I've previously mentioned the sensory issues I face around bright lights and visual contrasts that provoke visual stress and processing issues for me.
When I had wrote that, I was using cheap, coloured sunglasses to mitigate these negative affects outside of my home. Since then, I have been lucky enough to find a better way.
I’d been aware of the use of specific coloured glasses lenses to help with dyslexia, but hadn’t made the connection that while the visual issues I experience are not identical to those experience with dyslexia, they share a neurological basis; both dyslexia and autism are neurodiverse conditions, meaning they arise from differences in the ‘wiring’ of the brain.
Luckily, a local optician provides colorimetry assessment - a specific visual test designed to isolate the specific colour that can provide relief from visual stress – and while they were a little uncertain about providing it for someone who wasn’t dyslexic, once I explained the visual issues I experience due to being autistic they agreed that the test might provide a solution for me.
It turns out that while there is a precise colour tint that would help alleviate a lot of my visual stress-related issues, there is also a new high-tech lens that has a near-imperceptible ‘mesh’ that acts as a filter for the light passing through – and for me, this mesh completely removes the parts of the light spectrum that were causing me problems and pain.
So now - or more accurately – when this pandemic is over and I go back to working in an office, I will be wearing regular-looking glasses!
Now let me be clear, no one in my current workplace has ever commented on the coloured sunglasses I used to wear, and even in my old workplace the comments that were made were of a good-natured teasing sort – I have never been bullied because I’ve had to wear coloured sunglasses indoors.
But I was bullied as a kid, and I’ve internalised a lot of that, and it had left me feeling that wearing the coloured sunglasses was like painting a target on my back, a big, noticeable sign that I was different, that I wasn’t “normal”. So it is such a big deal for me that I now have a pair of regular-looking glasses.
Don’t get me wrong, if the optician had said I needed a specific coloured lens I would have gone with their recommendation (the pain and struggles I had daily were not something I wanted to continue dealing with). And please don’t take this to mean that I am in any way ashamed or trying to hide the fact that I’m autistic – the vast majority of my days I am happy and proud to be a vocal advocate and willingly share my personal experiences in the hopes of increasing autism acceptance wherever I go.
I am different, not less. And different isn’t wrong. I know this, and now I can see it clearly in my better-than-rose-tinted glasses.