Today was so beautiful that every time I looked at the bright green leaves sparkling against the beaming blue sky, I wanted to burst into tears from the intensity swirling around inside of me.
Which made me think — is that how my students with autism feel, all day long? Sensory experiences magnified times 100 — and in times like this, more pleasurable than most people know. But conversely, in other times, worse than anyone could imagine.
Oh, my heart hurts so much today. I woke up and instantly felt a wave of “heaviness” come across me. I feel weighted down by all of the emotions in the world, all of my thoughts. It’s hard to breathe because of what feels like fifty-pound weights sitting on my chest, on my heart. I want to curl up in a little ball, like a little child, and nap for hours under a safe, warm blanket. I’m not sure what’s behind this. Sometimes, nothing is. Sometimes, it’s just how I am, and a day like that has to happen. Sometimes, I think that I overstimulate myself with so much sensitivity–looking at images that awaken my soul, listening to music with combinations of notes, or lyrics, that put energy and radiance into every limb of my body, feel the intensity of the sun shining down on me…and those are all good things. Those are all things that I need, I crave. But maybe it’s almost like what I imagine coming down from a high, whether drug-induced, or otherwise, would be like. Maybe that “high” I felt from feeding my body all of those intense things, is over, and now I just feel…normal? Maybe it’s a delicate balance. Maybe I need to moderate it better.
Or maybe I’m just in a not-so-great mood, and over thinking it, just as I over-think everything.
Sometimes it scares me how much weather affects me. I love the high that I get from a sunny, warm day–the rush of endorphins that comes from feeling the sunbeams warming my soul, from looking up at the bright blue sky, from breathing in the beauty of the colorful flowers and grass. But with every extreme happy comes an extreme sad, which is what happens when the sun isn’t out, when it’s raining, when there is no color and life is grey. Most people respond to this with a comment like, “Ugh, I hate the rain” or “I wish it was warm out!” And I agree. But I respond, involuntarily, with crashing waves of hopelessness and sadness crashing onto me, into my body, into my mind. Once, in high school, I wrote in my journal, “The sun came out for the first time in two days today. I feel like a new person. No sun for me is like no oxygen. It’s like I haven’t been able to breathe in two days.”
That’s how I still feel, and that scares me. I so love how good the sun makes me feel, but it scares me that I can’t breathe without it. It’s hard that the intense wave of happiness is frequently followed by a splash of extreme fear, that the feeling will pass, and the sun will go away, and I will feel suffocated again. Oh, I try to live in the moment with the weather just as much as I do for anything else in my life. But it’s such a love-hate relationship, this dependency on the sun.