as small as a world and as large as alone

11:35am July 19, 2014

soilrockslove:

youneedacat:

soilrockslove:

I know this might be autistic person heresy.  or something.

But I’m tired of sunglasses.  I want to look at the brightness of the world until my vision splinters a little at the edges.  I want to stand in the world’s summer heat until the lava-crust melts.  I want to listen to music loud - the same song again and again.  And stand in strobe lights.  Until something inside me melts and flows.

I’m tired of having layers between me and the world.  I’m ready to let the world in - all it’s intensity.

Overload makes me function less well.  I move in unusual ways.  Can’t do certain things.  But I think I’d make that trade more often if I had the choice.

I love the tools I’ve found.  And I don’t want this to be an excuse to deprive other people of earplugs or sunglasses. 

But I’m ready for this.

Weirdly enough, I know what you mean.

I have gone through periods of wearing tinted lenses that make the visual world easier to parse, and periods of wearing just my prism lenses (which make my vision more likely to be 3d, but do nothing else, and aren’t tinted.).

I honestly sometimes feel like my body has evolved to deal with wonky vision, and that wearing glasses that force vision to be more central in my life, actually scrambles my brain pretty badly.  So putting up with the overload and the pain and the meaning-blindness and fragmentation and distortion and everything else becomes preferable to having my brain forcibly rearranged in a way that feels like I’m losing something.

Yeah, that makes sense!

I was not just talking specifically about sunglasses, though.  I was also talking about something more general.

There are both good and bad sides to sensory hypersensitivity.  There are good and bad kinds of sensory overload just like there are good and bad kinds of pain.  There are kinds of sensory overload that feel awful and basically feel like a violation of your soul.  That’s usually from people talking loud, especially if they are also saying things that seem mean. (Earplugs can help then!)  And bad kinds that just feel like hitting your thumb with a hammer or sharp fingernails scraping against you. And there are neutral kinds.

And then there are the good kinds of sensory overload.  where it hurts some and something breaks down, but there’s such an *awareness* of some part of the world, and it’s so huge and wild and close.  And it’s a way of being connected.  And whatever breaks down is ok because perception and thought don’t have to be solid all the time.

And I don’t hear many people talking about that.

And while intense sensation really does limit or change what I (and many other autistic people) can *do* - there’s a trade-off. And having people understand that is vital to everyday survival in this world.  It’s up to each person to decide what side of the trade-off they want to choose.  And they can choose differently on different days.

I think I know what you’re talking about.  And yes, nobody talks about it.  I’m reblogging it here so that hopefully people will read this and know about it.

I think that this is also how some people who are not naturally ‘sensing’ break into the 'sensing’ world a little bit.  Because naturally, their brain is in interpretive mode or significance mode, it’s adding meaning to the surroundings in a certain way that precludes sensing.  But if they get overloaded enough for interpreting to shut down a bit, then they get thrust into the world of sensing.  Which is a different experience than someone who is more 'native’ to sensing, or who can move back and forth at will.  But it’s still an experience of sensing.  Which can be important to some people.

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