We’re living in a world where we’re all witnessing the same symphony, with all of its nuances and variations and development of themes and variations of timbre and tone and iterations of rhythm and rhyming ends of lines,
and some of us are only hearing the pitch and timbre and tone and rhythm range of the violins,
and some of us are tuned into different specific frequency ranges, and timbral ranges, and rhythm changes, and tonal shifts and spectral bumps and thumps and squeaks and squawks and beeps and thunks,
and some of us are hearing the full spectrum of sound, and the spaces between the sounds (the spaces between are not just beautiful–they contain the beauty) and timbres and pitches and rhythms and iterations of rhythms,
and when we gather, after the symphony, and describe our experiences, some of us are being told that the nuances we heard don’t exist, and that we’re weird for hearing them.
Imagine, if you can imagine, (or at least make friends with someone who imagines, if you can’t imagine), being told that hearing basses and oboes and piccolos and triangles and tympani and glockenspiels and bassoons and trumpets and trombones is weird (to be fair, glockenspiels is a weird word, if English is your only language and you can’t hear the music in it).
That’s what people “on the spectrum” are up against. We’re weird for hearing the whole symphony, or a specific part of the symphonic fabric, and not just the violins, and trying to describe our wonderful spectral experiences to our peers, when we gather, after witnessing the symphony.
And sometimes we just give up. Or selectively give up. Because trying and trying is trying on our ability to describe, so we may appear to have a disability. I’ll tell you: it’s not a disability to witness the symphony. It’s a disability to get our experience across to those who are acculturated to violins.
Something weird’s going on, indeed–I’ll give you that.
Imagine, if you can imagine (or make friends with someone who imagines if you can’t imagine) a world where our experience of the symphony is better together, when we combine our described experiences, rather than excluding ones that are different from our own by calling them weird or saying they don’t exist at all.
Or maybe one wants to live in a world of violins…
As a person who plays both bass and piccolo, I shudder to think of it. It sounds like a violin world, indeed.
Here’s a bite-sized piece maybe someone can digest and apply across a spectrum of environments (if someone’s mind is flexible enough): There are people sitting next to you (or maybe even you) for whom a click of a button on a website unleashes a host of unexpected sensory and cognitive attacks, in the form of attention- and cognition-demanding responses to that one little click.
Test my hypothesis: go to a website for a church that rents space. Click on their scheduling link button. Chances are a completely new visual environment will leap out at you, as if out of nowhere, and you’re asked to log in with your account (remember, this is your first time visiting this website–what is this account? Am I accountable to the church? I just want to borrow a room for a minute). And then it demands highly personal information and account information for a seemingly unrelated account. (wtf is going on here? I thought this was a church). And then, after careful consideration (this is a church, right? They must have a loving intention) and tentatively entered personal information, the calendar application wants to mate with my calendar application, and gives me no opportunity for consent (I’m being raped by a church calendar. wtf just happened? Who can I call?).
And imagine this happening in the context of trying to create safe spaces for children’s attention and cognition to unfold at its own pace.
It’s not even a micro-aggression – it’s a highly-charged aggressive set of demands, that require attentional and cognitive equilibrium to process well. In the absence of this equilibrium, and in the presence of an obligation to be competent in this highly-charged aggressive environment, these demands are beyond aggressive – they are debilitating. They kill the spirit.
It should be obvious that I’m describing my own experience. And speaking from my own experience, of a person who is highly competent in certain environments, I experience that the disability I experience is the product of the environment, and not a flaw in my character.
But then, imagine that this person experiencing disability (meaning me, in this case) is told, in a thousand tiny moments spread across their life, that they shouldn’t be feeling what they’re feeling (because the people who design these environments aren’t feeling what other people feel when other people enter these environments). Imagine telling someone that they “shouldn’t” “be” “feeling.” Those concepts together are highly aggressive and dismissive. Isn’t that called gaslighting? But what do I know: I’m only operating from my experience. Who’ll believe me?
If you can feel what I’m getting at, you’re getting at the environment that we’re operating in as people with highly specialized nervous systems–HSPs, NDs, ADHDs, ASDs, and all the othered initialed sensibilities. It’s a whole process to even understand it from inside, let alone explain it to someone who designed it, and is highly invested in the design.
