Hello, and thank you for coming back. Today we are going to talk about something that is very different from person to person. I think everyone has sensory issues of some kind, but some of us just have a harder time with it than others, and there is a complete neurodivergence that is just sensory processing disorder(SPD). However, a lot of other diagnosis also include sensory issues, such as autism and ADHD. I’m Lya Batlle-Rafferty, and this is Memoirs of a Neurodivergent Latina.

Alright, so, the first question I guess is “What do sensory processing issues look like in the wild?” There are many of us who pass, who you would never know had sensory issues except in very extreme circumstances, and there are others of us who have a really hard time with even just the most minimal human touch. So what does it look like for me, specifically? I think this is where being a Latina comes in, though I think it’s gotten worse as I got older, my house became quieter. I grew up in a very loud household, there was always a party on the weekend, there were always people around. I got overwhelmed still, I would end up in my room reading a book, but I think I had sort of a minimum threshold, I guess, that was much higher than other people’s. In college I could go to parties, as long as I knew everybody there, as long as I was completely comfortable, I could deal with the noise. What I’ve never been able to do though, is go to a nightclub. So the combination of noise, of lights, of people touching me that I didn’t know, because they just brush against you constantly, right? I would spend about ten minutes in the nightclub and then I would start to feel what I often describe like having a tension headache without the pain, right? My forehead was tight, my brain was uncomfortable, and I just couldn’t take it for very long. And I would leave.

Other ways that I have sensory issues, I think are very common with the diagnosis that I probably have, which is- Y’know when I was younger I didn’t like labels on my clothing, I really didn’t like wearing a lot of clothing at all, like I would walk around with bare feet and shorts and y’know, big long shirts, and things that weren’t too restrictive. I also had food texture problems So, I couldn’t stand tomatoes because tomatoes were mushy in the middle and had this like, tight skin on the outside, and the combination was like, so bad. When I got older, and I learned there were different tomatoes, other than the kind of typical beefsteak tomatoes or whatever they’re called, suddenly I liked tomatoes, because the inside wasn’t as mushy, and so the pop wasn’t as bad. I know, it’s so weird, but, I mean, that was my thing. I couldn’t stand tomatoes. I didn’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because the jelly against the peanut butter, sliding around, it was just weird. I couldn’t handle, oh I still can’t handle raw cotton. What do I mean by raw cotton? Anything made of cotton that has not been softened. To me it feels a lot like nails on a chalkboard sounds to most people. So everything has to be softened in order for me to wear it. I can’t do cotton balls, they suck. I also can’t do crunchy snow. I call it crunchy snow, but it’s the snow where you like, step on it and the top kinda slides against the bottom and it makes a little- it’s not quite a squeak, but it feels like a squeak. Yeah, I can’t do that either.

And finally, there are scents. So, there are stores at the mall and in other places, candle stores, cosmetic stores, where the smells coming out of them are this big cacophony of just different scents that don’t all go together, and they tend to give me a really bad headache. So my son and I both tend to avoid them as much as possible, we’ll cross to the other side of the mall, y’know how malls usually have like, two walkways or something on the second floor, we’ll go to the walkway that’s furthest from the store in order to make sure that we don’t have to deal with it. So those are kind of like, common things- oh, the other funny one for me was one I didn’t even realize I had until my oldest son had it too. I grew up in a bakery, and I have always had to break eggs to make meringue, like my whole life, and the way I was taught to do it is not with the eggshells, but with my hands. So, I separate the egg whites and the egg yolks with my hands. When my son was about, I don’t know, probably three, he had chocolate on his hands that melted, and he was flipping out. He was in a carseat in the back seat, and he was flipping out, and he couldn’t get it off, and we tried to get him to like, lick it off his hand, and he wouldn’t do it, and it was this whole adventure. The story goes that he then realized his little brother was sitting next to him and he held out his hands for his little brother, and y’know, his little brother ate the chocolate off his hands. But either way, that was the first time I realized he had this kind of sensory thing with things on his hands. I think it took a little while, but I began to realize something: When I separate the egg whites and the egg yolks, I would wash my hands after probably every two egg whites, and then I would dry them really really well, because I know you can’t get water on the egg whites, and then I would go back to it. And I could only handle about two egg whites before I had to go wash my hands, but I had been doing it automatically without thinking until I saw how he reacted, and when I saw how he reacted, then suddenly it all made sense. That I had a sensory thing with my hands that I didn’t even realize I had. So there’s one example of how it can be completely unconscious, or maybe you’ve just done it for so long that you don’t even realize you’re doing it.

So those are kind of the background ones. Those are the ones that are always there. They’re not horrible, you can kinda work around them. I am actually a huge hugger, so I like hugs, but I have to feel very very safe to want hugs. Either way, the point is, I don’t have any aversion to human touch normally. However, when I am badly hurt or when I am really overwhelmed, I physically turtle. So like, as an example, I have a really bad knee that locks up every once in a while, and it is a horrendous, horrendous thing when it does, and luckily when I say once in a while, it’s like, once every three to four years. So, the knee locks up and I end up on the floor crying in pain, and I cannot be touched. It’s like the pain has taken over all of my processing capabilities, and I cannot process human touch at that moment. Also when I’m really really really upset, I turtle too. I go and hide, I don’t want to be touched. So what does this look like to the outside world? Every time, when normally a person would want to be hugged and reassured and made to feel better, I need everyone to be away from me. So you can imagine that that is very hard for somebody else to learn and to be okay with, and understand that it is not in any way about them, it’s just that your mind can’t process.

