I am very sentisitive. And it is hard to frame myself in that term. And I feel that the odds are high that my sensitivity are not directly related to autism. It is just a part of my personality. Autism makes it harder to navigate, yes. But I am sensitive and that is a fact.
Like I said, I dislike the term. It's the correct term. It's not offensive. But it is also a term that lacks the nuance to convey the reality of being sensitive. In our culture, sensitivity is associated to a lack of strength or drive or fire. I have a deep fire in me for the things that my sensitive nature brings to my awareness. I have spent decades surviving the onslaught of anxiety that comes from the act of walking the planet as an open wound, a raw nerve. No. Sensitivity does not mean the outcome but the awareness to the world around. Regardless of how the radar became so finely tuned.
The main issue of sensitivity is that the world around is raw data. Have you ever seen a spreadsheet with a crap ton of columns and thought... so what? Numbers? As a designer, I learned that data is nothing if it's not packaged in a way that, within the needed context, can be parsed by the processor of that data. So I get an avalanche of info every second of my day. Like...
- The person in the third thumbnail in the meeting is angry
- The teacher that called me sounds weary
- There are some unusual sounds or smells. Are they dangerous?
- A friend's speech patterns or timing of contact changed
- My supervisor hasn't contacted me in 3 weeks. Am I getting let go?
That's just... things one notices every second. Of course there are many more. Too many to articulate, really. But I don't parse it because the data lacks context to frame it and is simply too much. Sometimes I call it the Schrödinger's (Emotional) Box. Every single thing around me, if I cannot decipher easily the correct pattern, simply becomes everything at once. Light is a particle and a wave. My friend hates me and loves me. My boss will unceremoniously fire me and is sick with the flu. The house will blow up and a candle snuffed out. My child wore the teacher out and I annoyed her and she slept poorly. Sometimes I think that's the worst part. This infinite loop of recieving a deluge of data. Parsing it poorly, looping, looping, looping. Crying it out. Rinse. Repeat. Ugh! So annoying. Intuition is not all unicorns and rainbows. But it is certainly, never, ever, ever a sign of weakness.
Juanita’s experiment was to make the Metaverse more human, more real. She believed that if avatars could express real emotions, people would connect better. ‘I remembered my grandmother and realized, my God, the human mind can absorb and process an incredible amount of information—if it comes in the right format,’ she said.
– Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)