People who experience the world in special ways, who are highly competent in certain environments, experience these aggressive responses a thousand times a day. Or, when these environments are codified in the form of obligation, they may be experienced as an almost permanent disability. We are being gaslit into believing we are permanently disabled. But we are perfectly abled within in our special environments. And often, these special environments are highly conducive to inclusion, community, emergent wisdom, teamwork, cooperation. Environments that many people actually like, but rarely get to visit, because these humanly interactive environments are highly endangered.
And almost no one is listening. Most have tuned me out already.
But the ones who are listening are the ones who are hearing me now. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening. I hope we get through this. If we keep listening and connecting, maybe we will get through this. I have hope.
A shout out to all my relations, especially the ones who have called me out for the ways I have spoken of we, (or written of we, more precisely, as written and spoken are mostly the same for me–I feel safer, mostly, in writing, but they are mostly the same for me). (I’ve come to a place where I love being called out, because it causes me to see things differently, and I feel that that’s what we’re here about: hearing and seeing and feeling and smelling and tasting and thinking and emoting about things differently).
As I speak about me and we and neurodiversity, it’s easy to think I’m suggesting that all people labeled as on the spectrum will see themselves in the same ways that I see me.
I don’t think that at all. The things that I speak of are just a suggestion.
It’s not about me, even though I’m speaking about me. In sharing my process, I’m simply sharing a process that processes differently from how we’ve been taught a healthy person is supposed to process.
The process of learning about me in the context of neurodiversity is a process of seeing myself, and seeing myself reveals that I have certain blindnesses–to time, to inner pictures, to fast-moving emotions, to a certain range of facial expression where many people meet.
And I have been reminded of these blindnesses, often.
Believe me, it’s a whole process.
But every blindness opens another window–the blind see differently. And having recognized my blindnesses, and the windows that they open, I hope that in sharing and celebrating these differences, then having differences in the first place becomes normalized (if anyone’s reading this, normal or not). The we I speak of is simply the subset of people who have been reminded often of their blindnesses, but rarely celebrated for the windows these blindnesses open, because these windows are mostly invisible to most people, (because invisibility is the nature of windows), so most people don’t meet us there, and not being met there, there may not be a lot of conversation there to make people’s windows feel seen through.
But I have a language specialty, because of my blindness, which describes the world I cannot see inside. It sounds made up, but if you look up aphantasia, you’ll see that there are a lot of languagers among us. It’s just our specialty. We make symbolic words for the spaces in us that we don’t see. It’s just a brain thing. It’s special, but also nothing special. Sometimes the way we use language is referred to as visionary, and that makes perfect sense, considering it is simply the way our visual process is rerouted through language. The ways our brains are wired are weird, sometimes. But also nothing special. It’s just the way we work.
My blindness to time opens a window through which I see how people operate, and how they spend their time, and sometimes seeing how people spend their time and energy is alarming to me, and so I sound an alarm to the community about spending less time on productivity and more time on being we, in all of the ways that we can be we, outside of productivity. Because productivity is not really serving us well, honestly. It would serve us well to be a little less productive and a little more connective and present. That’s just what makes sense to the ways that my brains are wired to make sense of things. It’s weird, and also nothing special. It’s a present.
And my blindness to my own fast-moving emotions allows me to see the fast-moving emotions of the whole world, frankly, and frankly, that’s more than a bit unnerving as well, and so my nervous system sounds an alarm. So sometimes, if I sound like I’m sounding an alarm, or being alarmist, it’s because, instead of my own emotions, to which I am blind, my nervous system is feeling the fast moving emotions of the whole wide world.
And frankly, that whole wide world is terrifying. I wouldn’t really wish it on anyone. Being terrified is one of my specialties. Being terrified is not weird–it’s just terrifying. If you’re a specialist in being terrified, my heart goes out to you, because it’s terrifying af. fr. I feel you.
And that being said, because my face is blind to expression, my face doesn’t reveal that I am terrified inside. Believe me, I am mostly terrified inside. But people have often told me that my face is kind of a safe public space. Maybe my blindness creates a blank canvas that is safe to project on, and maybe they are projecting. That’s mostly been ok, but sometimes people’s projections are ouchy and dangerous, and add to the terror I feel inside.
