original writing

A lot of the learning we\’ve done over the last few years has included how to recognize when the other person is upset, and what to do once that\’s recognized.  With me, the first one is an extra complicated challenge.  I thought it might be useful to present this information, because some of it may be applicable to you or your loved ones.

With most people, their faces display the whole range of their emotions, or at least what emotions they want to be displaying.  This emotional expression is called \”affect\” in psychology.  One of the ways you can start to recognize an autistic person is by their affect.  If their emotional expressions seem flat all the time, that\’s a thing to note.  Neurotypical people can also display blunted or flat affect, but it\’s usually because they\’re depressed or completely worn out.

The word choice amuses me because another definition of \”affect\”  in the general lexicon means \”to put on a pretense of.\”  So, \”she affected wealth and high position, but in truth was working retail.\”  And also, \”affected\” as an adjective can mean \”feigned\” or \”assumed artificially.\”  In short, depending on how you think about the word, everyone\’s putting on pretenses of what they show on their faces.

This is particularly relevant when you recall that people don\’t merely convey their mental states on their faces, but instead use them as another hidden form of communication and to modify the behaviors of others.

A Matter of Degrees

So, with that in mind!  If I\’m slightly annoyed by something, my face may display it briefly before I decide it\’s really not worth my time.  If I am more moderately or heavily annoyed, my face may show it and I may try to address the situation.  Easy examples of both situations would be stuff that triggers my sound sensitivity.

Somebody dropping a heavy box of clothes from 60+ feet away might count as slightly annoying.  The sound that produces would be low in pitch, and while it might be loud, the distance helps make that tolerable.  I would hear this sound, but would try not to let it interrupt what I was doing.

However, someone\’s child screaming within 20 feet of me is more on the moderate to heavily annoying range.  My face might display the pain of having that high-pitched, grating, unending shriek shredding into my brain.  And if the child doesn\’t cease quickly, I might put in earplugs or try to leave the situation.

Emotional pain, such as that caused by arguments, can be much more painful.  This is where it gets tricky.  After a certain point, between \”I\’m upset\” and \”I am melting down, stand clear,\” my face stops displaying emotions.  This is not because I\’m trying to be confusing, and definitely does not mean I\’m doing fine.  It means I\’ve lost regulation of those muscles and am instead focusing very hard on managing myself and the pain I\’m feeling.

Affect, you see, takes effort for me.  If I\’m using all my energy to manage a conversation and my own hurt feelings, I have none left for communicating in a way that\’s unnatural to me.  I go stone-faced.  This is easy to mistake for \”calm.\”  It is very much not calm.  In a direct argument, treating it like that can be disastrous.

After I\’m pushed beyond \”stone-faced,\” my face starts expressing emotions again… but only because I\’m likely in tears or screaming.  Ideally things never get to this point, but it does happen sometimes.

Not All Bad

I put these two senses together for a reason when I planned out these blog posts.  A lot (though not all) of what we think of as taste is actually smell.  Some sources contend that you can actually only taste the most basic flavors: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour.  Everything else, they say, is smell.  From personal experience with having very stuffed up noses (thus, presumably, eliminating my sense of smell), I\’m not sure I buy that entirely.  But it\’s definitely true that having a very stuffed nose mutes my sense of taste. 

I went over this a bit in the very first post (which was about touch) but parts of eating belong to that sense instead of to taste.  Temperature, for example, is in the realm of touch, and texture is as well. Those two things are generally considered a major part of the eating experience, but have to be excluded here for scientific accuracy.

Limited Diets, Nails on a Chalkboard, and Cilantro

A common tendency in autistic children is food pickiness.  This is often based in texture, but also in taste and in smell.  The texture (which is touch) can be bothersome because some people hate or love crunching sounds, or mushy feelings on their tongue, or breading on food.  When I say \”hate\” by the way, I mean that in a much more literal sense than it\’s commonly used.  Think hearing \”nails on a chalkboard\” every time you crunched fresh green beans, or dry cereal, or popcorn.   You\’d probably avoid crunchy foods after a while, too, and be upset if you were forced to eat them.

It\’s worth noting here, as I have in past posts about sensory processing, that all of these reactions are involuntary.  You can\’t make yourself suddenly like hearing someone drag their nails down a chalkboard.  You can learn to tolerate it, but it\’s going to be an unpleasant sound basically forever.  If the whole world sounds like nails on a chalkboard, though, you\’re mostly just going to want to avoid everything as much as possible.

