C2V wrote:
People also get annoyed with me for being sensitive to what they're doing and asking them to please stop doing so. I can't stand people eating noisily (chewing with mouths open, sucking up noodles, slurping drinks, etc) so if we're eating together I will ask them to stop doing that, because it bothers me. I get angrily accused of being "social police," which is an ironic thing to say to an autistic.
This reminded me of something from way back in the past that I haven't thought about for a long time.
My ex-husband was a musician; he used to pick up his guitar often in the apartment and play. It was fine except for in one situation: if he was playing his guitar while I was fixing my hair. I didn't have an elaborate hair-do or anything, but I did kind of wrestle with it actually due to some of my sensory issues with how I need my hair to be. So it was always a moment in my day when my nerves were already kind of on edge.
The sound of his guitar playing always at the hair-styling moment for some reason
sent me crazy. The auditory input was too much for me during a process that I already found to be a stressful one (weird, I know, but I did feel tense about my hair and what to do with it).
The two activities put together always made me wind up yelling at him to please stop! I tried not to really get mad but it was so hard not to just scream, because inside I was so stressed out I felt like screaming. I managed NOT to scream at him but there was still a lot of tension in my pleading. He reacted with tension too and didn't know why I was being so weird (neither did I, to be honest).
Plus, he repeatedly did the same thing. I would ask him "While I'm doing my hair and stuff, do you think you could not play just for a few mins until I'm done?"
But he always picked up the damn guitar again and never just gave me that one accommodation/request. It was a repeated situation.
It actually drove a wedge between us and caused bad feeling, because he could not understand why the sound of his guitar at that particular moment was unbearable for me. Actually, I couldn't understand either (I wasn't to be diagnosed for another 26 years....)