As for seizing all over the place and being a general pain in the ass…apologies. At least I’m a funny pain in the ass? Generally I don’t fall on my head, but generally I don’t sit in chairs because I don’t like them because of that whole seizures-falling thing.

But no rush, of course – I can wait until after recovery from shut-down mode … unless someone else was there and is able to share :-)

I definitely had similar things happen while going through schooling — basically at one point I sort of figured out how to tap into “emergency reserves” for fairly long periods of time. And I mistook this for having “developed self-discipline”.

It was such a relief for a while to not be called “irresponsible” and various other things that even though I spent several years in pretty serious overload (senior year of high school, about 2 years worth of college) it was almost weirdly a relief to be dealing with things like dehydration and random shutdowns as opposed to getting a constant running commentary on everything I said or did. I couldn’t maintain that indefinitely, though. And my life is a lot more balanced now, though I still have to be careful of not ending up getting swept into Permanent Emergency Mode when a lot of stuff happens at once. :/

Also, glad you are back OK, and hopefully you are able to take whatever time you need to process stuff and rejuvenate, etc.

What was different was in part that I was looking out for other people. So I had to stay functioning in ways I normally don’t, but something had to give, so other things shut down than usual.

Which has given me the opportunity to reflect on what I was like in school, which was another situation where I managed to function for many years in other ways, but shut down in the exact same way I’ve been shutting down now.

So I know pretty well what the problem is, the issue is trying to figure out how to navigate this kind of shutdown. And that’s a very internal sort of thing, it’s basically a matter of figuring out where the boundaries are.

Having now talked to a few people who acquired this pattern of functioning to get through all or part of their schooling, I’m now wondering if this is another of the awful effects of school on many autistic people. I have to say I prefer my ordinary pattern of shutdown to this, although there’s very little I’d have done differently at the conference anyway even if I knew.

Also it was nice to talk to you, including in the bathroom under that weird primping-shelf. :-P Your speech is much easier for me to understand than your writing (no insult to your writing, it’s just difficult for me to figure out). So it was actually easier to talk to you there than it has been online (and I think it’s obvious we don’t talk much online even though we’ve known each other awhile :-/ ).