Being terrified inside, there are few spaces where I feel truly safe. And so I spend a lot of my time trying to cultivate safe spaces. It’s nothing special. It’s just the product of my specialties. It’s just what makes sense for a person with my sensibilities to spend my time doing. And I notice that in creating safe spaces for my self to just be itself, many in my community feel safer to be themselves as well in those spaces. Or at least that is what they are telling me. I’m not always sure, but that is what I believe they are telling me. That is what inspires my advocacy.
In advocating for myself, I am advocating for my community, with all of their various and variegated specialties that are different from my specialties, but equally special.
When I was a kid, they used to call the class for autistic and neurodivergent and differently abled kids the special class, and the bus for autistic and neurodivergent and differently abled kids the special bus.
Isn’t that special?
Actually, it seems like a way of excluding what’s special. But maybe it was just a special place for the special folks to be special. I’m not sure. I wasn’t included.
I am full of spaces inside of me that are not sure, and where I don’t feel included, even inside of me. It’s a whole process. It can be exhausting. Even though it’s exhausting, it kind of makes sense, even though the sense it makes is kind of a drag.
I never felt included in the normal class or the normal bus. It was kind of a drag. I wonder if I would have felt included in the special class or the special bus. My particular specialties cause me to experience that we all share the same classes and the same buses, and that those classes and buses are inclusive, even if only metaphorically. I know, that’s a whole metaphorical can of worms, but that’s how I feel. I feel inclusive, and that’s why I use the word we the way I do a lot. It’s just what makes sense to my sensibilities.
That being said, I don’t speak about the facial expression space. Faces are public spaces, and highly personal, and speaking about them is terrifying to me, because it’s so easy to speak about them in ways that are different from how people speak about themselves, inside. So I don’t speak about them. But I feel about them, and the way that I feel about them is like a fun secret, because I secretly love everyone’s faces. And I notice that people’s faces light up in spaces where they feel safe to have their faces light up. So instead of speaking about people’s faces, I try to make safe public spaces for people’s faces to light up. It just makes sense to do so, for someone of my sensibilities.
So no, I recognize that my blindnesses are just my invisible windows to seeing the whole world differently, and I don’t imagine that every neurodiverse person sees things in the ways that I see them (or is blind to things in the ways that I am blind to them, or that their invisible windows are the same as mine). And I’m having a hard time imagining a person who imagines a world that completely includes all of the things we all see through all of our invisible windows. Maybe that person exists – wouldn’t that be weird? I wonder what they would look like…
So no, I don’t imagine that everyone’s specialty is just like my specialty, or that anyone will see themselves in the ways that I see myself, but just that everyone’s specific specialty is something special, and everyone’s self is a self that is worthy of being seen. And being that language is my specialty, I advocate for specialty in general, which doesn’t always look like me, but which is nonetheless special and sensible and real. We each really have our own specific and sensible specialty, which is worthy of being seen and appreciated.
So that’s the we I mean when I speak about we. Being special speaks to me. We’re special, you and me. Really!
To be an autistic person is to be a person with something valuable inside you but to rarely find the right environment where your value is recognized as valuable by people around you.
This is me, speaking from the heart of an autistic person.
If you’ve been following my neurodiversity journey–as I articulate the experience of a person with autism, ADHD, aphantasia, and proprioception hyposensitivity from the inside, along with the other ways i share myself–and you’ve found that the insights I’ve shared connect with your experience, or contextualize something you suspected, realize that sharing these insights is one of the ways I care for my community.
And realize that, as a person with no degrees or qualifications as an advocate other than my lived experience and my inborn gifts, what I share makes no sense in the context of capitalism.
If you find that a person like me is a valuable part of the community, and worthy of support, realize that, within the context of 21st century American capitalism, there’s not much support for people like me, or for the people I advocate for, who often don’t have the gift for articulation that I share with my community.
I could institutionalize myself: pursue an advanced degree that legitimizes my advocacy in the context of capitalism, and in doing so, would need to unplug myself from the community that I move through, and in doing so, become another victim of capitalism – saddled with huge debt, and most likely unable to find an official advocacy position that would pay off that debt in my lifetime.
