i have this random theory that the amount of autism diagnosis seems to be rising partially because the sensory environment of the world is getting more hostile.
Things getting generally noisier, more screens/devices, more polyester in clothing. I'm not personally affected very much by lights, but maybe lights are different???
but like, kids generally spending more time in institutional settings (daycares/schools/extracurriculars) would also do it.
I was homeschooled K-12 (for disability reasons) and I really wonder sometimes how being in a "traditional" school environment would have affected me, like, developmentally. The number one thing that I absolutely Need to function and to Want To Be Alive is the ability to separate myself from other people and take downtime when I need it.
Situations where I have back-to-back activities all day are... I don't think I've ever been truly suicidal, but I've had times when the state of being alive felt so incredibly painful that I would cry for hours multiple days a week from the sheer crushing despair of having to live and be conscious through my life.
Sensory overload isn't the exact same thing as pain, but the "hurt" or suffering of pain is itself something that is not inherent to pain and only happens with pain above a certain threshold of tolerance and processing ability. So I think it's accurate to say: in the same way that an intolerable amount of pain hurts, sensory overload HURTS.
But every kid is expected to spend more than 40 hours a week in the same room as dozens or hundreds of other kids, and basically everyone thinks of this as the bare minimum for normal social development and literally cannot imagine anything else.
That is kind of an existentially dark thought to me
Discussions about how to make school (whether kindergarten, or college...) more accessible all seem to pathetically miss the point for me because fundamentally, the thing that would make "school" (being trapped in a room with stimuli that I have to process) accessible for me is for there to be FUCKING LESS OF IT
Like, I kind of get this sympathetic gut clench/nausea at the thought of kids having to Be In School all fucking day and not being able to just Leave
And then I remember that the majority of people do things like go to concerts and go to the mall
But that doesn't fully make the horror go away
Nobody has imagined what a world that didn't hurt, badly, constantly, for people like me would look like. It's hard to think about that
There were long periods in late 2024 and in 2025 I was crushingly depressed because the sensory overload of daily life was so exhausting that I literally could not do anything except school, work, attend to basic survival needs, and lie in bed with the lights out
I would try to explain this to disability services, therapists, academic counselors, and there was no comprehension. It was like trying to explain Vincent Van Gogh's use of color to a cave salamander that didn't have any eyes.
I have a deep disillusionment with the very concept of disability accommodations, because the world I see around me is not ready to even BEGIN to deal with the implications of very basic things like "some people need things to happen slower, softer, and more quietly"
