Listen I get it but you CANNOT use "sensory nightmare" as an excuse to avoid essential things. You HAVE to find a way to make it work, such as finding effective alternatives. But you can't just avoid it.
You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.
You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.
You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.
You have to find a way.
good LORD the piss is flying all over the place in that comment section! If you're poor do NOT leave your house you're definitely gonna get caught in the crossfire.
it's like, yes, you don't HAVE to do those things. you can just go so hard in terms of meeting your sensory needs that you fail to meet other human needs, and possibly die, possibly put yourself in a position that's even worse for your sensory needs due to injuries you acquire as a result. but you have to be aware of the trade-off you're making--and it's something we do deserve the autonomy for, but our goal is to create a world where people are aware of their sensory needs but also are accommodated well enough that they can push outside their normal tolerated threshold for small amounts of time, when it's something that will prevent worse consequences. And our goal in recovering from the trauma of being put through too many sensory nightmares, too often, as a child, should be to be able to make that trade-off and know that it's just a few things, that's okay, it doesn't mean we're going to be back in that world where our sensory needs were so badly unmet that it trumped all other needs that our bodies have--because they weren't something we ever had a visceral image of going unmet. We hyperfixate on the fears we have, and it often makes the things we do to placate them actually create more risks we just don't have the mental capacity to properly weigh up.
meeting the sensory needs of adults around me was something i bent myself over backwards to do as a child, made me so hyper-aware of how to accommodate others it took a quarter century to even figure out what my own sensory needs are. and i can say looking back at people i still love--one day you're gonna be my grandma, dealing with health complications of only eating certain foods, you're gonna be put into a position where the only way to make sure you don't die is a sensory nightmare in of itself. she's only now discovering her sensory profile that the rest of us spent decades tiptoeing around, and something that was meant to support her recovery is just being used as another excuse, another reason, fully justified in her head, to avoid doing things that will be uncomfortable yes but ultimately good for her body.
it's easy for us internet folk to dismiss things as 'old people problems' or say we won't live that long anyway, but she was 50 when i was born. not much older than many of us, and the age my mother is now. young, sprightly, and I watched that time go by and I watched ultimately unsuccessful attempts to accommodate for herself even before any of us knew what neurodivergence was. and the reason they failed is because she didn't weigh up what was something she had to tolerate for her own greater good or could afford to prioritise her sensory needs in. it was all or nothing, either deserving nothing good or being so desperate she needed the world and laws of physics to bend to meet her own sensory needs. we have a world of trade-offs and science and good inventions like seatbelts and vaccines and also a world where most people are kind and want to make people's lives easier, and though that wasn't many of our experience, that includes sensory things. ear protection, the ability to control our own lighting, choose which ecosystem we live in. the world has enough room for you to meet your sensory needs 95% of the time so you have the energy to endure that 5% where they have to come secondary to other needs like nutrition and safety and also--this is a big one for me--the sensory and relational needs of your children who often will contradict your own.
that all said, life jackets are great and the safer option 99.9% of the time but please NEVER wear one when jumping off a cliff of reasonable height (think, metres not feet) into water, it will hit your head at speed and knock you out and it's concerning how many people on tumblr don't know how dangerous that is. This is a metaphor for how something that's good for you the vast majority of the time can be WAY MORE DANGEROUS in specific situations.
learn to recognise what they are.
