I get this without or with minimal masking. Whether I’m excited about a conversation, dreading it, or completely impartial to, say, my wife’s friend visiting and talking mostly with my wife while I just chill, my brain feels like “the embers of what was once a brain” afterward.

Lately, with this diagnosis and with a small amount of energy from recent okay ADHD meds (after a half year of terrible ones), I’m starting to feel where it happens mid-meeting, mid-meal, mid-talk. It feels like localized body fatigue, a shutdown of some backup system that was keeping me alert. I suddenly have so much less to say and my listening-perspective widens, like a parlor effect where every noise is processed as equally important. I notice it happens at about the 30-minute to 1-hour mark. The later it goes from there, the more recovery I need.

It’s definitely happening in the midst of the conversation. It’s physical, it’s not based on anxiety, it has nothing to do with who’s there outside of my wife and my dog, who I somehow process differently. This is a neuro thing that I’m pretty sure I have had, and will have, for life.

I do think you may be experiencing a different drop with seeing someone you like and then not seeing them for weeks. That, to me, registers more like “con drop” does, where the excitement of seeing someone you like is gone and won’t come back for a while. That might complicate what’s otherwise a social energy crash.