I'm realizing that when I'm not self medicating with weed and avoiding people, I have a lot of nervous stims and am not as sensorially resilient as I like to think, and that I avoid situations where I know I'll feel bad about my poor audio processing. I went through 90s era early intervention ot as a child and it was a bit traumatic. Do any of you have e first person experiences? Am I likely to retraumatize myself?
Normally at home, I am a heavy cannabis user. I'm not thrilled about it but it keeps me sane and I worry prescription anti anxiety meds could be a bad mix with me. Plus, I have to go through so many hoops with my psychiatrist to get prescribed controlled substances and it's hard enough getting ADHD meds filled.
The past few days I've been on a family vacation at an all inclusive resort for a wedding. It's an environment I'm mostly okay with. Other guests get drunk and loud but stick to themselves, and the staff are very nice but I find all the kind words and interactions a bit overwhelming, and I find being served a bit uncomfortable. I value radical egalitarianism as part of my religion. My family are also very soft spoken and accommodating Midwesterners I find harder to understand than the direct East Coast types I work with. They generally try to speak quieter than the ambient volume to be polite, and will spend a few minutes discussing every action, demurring that they're okay if anyone feels different over and over, even things just like "this bar is closed for a private event and we can't hear each other, maybe we should go to the lobby where it's quieter and regroup" and then somehow turn that into five minutes of asking if everyone's okay with that or of they'd rather meet somewhere else to replan our evening. This starts stressing my sister (with higher support needs), and my mom doesn't notice while she talks to her sister or focuses on the puzzle of if we should stay in the same spot until someone things of a better spot to actually have a good evening, so then I start feeling anxiety for her. I've found myself occasionally snapping in exasperation when they get stuck in a loop just so we go somewhere and do something instead of just blocking a sidewalk for no reason, and then I feel like I'm too inconsiderate to regulate myself.
And I'm not going to lie: being in a place with a bunch of couples and where a relative will get married doesn't feel great while I also feel pretty down on myself for being single for reasons to do with my neurology and other reasons. But comparison is the theif of joy and I make a conscious effort to be happy for them and appreciate the hood weather and chance to see new plants and animals and eat good food.
I would expect this to be less stressful than work. It mostly is. But lacking chemical means, I'm stimming way more than usual.
The stims and trauma:
I have a smartwatch and I'm not used to seeing my steps. Usually on a workday when I've been calming myself down with weed, I hit 1000-3000 steps working from home, or 8000 if I just go to the office and back home. I figured it's because I walk a few blocks in the city, now I'm not so sure. I've caught myself pacing a lot. This morning, I hit 4000 steps without leaving my hotel room, just going through the logistics of meeting my mom and sister by the hotel pool, but somehow me showering and putting on my bathing suit and thinking thought my day got me there before even leaving the room. At restaurants, here I've caught myself getting up and pacing and then realizing it, and that never happens to me at home, although I don't go out much. I know it must look strange to my relatives. Trying to sit around and not be a bother, I'm hitting 15k steps a day.
And I'm realizing I'm used to being in a quiet office with loud people, instead of in loud places with quiet people, and I learned while reading tech news that apparently neurotypical people are so good at picking out voices that digital signal processing is only just now catching up via ai. And maybe I need some kind of accomodation to actually understand people outside of the few places I've found myself comfortable going. I love my city and the town I work in, and I love my religious community, but I'm basically not going anywhere but the office these days now that I have the ability to go places I want on my own, and I'm not happy about that.
So there's a good chance I have an auditory processing disorder that I've been denying through social anxiety and avoidance, and if I quit weed, a goal I've had to hopefully be sharper at work, I might need to see an occupational therapist to get the right treatment. But I'm scared. The part of life I went through ot was when I was a small child and felt vulnerable and wrong, and the mindset at the time was that autistic kids need as much therapy as early as possible and constant reinforcement at home to not regress. My mom, having two autistic kids and my dad being away for his corporate management job a lot, meant she had to remind both me and my sister of our stims and speech impediments, which made me feel like I was always getting graded and shouldn't say or do much of I didn't want to show faults. And a part of those therapists and my mom at the time live with me, regulating and judging me to this day.
Despite that, I'm grateful with reservations. By many standards I'm pretty successful, and their ability to turn my rigid thinking and hyperfixation into manageable tools towards a career was a fantastic boon. My mom loved me and still loves me, but was in an insane situation with people panicking over a condition they barely understood. If penicillin didn't exist, how can I be mad at a doctor for not prescribing it? I'm sure everyone wanted the best for the kids they worked with, but they were learning on the fly.
How are occupational therapists who work with adults these days? As a six figures in the big city with my own apartment person, am I too high functioning for the people out there? Do they get old ot and aba might have hurt their clients even if they look okay and act with empathy towards that? I've also heard that there are auditory aids specifically to help with signal to noise ratios with speech, so I'm curious about those. I accept insurance might not cover this. Or are the treatments even there yet for the kind of masking and regulation and comfort with others I'd like to hit |
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