I choose, instead, to move through my community in the ways I’ve been moving, because my community moves me to do so, and that’s how I show up. That’s how I care.
If you find this valuable, I’m asking to be allowed to continue advocating for your sensory and cognitive gifts, to continue recontextualizing valuable predispositions that have been pathologized. I’m asking to be adopted. I’m asking for your care. I’m asking for your support.
In asking for your support, I’m not asking to be the CEO of Spotify, or Starbucks, or Paramount+, or Ridwell, or any of the other services that folks find valuable and subscribe to. I’m asking for just enough care to be allowed to live and continue to do the work that I do. If you subscribe to even a little bit of the philosophy I share, consider subscribing to me, so I can continue caring for my community in the ways that I do.
Thanks for all you do, and thank you for being you.
The care economy is an emerging model for supporting people, things, and processes we’d like to see more of in the world. It is about recognizing the things in our experience that bring us joy, that give us a [wow] or a [yes], and responding to these moments in a supportive way. It’s actually just, well, practicing care, and that’s not new at all. But the language of commerce is transactional, rather than responsive.
I recognize that I love the work that I do with people so much that I would offer it for free if I was supported–if all of my needs were met. But traditional models don’t allow for that type of responsiveness. I would like to try to move toward a more responsive system, built on trust. Why not?
People who know me can decide if they trust the work I do, and they can choose to support me so that I can do that work, or not. In doing so, they are allowing me to be more myself, and guiding me toward their own needs. I’m the product, in a sense, but since our relationship is based on trust, I’m allowed to do the work I believe, adjusting to the needs that arise, as they align with those who trust me.
This simple shift makes the difference between the transactional and the responsive. But it’s kind of vulnerable and scary. I have to trust those that are responding. Will I be supported? Will enough people believe in the work? If I am being truly responsive to their needs, then perhaps. I think it’s worth a try.
I see a difference between commitment and obligation. Commitment is a responsive engagement, where we meet the needs of the moment as it arises. Obligation can keep us stuck supporting processes that actually hinder our ability to respond to the moment.
So, I see a possibility emerging to do things in a more responsive way, and in seeing how obligation often thwarts connection, I would like to avoid transactions that create a sense of obligation, and nurture ones that give one a sense of [wow] or [yes].
So, think about our interactions in the spaces we share. If our conversations seem to be taking us in good directions, let’s continue the conversation. If helping to support me gives you a sense of [wow] or [yes], then you are participating in the care economy. Thank you for recognizing your own power to support, and if our goals align, thank you for your support.
A recent conversation about emotional processing with my neurodiverse community got me thinking about putting language to my experience of my emotional ecosystem. I have realized for a long time that my emotions work differently from many people that I interact with, and it’s only recently that I have had language to describe what’s going on with me. I’ll take a stab at sharing my language around that.
I love language, and I love the nuances of emotional language when I read it in literature, but I’ve found that trying to apply emotional language, especially nuanced emotional language, to my emotional processing is not very helpful. I have big feelings, and my emotional process is more like the digestion process than a responsive system. It’s more of a background process, and it can be glacially slow.
Trying to apply nuanced emotion words to my experience usually results in rumination. Is this sadness? Is it ennui? Is it longing, or despair, or grief, or disappointment, or disconnection? Thinkthinkthinkthink. Stewstewstewstewstew. The thinking and stewing end up becoming more prominent than the emotion I am trying to parse. So I’ve learned not to go there.
I work with children, and they teach me everything about different processing styles.
There are some children who encounter a difficulty, they experience frustration, and may erupt in tears about it. The tears last for a couple of minutes, and then they move on to the next thing. They are able to quickly engage in another way. I will refrain from saying that this is a healthy emotional processing style, because we are de-pathologizing the language of neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is human diversity, and different processing styles are just that: different. Not divergent, not disordered, just different, and the many ways are useful in many ways.
