So I saw a couple of things about how autistic folk who have been masking without realising for a very long time tend to dissociate a lot from their bodies to cope with overwhelming sensory information, and that it can be beneficial to consciously try to listen to your body more, a little at a time.

Anyway I’m rediscovering all kinds of sensations and it’s A LOT. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but yeah, it’s no wonder I had to switch off to cope. A middle ground would be nice.

Examples:
- I haven’t shaved my legs for a little bit, they feel like sandpaper against each other
- I feel like I’m noticing every bump and motion in the building, when a neighbour moves around I worry the floor will collapse
- The carpet feels like scratching on my eyes if I look too long
- Some lights are just too bright, I have to cover my eyes to be in the room
- Water on your hands, not the wetness necessary, but the change in temperature, it starts to feel like freezing ice

There’s a lot of other things too, and it can feel like I’m aware of it all at once. “Listening to your body” seems more like a “floodgates opening” thing than a “try a bit at a time” thing.

I guess I’m glad I gave it a shot though, by experiencing it presently and knowing what I do now, it means I can recognise all the things I did without realising to cope with it. I can make actual choices about which I want to keep up, whether they are worth it, what other options might be, and maybe I’ll find times I can turn off the numbing and enjoy it.

I probably should try to find ways to make my sensory experience a little easier I guess, even if I’m dissociating and ignoring my senses, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still screaming.

Um, holy fuck, it seems like most of my childhood memories are linked to senses? I just remembered SO MUCH about my first year of primary school! I was feeling chilled so I tried to imagine a time when I was warmer, cue a memory of summer in the playground and then a flood of connected memories came!

Bonus: the memory of being warm helped! I don’t really understand but maybe my memory isn’t as bad as I thought, I just don’t know how to use it?

Anyway, we had frogs! They were so cute! I cried when the last one was released into the school pond because it was my friend (one that was perfect, because we were always on opposite sides of glass lol)

Just so many things clicking into place, like “how come everyone else can look forward on a bright sunny day and I can’t?” There’s hundreds of little things like that and suddenly I have an answer for all of them.

It’s simultaneously like I’m knowing myself better than ever, but at the same time it’s so huge a change in perspective of myself I feel like I have no idea who I am. There’s maybe some version of me that can know who they are in the world? That’s wild and scary.

Learned that sympathy and empathy are not the same thing and I’ve only kind-of been performing one and feeling the other. Which is like, okay sure, yes it’s mind blowing but add it to the list or whatever.

What is not okay are that one place’s definition of one matches others’ definition of the other and vice versa. And then there is affective empathy vs cognitive empathy and all the terms and definitions are just put in a blender.

Fucking standardise your shit, society!

tbh I think this is probably something that just isn’t understood properly anyway, since my emotional experience is hard to map exactly to any of the definitions I find.

Like, I think sympathy is something I perform as an immediate response to stuff, but it turns into deep empathy given time and thought? It takes less time if it’s something I’ve experienced before (first hand or with someone close).

When someone says something rough and others are like “I feel bad for you” I’m usually at “I don’t understand yet but I want you to know I care about you so I’ll say I feel bad for you because that’s what people who care do.”

My main feelings at the time are ones of distance and sadness at the distance- that someone I care about is out of reach and I can’t understand or help them.

Plus the usual “wait fuck what is this some new social test? Quick, act like a human, how would a human act right now?”

Also of course there are a bunch of times I don’t react at all because I don’t even realise a problem has been presented until way later. And then I spend a long time wondering if I am supposed to go back to the person to talk about it or if that is weird.

There was a time my mum told me that she very nearly had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, but it was a little euphemistic so I didn’t notice until on my own hours later and had to figure out how to talk to her about it to say it was okay and she didn’t have to feel bad about it. That is maybe another story but the point is she was unloading a huge emotional burden she’d been carrying and it was just so alien to me I didn’t even notice at the time.

Fucking hell recalling this kind of story and it sounds like such cliché autistic stuff. It’s fucking wild how I’m only now realising it.

If I’d ever just taken five minutes to examine my life with a “Autistic maybe?” lens I’d have figured it out in no time. 🙃

Just want to take a moment to say how validating it is to hear other autistic people talk about their experiences. So many little parts of myself and my life I thought were wrong, but it turns out they are just different to what was around me (and are shared with a whole lot of people after all!)

It lets me really feel like I don’t have to be so sheepish about my quirks.

“Why don’t you like beans on toast?”
BECAUSE BEANS ARE FUCKING WET AND TOAST IS FUCKING DRY. WHAT KIND OF MONSTER ARE YOU TO THINK THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO TOUCH IN ANY PLACE BUT MY TUMMY?!

I mean, I’ll probably not be quite so harsh lol, but there’s a new confidence in myself I never had ❤️

But yeah seriously, every time someone talks about how they have focused so much on trying to seem like they are paying attention as a normal person that they didn’t notice what was being said, I feel so connected and real.

And then the shame of feeling like you’re lying by smiling and nodding as if you understand? Ugh I’m just not going to sweat it anymore. I’ll listen my way or not at all. 💪

Okay so here’a a story. When I was a kid, I was a “picky eater” - something that was not especially indulged by my parents at the time. They took the stance that I’d simply learn to eat properly or go hungry, but when faced with food that grossed me out I would always choose staying hungry. I developed extensive techniques to avoid food to accomplish this!

First of all, meals at home: I was expected to clear the plate, and wasn’t allowed to leave my seat until I did. I would spend literal hours poking at peas with a fork (genuinely doing my best to try and make myself eat, but you can’t do what you can’t do).

