#REDinstead

The day I took this picture was not a good mental health day, but on the upside it was an excellent face day.

oh shit that’s what im supposed to do today!

I forgot to upload any photos of me but i have an ancient one for day 12 this was like 3 years ago? ish? I’m on the right. I’m an ace nonbinary orbisian  who uses they them pronouns (I was still female IDing at the time of that pic tho)

day 11 though was sensory and that’s a lot.

I dont have enough spoons to go into great detail I’m dragging today so im just gonna explain the terms for me. 

Sensory overload: when too many people are around and its waay to loud or theres too much going on and too many scripts flooding in and NOPE.

Sensory sensitivities: Sunlight, strong scents, light in general, noise, anything without a pattern, scruffy stuff, tags, necklaces that aren’t chokers.

Sensory Hyposensitivites: Kids: I can totally deal with kids no matter how loud. Pain: I have an ungodly pain tolerance and it scares my doctors. 

I’ve actually never posted a selfie before because of mental health and self-esteem stuff so quite nervous but here we go

[Image: photo of a white girl with dark brown hair and blue eyes, smiling at the camera]

9.  Favorite Characters

My favorite character currently is Loki. If we’re talkin’ autistic characters, I headcanon Newt as autistic so hard. I so wish they would confirm that. 

10. Diagnosis - 

So I was diagnosed with ADHD first, and I guess since it didn’t summarize everything, they looked further and came up with Aspergers Syndrome (at the time). Having this has been so helpful, for a long time, I thought I was broken. That would be the way to describe it.

11. Sensory. 

My issues used to be a lot worse as a kid. I was extremely sensitive to sound, and texture, and yeah. It was a lot worse. Those are still issues today, but not as bad as when I was younger. 

12. LGBT+ Autistic Selfie Day

I’m not quite out yet to everyone, and the chance of someone who could see this that I don’t want to is still there, so I’m gonna draw a sketch instead. Can’t promise it will be good, but oh well. I’m an asexual demi(bi*) romantic. *I’m thinking about dropping this, I’m not really sure that the gender of the person matters anymore. 

Day 12: LGBT+ Selfie Day

Prompt: "a selfie day specifically for LGBT+ autistics, who are facing oppression and stigma on multiple fronts.“

Here’s me, my dorky headphones and my horrible attempt at a smile… It turns out that a lot of autistic people are also trans. Funny, I wondered why I knew so many. ☺

Walkinredinstead April Challenge-Day 12

LGBT+ Autistics Selfie Day

Good morning to everyone except the waitresses who have misgendered and/ or infantilised me on three seperate occasions in the past two weeks. Particularly bad morning to the one who I saw two Wednesdays in a row, and who used different pronouns each time, and still got it wrong.

(They/them)

                  -Your Best Friend <3

I’m not exactly sure what all of my sensory sensitivities are yet, so I’ll probably repost this when I find out.

Sensory

Prompt: “sensory overload, sensory sensitivities, sensory hyposensitivity, processing issues, etc…”

Oh, my. I have so much to talk about with this one.

I have all kind of sensory processing issues, dealing with basically every sense. I guess I’ll break this down by sense and talk about each on individually, otherwise I’ll never get through it.

Visual

This is mostly due to a non-autism-related eye condition, but I have very poor eyesight and extreme light sensitivity. On sunny days, I can’t even look up. It’s actually very annoying.

On the autism side of things, I am easily overloaded by things that flicker or waver, especially slightly (like florescent lights). I can’t stand bright white light, excessively bright colors, things that flash, etc. I always have the brightness on my electronics turned almost all the way off.

I have a hard time understanding “visual learning” techniques like graphs, diagrams and graphic organizers. They make no sense to me at all, and often leave me far more confused than if the instructions had just been written out.

Auditory

This is by far the worst one for me. My auditory processing is bad enough that I have a hard time understanding people talking to me most of the time, expecially if I’m in a noisy space, or around other people who are talking. Sometimes I have to ask people to repeat themselves 5 or 6 times before it gets through my head. My brain can’t “prioritize” or filter out sounds. So the sound of the vents blowing, the lights buzzing and the conversation across the room are all just as important in my head as someone yelling my name.

I really hate high pitched and screechy sounds. White noise falls into this category for me, as does the sound trains make when slowing down on the tracks, microphone feedback, and of course nails on a chalkboard. Those sounds are so bad for me that they leave me feeling gross and on-edge for hours, and can single-handedly send me into overload. There’s also an entourage of other kinds of sounds I hate, but listing all of them would be too laborious.

On the positive side, I have excellent relative pitch. As a singer who can’t read music (symbols make no sense to me), I learn everything by ear to the point where I can memorize a song in an hour or less if I have to. Of course it would be better if I could read music, but I get by just fine. :)

Tactile

This one isn’t as strong for me. There’s only a handful of textures that really make me gag, and more often I find textures that are really nice.

