No filters

Imagine you’re in a moderately crowded cafe.  You are having an important and interesting conversation with another person, say a colleague you like but don’t know very well, while simultaneously working on a laptop and rearranging files, renaming and moving them so that others will be able to understand the arrangements and find what they need. 

The server comes to ask for your order, and you suddenly notice that the background noise – others‘ conversations, poppy radio music – is more noticeable.  In addition, the server is speaking a different language from the one you have been using to communicate with the person at your table, which is also different from the language you have been working in on the laptop.  You have to translate for your colleague, but the server keeps asking for clarification, and your colleague is getting impatient.  The server seems to not understand you and you have to keep asking your colleague again, translating into the server’s language as you do so.  Meanwhile the music and background noise is getting louder and louder. Maybe a fly keeps buzzing around you and landing on you, maybe the sun shining in the windows is hitting you right in the eyes, or a baby starts crying…you get the idea.

This is what life feels like day in, day out, for many neurodivergent people.  We all experience sensory overload differently;  some of us are sensory-seeking, but this can and does change throughout our lives, even from one day to the next.  Sometimes we can deal with crowds, or annoying background noises, or tags in our shirts.  Sometimes we can’t, and some of us never can.  Our own physical and mental context (a topic I’ll pick up on later)  affects how sensitive we are, as does hunger, hormonal levels, other kinds of overwhelm, day to day depending on what else is going on.  If we’re sick, or tired, or dealing with other stressful situations, or worried, or even hungry, we are often simply more overwhelmed more easily and quickly.

Even fun or exciting situations like a family gathering, event, conference, or even a long and meaningful conversation may take „recovery“ time that we don’t always know we need.  We may be outgoing and genuinely interested in people, even if we are sometimes clumsy or awkward or clueless, and social interactions with more than one person, concerts, events, may indeed feed our souls, but may also be overwhelming at the same time.

Then we need time to process all the information we’ve taken in.  The songs or conversations we’ve heard may resound through our heads for hours afterwards, even if they were positive.  They’re still exciting.  They still „fill us up.“  We probably never learned that this was part of our neurological structure, even if we did get diagnosed.  Many of us learned that our „sensitivity“ was something we  could „do something about“ by ignoring it or „toughening up.“  Depending, again, on the culture in which we were raised, we may have been told to „be a man“ or „not be selfish“ or „stop crying“ or that we are „dramatic“ (The book Drama Queen, one Autistic Woman and a Lifetime of Unhelpful Labels by Sarah Gibbs addresses this).

People who feel more pain than others, or who cannot readily identify bodily sensations or emotions, or who become overwhelmed by either, can also experience not being taken seriously, even when we are experiencing symptoms of physical illness that should in fact be investigated.  The fact that many of us have autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, or other health conditions needs much more awareness than it has.

And highly masked autistic people in particular may have learned very early on to accept overload.  When we experience that our needs are „too much“ we slowly train ourselves to ignore when it is too loud, too much, or even physical tension and stress.  We crave interaction or align our jobs with our special interests or seek contacts around those interests or hyperfocus topics and may overall feel a benefit from these, yet we may also not know how much is too much.  And any physical sensations as well as our bodies‘ need for rest, regular healthy meals, sleep, movement, relaxation, may contribute to an inner stew of sensations and chronic overwhelm that actually harms us.

And an organism that is in constant stress and cannot regulate enough to reduce this stress will develop protective behaviors.  

This is why a correct diagnosis as early as possible as well as being informed about what the diagnosis actually means for our neurology is so important.