Maybe another comparison that might make it more understandable is cilantro.  So, most people taste cilantro as a fresh, tangy, herb-thing.  And like it in food.  However, some people, as apparently determined by genetics, taste it like it\’s soap.  Very strong soap, directly to the mouth.  Needless to say, most of the people like that tend to avoid eating cilantro.  Why ruin your food with soap seasoning, right?

Oddly enough, I kind of taste cilantro both ways.  It does kind of taste like soap, a bit, but not enough to ruin the rest of the flavor for me.  I have a friend, though, that can\’t stand cilantro in things, which I can entirely respect.  

A really common thing I tend to read about in \”my family\’s experience with an autistic child\” accounts and medical recommendation books is the \”all white foods\” diet.   So things like white pasta, milk, bread, white rice, and potatoes.  The child will prefer these foods, even to the point of outright not eating anything that\’s not on that list.  Growing up, my dad called me \”the bread girl\” due to my tendency to enjoy and eat large quantities of bread.  I was never to the point of refusing to eat anything but the bread, but my mother can probably recount her frustration with trying to feed me a varied, healthy diet.

In fact, it was such a problem that the list below was a thing.  I think I recall having to have dozens of huge arguments with my mother before this list came into existence.  This is actually probably one of the later lists, and sadly one of the better examples of my handwriting in existence.  Good thing keyboards and computers became the main mode of communication! (cough) 

As you can see by the specificity of both fish and peppers, I was a pedantic child.  Fortunately for my mother, I didn\’t know that I could have said \”variants of the wild mustard plant\” and gotten cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli all in one item.

Actually, having moved back into town and having had more meals with adult me, my parents seem pleasantly surprised at how wide and varied my diet is now.  Like, to the point where my dad actually couldn\’t believe I eat fish now.  Which…  I guess is fair, since parents tend to remember their kids as… kids.  But my diet has expanded as I grew up, particularly after I was on my own for a while.  In my junior year at college, I pretty much ate only macaroni and cheese for dinner each night.  I did take my vitamin pills, at least.  (Also, my lunch was much more balanced, which I\’m sure helped.)

Through the Nose to Punch the Brain

Smell, on the other hand, can be a really unfortunate minefield.  Perfume, cologne, and scented products are widespread, and it\’s all too easy to get overwhelmed with the reek of these \”beauty products.\”  People can even get migraines, or sick to their stomachs.  I know someone who actually gets a brutal headache if she smells things that are floral scented.  She isn\’t autistic, but she definitely counts as sensitive to smells!

Beauty products aren\’t the only pitfall.  In an untidy kitchen, the smell of rotting food from the sink, refrigerator, or the garbage can be overwhelmingly revolting.  I have, in the past, had to stay very far away from a kitchen sink because something had been left to \”soak,\” and turned rancid.  People with less overzealous senses of smell simply don\’t understand, and may insist you\’re being excessive about your concern or reaction, which is about the last thing you want to hear when you\’re trying not to vomit. 

Another culprit is cleaning products.  Bleach has a very strong smell, as do some other chemical cleaners.  A freshly cleaned bathroom, like a dirty one, can also be a minefield for people with scent sensitivity.  I once cleaned my bathtub with bleach, and not only did I have to run the bathroom fan, I also had to open two windows for a cross breeze, and vacate the premises until the stench died down some.  I was literally getting dizzy, nearly to the point of passing out, from the smell.

My nose is kind of odd in general.  It seems sensitive, but it\’s either very selective, or I\’m rather bad at identifying what it\’s telling me.  In the last house my parents owned, at dinner time, the food that was cooking would smell like one thing from my room on the second floor.  As I\’d walk down the stairs, the food would smell like a different dish.  And when I finally got to the kitchen, I would find out that it was in fact a third, different food.

I also have a useless superpower for detecting spoiled cow\’s milk.  I can taste and smell when it starts to turn, but is still safe to drink, and the smell/taste gets progressively worse until I find it intolerable and the milk is definitely not safe to drink.  This would be less useless if I wasn\’t only drinking almond milk these days…  But I guess it\’s better to have it than to not have it.

