in the present. But we still experience them even if we can learn to keep some distance from them.

It's incredibly important to remember that with brains that make as many links to different things as ours often do, our experience of the world is not always based solely in the present. The past is close behind us and sometimes reaches over our shoulders, so in a way we're often living that too.
Don't judge us too harshly for what you think is odd until you've walked a lifetime in our shoes.
But then if you had you'd be one of us and we wouldn't need to have this conversation, would we?