Sensitivity to Hard and Soft Surfaces

(This was written in draft before I knew about the different receptors in the skin, including those for measuring pressure. I think that’s what this section is about, my sensitivity to pressure. This is different from the pressure I apply to myself in order to get that sense of internal awareness. This is how your skin tells a hard surface from a soft surface. In much the same way that I am sensitive to one side of the hot/cold dichotomy, I am also very sensitive to one side of the hard/soft dichotomy.

There are some places that look so uncomfortable I can‘t understand why anybody would sit there. Such as coffee shops, where the floor is hard, the chairs are hard, it‘s noisy and the lighting is artificial. I realise now of course that NT people experience their environment in a different way to autistic people. It‘s seems strange that I‘ve lived so long in the world being uncomfortable in it, never realising that other people where having a different experience.

What I found while revisiting this section was that my likes and dislikes, all these little quirky things I just thought were my personal preferences actually have their basis in my biological make-up.)

I love watching property shows, they’re the only things I watch on television these days. If I did buy my own property I would love to hire an interior designer to turn it into something I that would be truly a home for me. I love soft and fluffy things. I don’t like hard surfaces. I prefer carpets to tiled or laminated floors. This means I have favourite rooms in the house that I spend a lot of time in and rooms I don’t spend much time in. I would have to find a way of turning my least favourite rooms into something I would use.

I don’t like bathrooms. Bathrooms are the worst room in the house for me as not only are they covered with hard surfaces and hard objects they are usually cold as well. These may seem like minor irritations to NT people, but for someone with extreme sensitivity to temperature and surfaces they are enough to make me avoid going there unless I have to. It’s the reason I only shower once every two days, and part of the reason my bathroom hardly ever gets cleaned. It’s not so bad in the summer time, but in winter, the idea of stepping out of that nice warm shower into a cold atmosphere is a daunting prospect.

It’s also part of the reason I don’t like conservatories. Unless they are very well made and insulated they are still colder than the rest of the house. The floors are often tiled rather than carpeted, the walls are often left as open stone or brick work - not very nice if you fall or lean against it. And conservatory furniture is often wicker or metal, nothing very soft or comfortable. They just don’t look very cosy. And there is another reason to do with my fear of space, conservatories just look insubstantial to me. Maybe it’s all the glass, the thinness of the walls and the roof. The construction of the conservatory plus the furniture people put in them, none of it feels very substantial to me. I think this is to do with my inability to visualise space or to be aware of myself in it. When I’m walking down the street I try to stay close to the sides of buildings. When I sit down in a restaurant or a pub or anywhere, I much prefer to be sitting next to a wall. I hate being sat in the middle of the room. Conservatories never look like very permanent structures to me.

The kitchen isn’t as bad as the bathroom or conservatory. They can be warm, especially if you’ve been cooking. And normally I only go in there to work. That is to cook or clean, or do other physical work. I’m not sure it’s somewhere I’d chose to relax though. A carpeted kitchen would be nice, you could put some kind of protection over it around the units, some armchairs around a wood burner could work well.

My two favourite rooms in the house then are the lounge and the bedroom. They have lots of soft furnishings and are cosy places to sit. My favourite place to do anything is lying or sitting on my bed. I can watch DVDs, I can write, I can read, I even eat meals sitting on my bed, because it is the softest place in the house. My dream is to have a bedroom large enough to have a sofa and some armchairs and a coffee table in it.

Décor wise, I don’t really like the minimal modernist look, where everything is white and every surface is rendered smooth, and all the floors are laminated. I’d feel like I was in an art gallery or an open plan office. I don’t like open planned offices, and I don’t like open plan homes. It goes back to this thing to do with space. I like rooms to be big rather than small, but with a whole floor that is open plan? It just doesn’t seem very comfortable; noises travel further, you have less privacy and unless you have lots of furniture it’s a waste of space.

Well, that’s just how the whole hard/soft thing affects how I like to live and the type of home I’d like to live in. Generally in my day to day living, it can be a pain, literally. I am very uncomfortable sitting on a hard chair for any length of time. I always seemed to be wriggling about in my chair at school more than anyone else. They were just so uncomfortable. Thankfully office chairs are soft, so after leaving school this ceased to be a problem. It’s a problem when it comes to socialising, because friends want to go places that just don’t appeal to me and I usually end up toeing the line. My parents used to say this a lot to me, I was often being told I should just toe the line (this expression comes from running and means to keep your toe on the mark at the beginning of a race - I just checked it on the web to see whether it should be ‘toe’ or ‘tow’). Nobody realised though, how often I would toe the line and how exhausted it was making me.

I don’t know if this is related, but my skin is a bit strange. If you sat on your hands for five minutes then look at them, your hands would be red and there would be creases in your skin where the fabric from your clothes had made an indent. My skin does this a lot, or maybe it’s just the way I sit or lie. I notice it most on my hands. Because I feel cold most of the time, I do tend to sit in positions where I wrap my arms and legs around myself, so I’m probably putting myself into positions where this is likely to happen, still, I never notice this phenomenon on other people’s hands. Peculiar or what.