Perfume is thankfully mostly out of fashion where I live, but every once in a while, there\’s that one person who just slathers it on and doesn\’t seem to realize that they reek.  I run into those at church sometimes, but they mostly, thankfully, don\’t sit at the back of the church.  There was this once that someone did, and they sat right by the sound booth, too.  So while I was trying to run the sound board, I kept getting nosefuls of this cloying, revolting fragrance at about 10x stronger than it had any right to be.  This resulted in my choking and coughing fairly often, which I had to try to do quietly, because it was still a church service and nobody except my spouse knew that I couldn\’t breathe.

I\’m not really sure if this counts as smell, but my mother and I are both very sensitive to mold.   Within the last year or so, I went to a memorial service in a stone chapel.  The service was probably very nice, but I spent pretty much the entire time feeling dizzy and foggy and confused.  My mother said afterwards that the place must\’ve had a mold problem, because she reacts to it.  She shook off the effects within 5 minutes, but it took me more like 20 minutes or so, outside, to feel less awful.  I\’ve had similar effects when food molds in the fridge or the cupboards.  Those tend to last longer, because the mold spores get into everything, which then has to be washed.  Bedding, clothes, towels, all of it.

Next Week: Sound

So, this week I\’ve described oddities and sensitivities of taste and smell, including how they manifest in my particular case, as well as more general cases.   Next time I\’ll finish this series with sound, which is the sense that makes me suffer the most on any given day.  That also makes it the sense I have to compensate most for, and I\’ll discuss my methods for that as well. 

Brain-Eyeball Communication

So, usually when people think of their sense of sight, and things going wrong with it, they think about the physical eyeballs, glasses, eye charts, etc.  Perhaps red-green colorblindness comes to mind, or cataracts.  While those are certainly important, when I say \”visual sensory processing difficulties,\” these are not what I mean.  There\’s nothing physically wrong with my eyeballs (well, besides some nearsightedness): the rods, cones, and optic nerve are all just fine.
 
Instead, sensory processing difficulties are:

• disorganization in the muscles the brain uses to control how the eyes focus
• oddities in how the brain itself processes the data sent to it.  

One or both of these can affect a person, and because vision is such a basic sense, people tend to take it for granted and assume that others see the exact same way they do.  Particularly when the eye doctor tests come back with no significant problems.  But, like me, just because the eyeball and optic nerve is in good health, you aren\’t guaranteed to not have problems with your vision. 

Brain-Muscle Miscommunication

A normal person can follow the path of a bouncing ball down a driveway, for example.  A person with muscle-coordination visual processing difficulties might not be able to do that.  Their eye muscles may not track the movement properly, and as such, the ball escapes their field of vision and is gone.  They might also have difficulty keeping their eyes on an object as they move, find it hard or impossible to read lines of print in order, or find it difficult to change between looking at a blackboard and looking at a book on their desk.

The end result of these problems can include tons of headaches, regular squinting, frequently losing your place while reading a book (and continuing to resort to using your finger as a guide), trouble copying information from a blackboard, difficulty reading signs or your dashboard while driving, avoidance of stairs, and even avoidance of groups of people due to the dizzying difficulties of keeping track of them all. 

Again, this is not something special glasses or surgery can fix. It\’s a oddity in the brain itself.  The brain itself can be trained by a specialist, and accommodations made so the person can slowly work toward more normal visual processing. 

Visual Hypersensitivity

Driving is very visually complex.  There are other cars, road signs, traffic signals, pedestrians, bicyclists, your dashboard, and animals… just to name the things that are relevant to the driving experience.  There\’s also all the scenery: the buildings you pass, flowers and plants, people in your car, billboards…

Part of learning to drive, for me, was learning where to look for things, and what to look for.  The scenery seems pointless to look at, but sometimes it has road signs, so you can\’t ignore it entirely.  Not all road signs look the same, particularly street signs in cities and towns.  Then, too, the problem is multiplied by movement.  All these things are passing by, which means you have a limited time to process them before they\’re gone.  If you missed them, too bad/hope you didn\’t need that information. 

Part 2 will cover the two senses we aren\’t taught about in school: proprioception and the vestibular sense.  These two senses, while not waxed about in any kind of poetic fashion by philosophers and artists of the past, do serve very important functions.

