The world arrives at us differently. Not more, not less, differently. The fluorescent light that nobody else registers is a fluorescent light I have been counting for an hour. The background music in the restaurant is not background. The seam on the inside of the sock is a fact of the day. The smell of the perfume on the person three rows over is information I did not ask for and cannot put down.
Sensory experience is the layer underneath everything else we describe about autism. Our thinking, our communication, our connection, our distress, all rest on what our bodies are receiving from the world moment by moment, and on how much spare processing we have left after receiving it.
Different, not more
For some of us, sensory input amplifies. A whisper sounds loud. A tag is painful. A specific kind of light is nauseating. For some of us, sensory input dampens. We register temperature late. We do not notice hunger until it is an emergency. We can walk through a noisy crowd and hear nothing. For most of us, both are true at once, in different channels, and the channels change across the day.
This is not a disorder of the senses. It is a different calibration of them. In another evolutionary setting it would have been an asset. In the current built environment, designed for a narrow sensory range, it is a tax.
Sensory access is the simplest, cheapest, and most immediate form of inclusion. Adjust the lights. Turn the music down. Offer the quieter room. Let us keep our headphones on. Put a lid on the bin that the rest of the world has stopped smelling but we have not.
Sensory access is the simplest fix
When we talk about Autistic access, this is usually what we are asking for first. It is not complicated. It is not expensive. It is the thing most organisations still forget.
If you have a quieter room available and are wondering whether to offer it, offer it.