However, I am very touch averse. I find the feeling of physical contact absolutely horrifying, especially people touching my head, neck and forearms. If someone touches me unexpectedly, I get so uncomfortable that I freeze up. It’s like having bugs crawling on my skin. At the best of times, I’m okay with brief handshakes and there are a few close family members who I let hug me.

I don’t know why, but I really like the pressure input of wearing shoes and I’m uncomfortable going barefoot. Even in the summer, I prefer shoes and socks.

Speaking of summer, I really love heat and humidity. I know it’s hell for a lot of people, but my happy temperature is 70-80° Fahrenheit and preferably raining 💧☀️🌡

Olfactory

I memorize smells very easily and quickly form associations for them. My favorite smells are woodsy, spicy smells that remind me of forests, and ozone smells like rain, fog and frosty air. I like the smell of fresh plywood because it reminds me of building sets for plays.

I CANNOT be around the smell of marijuana, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, or nail polish. Certain perfumes also overpower me, especially cheap acrid floral scents. Anything astringent will make my lungs burn. I’d say bad smells are the leading cause of me having to leave places due to sensory overload. Even though I hate sounds more, the smells that trip me off are unfortunately common.

Taste

Taste isn’t really a sense of its own. It’s mostly based on smell and texture. That said, I’m hyposensitive to most flavors and prefer strong/spicy foods (as long as they’re not vinegary). I’m also not very picky, unlike many autistic people. There’s only a short list of foods I really can’t eat, and I love trying new foods. My favorite food is probably burritos.

Proprioceptive/Vestibular

I don’t really know what to say for these other than that a lot of my stim (rocking, spinning in chairs until I’m so dizzy the room tilts, bouncing my knees) are vestibular/ proprioceptive. I don’t know where I fall on the hyper/hyposensitive scale for these, but I think I may be hyposensitive due to the fact that I don’t know where “too much” input would be.

My biggest sensory issue is noise sensitivity. I can’t stand loud noises. Sometimes it feels like certain noises almost bypass my ears and go straight to my brain. I also struggle if noises are sudden or particularly high pitched.

I’m very touch sensitive, especially on my shoulders. If people touch my shoulders, I feel the need to rub them really hard afterwards to get the feeling off. I hate touching things with a very scratchy texture. Denim is the worst material ever.

Better late than never, we have a new Walkinredinstead April Challenge!

This is for autistic people only!

I took the recommendations from last year  and did my best with them (though I did do this very quickly and went on memory)

For me to see them, you can submit them here, tag me @walkinreadinstead, or put it in the tags (#walkinredinstead)

No day is required, you can participate in as manny or as few days as you want!

Under the cut is a vague description of each of the days, though each is open to interpretation - this is just what was in my head about them.

I have less sensory difficulties than some, but they’re definitely there. I can’t eat wheat bread unless it’s toasted/grilled (Like in grilled cheese) and I also have issues with the taste so I usually either don’t eat it or cover the taste with other stuff (even then I can taste it) and I have issues with the taste of tap water. It tastes like metal to me so I either drink bottled water or I have to have juice/the water flavored with something/I chew ice.

I also use one of those scrub brushes that have a handle to wash dishes because the texture of the wet food on my hands is gross and horrible. I think I have a higher sensitivity to light than some because I almost always have my phone on less than half brightness bc it hurts my eyes if it’s higher than that.

I think I’m oversensitive to sound because I hear things that others don’t most of the time, which makes it difficult to filter out background noise. I’m also pretty sure I’m oversensitive to smell. Strong perfumes are horrible, food and coffee in the morning make me nauseous and sometimes smells will just randomly make me feel sick for no reason.

I’ve only experienced a sensory overload that caused a meltdown a couple times, one in a doctor’s office. The lights were too bright, the sounds were too much and I was really uncomfortable in that environment to begin with. I’d really like a weighted blanket, I like being hugged tightly when I can be.

Sensory

I’ve favoured tactile input for as long as I can remember. Even now, clothes shopping turns into a game of ‘See How Many Clothes I Can Touch in a Time Limit.’ When I was at school, my constant impulse to touch everything was dismissed as mindless fiddling.

I also experience hypersensitivity to sound and smell. The former is major contributor to my lifelong fear of balloons. The latter was an endless source of frustration for my mum, as I’d loudly declare that her friends houses smelled weird.

Diagnosis - talk about your diagnosis (or lack thereof), the process of diagnosis/discovery

I was diagnosed at 12/13 while I was in the hospital. I had my 13th birthday during that nearly 2 week stay thus the age thing. I had been going through a complete mental breakdown over the course of months, the exact details I don’t wish to make public. But from the fact I was hospitalized, you can tell it was not good.

I was diagnosed with Atypical Autism at this time but being a young teen. I didn’t give it much thought at the time. Autism Speaks hadn’t been founded yet, so autism didn’t have much exposure at the time. Even for so many years, it was sort of an afterthought with me. I was aware it was what made me sensitive to loud noise, but it wasn’t something I mentioned to people a lot. Since there was that narrative of “using autism as an excuse for bad behavior.” I felt if I mentioned being autistic, I was doing just that.