(and FWIW: most of the people I know, Asperger's or not, hate shopping centres with the fire of your apocryphal thousand burning suns, and for exactly those reasons...so maybe people *just aren't meant to be be in these places*, but for people with Asperger's it's a kind of SPECIAL HELL.)
Many people hate shopping centers, and with good reason, but most of them don't have to fight the urge to get their back to a wall and shut down, or else freak out completely and GTFO now. Strangely, it's not as bad if I'm on my own. I think there's an attention threshold, and dealing with the crowds and the people I'm there with tips me over the edge.
The thing about Aspies is: when you've met one Aspie, you've met one Aspie. Sarah's tolerances and personal irritants will be different from mine. Transitions lenses certainly may be a good thing, especially in an over-bright distracting environment. Sunglasses inside tends to draw the wrong sort of attention. The earplugs might help, they might not, depending on the context. If she's particularly bad with sound distractions, as I am, then it's the distractions, not the raw decibel level, which is the killer. She will likely have trouble in a noisy classroom either way; just dropping the dB level will silence the teacher as well. Better for ignoring distractions for study, I find, is listening to music. It gives something to concentrate on, and in my case visual input overrides audio: when I get into what I'm reading, I stop being able to hear. No, really, my brain turns off my ears. The trouble is, it's harder to get into that state if I'm distracted by what I'm hearing. Putting headphones on and music I like enables me to acclimatise and tune it out, and focus on what I'm reading.
But then, maybe her brain works differently: the trick is to ask her what works for her, and see what you can do to accommodate that.
And, as well, while I'm trying to explain how my brain works differently from yours, it's hard because it's not like I can take an NT brain and an AS brain, run a diff and show you only the differences. When I have a reaction to something, I don't know whether it's normal or Aspie, or whether it's a normal reaction but with abnormal tolerances. It's taken me 36 years to get to the level of self-awareness to realise that I really do think and react differently than most people, and I'm still figuring out the (fuzzy) edges of the differences.
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Date: 2010-11-05 10:51 pm (UTC)Many people hate shopping centers, and with good reason, but most of them don't have to fight the urge to get their back to a wall and shut down, or else freak out completely and GTFO now. Strangely, it's not as bad if I'm on my own. I think there's an attention threshold, and dealing with the crowds and the people I'm there with tips me over the edge.
The thing about Aspies is: when you've met one Aspie, you've met one Aspie. Sarah's tolerances and personal irritants will be different from mine. Transitions lenses certainly may be a good thing, especially in an over-bright distracting environment. Sunglasses inside tends to draw the wrong sort of attention. The earplugs might help, they might not, depending on the context. If she's particularly bad with sound distractions, as I am, then it's the distractions, not the raw decibel level, which is the killer. She will likely have trouble in a noisy classroom either way; just dropping the dB level will silence the teacher as well. Better for ignoring distractions for study, I find, is listening to music. It gives something to concentrate on, and in my case visual input overrides audio: when I get into what I'm reading, I stop being able to hear. No, really, my brain turns off my ears. The trouble is, it's harder to get into that state if I'm distracted by what I'm hearing. Putting headphones on and music I like enables me to acclimatise and tune it out, and focus on what I'm reading.
But then, maybe her brain works differently: the trick is to ask her what works for her, and see what you can do to accommodate that.
And, as well, while I'm trying to explain how my brain works differently from yours, it's hard because it's not like I can take an NT brain and an AS brain, run a diff and show you only the differences. When I have a reaction to something, I don't know whether it's normal or Aspie, or whether it's a normal reaction but with abnormal tolerances. It's taken me 36 years to get to the level of self-awareness to realise that I really do think and react differently than most people, and I'm still figuring out the (fuzzy) edges of the differences.