Eve Owen
For me, autism is feeling everything very close up all the time. Everything’s volume is high and constant, sensorially & emotionally. It feels isolating sometimes, like the world is too loud to interact with. Most days I find myself purposefully dulling down the things around me so they don’t overwhelm me.
It’s sad that’s something I feel I need to do. Surely it’s a good thing to experience life intensely, but it just makes me disorientated and existential. I feel things up close, but feel far away from people.
It’s important people understand that autism is a spectrum. Just because we can sometimes appear neurotypical, doesn’t mean we’re coping that way. We mask because it makes you more comfortable, not us. If anything, that just shows how far we’ve got to go in making sure autistic people feel accepted into society. - Eve