Other times when I end up with sensory processing problems is when I’m really really stressed, and that’s a different type of sensory processing issue. So, when I’m very stressed, noises and yelling and arguing and y’know, people talking over each other, all of those things become this overwhelming sensory thing that makes me want to snap and yell and all of that. With my kids in the car, I had to learn, y’know, after a full day of work where I might’ve been really stressed and now they’re coming home and they’re yelling in the car, I had to learn to be like, “Okay, Mom is really stressed. Mom is about to get overwhelmed, and if you keep doing what you’re doing right now, I’m going to yell, and it will have nothing to do with you being bad, and it will have everything to do with me being overwhelmed. So can you please just be quiet for y’know, however long to get home.” Usually five minutes. When I say ‘the kids yelling’, I’m talking about any sort of yelling, not arguing with each other or screaming, even just loud laughter between them when I was overwhelmed. So just to clarify that yes, everyone gets stressed when their kids are yelling at each other, but in my case it was loud noises in general.

Sensory problems can also lead to some of the behaviors that you sometimes see with people with autism, and it’s odd because I can’t blame it all on sensory problems, but I can say that it literally affects me that way. If I am too stressed, and if I cannot stop the noise, and if people won’t let me process for a while when, well, I should say, when I was younger, y’know, I would do the things, right? I would bang my fist against my forehead maybe, I would hide in a corner. Note: I never did this at work, so once again, very good at the whole ‘masking’ and ‘chameleoning’ thing. We will talk about that later, but personally, y’know, hit your head because you just can’t get anything out. As I got older, I did that a lot less, I’ve probably done it once in the past four years. So I don’t know if that means I’m coping better or I just have enough experience that the things that used to stress me a lot I can now blow off, like, I don’t know about that, but as I’ve gotten older, those particular ways of dealing have appeared less.

Why do I bring up sensory stuff? Sensory stuff is the most visible thing, it really is. Like, if I’m trying to think about the things that would make someone think I am autistic, the sensory stuff is far and away the thing that people would probably notice the most. Y’know, I can’t stay very long in a large crowded room where everyone’s having fun. A child cannot handle field day partially because of schedules and expectations, but partially because it’s loud and people are running around and they’re being touched and they’re being asked to wear things that they feel are uncomfortable. So sensory issues, either when they manifest because of something else or when they are kind of these passive sensory issues that we have all the time, are very obvious. Y’know, I would cringe, I would get grumpy about food, I still get grumpy about food sometimes, just not in the same way. I would hug a lot of people, so I had the opposite sensory thing I think than most people like me do. I liked being hugged, I liked being held. So this show is supposed to be about me sharing things with you in order to make people think about whether or not they might have some of these issues as well. So let’s talk about that.

Sensory issues do not mean there’s something wrong with you, ‘kay? I know it’s called sensory processing disorder or it’s part of the diagnosis for autism. You have a different way of taking in your environment, and interestingly enough, even though they throw around these like terms like ‘Lack of Theory of Mind” and things like that, which we will- I mean we’ll talk about that later. What it really means is you’re excessively sensitive to your environment. You may feel things other people don’t. You may experience things other people don’t, because they just don’t notice those things as much. That doesn’t make it something bad, it does make it hard for other people to process, but that is not on you. Like, you cannot help this. Sometimes I wonder about coping mechanisms, and I’ll talk a lot about this when we talk about ‘masking’ and ‘chameleoning’, but sometimes I wonder if the coping mechanisms that we use to try to be okay in a world where we don’t quite fit in actually hurt us in ways that we don’t think about, when our sole goal when we’re younger is to, y’know, get in the workforce, to not be seen as odd, to find friends and fit in in the right ways, right? So your sensory issues mean that you are more aware of things like pains in your body or odd things in your environment. You may not always be aware of odd tensions between people, but you can tell when things have changed around you, and that can manifest in a lot of different ways for a lot of different people. So I’m not gonna tell you exactly how you might be sensitive. I know that I can tell when things have been moved around me. I’m like, uber aware of where things are and how they’ve been moved. I’m very aware of my internal state at almost all times, which, y’know, this kind of crazy analysis that I do because I’m aware of how different I am. I find things disturb me quicker than other people, so if I go to the eye doctor for instance, and I am thinking that there’s something wrong with my eyesight, the eye doctor will almost always tell me ‘Wow, there is a very minor difference. Most of my other patients would never have seen that.’ So there is this kind of interesting detailed sensory thing that we have, that can be helpful. Anyways, I don’t wanna skew it too much in the direction of ‘everything’s great’, because you know, it’s still frustrating, it’s still hard, it’s still something that we will all, all of us like me, will have to struggle with. It does help a little bit when there is a diagnosis or something that explains why you are the way you are. Like I find it helpful because what it means is it’s not in my head, and it’s also not something where who I am is wrong. So for those of you who are still struggling, for those of you who are listening, once again, there is nothing wrong with you. You are okay, just because we’re different, doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Thank you for tuning in to Memoirs of a Neurodivergent Latina, this podcast was written, edited, and produced by me, Lya Batlle-Rafferty. All music is by Carlos Neda, and this podcast is part of Labrat Solutions Inc.