Autism & Noise

My home is noisy.

I sometimes can't put a shape on my urgent need to escape, or why the persistent buzz of anxiety exhausts me.  I love my family.  I have purpose and joy in my life.  Yet I crave a roaring ocean, a stormy forest, a vast, empty sky.  I ache for restful birdsong and seasalt on my skin.  I want to lie in an open field with the sun in my face and the breeze on the back.  I long to be lulled by bees and made drowsy by distant traffic.  I am at a loss to explain this urge to flee.

My daughter's boyfriend, who I love dearly, recently articulated it perfectly for me.

"Your house is fucking mental" he told me.

Tbh, I had kinda forgotten.

In the same way that a fish doesn't know it's wet, I have become oblivious to the pervasive volume contained within our walls.  It is the constant heartbeat we are deaf to; the white noise we don't hear with our ears, but feel in our blood.

Clamour is ubiquitous.  We have no mute button.

Three TVs, in three different rooms, transmit a cycle of cartoon series.  A desktop pc spouts many open tabs of multi-lingual YouTube clips.   A portable DVD player syncs with the TV.  Finian vocalises his own autistic language; laughing, squealing, grunting, scripting, singing, humming, shouting, crying, snorting, talking.  But rarely silent.  He never stops moving, heavy feet bouncing between devices to adjust buttons and dials.  His mobile phone connects us to a river of nursery rhymes.  When he can, he comandeers his brother's XBox and streams his shows through that too.  I hear little of it.

Overwhelming sound is the silent river I swim in.  What I am ear-blind to, erodes my rest and invades my dreams.

I get that noise may, paradoxically, help defend him from sensory overload.  It may form a shield against the onslaught of sensory input he can't filter out.  None of this is his fault.

But it's exhausting.

A spell of silence, stillness, reverie would be divine.