An Autistic Weather Forecast
“Following the cold snap there will be a period of high pressure as everyone gets out their weighted blankets…”
Jokes only an autistic person would get aside, having tolerated another English winter I started thinking about what different weather conditions mean for me as an autistic person.
Sure, bad weather conditions get to everyone and some say autistic people are too sensitive to everything but that’s what being autistic means. You’re more sensitive to everything so everything affects you more, often to the point of disabling when it comes to many areas of life.
So I’m wanted to rundown each piece of weather with an autistic analysis. Like all things autistic it’ll affect others in different ways. This is just the way weather affects me and 3/4 of my senses.
Rain
This is England so let’s start as we mean to go on. (Foreign readers, it doesn’t actually rain that excessively in England, despite the jokes. I’d estimate it rains anywhere from 5–20% of the time, depending on the time of year.)
Light-wise, rain means clouds so that’s kind of pleasant on my light-sensitive eyes. Sound-wise it’s either inaudible, and therefore no problem, or audible, obviously. When it is audible, on the whole I find rain a positive thing; it’s a very pleasing aural stim, particularly outside under an umbrella in moderate rain. Inside with a really heavy downpour outside is just as good, although I will admit at times it can become an irritating background noise I can’t phase out. Autistic brains aren’t always good at phasing out background noise — I find ticking clocks or distant talking particularly bad for example — so there are days it can really wear on my aural nerves.
All that is just the rain itself though. There’s also puddles to consider and water on the road. That’s a sound that really gets to me, the sticky noise of tyres on a wet road or sudden crash of a puddle being obliterated by fast-spinning vulcanised rubber. I hate the sounds cars make in the rain. Other sounds I can deal with but those exhaust me in a way I can barely describe.
The other sensory issues are, I guess, tactile ones — Rain does smell; it’s called petrichor, that smell of rain, if you wanted to know — Touch-wise is as bad as cars on wet roads, another sensory experience I find exhausting. Being wet is so unpleasant for me — You don’t like being wet? Try being hypersensitive to touch and wet — that I go to great lengths avoiding getting splashed or stepping in puddles. That means a lot of extra waiting for cars to pass, leaping puddles or walking around muddy patches. Having to think and plan every step I take tires my brain out so fast.
Rain comes in lots of types, with a bunch of side-effects and together with other weather conditions like clouds or wind. With all those things, it ultimately feels as if you have to navigate the world in a totally different way when it rains. Autistic people like learning one way to do things and then doing it repeatedly; changes to a routine, even things you think nothing about such as walking a different path to avoid puddles or carrying an umbrella, are a whole new routine to autistic brains which is very tiring.
Tiredness is what rain equals to me. After a few days of rain I get used to the routine but rain never lasts. And there’s always the looking out the window and wondering if those clouds are rain-grey or just overcast-grey; I hate the erraticness.
Child-me used to wish the sky was dry all day every day and then rained each night to get all its rain out; there’s nothing an autistic person loves more than routine.
Clouds
Clouds can mean all kinds of things but for this one I’m talking about those overcast days where there’s a thick layer of white/grey on the sky and nothing coming out of it — That’s 50% of the weather in England.
Clouds don’t present any real sensory issues for me by themselves. They’re dull, quiet and stay high up in the sky where they can’t touch me. Therefore I guess they get an autistic thumbs up.
Emotionally, everyone feels a bit less cheerful when it’s overcast and perhaps that’s a little stronger for a more sensitive autistic brain. But sometimes a bit of calming can be a perk if your hypersensitivity is already reacting to too many things. What might be hyperactivity in sunny conditions levels out at a more workable neutral under cloud.
You might not be much fun but you’re good for me, clouds.
Sun
This is very sunny days I’m talking about here, properly bright sunshine instead of middling days with some scattered cloud. Those days when it’s hard to look in the direction of a window, let alone out of it.
Okay, it’s rarely that bad but my eyes and brain do get tired more quickly on sunny days due to all the extra light to process. Wearing my tinted lenses helps but I still find myself squinting if I face the direction of the Sun on those days. I may enjoy it but my optical nerves don’t.
I can’t bring myself to mark sunshine down though — Who could? — and it’s rarely a problem.
Or not for that reason at least.
Sunny days, particularly sunny afternoons around 2–3pm when the Sun’s passed its zenith but isn’t properly setting yet, strike me with a strange sadness. I’d be hard-pushed to say it’s an autistic thing instead of a personal one but days like that, perfect days, hit me with the full force of how ephemeral beautiful experiences, the world and life are. Every time there’s an afternoon like that I catch myself wondering how many more perfect days I’ll see before I die.
But that’s getting morbid, and it’s not the Sun’s fault anyway.
Snow
Caveat: This is mostly based on my memories of snow, given this is England and when my Canadian friend messaged me saying she’d had 24cm of snow overnight and couldn’t see their sidewalks anymore, I messaged back saying we’d had snow too and there was currently 2mm of it on our pavements.