There are other children who present differently. They may appear to be engaged in parallel play–not actually going along with the program that most folks are going along with, but engaged in their own program, in the same space, but on a different time frame. Being attuned to their own frequencies, they may not respond in ways that one might expect. And then, they will appear to be responding to something that others are not aware of. They may appear to not be troubled by a situation that seems troubling in the moment that it presents itself–they may not cry when frustrated, like many kids will. But then, at another moment, they may appear agitated, dysregulated, and the cause may not be clear.
That’s us–the attentional disengagement family of predispositions. We are literally built different, and in our ideal environments, we rock the house. But we can seem odd to others, and others may apply their own calculus to what’s going on with us, or project their insecurities onto the blank canvases that their misunderstanding presents. We often don’t have language for what’s going on, so we often get caught up in others’ descriptions of what they think is going on. I’ll try to say something about what’s going on for me, and maybe this will apply to others with processing differences.
Side note: my language is emergent, evolving. When I notice a pattern, and notice that I am dissatisfied with a word, term, phrase, label, or cognitive frame, my problem-solving mind tries to find a better alternative. I’m noticing all of these references to “differences,” as if there is a set of “sames” that is juxtaposed nearby. I’m dissatisfied with this juxtaposition, and as my language emerges, I will be trying to reframe this, to speak of specialties, and specificities, and a range of possibilities, rather than a set of norms and a set of differences. We are all needed, and valid, and part of the great human body. Because the eyes don’t hear, they are not seen as deficient, and their range of understanding is not a difference. I’m processing stuff like this in the background all the time. Such is my process.
Back to my processing specialties, particularities, specificities. I have found that my emotional processing is much slower than the child who tries, and fails, and cries, and recovers, and tries again, and laughs, and falls asleep. That’s just not me. My emotional processing is much more like my digestive processing. An event or engagement invokes a set of responses, and a range of possible resolutions to return to equilibrium. Emotions are kind of a way to return to equilibrium from an engagement with certain types of energy. And mine work very, very slowly, like the rest of me. So whereas someone else might encounter a situation that would invoke an emotion that might arise and quickly pass, that encounter, for me, might happen much more slowly.
An engagement is kind of like a piece of emotional food, and when it enters my nervous system, it will have a long way to go before it is digested. Emotional processing is kind of a background process in this way, and applying nuanced emotion words to this process is counter-productive. Similar to the digestive process, my emotional process is getting vitamins from the emotional encounter, but this process of getting vitamins is slow and in the background.
It’s like my nervous system is engaging in all of the nuances and possibilities for how the emotional problem that was presented could be resolved, and it is resolving them in all of the ways. My nervous system seems to be concerned with resolution, and the process of resolution is very much like the process of turning food into poop, and in my case, I eat emotional problems and I poop out resolutions in the form of words. Maybe that’s why my words sometimes appear stinky to people. (That’s just a silly side note).
What I’ve found much more helpful in the realm of emotional processing is to focus on sensory responses, and have simple and specific names for these responses. It’s a little vulnerable, because these responses can reach deep into my nervous system, but these responses pass much more quickly than emotional arcs, which can be glacial in their movements. A loud sound might provoke an [ouch], which might be accompanied by a [grr] or even a [buhu]. These responses might pass quickly, or they might provoke a longer background process as my nervous system attempts to process it. But focusing on the foreground responses has shown itself to be much more helpful than focusing on the background processes, which kind of seem to work better when they are not named. Just as I don’t really know if the burrito I ate is being processed by my stomach or my liver at any given time, I don’t really know at what point in the process my emotions are being processed. It’s a whole process, and baffling to those with different processing styles from mine.
But when I focus on the responses, I can see more clearly what’s being responded to, and often, this results in the response passing quickly, rather than turning into a whole digestive process.
A conversation is an engagement [engage]. It might result in a [wow] or a [yes] or a [nope] or a [grr] or a [fu], or an [ick] or an [ew], but it is still [engage]. That seems clear and makes sense to my nervous system. The responses take place within the [frame] of the [engage], and mostly the arise and pass quickly. But there may be elements of the [engage] that stick with me and don’t pass quickly. These pass through me like food passes through me–slowly, mysteriously, but also nourishingly, and resulting in a compostable residue.
