When Sound Sends Me Into Shutdown

Welcome to my Unmasking Autism series. This is where I share what I’m learning as I begin to understand my autistic experience and gently come home to myself. These posts are personal, honest, and written with tenderness for the parts of me that have spent years surviving.

Recently, I have learned something about myself that has explained so much of my life. I am incredibly sensitive to sound.

Not in a casual way. Not in a “that’s annoying” way.

In a nervous system way. In a full body way. In a way that can flip a switch inside me and send me into meltdown or freeze before I even realize what is happening.

In the fall of 2025, I was in a public place when they sounded a weather alarm as a warning to come inside. It was sudden and loud, and everything around me turned into chaos. More noise. More movement. More voices. More urgency.

And inside me, something cracked.

I had an internal meltdown and went straight into freeze mode. I could not think clearly. I could not speak normally. I could not orient myself the way other people seemed able to. My body just locked up, like it was trying to protect me by shutting everything down.

What surprised me was not only how intense it was in the moment, but how long it lasted afterward.

After that day, I was dysregulated for a month. I could not sleep. I could not eat. I could not truly rest. All I could do was pace, like my body was trying to move the overwhelm out of me. I felt like I was living in a fog, like I was in a blackout state for weeks. Everything looked normal from the outside, but inside, I was not okay.

It took a long time for my nervous system to come back online.

➡️ Sharing my stimming & hyperfocus favorites here ⬅️

Then Christmas time came, and I thought I was fine again.

One of my teams went out for a holiday gathering, and I joined them. It was loud, but manageable. I was doing okay. I was talking. I was present.

And then a plate dropped in the bar next to our table.

It was a sharp, sudden crash, and my body reacted before I could even process what happened. My eyesight went blurry. My ears started ringing, then it felt like they went deaf. I felt completely out of my body for what felt like minutes.

It was like my system short circuited.

I excused myself and went outside to do my best to calm down and regulate. I took deep breaths. I tried grounding. I tried telling myself I was safe.

But the truth is, once my nervous system gets pushed past its limit, it does not just bounce back.

After that night, the same thing happened again. A month of dysregulation. A month of fog and shutdown. A month of my body pacing, my mind struggling to stay present, and my emotions feeling unreachable. It was like I could not fully think, feel, or converse like myself until my system finally stabilized again.

Writing this is hard because it still makes me feel embarrassed sometimes. Like I should be able to handle what other people brush off. Like I should recover faster. Like I should be tougher.

But unmasking autism is teaching me that this is not a character flaw.

This is sensory overwhelm.

This is a nervous system that processes sound differently and reacts intensely when it feels threatened or overloaded. This is my body doing what it was designed to do when it thinks I am not safe, even if the “danger” is just noise.

And now that I can name it, I can start meeting it with compassion instead of shame.

I am learning that I need to take my sound sensitivity seriously. I am learning that I need more recovery than I thought. I am learning that protecting my peace is not dramatic, it is necessary.

And maybe most importantly, I am learning that my body is not betraying me.

It is communicating with me.

Thank you for being here. If any part of this resonated, I hope you feel a little less alone. I’m still learning, still unmasking, and still choosing compassion over shame one moment at a time.

xo,

jd

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