I have a Sensory Processing Disorder, which is common in people with autism, as well as Misophonia so there are a lot of things that bother me. Sensory Processing Disorder affects how the brain processes various sensory input. Misophonia causes certain sounds to trigger an extreme emotional reaction. I also have OCD which adds a whole new list of problems gnawing though my brain.
My Sensory Processing Disorder doesn’t always get in my way, but it still causes a lot of issues mostly with touch. It feels as if my own clothing has me trapped and I can’t escape fast enough. In high school, the way my shoes touched the top of my feet caused a lot of issues in class and I’d end up just taking them off. To this day, I only wear shoes when I have to because I don’t like my feet confined. I can’t stand dirt sticking to my feet so I wear socks in the house and take them off to sleep so my feet can air out a bit. I also hate wearing jewelry and make up. Don’t get me wrong, jewelry is very beautiful and I do own some pieces that I wish I could wear but after some time it just rubs me the wrong way and I have to take it off. I can only wear rings for a few minutes before I have to take them off. I got myself one of the fitness watches to track my health but I keep taking it off because it makes my wrist feel wrong. The most annoying of all of these is whenever I need to wear a brace. I should be wearing my knee brace but I can’t wear it for long periods of time without feeling wrong.
Misophonia makes a lot of sounds unsafe as if the sound itself is crawling through my ears and digging into my brain. My least favorite sounds are chewing (especially wet chewing), scraping of metal or glass, and any sort of high pitched repetitive sound like alarms or metal banging against each other. For example, one day at work my coworker started clanking the tongs together over and over to annoy me after I asked him to stop. Those types of sounds can send me immediately into a meltdown. I ended up needing to leave the line and went to my purse to get my anxiety meds so I could calm down. Sadly, the incident already made its mark and my coworkers started poking fun at me. Luckily, I now work in a place where I can put in my earbuds to change the sound and calm down before I fall apart! Sometimes I’m just in a bad mood and the sounds that are normally fine start to bug me. I have to be very careful watching ASMR videos because some do chewing sounds or the texture of the slime they’re playing with is too much for me to handle. Those videos show up on my feed from time to time but I usually try to scroll past them.
Having autism in general, I don’t like change. My lifestyle works very well for me and when I’m ready to make a change, I’ll work on it, but otherwise I like things the way I do. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the grocery store to get myself more of my sodas and almost had a meltdown in the aisle. I was already having a bad day and this was the second store I’d gone to and they didn’t have my sodas in the packaging I usually got. Typically, I get the 24 pack of the zero sugar sodas but they only had diet and regular in the 24 pack and I had to get two of the 12 packs. Luckily, the 12’s were on sale, but it still wasn’t what I usually got! I know it doesn’t make a difference to most people, but it made a difference to me. If I ever make plans to do something and those plans get ruined, it wrecks my entire day! I once made plans to go to the DMV one day and do some stuff after, but I found out the DMV was closed and felt stuck all day. I get a very specific idea of what my day is going to look like and if my idea changes, I can’t just bounce back.
OCD makes my life particularly difficult. I don’t always think about how it affects my life, but I keep finding new problems. I can’t just walk away from a closed door or locked car, I have to jiggle the handle a very specific way or the door isn’t locked or push or pull on the door or it’ll open on it’s own. After using any sort of chemical or cleaning product, I have to wash my hands twice. I can’t just wash them once, or my hands aren’t clean. My roommate recently got a dog; one day she gave the dog a bath and brought in a jar of peanut butter to give the dog a treat so she’d associate bath as a good thing. I couldn’t wash my hands because there was peanut butter next to me and they wouldn’t be clean. I also couldn’t touch that jar of peanut butter after knowing it was in the bathroom, much less that it had the butter knife she’d used to smear the contents on the side of the tub still in the jar. It also really bothers me when people who don’t have OCD say they do. I’m not saying you need an official diagnosis, but just because you’re a perfectionist doesn’t mean you have OCD.
There are a lot of little things that bother me in life, mostly because of my disorders. I’m also bothered by a lot of the problems going on in today’s society, but there’s not much I can do about those. I try my best to manage life with what I have and so far I’ve gotten into a pretty comfortable rhythm. Despite all of the little hiccups, I still find small joys in life.
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