Misophonia & Sensory Processing Disorder

it’s okay if you’re never going to be independent. it’s okay if you need help with tasks that other people think are easy. it’s okay if you need help with looking after yourself. it’s okay.

acknowledging that you need to rely on other people is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness. you deserve to get the support you need. you deserve to be able to have autonomy over your life. you deserve to be able to lead the life you want to lead, even if that includes more support than the average person.

Do autistic kids "grow out" of their autism? Why does it sometimes seem like there are so few autistic adults?

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who are nowhere near the stereotypes

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who are self diagnosed

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who are professionally diagnosed

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who were told they "dont look autistic"

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who were bullied for being obviously autistic

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who cant mask

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who have been masking for so long that people would never expect you to be autistic

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who struggle really badly each and every day

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who have learned how to work with their autism and struggle a lot less

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who grew up not knowing what was "wrong" with them

happy autism acceptance month to the autistics who knew they were autistic from a young age and faced hardship because of that

The DSM is the handbook used by healthcare workers worldwide, for diagnosing mental disorders and the like. You may have read that the autistic diagnosis criteria is getting updated and, like many in the autistic community, hoped that this meant that it would be expanded, to make it easier for AFAB, transgender, and non-white people to be diagnosed (as it is notoriously hard for anyone except for white, cisgender men to obtain an autism diagnosis). However, they recently released a statement saying that they were not expanding the criteria, but were instead making it more ‘conservative’, as they feel autism is being ‘over-diagnosed’. (Which is, of course, bullshit for a whole plethora of reasons which I’m sure you’ve heard before.)

For most of my life I thought I was shy or an introvert, and all my therapy treated me as such. But I remember bits of my early life and not being shy at all, and at one point a few years ago my mom mentioned how I’d been such an outgoing little kid. 

I was an outgoing kid. And being alone – physically alone, living by myself – induces more anxiety and outright depression in me than being in a crowd. I’m an extrovert, but at some point during my experience in public school, the amount of peer and adult rejection I received for my neuroatypical behaviour caused me to retreat from social activities and even class participation.

My siblings had it even worse because their symptoms were more pronounced than mine.

Hello, my name is Alex, and I have sensory processing disorder. Here is a link to a post I made about what that is. Anyways, I have a headcanon, that Tony Stark has sensory processing disorder, which can cause people to become overwhelmed with visual stimuli (See above), as well as sound, touch, smell, and probably taste. He finds the moving ornament (visual stimuli) too distracting to properly hold a conversation. 

Now there’s a seemingly, kind of obvious rebuttal for this headcanon. The loud music Tony listens to in the lab. However, loud music can drown out repetitive noises made by hammering, and other things, and keep you from hyperfocusing on small sounds in the area.  I listen to loud music when trying to do homework because the squeaky noise pencils make on paper sometimes sets off my SPD.

This headcanon is obviously a big deal to me for personal reasons. It’s nice to see a character I can identify with. And Tony is not the only MCU character I view as having SPD.

When Tony asked Peter how he saw out of the goggles, Peter said that his heightened senses made it hard to focus and the limited vision provided by the goggles helped. A sentence that I have always related thoroughly to because of my SPD is “Sometimes I can’t do all of my senses at the same time they are too much much… I had to plug my ears to look at it, I had to close my eyes to listen.” (Andrea Gibson.) I feel like that’s what Peter is experiencing, and that the goggles help because they block out some of the stimuli. 

I wrote a fic a while ago, and posted it here, but I’ll link it Here again. 

Such a great list. Share this with others who might not understand sPD, but want to help you!

• *someone says something* “what?” *repeats themselves* “sorry?” *repeats themselves again* “pardon?”

•"hey, y'see the red thing at the top of the shelf, will you get it?“ "Sorry, what?” “On the sh-” “oh yeah sure, I’ll get it.”

•*doesn’t hear teacher because someone’s pen is making a scratchy sound at the back of the room*

•*replays video 10 ten times to figure out what they’re saying*

•teachers asking, “why do you always stop writing in the middle of a sentence, just write down whatever I’m saying,” followed by the response, “I’m just processing it,” rebuked by, “we’ll stop processing it and just write.”