Three things

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Cloudchaser: Stuart. Adult: dxd A.S. & A.D.D.

Because I've been getting stressed out about going back to college my friend has been collecting ideas so that I can hold my head together (it's the new students who laugh at me you see because I'm sound senstive to their shouting and screaming at each other).

Anyway, my friend found some advice from someone else who said that when the day is over think of 3 things that went right today and work out why they went right.

I'm always stressed out when my course is about to open. I'm studying Drawing (once I start drawing I'm usually more together because drawings don't shout).

I'm middle aged, by the way, which makes me look even more peculiar when the noise of people shouting and screaming rips me apart.

If anyone else copes with sound sensitivity then I'd be grateful if you'd let me me know how you manage it. The college corridors and some of the rooms have ceramic tiles and the shouting and screaming is amplified.

Also: a question. When students in my college are sat at tables in the coffee bar and are sitting only a metre apart....why do they need to talk so loudly to each other? Why do they need to shout? Why do they need to scream?

I'm sorta your age and I've done the back to school thing and, yes, the noise is horrific. Not to mention the problem with space - kids don't need any, they brush up against each other without noticing, and it upsets me no end.

Why do they do that. Well, I think it's just part of growing up. A baby needs no space at all, and screams for fun. Gradually people need more space and less noise - and that's NT's that I'm therorizing about. And why do they have to yell at each other - for the sheer boisterous joy of it, I think. In their world, anyway.

I think back to being young, and I can remember thinking grownups were disgustingly shushed, and I would never be like them. I didn't make noise myself, but the Beatles sure did, why would *anybody* want to turn it down? Now I'm 56 and I know.

So it's partly a kid thing, maybe? Even as an aspie teen, I could lose myself in the right kind of 'noise' and be free of the NT world.

Anyway. What to do about it. Earplugs! ahhh, what bliss. I carry them always. And don't be shy. Another thing you can try is a Walkman, or is it iPod? They say classical music = a tranquilizer. I've found that to be true. Mozart in particular. Even better, put sound-reduction earmuffs over it.

Re people generally - i wear a baseball cap at all times, or even better a trucker cap (wider brim). It's wonderful how much of the world it blocks out and around here, it doesn't attract attention.

You might want to Google 'sensory diet' - it's helped me a lot.

Thanks Claradoon,

I'm beginning to think that living a long period of my life undiagnosed and pretending unsuccessfully to be NT and then suddenly being diagnosed....makes me feel like a 'refugee'.

I look back on my 'undercover years' (nearly four decades) and I think to myself that I wasn't an 'Aspie' since this new A.S. culture didn't exist then. I was sort of in 'deep cover' and also very confused and paranoid...but I certainly wasn't an NT either because I was never ever accepted by them.

There was a loneliness back then which I'm not sure I could communicate to the younger generation today who have the web which is at least one channel of reassurance. It's left me feeling somehow 'bi-lingual' on the inside because I can appreciate the goals of NT culture at the same time as appreciating Aspie Culture.

Meanwhile:

I do take a walkman to college and it really helps. When people sit with me at one of the coffee-bar tables - that's when it's difficult because I'm trying to reply to them through a hailstorm of screaming.

After college (if I do eventually pass) then I'll probably continue tagging along with deaf artists in some way.

My next out of the blue question is: "If we don't see the social world properly, can we confidently judge that world if we've never properly seen or understood it?"

I believe that.