My parents did not have the patience to oversee me for that kind of time, so when they left the room I’d sneak little bits off my plate and into the bin. I did it gradually because I was a cunning kid!

Sometimes I’d get caught and yelled at or worse, but I kept doing it for any meal I couldn’t stomach. For the most part I just got really good at wasting meals my mum cooked. (Sorry mum!)

But that’s not the interesting part of the story, see my mum also made my packed lunches, so I had complete adventures disposing of sandwiches I didn’t like.

At first, I used the bin at school. This worked for a while but I think a teacher found them a couple of times and started looking out for who was doing it, so my parents found out. From then on I had to bring home evidence that I’d eaten the sandwiches: a display of my lunchbox including the used cling film. Easy to do but there was no bin between my house and school, but there were people’s gardens, bushes, flower beds, the woods.

I left uneaten sandwiches EVERYWHERE!

Buuuut after a while I started feeling guilty, plus it felt like such a big risk. If anyone started to talk about sandwiches appearing everywhere then my parents would know it was me, I had to do something else.

So I started unwrapping my sandwiches and hiding them under my bed.

Look in my defence I was a child, I didn’t know what would happen, just that they were hidden.

So obviously my bedroom starts to smell, my mum decides to clean it and finds a pile of mouldy food under the bed.

From then on, I had to have one of the school dinner ladies watch me eat during the lunch break. But I still couldn’t make myself eat things I didn’t want to, eventually they got tired of spending the whole break waiting for me to eat something I wasn’t going to eat, I went back to binning sandwiches I didn’t like, and everyone just kind of accepted it I guess.

Anyway the point of the story is that I went to absurd lengths to seem like the person everyone wanted me to be, and even though I knew I couldn’t do what they wanted it still never occurred to me that I couldn’t become that person either. Getting a good perspective on yourself is surprisingly difficult, but tbh I’m proud of that hungry little food-stashing kid burying sandwiches under some roses. They struggled but figured out a way to get by.

So I’m watching a lot of autistic tiktok compilations now because they are free piles of human connectivity just for me, but there is a problem.

In a few there is something I’d describe as a sort of autistic expressiveness. It’s super authentic, sincere, unreserved, and even joyful, in a way that is very clearly NOT neurotypical - and I have a bad reaction to seeing it. I feel so uncomfortable, “😱 oh no, you’re not supposed to be like that!”

My reaction is clearly some internalised unpleasantness that I didn’t know I had. It probably played a big part in me not realising I was autistic by making me averse to something so beautiful that I wasn’t allowed.

I thought I’d unlearned the “be normal” rule years ago but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Just to say it and be clear, I don’t like seeing autism as a disorder rather than just a different neurotype.

And frankly, it’s really bizarre that it is treated like a miserable condition by neurotypical people who will get tired of their favourite song if they listen to it on a loop for too long. 😛

I’m still figuring some things out and I’ll probably stumble along the way but I don’t think those opinions are likely to change. (Neurodiversity is good and the social model of disability sounds cool, and also that it’s sad and fucked up that some people get tired of things they really enjoy)

Really glad I started this thread with the recommendation that you mute it if I’m posting too much because wow stuff keeps occurring to me, here’s another!

I used to get told *a lot* that I lack “common sense”, which usually meant that I didn’t know what people wanted from me. Anytime I’d get asked to do something new I’d have to ask for various clarifications until I thought I understood exactly what was being asked. And then later when I did do exactly what was asked, the person was often annoyed because there was some implied thing that I should have done in addition.

Simple example: “Please fill the kettle.”
“How much?”
“A cup for each of us grown-ups.”
*task is performed, and then later;*
“Why didn’t you turn the kettle on?”

You didn’t say to do that! Besides surely if you wanted it boiled immediately you’d have said “boil water” not “fill the kettle”!

I’m not exactly like this now, but only because I have a lifetime of stumbling into this kind of thing. For anything new though, it’s going to happen still.

I definitely had a few bosses get exasperated with me about this, at first thinking I was just lazy and then becoming super annoyed when they realised I needed some stuff explained to me step-by-step.

tbh I still don’t understand how it’s supposed to work if you’re not giving exact instructions - you’ll never get exactly what you want!

Maybe this is part of why I actually appreciate legalese as much as I do, sure there are still things unsaid and things between the lines, but they stand out much more to me because of the sort of negative space they take up. If that makes any sense at all?

Quick sensory exploration/reassociasion(?) update:
- I got some noise-cancelling earbuds today, they definitely make some background noises less sharp, but they help nothing for sudden sounds which are my biggest shock. Better than nothing though!
- I have a patch of dry skin on the back of my shoulder rn and it feels SO AWKWARD as my vest moves over it! I’m finding I can open up my senses pretty quickly but shutting them off again is sloooooooow, deliberate dissociation is tough :(

- I tried opening up to listen to the cars and all the birds on the street. It was… kind of cool? Some engines were very unpleasant as they passed and I had to recoil, but I started to be able to distinguish different types of engines and even noticed one car had a high frequency rattle hidden in its brum, it probably needs checking but I can’t catch up to a car to let the driver know lol.

Overall, it’s definitely a lot, and I am very aware that when I’m actually listening to my body I look pretty uh… well, let’s just say it’s not something you get in the habit of doing when you’re masking.

However, alongside the rougher parts there was really beautiful stuff too, there were little spots of rain that looked like diamonds as they hit the concrete just before fading. I’m glad I’m rediscovering my senses.