Your Sensory Experiences Are Valid & Real
When I spend time in online forums or speaking to other autistic people in person, one of the things that I notice is how often we have been told that our sensory experiences are impossible.
“You can’t possibly get a headache from a fluorescent lightbulb.”
“The irritation from your polyester clothing is all in your head.”
And many many other statements spoken by neurotypical parents of autistic children show a degree of ignorance that is completely unacceptable. This is gaslighting and we know that gaslighting is an abusive power tactic.
Just because you don’t experience the distress of a particular sensory experience does not mean someone else’s experience is imaginary.
Consider, for example, the sense of sight. Vision is a spectrum. Most people have “normal” aka 20–20 vision, at least as children. But some people can only see things that are close to them, or far away. Some people can’t perceive certain colors. Some people can’t perceive any visual sensory signals at all. We are comfortable with this diversity in visual capacities, as a culture. People wear glasses or contacts, there are accommodations for the blind. It’s not perfect, of course, there are all sorts of situations where visual impairment causes great challenges, but it is generally a cultural norm to…
