The first week of March 2020 is burned into most people’s memories as the edge of a global cliff. We were days away from the world shutting down, but inside a hotel ballroom in Buckhead, Atlanta, life was still moving at full speed.
I was attending our annual company convention—an enterprise-wide gathering bringing together managers from more than 100 branches, alongside corporate leadership and support staff. Close to 200 people packed into the space.
I’d been to events like this before and have always felt a subtle undercurrent of discomfort at these gatherings—an uneasy, unspoken friction I could never quite name. But this time was different.
For reasons I couldn’t comprehend at the moment, the background noise turned into a sensory wall. The room didn’t just feel crowded; it felt completely overwhelming. And for the first and only time in my life, right in the middle of the convention, my mind simply pulled the emergency brake. I experienced a total mental shutdown.
I didn’t know it yet, but that room in Atlanta wasn’t just where my corporate convention took place. It was the exact spot where my journey toward discovering my own neurodivergence began.
By the time I walked into that first evening’s social mixer, my internal battery had already been drained by hours of navigating high-stakes, unfamiliar social structures. I had just spent three hours on a flight from my mid-sized Midwest city to the chaos of the world’s busiest airport, where I had to decipher the “Plane Train,” gather my luggage, and arrange transportation through Atlanta traffic to Buckhead. Every step required active, conscious effort to present, adapt, and navigate—a constant burn on my mental reserve.
We were an hour into the mixer—a crowded room, far too small for nearly 200 people. I was managing, even if my baseline stress was already elevated. But as the evening wore on, the energy in the room began to shift.
Most of the people in attendance came from a traditional sales background: loud, bombastic, and overzealous by nature. For many of them—especially those with families at home—this annual trip was their one week to unwind and shed everyday responsibilities. Naturally, as the drinks flowed from the open bar, the volume skyrocketed, personal boundaries thinned, and the room began to feel suffocatingly claustrophobic.
I’ve never been a big drinker. While I’m not entirely anti-alcohol, I’ve always leaned more toward teetotalism, and I tend to notice how easily social drinking turns into unchecked excess. Sitting at the center of that dynamic—surrounded by nearly two hundred increasingly intoxicated, boisterous colleagues I barely knew bumping into me in a cramped space—my nervous system was pushed to its absolute limit. The noise, the motion, the smell, the loss of personal space—it became a wall of raw sensory input.
Then, about an hour in, the threshold was crossed.
My mind simply froze. It wasn’t just stress; it was a total cognitive shutdown. I was completely conscious and hyper-aware of everything happening around me—the voices, the lights, the movement—but I was totally trapped in my own body, unable to react, speak, or move.
It only lasted about five to ten seconds, but in those few seconds, I registered a chilling reality: this wasn’t just my familiar social anxiety. This was a brand-new, terrifying level of sensory overload combined with social adaptation burnout—a line my brain had never crossed before.
Fortunately, the rest of the convention shifted into a predictable structure—formal seminars, scheduled presentations, and organized sit-down dinners. Without the chaotic, unscripted friction of that first night’s mixer, I managed to get through the week without another complete freeze.
Then came the following Friday—March 13th, 2020.
As the pandemic rapidly escalated, our entire company made the sudden shift to full-time remote work. What no one realized at the time was that this temporary measure would become my daily reality for almost five years.
In hindsight, that transition effectively hit the pause button on my sensory issues. For five long years, I spent 80% of my time in my own home environment—a space I could control, keep quiet, and structure around my own needs. Without realizing it, I was living in a protective bubble that kept further cognitive and sensory overload at bay. My underlying neurodivergent struggles remained quiet, insulated by the calm of my own walls. The remaining 20% of my societal interaction came in abridged, manageable chunks—two hours at most—followed by an immediate opportunity to decompress.
For decades, I had relied on complex social scripts and heavy masking just to function smoothly in the corporate world. But five years of remote work and pandemic isolation changed that. Without realizing it, I stepped away from the constant performance.
Like an unexercised muscle, my masking muscle memory simply atrophied. Moreso, it was a muscle I didn’t even realize I was using before—a completely involuntary social adaption that suddenly became a voluntary one.
I lost the subconscious rhythm and endurance I had spent a lifetime building to blend in and force my way through neurotypical environments. When I was finally forced back into the office full-time, I couldn’t just switch that masking back on. The armor no longer fit, and the taxation of trying to rebuild those scripts from scratch was exhausting.
Away from the sanctuary of home, the combined weight of sensory demands and social adaptation returned—not all at once like that night in Buckhead, but as a slow, relentless escalation over the course of a year and a half.