Just FYI…

A note, which I\’ll paraphrase from part 1 and then explain a bit more:

While I\’ll talk about these senses separately, you should keep in mind that a person can\’t process these senses separately, or turn off one if it\’s being bothersome.  All people experience all these senses at once.  The only reason you\’re not regularly overwhelmed by feeling where each of your limbs are in space, while smelling the odors of your house, hearing the shrieks of the neighbor\’s children playing outside, smelling the soap you used to wash your hands, tasting the last thing you ate, and feeling both the pull of gravity and the texture of whatever you\’re sitting on… is because our brains filter out all but the most relevant details.  Sometimes this filter doesn\’t work very well, but I\’ll explain about that later.

Proprio-what?

Proprioception (such a weird word) is your sense of where your arms, legs, and body are in space, and it relies on being able to understand feedback from sensors in your joints, ligaments, and muscles.  These sensors tell you what angle your arms and legs are at, whether any force is being applied to any of those areas, and where your limbs are at any given time.  When you reach behind you to shut a door, or move yourself through a dark area, you are relying on this sense alone to not bang your arms and legs into themselves, and any objects you remember in the area.  You also rely on it to use the correct amount of force to shut a door rather than slam it or leave it ajar. 

When this sense goes amiss, a person can\’t locate their arms and legs in space without looking at them.  You could find yourself regularly sliding out of your chair rather than sitting solidly in it.  Or tripping over your own two feet as you walk or run.  You might also grab things too roughly or softly, thus either breaking them or dropping them.  Children with difficulties in this area might avoid (or crave) jumping, crashing into things, pushing, pulling, bouncing, and hanging.  An otherwise mild-mannered child that always seems to be banging into others might not be aggressive, but rather lacking proprioception\’s body awareness.

About a year ago, I reviewed a book called The Reason I Jump, by Naoki Higashida.  I didn\’t comment on the title at the time, because I didn\’t want to spoil the answer to the implied question.  But in light of this particular topic: the essay that explained this answer involved this sense.  Mr. Higashida pretty clearly suffers from lack of body awareness.  His particular description was extremely poetic and very impressive, and I still recommend you read that book.  If nothing else because it gives you another viewpoint on from the autism spectrum, and one that doesn\’t overlap a whole lot with my own experience.

Pencils, Skates, and Origami

As for me, personally?  I think maybe a lessening of this sense might explain some of my innate clumsiness.  As a child, I tended to always look down when I walked.  This was because I tended to trip over my own feet, on apparently flat surfaces.  I knew this, and knew I\’d have a better chance of placing my feet optimally if I simply looked where I was putting them.  This came with the added bonus of being able to see where to catch myself when I inevitably tripped anyway. 

As I grew, I got better at not tripping, and became more adept at catching myself before I fell.  This was in part due to taking up roller skating.  I started in the beginner\’s class, with lots of little children, but with time, effort, and many bruises, I became adept enough to skate on one foot, cross my feet over each other to do fancier tricks, and even perform simple jumps and spins.  I was eventually informed that I should be in the adult class, which helped me refine and stretch those abilities.  My instructor was a retired professional skater, whose high school daughters competed in the state competitions.  So while I would certainly never have made it into any of those competitions, I can safely say that his instruction was excellent.

Another proprioception-related task I had to learn to overcome was my fine motor clumsiness.  I think I still suffer some of that, particularly when I\’m not paying attention.  I do seem to drop things and break things a great deal more regularly than my peers… But it\’s not as bad as it used to be, I think.

As a child, I tended to hold my pencil with a death grip.  This was noticeable because my hand would tend to cramp up, but also because I held the pencil wrong.  Children are taught to hold a pen with three fingers… 

To this day, I hold mine with four.

This is, as a rule, an inferior grip to the first, as it strains your hand more.  But for someone with clumsiness issues, adding the fourth finger stabilizes the pencil and allows for more control and accuracy.  So that was how I wrote, despite teachers trying to teach me otherwise, and it\’s how I write to this day.  The end result was darker marks on the paper, with occasional tears from pressing too hard.  (This is actually also a sign of a messed up proprioception in children, by the way.)

As an adult, I tried the three-finger grip out, and can now manage it without losing too much by way of speed.  But it\’s not comfortable or how I\’m used to doing it, and since writing has become far less common, I see no need to change my habits.  I did work to overcome some of my fine motor difficulties, though… with another hobby: origami.