All of that being said, there is a certain subset of emotional responses to engagements that is akin to eating something very spicy, and feeling that spicy food deep in my guts. A couple of types of engagements that feel especially spicy are 1) when someone brings me a whole story about something I’ve said or done that doesn’t match my insides at all, and they have no interest in asking follow up questions or hearing about my insides; and 2) when someone has a strong reaction to something I say that I know to be right and good and kind. Both of these types of engagements can be said to be “heated,” and both can leave me feeling hot and spicy in my center of gravity, and a little off-balance. When I was younger, I might have given a spicy response, and sometimes those spicy responses actually broke things open in the engagement and resulted in laughter of recognition. But other times those spicy responses left marks, and left me feeling terrible for having responded in that way.
As I’ve gotten older, these heated exchanges have not seemed as heated as when I was younger. I was able to sit in the middle of the spicy feeling in my center of gravity and not feel the need to give as spicy a response. Recently, for example, a parent in one of my spaces was engaging with their phone, an activity around which I have clearly set a boundary, and refreshed it often. In advocating for their child’s sensory and cognitive needs, I asked the parent to refrain from engaging with their phone, in as gentle and playful way as I could find to. They responded with their own spicy response. I was aware that an engagement such as this might in the past resulted in me feeling off-balance, and spicy inside. I might have felt my hand tremble, and I might have had a spicy space under my breath that made my voice tremble. But this time, I continued to be gentle in my advocacy, and found gentle reasoning where there might have been a spicy retort. At some point the parent became conscious of their place in the space, among other parents and their children, and I could see them reflecting, and thinking better of their need to push back and defend. It all felt very matter-of-fact, rather than spicy, in my insides, but with that there was also the feeling that the matter might not feel resolved for them. They might have some resentment left behind from the engagement. I experience this as the dangerous aspect of human relations. The little resentments that don’t get burnt up and released in the exchange can fester, and collect, and become highly charged. I’m always on the lookout for evidence that an individual might have a lot of these festering resentments, and I try to leave a big space between us, because something about my nervous system (even if I’m silent and secret) can make these resentments bubble up. It’s weird. I’ve learned to tiptoe.
All that being said, I’d say the biggest part of my emotional realm, especially since recognition of my sensory gifts emerged, has been a renewal of my love affair with experience, and often I experience this as having had a wonderful balanced meal, savoring all of the lingering aftertastes and feeling the meal move deliciously through my body. When someone asks me how I’m feeling in a moment like that, it feels kind of cheapening to say “good,” but I’ve learned that most folks are not interested or patient enough to hear about the lingering fragrances and tastes of my delicious experiences. So I write a lot, and in writing, my experience becomes real, and I might be able to share it in an appropriate moment. I recognize that my ancestors have been like this, and they’ve been showing me the way, even when I didn’t understand it, but only suspected.
Neurodiversity is the new (different! better!) cognitive frame. Astrology, Enneagram, Meyers-Briggs, Chinese medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy: having passed through these modalities, none of them made me feel seen in the ways that they were implemented by the particular practitioners who applied them to me. To be fair, I may have met with unskilled practitioners. Your mileage may vary.
But describing my sensory and cognitive differences to AI, and asking AI to describe an anonymous person with traits like mine makes me feel seen.
Take a look below, and if you know me, tell me if they got it right. And if you know me, consider the closing sentence of the assessment in your response. And if you are inspired to respond, don’t worry about offending me. I’m here for the opportunity for reflection. If language isn’t your thing, respond with your special way of being in the world.
Now, all we have to do is keep studying, and de-pathologize the language of neurodiversity so that the person described is seen as a healthy member of the community that has particular specialities that contribute to the health of the community (if you see me that way, to be fair), rather than a person with a set of syndromes that merit isolation, retraining, and medication (to be fair, that may be how you see me. There’s room for all of us).
Know thyself, indeed. “Come to your senses” is a phrase coined for a reason. Self-awareness modalities that stand up to scrutiny and are resistant to dogma are liberating.
Oh, and please reduce the energy needs of pattern-recognizing technologies, and keep them out of the hands of those who would use them to divide us. We need to know ourselves, and we need each other. Knowledge is power only if the power is in our own hands.
