Normal people scare me /gen

UwU

A sticker design for a very specific type of person

i pointed out a cool wasp to one and she just picked it up with her bare hands and started showing me different features she was using to identify the species

when i’m at work, people get mad at me for not hearing them the first few times. like, openly agitated. they’ll assume that i’m stupid, or rude, or careless. sometimes they will indirectly chastise me for ‘not paying attention.’ at which point i say “i’m sorry, i’m hard of hearing. you were on my right side and i’m severely deaf in that ear,” and they go “oh my god i’m so sorry i didn’t know.”

yeah. you didn’t, did you? the only available information you had about me was… that i didn’t hear you say something. the thing you hated enough to comment on was that i couldn’t hear you. you don’t get to backpedal once you find out that i have can’t-hear-well disease. i shouldn’t need to present a diagnosis to expect decency from you

Autistic people don't have "better hearing so sounds are louder." Generally we have average hearing (of course with variation), our auditory pain threshold is lower than an allistic's so sounds hurt at a lower level. The typical allistic threshold of pain (barring any physical or neurological condition) is 130 decibels, a little bit quieter than a jet engine. They can hear gunshots, subway trains and car horns all without pain, though gunshots are above their threshold of discomfort.

For us it varies of course, as with all things autistic, but my threshold is somewhere around where people start talking too loud -- 65-70 decibels. That's a massive divide, so of course it's nearly impossible for allistics to conceive that things that don't even cause them a little discomfort are causing me intense pain, just as it was always impossible as a kid for me to conceive that the sounds that had me going into screaming meltdowns from the pain weren't even uncomfortable for everyone else.

I remember as a kid I would completely lose it before and during thunderstorms, cowering in my room with my hands so tight over my ears I was hurting myself every storm until age 17, and people would suggest to my mom to buy me a thundershirt and it pissed me off -- they really couldn't fathom that it wasn't just anxiety, but that the fear was sourced from physical pain. (Or, you know, that I was her child and not a family pet.) Of course I was going to have a phobic reaction when I saw lightning because by early childhood I learned lightning meant pain was imminent. My mom didn't believe this either and would attempt to "desensitize" me by trying to get me to go outside during storms and fireworks -- because I didn't have the knowledge to explain "Hey, I'm scared because this is actually painful for me," I just assumed people were yelling at me to get over it because it was painful for everyone and I was just uniquely bad at dealing with it.