I\’m almost 30, so it bears pointing out that when I was learning, you couldn\’t simply pull up videos on the Internet to teach you how to make this fold and do that technique.  Instead, I had books.  These books had the words \”mountain fold\” and \”valley fold\” and \”bird base\” and all manner of other artistic-not-immediately-helpful-to-a-small-child vocabulary.

So learning was a bit of a struggle, but I\’m extremely stubborn, so after accidentally tearing, smashing, and otherwise destroying probably hundreds of squares of paper, I did actually learn the basics of the art.  Origami is an art of precision, particularly when you\’re working with specialized paper.  The closer your folds are to their destinations, and the thinner the creases, the better your final product.  This means you can manage to follow all the directions, yet still have a final product that doesn\’t look that great.  But it also means that practice really does make perfect.

I can now boast of being able to teach anyone how make a traditional Japanese crane, so long as they\’re patient and willing to put in the effort.  Also, I once pranked my second high school by scattering a thousand of these cranes, along with the wish that the place would become less of a toxic hellhole.  I kind of doubt I got my wish, but at least the prank was fun, and I really doubt they\’ve found them all unless they\’ve renovated their ceilings…

Vestibular Sense

The vestibular sense is also involved with movement, but instead of your joints, it\’s instead linked to your inner ear.  It\’s your sense of how fast you\’re going, whether you\’re accelerating, and the pull of gravity itself, which in turn affects your balance. Apparently this is registered by… what amounts to little hairs with protein crystals suspended on them, inside your inner ear.  It sounds really weird and random, but when you turn your head, the hairs move, pulling the crystals after them, and that movement is gauged by sensors inside the inner ear.

When you lean over to pick something off the ground, you\’re using your vestibular sense to counter-balance yourself so you don\’t tumble to the ground right after the object.  You also use this sense to figure out what position you\’re in, related to the pull of gravity.  After all, a standing position is relatively similar to a lying-down position… at least if you\’re in space.  With gravity, your inner ear tells you which way is down.

When this sense goes awry, all kinds of exciting and unfun things can ensue.  Your balance can go entirely out of whack.  Without the ability to sense the pull of gravity, you can over- or under-compensate for it, resulting in uncoordinated and clumsy movement, if not outright falling.  Stairs, ladders, and slides can become your worst nightmare… or your best friend, if your body craves that sensory input.  Motion sickness might be your constant companion, or you might never ever get motion sick even in circumstances that would make pretty much anyone else ill.

Most interestingly to me, apparently the vestibular sense also factors into your vision.  When a neurotypical person jumps or bounces up and down, their field of vision appears to remain relatively stable.  With a wonky vestibular sense, that is not the case.  So you can have a child perfectly able to read the blackboard or a computer screen, but not able to walk across the school room without banging into desks and classmates.  I guess, something like that accursed \”shaky cam\” technique that keeps making me miserable and confused while watching movies.

Personally, I think I mostly lucked out when it comes to this particular sense, sans the motion sickness aspect.  I don\’t particularly suffer oversensitivity to movement, and my vision complications are brain-related, not inner-ear-related.  I usually don\’t fall while leaning down to pick something up, and my sense of balance is remarkably good considering my proprioception-related limitations.

The motion sickness, though…  I don\’t recall getting very motion sick, ever, as a child.  I could even watch those enormous IMAX 3D screens in reasonable comfort (but my mom couldn\’t).  I didn\’t adore theme park rides, especially not roller coasters, but I could tolerate them.  If it got too bad, I\’d simply shut my eyes, thus eliminating the most dizzying form of sensory input, and huddle until the ride was over.  It was still uncomfortable, but not intolerable.

Now?  Now I can get motion sick from things as simple as \”riding in the back seat of a car.\”  It helps if I\’m hungry.  Something about being hungry makes it exponentially more likely I\’ll get sick on a theme park ride or a car ride.  However, that naturally makes the fix just as basic: get off the ride or out of the car, and eat something simple.  I have no idea why this works.  Even with food freshly in my stomach, though, I no longer care for IMAX 3D movies, and tend to avoid most theme park rides. 

It\’s notable that this particular sense (in conjunction with others) is also used by some autistic people for calming down.  Dr. Temple Grandin, the foremost autistic speaker, includes spinning and rolling as forms of comfort.  There\’s a clip from the HBO movie where the actor playing her explains exactly this.  I… am not like that.  I don\’t really like spinning or rolling, and get dizzy at a regular rate, if not faster than usual.  This actually made learning those skating techniques a great deal harder, as a dizzy person is more likely to fall down than a stable person.

