Bringing Autism to a Rock Concert

I should start off by saying that there probably isn’t one right way of doing this. In fact, initially, we weren’t sure if there was any real way of doing this. If you do the math, taking J to see Imagine Dragons looked like this:

autism + travel 3 hours to Winnipeg + alternative rock concert late at night = pure insanity

So we decided to go ahead and buy 4 tickets despite of all that. YOLO, right?

We were banking on a few things. This was Imagine Dragons. J is absolutely obsessed with Imagine Dragons, so there was a chance it might work. And J is fresh off his first year of middle school so we have maturity (HA! sort of) on our side. J’s always up for a car trip, so the three hours to Winnipeg wouldn’t be a problem.

But there are plenty of potential “hiccups” when it comes to autism, and the fact that we would be technically out of the country if any meltdowns occurred and hours from home was a little unnerving to both me and Steve. You just can’t turn back and go home after 5 min of a failed attempted when it’s three hours back to Fargo. As Steve’s dad would say, we were “working without a net ladies and gentleman.”

These were the potential anxiety hot spots we anticipated:

1. Crossing the border

2. Waiting. Waiting through the first act. Waiting for the right song to come on.

3. The Sensory Overload Extravaganza of strobe lights, lasers, smoke machines, 120 decibels of distorted sound, and much, much, more.

Crossing the Border: We checked the wait times at the Pembina/Emerson border online the hour before we left. When we left at 2 pm the wait time was 40 min. This was bad news. 40 min to wait in a parked car was 40 min to fuel anxiety for the rest of the night. I couldn’t think of anything but, “If any meltdowns happened while we are waiting or talking to the border patrol I will take away all privileges and turn the car back to Fargo.” You know, your standard parenting threat. J was motivated. He didn’t want to lose privileges or the concert and told me he would have no problems. Luckily, by the time we got to the Pembina crossing there was no wait. First hot spot averted.

Waiting: Steve and I have been to enough concerts to know that even though your ticket might not say it, there is ALWAYS AN OPENING ACT. The concert tickets stated that the concert started at 7, so we timed our departure from Fargo to get to the MTS Centre around 7:30 ish to catch the tail end of the opening act and make sure we were there at the start of the Imagine Dragons opening number. Once we crossed the border, we heard via a radio station that the opening act would end at 8:15. Steve and I quickly changed our strategy. We would eat dinner, hang out, and take a walk around the Forks to kill time and then show up at the MTS Centre around 8:15. J is a clock Nazi, so he soon discovered our change in schedule, but conceded that it was “just a glitch” (thank you SLP Amy and Social Thinking jargon) and he was fine to eat at the Forks. However, when we arrived at the MTS Centre at 8:00, the ticket scanners told us there was ANOTHER opening act and that Imagine Dragons wouldn’t be on until 9:30. Another “glitch.” We tried walking around the MTS Centre downtown, but if you know Winnipeg nothing is open after 8:00 pm. The only thing open was Dollarama. We bought J a $3 hat. We killed some more time. Finally at 9:30 we were in our seats ready for the show to start.

Sensory Overload: I tried to prepare J for this a few short days before the concert. Most kids with autism benefit with knowing exactly what is going to happen before it happens. Unfortunately, with J this backfires. You have to find that sweet spot where you give enough info but not too much (and not too far in advance–his anxiety will have a heyday discovering everything that will go wrong if he knows too much). I YouTubed pirated cellphone recordings of Imagine Dragons concerts. Thank you YouTube user XE53 for your recording of the 2014 Seattle, Washington concert. J was able to see all of the pyrotechnics and poor audio in all its glory in anticipation for the real concert. I explained to him that the concert would be very loud, have lots of flashing lights, and maybe fireworks. I told him it would be fun and asked him if all of the lights and sound would be okay. He told me it would be “just fine” so we decided to bring his sound reduction headphones, “just in case.”

At around 9, we sat through the last few songs of Metric, the very last opening act. It was a warm-up–a test for us. J closed his eyes tight during the first few sets of strobe lights and I thought, “this is it–we’re headed home,” but his eyes flickered open. By the time Imagine Dragons opened with “Shots” J’s nervous system, J’s anxiety seemed to settle down. For the first time since 2pm, I felt I could settle down and just be there in the moment too.

I’m so glad we risked it. The tickets, the time, the travel. You never know what will happen with autism. You can plan everything right, and everything can still go wrong. The look on J’s face was just priceless when his favorite songs came on. It’s an enormously powerful experience attending a live concert. You feel the music in an entirely different way. It was exciting for us to see J experience that.  We made it to the second to last song (nearing 11:00 pm), when J said he was done. A total success for the Beck history books.

Today J woke up at noon, singing the lyrics to “Shots” to himself and announced to everyone with great enthusiasm, “I’m awake and I’m okay.”

Glad to hear J. I’m glad we all made it through last night.

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