This week has been a week that reminds me that being autistic is a disability. Disability is not a bad word. It is not a morally bad thing to be disabled. It is a very annoying thing, and one where I keep not-realising how much extra help I need until I really need it.

It’s a bugger, to be sure.

I’ve struggled to communicate all week. It’s not exactly a feeling of being overwhelmed. It’s more like pressure. A continuous sensation of things pressing on me, weighing on me, and me being too slow to turn and face them.

Today we’ve been trying to book travel, and there are a lot of restrictions to how I can travel. Because I’m disabled. And that sucks, and I feel – when we’re searching for travel that meets these conditions – that I’m a burden. To be clear, that’s not how my partner feels. It’s how I feel.

Feelings are valid, but they’re not always true.

I’ve been struggling at work, because folks are doing things in ways that I feel screamingly certain are wrong, and there’s nothing I can say or do about it. I can’t get through to myself that there are different ways of doing things. I feel like there is only one right way.

Feelings are valid, but they’re not always true.

And today – I should be at a show. I should be with friends. Ironically, they’re friends who will understand why I’m not at the show. Because the thought of getting ready and going out and being around lots of unknown people with their novel smells and their unknowable noises and their myterious opinions made me want to peel my skin off.

Everyone has a limit for sensory overload, I think. It just really sucks that for me, and for some autistic people, there are things that add to that overload unfairly. A guy who splashed out, and then splashed around in, some expensive new cologne shouldn’t be the thing that erodes all of my sensory tolerance – but it does. The whole day, just completely wiped, because a guy figured he spent all this money and he’ll damn well wear it.

And it’s…it’s so fucking annoying that this is the case, and that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I just have to live with the suck, and figure out ways to accomodate it.

For now, that means the suck and I are going to switch the lights off, and put phones away, and put on a show we’ve seen a hundred times before. And slowly the tolerance ebbs back. And slowly we come back to an even keel.