I wound up taking today off work (the day I wrote this, which is about two weeks before it got posted) because I was just so burned out and exhausted that my body physically refused to operate correctly. Which is a bad state to be in, considering that I have plans to drive about five hundred miles in two days, another five hundred two days after that, and then a thousand in a single day four days after that. I don’t need to be in tip-top physical shape going into all of that, but it would certainly help make the total thirty-two-or-more hours of driving more bearable if I didn’t feel like crap. So I stayed in, played some video games (to wrap up some Final Fantasy 14 stuff before my week away from the game), and had a mostly relaxing day. Unfortunately, it was not entirely relaxing. I found out about an event my favorite wrestling group was doing a literal hour before it was supposed to start and scrambled to reorganize my evening so I could attend the event. It was a lot of fun, but I was not prepared to record and I was not mentally prepared for the shear amount of stuff that was going to be happening. Wrestling events can be a little overwhelming because there’s two chats to watch (the Wrestling chat and the crowd chat), the action to follow, the event’s music to listen to (used to help set the emotional tone for scenes), and usually my recording to monitor (and related camera work). While I wasn’t recording this time, there was a lot more mixing of chats than usual, a lot more attendees, just as much music, and I wound up in a discord voice chat with some people I’ve been getting to know, all of which left my fried and overstimulated after the first two-hour event.

Auditory input has always been the thing most likely to overstimulate me. Crowded rooms, crowded places, loud noises, too many conversations, and even music that’s too chaotic can wear me out pretty quickly, as my brain attempts to separate out each and every sound so it can listen for the Dangerous Noises it was always listening for in my childhood. Adding that layer of audio on top of the overwhelming mix of chats drained me so much that I had to leave the event before the wrestling portion even began (the first half was a different RP sport that was nearly impossible for me to follow since it was my first time seeing it and I refuse to watch the Twitch stream on top of everything else because that would have cooked my brain instantly). I would have liked to stay and record the event, not to mention continuing the roleplaying I was doing, but I was already starting to minorly dissociate. I wouldn’t have wound up in a full dissociative episode if I’d stayed, but I absolutely would have had to suddenly leave the event, log off, and go hide somewhere silent if I’d stayed for another fifteen minutes. Which would not have been great for my mental well-being going into a busy, social, and long-drive-filled week with only one day to recover from it.

Most of the time, I’m pretty good about not letting myself get that overstimulated, but I genuinely wasn’t expecting things to get as bad for me as they did during that event. It wasn’t the event’s fault, of course. I’d probably have been fine if I’d know about the event with a little more time to mentally prepare. It’s a lot easier to work through that stuff if I go into it with the expectation of there being a lot of stimulation. Instead, I got one unexpected complication after another and while some of them were a lot of fun (my character was approached before the event by someone who immediately tried flirting with them), not knowing just how much noise (auditory and otherwise) I would be subjected to really put me on my back foot and left me there until I eventually retreat. Still, it was a bit of a novel experience. Most of the time when I’d get this overwhelmed, it was a result of doing a trip to downtown Chicago with my family around the holidays. Close, inescapable proximity to my brother; a constant throng of people; and absolutely no places to go where I could get away from it always meant that I was ready to cry from pure exhaustion by the end of the day. It was easier in later years when I could wear my headphones to cut down on the noise (by reducing it to one specific thing I chose), but it was never something I could handle without a decent amount of mentally preparing myself for it. This time, while the auditory stuff definitely contributed, trying to balance two chat logs, a bunch of visuals I couldn’t really comprehend, looking for my friend and the people I was RPing with, and the fact that the event characters kept mixing which chats their messages were in meant I was more visually overstimulated for maybe the first time.

Typically, I’m very good at processing visual information. I’ve always been good at spotting things in my environment and tracking what’s going on around me without needing to directly look at all of it, so while monitoring all the visuals for a wrestling event can be very tiring, it rarely tips over into overstimulating. I think my exhaustion going into that day contributed to my eventual overstimulation by lowering my threshold quite a bit, but I still probably could have managed if I’d had more time to prepare. I wasn’t even sure I was going to go at all until right before the event started. I put off making the decision as much as I could, so I really only have myself to blame. If I’d spent even fifteen mintues mentally preparing myself and taking a breath before the event, I probably would have been fine, but I didn’t, I needed to leave early, and then I let myself get pulled into something else instead of winding down so now it’s very late at night and I’m writing this to try to get my mind out its current funk. All-in-all, it was a novel experience. I also hope to never experience it again. I think it’ll be easier to avoid since I hopefully won’t be this burned out from how much mental stimulation I’ve been burdening myself with, but right now I really need to get out of this chair, away from these monitors, and into some other kind of activity that does involve intense visual stimulation.