This might sound kinda weird but is becoming super unbalanced when it's too dark to see an autistic thing? I read somewhere that autistic can't feel where they're bodies are and instead have to see where they are if that makes any sense?
Yes! It’s called poor proprioception! I learned that word from this blog, yay!
“Proprioception, also called kinesthesia, is the body’s ability to sense its location, movements, and actions. It’s the reason we’re able to move freely without consciously thinking about our environment.”
This statement is pretty ableist, because it assumes everyone who’s reading it CAN move freely without consciously thinking about their environment. But people with poor proprioception CAN’T. We do have to think consciously about our environment, every time we move, to avoid crashing into things, tripping on things, dropping things, or, as you said, falling over.
When a person has poor proprioception, they cannot “feel” where their own body is, and so they compensate by looking, and using their eyes to see where their body is. The example I give is going up a flight of stairs. Normally, when I go up a flight of stairs, I watch my feet. I need to, I need the information from my eyes to tell me whether I have lifted my foot high enough or not. People with normal proprioception do not have to do this. They only have to look at the first step, to know how high these particular stairs are, and after that they can just feel whether their foot is high enough.
So a person with normal proprioception could walk up a staircase while carrying something that blocks their vision of their feet. I cannot. When I have to do this, what I do is lift my foot slowly, banging my toes higher and higher against the next step until I feel the top of it, and then I take the step. This is compensation that I have learned (painfully) how to do from many years of tripping up stairs and dropping things.
So when it’s dark, you can no longer use the compensation tool you’re used to- seeing. Without seeing, you now have to rely solely on your proprioception, and so it becomes very apparent that it’s not up to the task.
