There are people out there who have no clue what we are going through. Well I plan on giving you a inside look, on what it is like to be a Aspie.
To most people for them to get point A to B, its just a straight line. But for us I want you imagine a road with detuers, constant stops, and pot holes. You can think of the pot holes as the meltdowns and everything else as sensory issues.
A great example of how our brains work is, think of all our wires are crossed and we get crosstalk, now add sensory issues. Things like tags on shirts irritates us, or the light from office lights or the sun hurts our eyes or certain sounds hurt our ears smells make us sick.
You add all that up, you have a meltdown. You’re not happy, things are bothering you, and all you want is some place quiet and dark so you can calm down. But when it happens people don’t know how to respond to it.
One of the other major issuse that goes hand and hand is no fliter and lack of empthy. The reason I say this, because we dont have a filter, we dont understand how something can hurt someone else. We do have feelings, we just dont understand how what we are saying can be hurtful to others. Now what I mean by no filter is, not being able to know what we are thinking is right or wrong to say, which comes down to speaking whats on our minds.
I recently about a month back read a good example of a meltdown on a younger child. Imagine a home sleeping and needs him to get up for school. So his mom wakes him up, all the while getitng everything else ready for the day, his lunch, and getting his clothes out. Now imagine he is taking his time, and now his mom is yelling up to to hurry up so doesnt miss his bus. So now she runs up stairs, throw on any shirt with a itchy tag and now thats bothering him., she hands him his lunch and walks outside to wait for the bus. Now he has the bright light from the sun bothering him, and once he gets on the bus the noise and smells around.
Now you add all those sensory issues up and you have a meltdown, everything all at once causeing a sensory overload and the brain just stops and says enough.
Now if you look at the spectrum, there is a scale from low to high.. The high end are those who are able to adapt and dont have all the major issues. Just social issues with dealing with people and some minor sensory issues and the low end has lot more problems.
So when you see one of us out there in the world. Be kind. You never know what our day has been like.
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