“Without meeting them, what might be inferred about a person known to exhibit autism, adhd inattentive type, aphantasia, and proprioception hyposensitivity?”
🧠 Inferences About a Person with Autism, ADHD Inattentive Type, Aphantasia, and Proprioception Hyposensitivity
Understanding a person with these characteristics can provide insights into their behavior, preferences, and challenges. Here are some potential inferences:
🌈 Cognitive and Sensory Processing
Autism: This individual may have unique ways of processing sensory information, possibly leading to heightened sensitivity to certain stimuli or a preference for routine and predictability. They might also exhibit focused interests or deep knowledge in specific areas.
ADHD Inattentive Type: They may struggle with attention regulation, leading to difficulties in maintaining focus on tasks that do not engage them. This could manifest as forgetfulness, disorganization, or challenges in completing tasks.
Aphantasia: The inability to visualize images in their mind may affect how they think about concepts, plan, or remember experiences. They might rely more on verbal or logical reasoning rather than visual memory.
Proprioception Hyposensitivity: This could mean they have a reduced awareness of their body position and movement, potentially leading to clumsiness or a need for more physical input to feel grounded. They might enjoy activities that provide strong sensory feedback, like jumping or spinning.
📚 Social Interaction and Communication
Social Preferences: They may prefer solitary activities or small, familiar groups over large social gatherings. Communication might be more comfortable through written forms rather than verbal, especially if they find social cues challenging to interpret.
Emotional Expression: There may be differences in how they express emotions or understand others’ feelings, which can lead to misunderstandings in social situations.
🛠️ Coping Strategies and Interests
Learning Styles: They might benefit from structured environments and clear instructions. Visual aids or hands-on learning could be more effective than traditional lecture-based methods.
Interests and Hobbies: They may gravitate towards activities that align with their focused interests, which can be a source of joy and motivation. These interests might be unconventional or highly specialized.
⚖️ Challenges and Support Needs
Daily Life: They may face challenges in daily tasks that require organization, time management, or sensory regulation. Support in these areas could be beneficial.
Self-Advocacy: Understanding their own needs and preferences may lead them to develop strong self-advocacy skills, especially if they have had positive experiences in supportive environments.
These inferences can vary widely among individuals, as each person’s experience with these characteristics is unique. Understanding and empathy are crucial in supporting someone with this combination of traits.
“Social situations” is not one category. People with selective attention disorder [SAD] may have difficulty conceptualizing this, but people with broad spectrum awareness [BSA] will understand it intuitively. There are social situations that drain us, and there are social situations that activate us. There are endless gradations and variations of how social situations can drain or activate us.
This is the spectrum we are on.
To be on the spectrum means to have access to BSA. Telling this to a person with SAD will likely cause them to experience cognitive dissonance [CD]. You’ll recognize this when they tell you you are overthinking.
It’s not you, sweetie.
They just can’t help it. Cognitive load grinds their gears, just like it does ours, but in different situations. The difference is that they point the finger of blame outward, while we point the finger of shame inward.
Don’t be gaslit.
Disengage, call a BSA buddy and laugh and laugh about that SAD encounter you just had. You’ll be glad you did.
My autistic traits are nothing to be afraid of. They are highly effective strategies in the environments for which they are adapted. If you spend time with me in these environments, a little of these traits may rub off on you, and your movement through these environments may be eased.
I have come to never doubt this.
I have also come to never doubt that people with autistic traits are not to be feared–whether we are nonverbal or highly talkative, highly energetic or profoundly still, highly organized or seemingly chaotic, hermetic or super social. If you recognize the environments for which we are adapted, and move through these environments with us, we often rub off on you in ways that make these environments easier for you to navigate.
We are connected to something, which sometimes makes us appear disconnected to you. If you connect with us, you connect to something, too.
We connect directly, which can sometimes seem off-putting, since we are not putting off connection or putting on appearances. Yes, we will likely rub off on you, but this rubbing off may actually make your way appear easier.
Please: recognize us. Recognize the environments for which we are adapted. Move through these environments with us. Let us rub off on you.
Despite appearances, it’s way easier than you think.
May all beings recognize their true nature. Every day is neurodiversity awareness day.
