You know how when you turn on the bathroom light after walking through the house, it hurts your eyes? Imagine that happening about every five minutes, or even more frequently, throughout the day. That’s how I experience the world.

The people around me occasionally see an overload – where my body physically buckles from noises, bright lights, or someone touching me – but most don’t realise that it’s like I’m constantly under attack. I have depression, and during spells of it, I’ve told the people I care about ‘This world, it hurts. I don’t belong here.’ and I mean that literally.

These are symptoms of sensory overload disorder, a fairly common co-morbid of autism. I have high-functioning autism; and I’ve been pitied, invalidated, and celebrated for it by different people in my life. None of these reactions do me any good, really.

On being pitied; I often tell my friends I’m tough. One of them argued with me for a long while, half-joking. Then I let him in on some of the things I deal with every day, and now he says I’m one of the toughest people he knows. His reasoning is that I manage to deal with all these things that regular people don’t have to – even if it overwhelms me now and then. I appreciate that he thinks that highly of me, though I don’t necessarily agree. But beyond that, pity tells me that someone is seeing me an ‘autistic person’, and not a person who happens to also have autism.

On being invalidated; my brain likely has better reasoning capabilities than yours. I say this not to be conceited, but simply because it’s true. I might not get nuances of behaviour, but if you gave me a piece of writing, I’ll find every part where it needs work and have one or two solutions for each; I’ll generally also be able to tell you what would aid the writer in retraining his brain to write better. My brain is pretty much made to find, then solve, problems.

On being celebrated; it’s sort of nice, in a fluffy way, but it shows a fundamental disconnect between what they see and what I actually deal with. Because it’s not a nice, happy thing to have autism. Sometimes it makes me feel physically ill – from things as simple as a balloon popping, or someone turning the stereo up too high, or even having wind creep up under a loose-fitting top. My mother went through a lot of anguish trying to work out what made parenting me so different to her elder children, because I didn’t get diagnosed until I was thirteen. I was bullied heavily throughout school, and I know autism was a contributing factor. Relationships can be a nightmare; and I get really anxious when I’m single, because I don’t get hints, and I worry endlessly that I’m unintentionally leading people on. I find things regular people don’t sweat to be nearly insurmountable obstacles, and I suffer from anxiety and depression as a result.

A lot of the time, I feel like I’ve just turned up to run a race, but I was late and had to sprint for a kilometre just to get to the starting line. You see, ever since my diagnosis, I’ve worked on masking and reading people manually – this takes up brain power. If I go to one two-hour class that happens to be mostly discussion, keeping track of group dynamics results in my brain being exhausted.

And even then I miss things. I’ve now spent over seven years working on communication, and I’m still a little behind. I try. Every day, I get up and try to be better than the day before.

I try because I want to be happier. I try because I want to understand. Most of all, I try because I think respecting the people around you includes taking steps to understand them and communicate as effectively as possible

And communication is vital. I, with autism, can’t do all the work to sustain close friendships and relationships. I need people around me who will be blunt when I accidentally offend them, be understanding when I am struggling, and be honest with me. On the other hand, in return I do whatever I can to become a better person to have around. And I am openly appreciative – I often get told ‘you don’t have to thank me’, but the fact is, I want to. I don’t take the people around me for granted. I know they don’t have to be there. I know that I can be a handful.

Occasionally, people lead me to believe knowing me is worth the hassle. I’m not about to rest on my laurels until that changes. I will return their love and grace wherever and whenever I can.



As I wrote this, I hoped, probably in vain, that I help someone who is like I used to be – unable to articulate, even to themselves, what it is that they’re experiencing. That someone reads this and stops thinking ‘autism’ equates to some sort of mental deficiency. That someone will actually read this, and read this far, period.