Melting or Melting Down?

What comes to mind when you hear the word “meltdown?”

An image of a tiny human losing their shit in the middle of the grocery store?

The last time you endured a heated conversation with your boss/ex-lover/parents and felt yourself on the verge of ripping the hair from your head?

A certain animated movie featuring a prehistoric squirrel?

The feeling of your body dissolving into a puddle of human-scented sweat in the middle of the most recent heatwave?

All valid answers, but not what I think of.

For me, “meltdown” conjures an image of looking at myself in the mirror, pretending not to notice the fine tremors running up and down my limbs, conjuring justifications for the brightness of my eyes while fighting to hold back tears, coaxing myself to present some kind of expression related to “normal human being,” and attempting to ignore the swirling chaos in my brain that makes it difficult to string two words together.

It’s the precipice between lying about how “I’m fine” and dissolving into uncontrollable hysterics that resemble that first option above. Complete with screaming, flailing my limbs in uncoordinated thrashing, and failing to gain any kind of sympathy from the neurotypicals around me.

I run through thousands upon thousands of excuses in an attempt to explain my precarious position—anything but an admission that I’ve internalized too many thoughts, worries, and speculations to the point that my mind is locked in a frozen Blue Screen of Death with little hope of a restart.

After all, as far as the outside world knows, I’m a functional, capable, rational adult. Where they’re concerned, I don’t sit for hours struggling against the unwanted visions of violence and terror claiming my mind. They certainly wouldn’t believe I physically sit on my hands to prevent my twitching fingers from plucking the hair of my eyebrows. And they’d never entertain the possibility that I get lost in the need to write out words—letters grouped in pairs—to drown out the internal pressure to hyperventilate, chew my lips to pieces, and jog my legs up and down until the motion blurs into nonsense.

It’s impossible to envision a time where I might lose the capability of speech, eye contact, or basic commands.

The outside world doesn’t see the build-up to that impossible breakdown. It’s contained within the borders of my thoughts, carefully tamped down out of public view.

The obsessive need to imagine the worst possible scenarios of my personal multiverse. Watching helplessly as my brain twists even the most mundane scenes into horrors BlumHouse, A24, and Shudder would salivate over. Mouthing the words, “Stop it” without moving my lips and tipping off the outside world that my brain is a broken disaster area. Finding myself trapped in an unending loop of my life’s greatest failures, struggling to rewrite and resculpt them into different outcomes, as if sheer will alone could revise the past. Struggling to assimilate news bites that feel like they’ve emerged from the most poorly written dystopian fiction to grace the bookshelves with a thought process that desperately wants to believe everyone who says, “It will be okay.” Watching as the self-created To-Do List grows a little more with every breath, taunting me with overwork, stress, and self-doubt, unable to stop myself from adding just one more item. Grappling with the underlying meaning of the daydreams and nightmares plaguing my rest periods, wondering why I can’t see so clearly on the average day.

The storm remains locked behind my practiced mask of polite interest.

It makes it so much easier for people to dismiss me as “lazy,” “unemotional,” or “apathetic.” They see nothing and refuse to grasp the idea there might be more to a person than what’s revealed on the shallow surface layers.

Until I slip up and let the meltdown loose, spilling my withheld secrets into the world for scrutiny and snap judgments.

In those brief moments where my control fractures under the weight of so much pressure, I’m no longer a functional, capable, rational adult. Any respect or admiration someone might have dissolves and disappears. The kindest response they can offer is to turn their back and walk away, pretending they haven’t memorized the scene to use it against me at a future date.

If I were everything I present myself as, I’d never succumb to such childish behavior as a meltdown.

I’d keep my shit together and shove it into the skeleton closet like everyone else.

Because, of course, I’m expected to have my wayward obsessions, spirals, and stims confined within the leash of human decency.

No one wants to see another person losing their mind under the world’s pressure. Or the twisted vagaries of their brain chemistry.

Certainly can’t blame the formation of their mind in its divergent pathways.

All of which runs through my head as I stare at my reflection, seeing beyond the glass to the impending disaster area lurking beneath the skin, waiting for release.

And whisper to myself, “Please stop.”