Bad Wiring: A Non-Exhaustive Catalogue of Sensory Malfunctions

It’s giving AuDHD

Diagnosis via Dr Google is not a new thing, or even a shameful place to begin, whatever Wes Streeting and his ilk would have us believe. Having realised that perhaps it was not normal to be driven to a helpless rage approaching tears by the sound of minor repetitive noises happening near to you, I diagnosed myself with misophonia using the internet in the early 2000s, at about age 14. There wasn’t a huge amount of information out there, but autistic people are over-represented on the internet - and sensory sensitivities are common within the autistic community - so there was enough. I hadn’t realised at that point that I might be part of that community, and knew only that I was precocious, very bright, socially awkward, often bullied and mocked, and spent most of my time in books or concocting emotionally rambunctious daydreams with sprawling narratives that I would return to across multiple days.

So now I had a name for what I felt: misophonia, or hatred of sound. I love words, and I felt less alone now that I had a word. I didn’t look beyond that word at that time. Other sensory sensitivities were irritating, but usually tolerable, in that they were more within my control - if a piece of clothing was scratching at my skin, I could refuse it, or remove the label, or not choose it in the first place; if a texture of food was unpleasant, it could simply go on the list of items I wouldn’t eat (the only pushback to which was from the dinner ladies, who would parrot “your mummy would want you to eat it” after serving me tinned, slimy, corrugated beetroot - to which I would reply, “you don’t know my mummy, and she wouldn’t, because she doesn’t like beetroot either”. Sorry Mrs Sidebottom).

It is only more recently, as more information becomes readily available and the scope for what we recognise as neurodivergence broadens to include:

• (gasp) women and girls

• adults (this feels absurd to me, but the belief used to be that ADHD was a disorder of childhood, which would be grown out of in time)

• high-maskers (again, often girls, socialised into compliance)

• those with lower support needs (those who we might expect to put up and shut up)

that I have begun to put this together as part of a wider neurodivergent picture, and to connect it to my highly sensitive and constant internal monitoring system. So perhaps there is a word that I can use; I am feeling my way towards it.

The body has more senses than the Big Five, and you can have sensitivities or processing abnormalities across what I think of as the “Dark Senses” too. These hidden senses include:

• vestibular - your balance and coordination

• interoception - your awareness of internal and autonomic processes, such as your heartbeat

• proprioception - your awareness of the body’s position relative to the space around it

To these more hidden Dark Senses I would add a sense of bodily integrity: the feeling of your physical and psychological edges and borders, a hyper-awareness of intrusion, a drive to remain whole and autonomous. The feeling of where you end and the world begins. I don’t know if there is a word for this sense, but senses can exist without words, and for a long time do.

As one thinks about putting oneself through any type of assessment, one naturally begins to catalogue the ways one might meet the given criteria. This is something you can get too bogged down in, and probably no doctor is ever actually going to be interested in all of them; certainly my ADHD assessor seemed lightly annoyed that she had to make so many notes. Maybe she was in general just lightly annoyed! But if you ask me questions you must expect that I am going to respond. Perhaps they were just looking for a “yes” or “no”, but, as I understand it, the inability to give a straight (read: unspecific, so untrue) answer can be diagnostic in itself.

A non-exhaustive (but nonetheless exhausting) list of ways in which the sensory system may play hopscotch:

• You cut all the labels out of your clothes to stop them scratching your skin.

• You do not want to touch particular textures, particularly with your tongue or teeth.

• You need to wear earphones or earplugs in loud sensory environments.

• You have trouble sleeping or concentrating if there is any type of electrical humming or repetitive sound in the room.

• It is unbearable to you when your sleeves rumple up underneath your jacket or jumper.

• You regularly have to relocate on the tube or in the cafe or at the pub because someone is scrolling through reels on their phone out loud.

• You are on edge upon arrival at the cinema as you wait to see where all the people with popcorn settle. Their decisions will either make the film tolerable or ruin the next 90 minutes (obviously you would never go to see a film that’s longer than 100).

• You are in your first bad job after graduating into a recession. You hide in the toilets because your colleague ostentatiously eats an apple criminally slowly at exactly 10am every single day. The exactitude of the timing makes it worse, somehow - the expectation - the dread!

• You are a teenager. You sneak the clocks out of rooms or hide them in drawers at sleepovers and then are awkwardly asked at breakfast by your friend’s parents what on earth you have done and why.

