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Where Everyone Lives the Autistic Life

I have seen everyone being stressed into the autistic world recently. That was at the Northbound Sedgemoor services on the M5 in Somerset. It was a rainy bank holiday Monday. The M5 was at a crawling pace at best. People were all going home from holidays in Devon and Cornwall. All at once after breakfast as the weather was wet and dreary. It was a late lunch time and the stream of wet cars was crawling and stopping on it's way north.

The services were over capacity with miserable wet people. The staff were overworked and overwhelmed by the weight of people in there. The floors were wet, the air cold and damp with nowhere to turn for anyone. People bumped and shuffled around. Wet hair, downcast faces and a glum resignation everywhere. everyone was overloaded, uncomfortably close to people and in a state of sensory and cognitive nears shut down.

The strange thing was that me and autistic person would have found this crowding intolerable but I was strangely OK in there. I did not like being there or the circumstances. I reflected long and hard about wondering why I was not more overloaded and shut down than other people as is normally the case in busy public places.

I qued, paid far too much for a not very good burger, sat on a grubby chair and ate. I watched life around me and realized why I was not so out of place in here. The other people were as overloaded and subdued as I normally am in busy places. They were in my world in this heaving and stressy place. They were approaching shut down, their minds and senses were in a bad place and they were just quietly coping. They were behaving like autistic people in a crowded place place.

I was not being overloaded beyond my natural public overload and this was strangely a relief. The people around me were quiet and relatively still and were not overloading me beyond endurance as would be normal in such a place. This was sort of nice in that it was horrid but no intolerable.

Crowded public places are normally intolerable for me, never good as many people can find them. Often when out the most I can hope for is for things to be not too bad, never good. I am resigned to this.

In the Sedgemoor services we were all in the gritty dark world of overload. I was well placed to cope with this as for me it is simply normal ;-)