Only very lately, I've started to understand how loud sounds affect me. It's a strange combination of self-controlled loud music (yes, please) and uncontrollable, sometimes sudden, loud sounds making me very tense. I mentioned a loud stop signal in a bus yesterday.
The tensest I get is when our dog, who just turned one, starts to whine at the end of a car ride. We try to teach her that she needs to be quiet in order to get out. When she's agitated it might take a while. It's loud and I feel empathetic and get very tense. I can feel it everywhere in my body. Another example is when she repeatedly barks in a small space, such as our sauna cabin by the summer cottage. It might reverbarate in the structures, and my head.
Another type of sound that gets to me is the sound of brushing. It's physically uncomfortable, has always been. The worst is when a tractor is brushing gravel off the road after the winter. Almost makes me shudder to think about it. Always wondered why it's so uncomfortable. Now with self-diagnosed autism I get it.
Diary of an ASD Squirrel. Day 198 , Monday 13/05/2024
Up early for some reason beyond this simple squirrels reasoning.
Tidied up after herself, did my chores & went for a walk in the warm early summer sunshine !
I cannot seem to find the impetus to get stuff done, I work best to a deadline & the only person pushing me at the moment is me, which would be fine but I have minimal motivation levels at the moment.
I’m wondering from day to day like a leaf blowing in the breeze, no direction, no purpose.
At least the days are warm now & a lot sunnier, saving energy is easier , my lone mission to drag our energy bills down is less onerous in the summer.
Final Thoughts.
I suspect that I am going through a depressive episode, I hope I come through to the other side soon.
Thank you to all those who are helping me on this journey, in a myriad different ways. I am thankful to each & every one of you! 🫂 🫶🐿️🖖
I know people with estrogen have said their ADHD gets worse during perimenopause/menopause, but I'm wondering if people with testosterone 50+ also notice their Autism/ADHD symptoms getting worse. Especially more "inattentive"/stuck in their thoughts.
I feel like we really need more research on all of this.
Sitting in the bus after a day at work. Feeling tired. The meeting that ended the day dragged on and I stopped even trying to follow the discussion. I haven't listened to music in a bus in ages but now I find myself thinking that maybe I should buy a set of noise-canceling headphones.
The bus is hissing loudly, there are conversations that I can't hear which somehow makes them even more annoying. On top of all I'm sitting under a loudspeaker that plays the stop signal in a very loud tone. Shit, it rang again and startled me. Why does it have to be that loud?
Suddenly running out of food, especially when it’s food that serves many purposes: safe food, same food, and supports health amidst chronic illness… is probably the worst thing. Immediate meltdown.
Especially when you find out right before a meal time. And that’s right when the consequences of insomnia, nightmares, anxiety and PEM have been kicking in.
Loved one helped, but I hate that I was utterly dependent on them. I was ready to go without eating and spiral into despair. I’ve had to do that many times before, especially when ME/CFS was much worse and there was no respite between flare-ups. I didn’t have a loved one around who could help back then. It’s certainly not always a guarantee that I’ll have support even now if loved one is around (they get busy, they have their own life, they can simply say no, not be in the mood…).
Second meltdown in a few days. I really need to get a handle on this somehow.
One of the things driving some of this stress is I can’t “see” the end of chunks of work. I might know what to do, but I have no idea how long it’ll take and don’t have a sense of how far things are progressing until I am right at the end of it. I’ve just switched to exam revision and you bet I cannot see the end of it right now, despite technically knowing what to revise and having a rough revision plan. Some topics I know well, others are massive topics that need time. I can’t see all that in advance. I tried to plan all that for exam revision once but just ended up losing entire days to the planning process. I don’t have that much time. I will be using study skills like prioritising but until I’m at the end of my exam, I won’t know if I’ve achieved much at all.
When you can’t “see” the end of a project, it’s metaphorically like all you can see is a huge mountain as a whole before you start to climb it… with about as much detail as this little mountain emoji: 🏔️. Then the minute you get closer to the mountain and expect to see the details and find a path to climb it, you are shrouded in dense, zero-visibility fog. Once in it, you have to keep moving forward and up and over, but you never know if you’ll get over the mountain or which day you’ll even complete it. You only find that out when you have a few meters left of descent on the other side.
I truly don’t know how I’d have managed this degree without knowing I’m autistic. I would still be beating myself (more) up in addition to the challenges because I would be believing that I’m choosing to make things harder for myself. I won’t stop looking for better strategies, but the self-blame and shame tactics don’t help one bit.
@melindrea The last sentence pretty much covers it. However one views it, Autism is Disabling, because 'to mask' is harmful to us, and not masking exposes us to unwarranted, harmful criticism and ridicule. Damned if we do, and damned if we don't. I also got told, by the parent of an #ActuallyAutistic teenager, that Autism was an excuse for being lazy and stubborn. His son is not living with a supportive parent😕 @theautisticcoach@actuallyautistic
Pff I got everything wrong tonight, mistaking Husband's enquiring/puzzled look for an annoyed one, and I got angry 😔.
It doesn't last, and he does not resent me once I explained but it sucks. #ActuallyAutistic @actuallyautistic
@theautisticcoach@actuallyautistic When I hit my fill line for "peopling" I find I tend to start to feel agitated and it's hard to pay attention to anything. I often start to disassociate from my surroundings. If somebody is really persistent with trying to engage with me when I'm done with people I can also react pretty negatively, and meltdowns are more likely to be triggered.
Since it comes up with some frequency on autistic social media, I wanted to share my experience with noise cancelling headphones as an noise sensitive autistic person with auditory processing issues. As always, this is just my experience.
I tried writing it for a Mastodon post, but it got way to long... so I ended up dumping it on my blog instead.
If you have any questions etc. do feel free to share.
I'm thinking about this because I'm sitting in the next room listening to my parents visit with my aunt and uncle, but I get so overstimulated when there is a group of people and more than one conversation is happening within the group, and I do not know which conversation to track and participate in so I'm trying to track both.
I often feel like this is one of the things that makes me feel most isolated in groups.
I have half formed thoughts about autism and externality. Not sure if "externality" is the right word?
I seem to be much more entangled with objects and my environment than most people, and I think that's a autistic (and ADHD?) thing.
Having to use notes and lists to remember things and organise my thinking, as if my memory resides as much on paper and digitally, as it does in my brain.
Having strong empathy for non-living things, as if harming them is harming myself.
My relationship with my home: I don't really feel safe and relaxed anywhere else, and I strongly dislike other people (except for my husband) being in my space. As if my space is an extension of myself.
All of these things feel like different manifestations of the boundaries between myself and everything else being blurred.
A few times this week I found myself escalating to the point of meltdown due to me completely misreading social situations happening and reacting to them like they were traumatic events of the past.
It's always incredibly embarrassing when this happens, and anytime there's a meltdown there's a risk of dysregulating the people around me... which happened last night. My outburst triggered my partner into a meltdown, which triggered his roommate to emerge from his room screaming at us for our dysregulation being "unacceptable" which escalated my partner further.
It's not the first time we've had trouble with this particular roommate dysregulating due to our inability to keep it cool 24/7, and it had me realizing that I've been walking on eggshells and holding so much anxiety around him for years because every time my partner starts to get a little meltdown-y, I'm terrified he's going to emerge from his room and lash out and make things worse.
I'm back home and recovering now, but I just feel really sad about the whole thing and angry at myself for just jumping to conclusions and yelling my head off.
On the thankful side, the other roommate who was the person who had done the triggering thing both times I lost it this week seemed to get where I was coming from was able to help set me straight and help me regulate.
Home now, trying to process and recover. Being a person is hard.