Summary

Why Talk About This?

A book I\’m reading talks about sensory over- and under-sensitivities in children, and how this is a distinct phenomenon from autism, but that it often goes with autism.  And recently there was an incident in church where a staff member shooed me out of the side room I was using to accommodate a sensory overload.  So I thought it might be interesting for you to have some time inside my skull when it comes to sensory issues in an adult autistic.

The book I\’m reading calls for seven senses, rather than the traditional five, which is probably lowballing it, but as good a place to start as any.  The book points out, and I\’ll underline, that these seven senses are not separate input channels.  They are all processed at once, often several senses for each part of the brain that does the processing.  The autistic person does not get to try to turn off their sense of hearing because it\’s hurting them, but still leave the vision, touch, and taste senses active.  That isn\’t how it works.  It\’s all in the same place: the brain.  So you can distract the whole brain from the painful sensory experience, but you need to distract the whole brain.

One more very important note: all the reactions I\’m going to describe to you are involuntary.  I literally do not control how my brain reacts to certain sounds, or to certain types of touch, or anything else I\’ll tell you about.  I did not choose to be the way I am, I simply…am.  The next time you see a child having a tantrum in a public place, keep in mind they might well be like me… just not as old and as well-practiced at handling their suffering in a socially-appropriate manner.

Many Kinds of Touch

• light touches, like someone brushing your arm, or the texture of grass, sand, or dirt.  This also encompasses having your hair brushed, washing your face, and textures felt in the mouth.  (This is the part of touch that most people with sensory issues have trouble with.)
• deep pressure, like massage, bear hugs, rolling, bouncing, etc.  
• vibration, like the feeling of touching a washer on spin cycle, or one of those battery-powered back massager devices.  
• temperature, your hot and cold senses that spare you from both holding cold packs too long and burning your hand on the stove.
• pain, which covers everything from a light scratch to broken bones.  

As a child, I couldn\’t stand having tags in the back of my shirts.  My poor mother had to painstakingly cut the tags out of every one of my shirts.  The same was true of my underwear, I believe.  This is a form of light touch sensitivity, and I continue to have difficulties with it to this day.

I no longer have to snip the tags in my shirts or undergarments, but sometimes when my spouse touches my arm lightly, in affection, it hurts instead of soothes.  The same is true with my back.  Since I got my hair cut short, my spouse will also pet and gently scritch my head.  The former is nice, the latter hurts after a while.  It\’s emotionally painful for both of us when I have to tell him to stop doing something affectionate because it hurts, but the other option is for him to be causing me physical pain while thinking he\’s being sweet and affectionate.  There really aren\’t good options here, is what I\’m saying.  I try to be gentle and tactful about it, but I know it hurts him, and that hurts me.

Haircuts Are The Worst

Another way this touch sensitivity manifests is when I get my hair cut, or need to wear jewelry.  While I now tolerate tags on the necks of my shirts, I do not take easily to wearing things around my neck.  And I really don\’t take kindly to having things put tightly around my neck.  This is most noticeable in my current life when I get my hair cut.

Haircutters tend to fasten a paper neck band around your neck, to keep the hair from getting down your shirt.  I can\’t stand that.  I have to put my hand to my throat to offset the nearly-unbearable sensation of choking and feeling trapped.  Having that extra sensory input from my fingers at my throat helps confuse the tightening feeling enough that I can tolerate it.  So instead of ripping the stupid piece of paper off and screaming at the poor haircutter, I can instead, seemingly calmly, sit through the application of the neck band. 

After the neck band stops tightening, I can then make myself learn to tolerate the feeling of having something around my neck… particularly if I don\’t move too much.  That lets my brain try to tune out the feeling as \”irrelevant,\” which it\’s not great at, but it sometimes succeeds at. 

This unpleasantness has not, obviously, stopped me from getting my hair cut. (And dyed blue, check it out!)

…but it very much does make the process a lot more miserable than it would be otherwise.  Another way this light touch sensitivity manifests around haircuts is afterwards.  Even with a tight neckband, there\’s inevitably going to be some little bits of hair that escaped into your shirt or stuck to your neck.  Most people just brush these off in annoyance, and after a day or so, they\’re basically gone anyway.  I… have to go home and use a lint roller to get them off, and can think of little more than doing so until they\’re off.