Snow’s a quick path to sensory overload for me. While a little on my hand or to stomp in is a lot of fun, stim toy levels of fun almost, the coldness is draining and the wetness just plain intolerable. I have no concentration left to focus on anything once I’m wearing wet clothes; my mind can only focus on the sensations and how long until I can get the wet clothes off. I couldn’t even hold a conversation properly with wet shoes on.
If I’m inside, sure snow looks pretty but it becomes a vision hazard of glare if there’s sun — Though the combination of snow and sun in England approaches about a 0% chance.
There’s one other effect snow has if I’m inside, on sound. I’m not sure if it’s some insulting property or just the discouragement it presents to people going out and doing noisy things but the world gets so quiet when it snows. Too quiet. I get under-stimulated aurally and need some noise.
Snow, like rain, presents a whole new routine and sensory world. While I’d rate it above rain in most respects, they’re not cousins for no reason. Same wobbly, ambivalent gesture with my hand.
Hail
Pain. I think hail universally means pain to all brain types if you’re out in it. But most brains will tell you to get in away from it, at which point it becomes a different matter.
Inside I enjoy hail, the noise it makes and watching it fall and bounce. It’s very visually and aurally stimulating so I find myself drawn to windows whenever it’s hailing outside. Hail’s a weather that gets a big autistic thumbs up from me. I can even forgive being outside in it partly because it’s so pleasurably stimulating.
One of the most exciting types of weather I’ve ever encountered is a combined hailstorm and thunderstorm; I was practically glued to the window for that one.
Storms
Like hail, storms are something that always brings me to a window although with slightly more mixed feelings.
I’m not scared of storms per se but they do make me jumpy. The intermittent, erratic nature of thunder keeps me constantly on edge and unable to do anything, especially if I can’t block the noise out with headphones. Autistic brains are always ready to jump at any possible threat. Lightning flashes are a similar problem, only with added pain from the bright light. Not good, particularly not at night. But I’ll give them some points back for being pretty to watch.
Fog/Mist
A condition that never really lasts long, not round here at least, but that I enjoy while it’s here; let’s put it with hail then based on those criteria.
How can I enjoy fog? Well, not being a driver, I’ve got little to fear from it — Aside from the people that do drive during it, perhaps — and it’s rather nice to walk in. Cold and damp, potentially, but in terms of autistic sensory issues it dulls both sound and light to a comfortable level.
The experience of walking in fog, only able to see 20 metres or so ahead, saves me the bother of staring down at the pavement as I walk to reduce visual input, something I find myself doing a lot when I’m tired. It’s certainly not something I’d want all the time but a switch that could bring fog down when I’m tired? I’d actually like that. You’d get more drama-points for summoning thunderstorms but I’ll take my fog.
Wind
The final two weathers I’m going to cover are more like components of weather I suppose, or perhaps side-dishes. With conditions currently storm-like in England, 60+mph gusts, this one wasn’t hard to go research.
Wind’s effect on me depends very much on which way I’m blowing at the time. It can be a fun source of noise and activity if I’m inclined in a similar way but at other times those same things just bring pain to my autistic ears and skin. Constant movement in my periphery out a window can be just as much a bother. And all that isn’t counting the amplifying effect of wind, bringing faraway noises I wouldn’t otherwise hear, adding force to cold and rain on bad days or increasing all the unpleasant smells of the world like people’s perfume and cut grass — They’re not pleasant when they’re always overpowering to a hypersensitive nose.
But for all my occasional problems with it, there are still plenty of gusty days I take my coat off and run down the street into the wind, holding it behind me like a Batman cape. It’s a friend you’ve got to be in the mood for, but these days most of the time I am.
Cold/Heat
I’m mainly referring to extremes here, although considering England rarely gets outside the 0–30°c range perhaps they’re not very extreme extremes.
Cold and heat equal tiredness to me. The easiest comparison I can think is to chronic pain, and pain is something I have enough of anyway, in that cold and heat don’t stop you doing anything intrinsically but they make everything require that bit more effort. They’re wearing on the system and while that’s probably true for most people, when you’re already fighting for what little energy you can muster to get through each day, losing some to the heat/cold becomes a significant issue.
Outside of weather I like heat and cold; I temperature stim by holding ice in my hand until it melts or sitting with my back right against the hot radiator, two things that mildly hurt yet I can’t seem to stop myself doing because they’re so pleasurable to me. But the weather still sucks.
So let’s see. That totals up to… Well, I lose count of how I graded half of them. There’s not many conditions that don’t have both positive or negative aspects to them at times.
When you’re autistic, you need as little bother as possible in your life in terms of things beyond your control that you need to account for. Routine is good. Weather is the opposite of routine.
It may be a small thing in the grand scheme, especially all the more difficult challenges in the life of an autistic person, but weather is a constant in life, and always a constant mystery what it’ll do next.
Originally published at millitflakes.wordpress.com.