• You are 7. You refuse to wear tights at school because they are restrictive and itchy, which means you are freezing all the time in the winter because this is Northern England in the nineties and girls aren’t allowed to wear trousers.

• You get mad at your own breathing at night, especially if one of your goddamn nostrils is blocked up.

• It is 2am. You have covered up all the little red lights on electrical items on standby in the hotel room with delicately balanced socks or scarves and now you are panicking that you’re going to start a fire accidentally.

• Your hair is stuck to your face, it’s stuck to your face or to your lips or it’s in your eyelashes, it’s touching you and it won’t get off, the strand is evasive every time you try to grab it but you can feel the fucker.

• You have put some type of unguent on your skin and now everything is sticky and oily and wrong. It puts the lotion on its skin and it hates it!!!

• Something hurts or itches at all points in a minor way that nonetheless demands some attention. If someone asked you to catalogue these minor ways at any given moment you could do so.

• You are 8. You spend a lot of time throwing up during car journeys, eventually earning the familial recognition that you are “very good at being sick”.

• You become dizzy and overwhelmed when navigating steps or patterned carpets, especially if you’re carrying things at the same time - especially drinks - beginning to panic that you will drop everything, your arms and legs stopping working properly, your knees going weak - you can’t really tell where your body is - this is particularly difficult in theatres or stadiums, where someone will always say “can you just hold my drink while I - X”, and you quake, can I JUST?!

• Your own internal system monitoring has become a vicious cycle of over-attention and now you’re too aware of one particular thing and it’s acting in a slightly abnormal manner which must mean you’re dying and you’re about to have a panic attack about it oh fuck.

• You sometimes become so angry at a particular repetitive trigger noise or motion that you start to have invasive thoughts about harming yourself or them.

• You are convinced that the emergency services like to turn on their siren as they are passing you just to see you jump and flinch and press your hands to your ears.

• Next door’s smoke alarm is pipping to tell them it’s out of battery, has been pipping for weeks, months, how do they live like that? Are they doing it on purpose to hurt you?

• Someone invading your personal space feels like an intrusion which shatters your sense of bodied boundaries and fragments your edges.

• The susurration of whispering is a horrible, too-close invasion like nails down a chalkboard; likewise someone playing with your hair. ASMR you think is clearly for perverts.

• You are very aware during sex that all you are doing is rubbing two bits of ham together. At some point something will probably be cold and viscous and congealing on your chest.

• You dread being perceived when you were trying to sneak by, sneak out, sneak in, or otherwise keep yourself small enough not to invite notice or remark or judgement. You did not consent to be an interactive person right now. Don’t they know you are in NPC mode.

• You are 32. You have decided there is no other option - you will simply have to quit your job - because the man opposite you is both a tapper and a leg jiggler, and likes to do both at the same time, constantly, in your peripheral vision. You cannot possibly request a different desk - it would be too precious, too shameful.

• You consider the designers who removed headphone jacks from phones your one true nemesis.

• You have never really understood the “5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear” grounding approach because you can always see 500 and always hear 400 - so why would you want to welcome in even more?

• You believe strongly that chewing gum is the devil’s meat.

Of course, each of these things is trivial and mundane on its own, and I am sure most people experience some or all of them to some extent. It is difficult for everybody to be in a body. For people with sensory sensitivities, this can be a case of death by a thousand cuts: the gain knob is constantly set too loud, and the things which to most people remain in the background are foregrounded, meaning our experience of the world around us can be one of constant static and abrasion.

A neurodivergent brain does not just mean a neurodivergent brain: it also means a neurodivergent body, a divergent nervous system, even divergent autonomic processes. Where, after all, are the edges to each of those things? The brain is not just a lump of meat that sits inside your skull; it stretches throughout your body. In a very real sense, it is your body, along with all its Dark Senses.

I note that the word autism comes from the Greek autos, meaning self. Auto is retained as a prefix in many of our words that pertain to self-driving or being self-driven: automated, automobile. At the moment I am mostly self-driven towards making these little lists and looking for patterns within the lists. Perhaps that is all diagnosis really is: a catalogue, a vocabulary. Words are windows to the world - an entry point to self-understanding, self-advocacy, clarity, even community.

It is striking to me that we also see auto used in spaces where we speak of self-authoring: autobiography, autofiction, autotheory. In each case the self becomes both subject and method; the self becomes the text. My work is to build the vocabulary of that text, so that I can make myself more legible to others around me - and more importantly, so that I can explain myself to myself. I am, as I have always been, the primary subject of my own study.