If the house caught fire while I was doing this lint-roller hair-bits removal, I would take the freaking lint roller out of the house with me, forgetting the clothes I took off to get at all of my neck.  That\’s how bad it is.  I am almost invariably miserable when I get home from having a haircut, and don\’t stop being miserable until all the tiny hair-bits are gone and I\’ve had some time to decompress from my misery.

All is Not Lost, Thankfully

It is possible to accustom oneself to things like this, by the way.  The book has suggestions for how to make this sort of thing a regular activity for children, but autistic adults like myself are kind of on our own unless we\’re involved in therapy for it.  Which isn\’t to say we can\’t do it ourselves… it\’s just difficult and not very intuitive.

As I type this, I am currently wrapped in a light blue, ridiculously soft and warm polyester blanket.  It\’s the kind that\’s almost like short, extremely soft, smooth fur.  My spouse noticed it in the store, and we were looking for a nice warm, blue blanket.  But when I first touched it, I immediately yanked my hand back in discomfort.  It was too soft!  My brain couldn\’t process the sensation, it was too overwhelming.  This startled my spouse into amusement, which annoyed me. 

I think I glowered at that silly blanket for a couple minutes, scowling as I made myself touch it over and over.  Just lightly at first, and not very much of it, and I still had to pull my hand back due to sensory overload.  But as I kept at it, I started to be able to handle the sensation.  It must have looked pretty silly, a grown woman scowling at a blanket and touching it repeatedly while her spouse stood by.  But nobody threw me out of the store for being extremely weird, so whatever.

We ended up buying the blanket after I was fairly sure I would be okay with it.  And now obviously, I am.  It still feels a little weird to me to touch with my hands, but it no longer overwhelms me, and the blanket lives by my computer chair to keep me warm when the basement is cold.  Which it usually is, so that blanket gets a lot of use.

Texture of food is another complication in this category.  It\’s not one I\’ve paid a whole lot of attention to, but my spouse is actually pretty picky in some cases about what goes in his mouth.  I was an excessively picky eater when I was growing up.  It drove my mother to frustration quite often.  We ended up having to establish a list of foods I didn\’t have to eat if they were served to me.  Broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and other strong-tasting vegetables tended to top that list.

I\’d always assumed my dislike for foods was taste-based.  After all, many of those vegetables do taste pretty strong.  But it may not have been that simple.  I no longer need to have a very limited diet, and make a point of trying new foods as a matter of course.  But I may have to pay more attention to how those foods feel in my mouth.  I do enjoy just-barely-soaked cereal (mostly crunchy, with subtle hints of sogginess) and ice cream blended with M&Ms (which are mostly creamy with some crunch
/and/ subtle hints of sogginess).

All of the above has been about light pressure, and I\’m sure if I gave it a week, I could think of more examples.  But that\’s only one part of touch, so I\’d best move on.

Deep Pressure and Vibration

Deep pressure is what I usually advise my spouse to give me when his gentle touches on my arms hurt, or when he accidentally tickles me.  His actual response is usually to stop touching me entirely, which is kind of saddening, but understandable.  I\’d much rather he press harder with the arm-touches, thus solidifying the sensation and making it more tolerable.

I do like massages, as a rule.  Not only do I suffer basic neck pain, the deep pressure type of touch is very easy to pinpoint and process.  So unless it actively hurts something, it\’s definitely the way to go.  I used to give bear hugs a lot as a child.  I have no idea if that was just because I was odd, or because I liked the sensory feedback of giving a tight hug.  Usually people protested, though, so I think I eventually stopped.

I also bounce my leg when nervous.  This is actually a relatively common nervous habit for all kinds of people.  I actually taught myself how to bounce one leg quickly and slightly, mimicking a friend of mine who had hypertension at the time.  (He actually did both legs at the same time, but one leg was hard enough to learn that I stopped there.)  It became a habit, and now I do it when I\’m seated and anxious.  So, often. 

Vibration type sensory input is relatively scarce in modern life.  When I\’ve run across it, I haven\’t really had much issue with it, beyond it making my hands numb after a minute or two.  I\’m not actually sure if that\’s a common experience or not, but either way, I tend not to hold onto the washer or a battery-powered back massager much.

Temperature

What A Pain

What I\’m Not Talking About

Summary