#MHSN autistic here

[expressionless-fr]

Also having a high empathy does not make you a good person and vise versa. who tf cares about your empathy levels.

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There are many things wrong with this block of text. From saying autism has no downsides, to saying it makes you have more empathy so you’re trustworthy.

There are multiple things wrong with this so let’s break it down.

There ARE downsides of autism. As a higher support need’s individual, most days there’s more downsides then there are upsides. Yes, I wouldn’t have changed my autism (although some people would), yes, autism is sometimes great! But saying it has no downsides is downplaying the struggles that autistic people face, over and over again. From being assaulted, to ableist comments and treatments, to neglect and abuse, to support needs, to being killed. All of these are downsides of having autism and I’ve not even scratched the surface. You do NOT get to say that autism has no downsides.

The next thing, that autism makes you have more empathy. Are we forgetting about the people with no to low empathy? Are we forgetting about the autistics who experience no empathy due to their autism? Autism can make you hyper-empathic. But it can also make you Hypo-empathetic. There is no doubt about that.

Stop trying to erase that some people don’t experience the same things as you. Stop trying to downplay autism into this cutesy disorder. It’s not cool. Autism affects peoples lives, it makes their lives hard. It makes their lives miserable sometimes.

Autism has taken so much from me. From my ability to make friends, to my ability to effectively communicate. Autism HAS downsides and I can attest to that. Don’t erase the downsides.

[crippy-tangerine]

Really don’t see other autistic people talk much about temperature-related sensory differences beyond “the sun is too much sometimes”,, in any autistic spaces we’ve been in,,,? Which we are confused by, because it’s one of our most prominent autism-related sensory difficulties.? Aside from noise & smell hypersensitivity anyways... So we’re unsure if we’ve just missed all the conversations about it, or if other autistics don’t find it as difficult/debilitating so don’t feel the need to discuss? But we think the first option is much more likely, so hi autistic community, talk to us because we missed the earlier conversations 🥹💖. (This is not meant as a criticism of any autistic communities by the way, this is very /neutral, and just an observation really! Especially as we may just have forgotten the times people have discussed already!). Anyways, we’re just gonna ramble about our autism & temperature issues below, because it is an issue for us and we need to write things out to process them 🫡. This will be long, so TLDR is at the bottom!!

-> content warning for accidental self-injury, accidental self-neglect(?) of health needs, general disordered habits, and also specific disordered food issues. The food stuff isn’t related to our eating disorder(s) and is purely about temperature issues/stimming, but it’s still not exactly something we would encourage, so yes this is your warning!

Our autism has such a huge impact on our ability to feel temperature properly… we don’t seem to be able to process any temperature sensory input like others do.? For example- our living space feels like a totally different biome from the rest of the building 😭. People come into our space and reflexively go “oh, it is very cold in here-!”, and follow that up by asking if we are ok in this much cold and if we need help making it warmer. Which is very sweet and appreciated, but… It is deliberately this cold, because we have the heating turned completely off and usually have the windows wide open to keep it a nice “outside-during-winter” temperature. “Surely you are freezing?!” you may ask~ the answer is: “we probably are, but fuck it, we can’t tell!”.

We will sit in a T-shirt and shorts (maybe with socks on too?) when it is 7-11 degrees (Celsius, no idea what that is for you Americans sorry) and feel,,, fine.? Don’t even know. Can’t tell really. But we can definitely tell when we overheat, and that is the most evil sensory experience for us, so we are genuinely much more happy to sit in a close-to-freezing room than tolerate warmth 😭. Like we will just make our space the same temperature as the outside (unless it’s hot outside, in which case we will suffer and spend a lot of time taking freezing showers?).

It’s not even that we are immune to the cold or something, the body can definitely get very cold (shaking, blue-purple tinge to hands/feet/lips, goosebumps, hair standing on end, we lose mobility in our joints because they stiffen so much, etc.). We just…. Can’t process that sensory input and *feel cold* most of the time? We don’t have that “oh no I’m cold brrrrr!” reaction other people seem to have.?? And if we do have that reaction it’s more like “whoops, we have gone blue from the cold and didn’t notice, guess we better put a sweater on”.? We tend to not react to the cold until we’re at a point where we’re potentially making ourself ill from the cold, which probably isn’t very healthy, but.??? Cannot handle anything over mildly warm without discomfort. Would sooner freeze into a block of ice than be too hot (/hyperbole and /half-joking).

Heat sensitivity also means that we would rather eat absolutely everything cold. Like, everything. Cold soup, cold pizza, cold stir fry… We will eat bits of frozen foods while they are still frozen because the sensory experience is more fun when they’re icy.? Will happily chew on frozen chips, frozen fruit, frozen veggies, frozen pizza toppings… We were also That Child that would fish the ice cubes out of drinks in restaurants to crunch on 😟. (Would also eat the lemons out of everyone’s drinks, but that’s a whole other thing 😭). We will eat chilled foods raw, instead of cooking them (which is fine and safe for us as we only eat plant-based foods that aren’t dangerous when uncooked!! Please do not do this with stuff like raw meat 😭). Raw veggie spring rolls, cold pasta…. Even if it would probably taste better hot/warm to everybody else, we will try our hardest to eat it cold because we don’t like the heat. Cold coffee, cold tea (no, not even iced tea, we will just make green tea with cold water because hot liquids are not fun for us).

There have been days in the past where it’s been muggy and uncomfortably warm because there’s a thunderstorm coming, and when the rain started we would just go stand outside until we were Very Soggy because we would sooner deal with wet clothes all day than not be able to self-regulate in warm weather.?? And that’s saying something because wet clothes are a bad sensory experience 🫠.

But then on the other end of the spectrum, we have repeatedly burned our hands from accidentally touching stoves/oven shelves/fire and not realising.?? (Reason #62835 why we are not safe alone 😭 /lighthearted.)

Like, somehow, we can accidentally do ourself damage because of not feeling temperature properly (either from holding our hands into burning hot things, or from making ourselves feel ill from the cold).

And this isn’t to be all like “wowee autism makes us so silly and quirky teehee!!”, that’s not what we’re trying to say. We’re trying to say: we can’t act like a person if the temperature is bad, we eat foods raw/frozen that aren’t meant to be eaten like that, we border on making ourselves ill/actually make ourselves feel ill because of how cold we need to be to exist, we stop functioning whenever it’s even mildly hot outside, we are so dysregulated by heat that we just shut down and cannot get anything done properly without going into sensory overload. Like, we have such major issues with temperature because of our autism. We don’t remember ever seeing other autistics talk about the same/similar issues, and we don’t get why.? So like, if you’re also autistic, do you have similar issues with temperature? Whether it’s hypo-sensitivity or hyper-sensitivity.? Would be really interested in hearing other experiences in more detail.!! (/genuine, this is an invitation to ramble about your autistic temperature experiences!)

TLDR: we are terrible at temperature-related things (can’t feel temperatures properly and/or have a sensitivity issue with them) and have a tendency to cause ourselves accidental harm because of it. We are wondering if other autistics have the same/similar issues.? (You can ramble in replies/reblogs as much as you want to answer that question!)

Allistics (non-autistics) please do not derail. This is a post about our autism and temperature issues, addressed at other autistics. If you want to talk about a separate disability and how it affects temperature-related sensory issues, please make your own separate post.! Thank you 🫰.