I Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy Meltdown

The other day, I done goofed. I wanted to blog about it partly so you can learn from my mistakes, partly so I can learn from my mistakes, and partly because “at least this will make for good content!” is proving to be a surprisingly effective coping strategy.

If you’re new here – heatwaves are not my vibe, but like, pathologically. It’s a weird cocktail of autistic sensory overload, anxiety stuff, possibly some other mental health bits, possibly something physical in the mix – we’ve never quite managed to work it out. It’s kind of turned into an autistic-special-interest-gone-wrong, which explains why I end up writing about this almost every year (see 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018…). Honestly I don’t even have an internally consistent theory, never mind an actual label, which makes the whole thing quite hard to explain in the absence of live demonstration (which, as we’ll get to, is not recommended).

Last summer, I moved in with my partner on the Kent coast, which means this summer is a bit easier than it otherwise would be. The flipside of that is that, usually once a week, I’m back to commuting into London. Which brings me to the error of my ways – convincing myself, in the face of all reason and to the surprise of basically everyone, that a business-as-usual office trip was a good idea.

Feel Bad Inc.

Here’s the cool thing about being disabled (or possibly just being me). If I don’t push through when I think I can do it, I feel bad about what feels like unnecessary avoidance. If I do push through and this goes well, I also feel bad, because I worry it makes the rest of it less believable. And if I try to push through and fail, obviously that’s bad and I feel bad. Crucially, there is no option in which I do not feel bad. With just one small lyrical tweak, you can neatly fit the classic Gorillaz bassline between each individual thought in the worry spiral (so at least I got an earworm out of this!). This isn’t exactly helpful, so after a few days of this I just gave up and went with the path of least resistance.

Besides, I’m sure it will probably be fine. The journey involved transferring from an air-conditioned train to an air-conditioned Tube line to an air-conditioned office, so there were only a few points of failure. (One of which happens to be amongst Britain’s top 10 busiest railway stations.) I used to live in London until recently, so I know I can handle it. (A colleague later pointed out that my history of running away from London in every summer I lived in London, and working from home long before COVID made that our normal, might invalidate this argument somewhat.) The numbers have been bigger. Other people are having it worse. (In some cases, because they don’t have to put anywhere near as much effort into mitigation and even because they’re actually having a really great time.) Pull Yourself Together.

As I realised once I was already hurtling uncontrollably towards London at 140mph, this was not a strong case.

Could vs Should

The way in was tricky; there was a crowded queue for the Tube barriers, which is normal and usually manageable but that morning threw me. I was quite wobbly when I got in, but settled quickly. I bought lunch en route so I wouldn’t have to go outside again, and the day was very salvageable. In fact, I was beginning to think I’d made the right call after all. Then came the return journey, which I deliberately started later than I usually would for this train to minimise time in the station. I got held up at the Tube barriers again, had to run for my train, found my usual route closed off, and got on board only to realise too late that there was severe disruption, the platforms had all swapped and the train I actually wanted was pulling away from the next platform down. Cue meltdown. Thankfully, owing to who I am as a person, I was quite quickly directed along an alternative route by a Discord server full of transport enthusiasts. I think the migraine that wiped out a good chunk of the following afternoon was an unrelated coincidence, but in hindsight, I probably missed a few early warning signs because I was already feeling a bit rough.

As the dust settled, I kept thinking of the memetic line from Jurassic Park:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Was this technically manageable? Yes, at least I thought. Was this, weighing up all the pros and cons, the best course of action? Nope – not for me, and not for my productivity levels. In hindsight, that much was obvious, but I got so caught up in that “it will probably be fine” loop that I didn’t consider it. That final “should” can change in different contexts – for example, if there were external meetings or other in-person events I didn’t want to miss, or if I hadn’t gone in for a while or knew I wouldn’t be going in for a while, that would tip the balance the other way.

Another learning point is that in my “it will probably be fine” reasoning, I made the big assumption that everything else would go completely to plan, and this turned out to be incorrect. Things like travel can always go wrong, unpredictably and unavoidably. A key question next time is “Am I still in a position to handle that if it happens?”

This has been A Learning Opportunity, and at least nothing went too badly wrong in the process. We can all be our own harshest critics sometimes, but being kinder to ourselves is so often what creates the best outcome for everyone involved. AND YES, GEORGIA, THAT MEANS YOU AS WELL.