Fireworks!!! 🎇🎆🎇🎆

I hate fireworks.

I have always hated fireworks. When I was a kid we had a very traditional fourth of July situation every year: backyard barbecue with friends, homemade ice cream, all that. I loved the homemade ice cream that my dad made, but on the fourth it was a dread-inducing sign that we were about to pile into a van and head down to the park, where I would sit in the van and sob for half an hour while fireworks exploded overhead. It was too hot in southeast Texas to sit in a car with the doors and windows closed, so I’d have to leave a door open. The mosquitoes took this as an opportunity to swarm in and snack on my blood while I held my shaking hands over my ears, unable to swat them away.

I’ve always been easily startled by loud noises. As a child, I was terrified not just of fireworks but of barking dogs, Christmas crackers, those little popper things that rude boys would hurl at the feet of anyone within throwing distance. Back to the Future was my favorite movie, but the opening scene where Marty hooks his guitar up to the loud amp and blasts himself off his feet had me cowering behind the sofa every time.

And balloons, oh god. At summer camps and day care they’d force everyone to do this relay race where you’d run across a field to a folding chair, sit and bounce on a balloon until it popped underneath you, then run back and tag the next person. Every balloon I saw was already a ticking time bomb of terror, and now they wanted me to pop one on purpose? With my butt? I cried in the bathroom until the camp counselor forced me to participate, then I cried while bouncing on a balloon on a folding chair.

Why did my parents make me go to fireworks every year if I found them so terrifying? Why did the counselors make me pop balloons? Because I would grow out of it and because I was just being a baby, respectively. In the early eighties people didn’t talk about children with sensory issues, and sensory processing disorder had barely even been invented. You couldn’t have ADD unless you were a hyperactive little boy, and you definitely didn’t have autism if your verbal skills were normal for your age.

So the problem was me. I was the older sibling in my family, but I was just weaker somehow. My sister loved fireworks and dogs, and she loved Back to the Future THE WHOLE MOVIE, and as best I could tell she didn’t scan every room for potential loud noises the way I did. Other kids at school and camp didn’t make fun of her. They made fun of me, the kid who cried because a balloon popped.

I was just defective. I’ll emphasize here that my parents did not tell me I was defective, but neither did they reassure me that there was nothing wrong with me, nor did either of them take one for the team and stay home with me on the fourth. I’m still a little miffed about that.

You’ll be glad to learn that I’ve evolved some coping mechanisms to deal with my noise sensitivity. Subtitles, earplugs, avoiding loud situations, just generally getting used to being alive. I can be in a room with many, many balloons at a time and barely notice them. If one of them pops I might do a little scream-startle, but now when I do that it makes me laugh, not cry.

But also? I’ve learned to hide.

The best definition I’ve heard of neurodivergence is from Devon Price in Unmasking Autism: neurotypical people process the world from the top down, while neurodivergent people process it from the bottom up. Humor me by reading this long quote if you don’t mind.

Because of this way of processing, a lot of people with autism/adhd have sensory issues. If you can’t filter out the tiny little details most people can ignore, then all those little details aren’t so tiny or little anymore, they’re major things that affect your ability to live in the world. Maybe you can’t understand what someone is saying if there’s music playing at the same time. Maybe you can distinguish one weird dripping noise happening during a rainstorm. Maybe one balloon popping can ruin your entire day.

These days I can deal with fireworks, but I still don’t like them. On the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve, I avoid them when possible, and I usually sleep in my basement to avoid the noise of the amateur displays on my street. It’s ok.

But I still wish that little kid crying in the van while mosquitoes ate her legs had known that there was nothing wrong with her.

Ok hi welcome to my newsletter about late diagnosis adhd/autism! I’m going to talk about some of the stuff I’ve been figuring out about myself, and speculate about the things I’m still working on. A few notes:

1. My adhd diagnosis is official, my autism one is not, and I haven’t decided whether to pursue that yet. The autism community accepts self-diagnosis for a number of reasons I can get into later. But if self-diagnosis is not something you find credible, this might not be the newsletter for you. I will say that I’ve done quite a bit of research on this topic for myself, and none of it was on tiktok.

2. I am not going to make any claims in here that I can’t substantiate, but this isn’t the kind of newsletter where I’ll cite sources for every single thing. It’ll mostly be about me. If you have questions or want to know where to find more info, feel free to ask.

3. If your reaction to this is, “so you’re afraid of balloons, that doesn’t make you autistic!” I’ll ask for your patience while I draw the bigger picture. I’m going to tackle a few things at a time, and it’ll add up eventually.

4. If your reaction to this is, “this sounds exactly like me as a child, omg am I neurodivergent somehow?!” you wouldn’t be the first. I need more than one hand to count the number of friends who have begun looking into adhd/autism for themselves based on things I’ve said about me. But everyone’s different, and while I can point you to resources, I’m not qualified to tell you about you.

5. Neurotypical/neurodivergent is a false dichotomy, of course. Everyone’s all over the place, it’s not a binary. But I’m going to use NT/ND as a quick way to differentiate between people who have these issues in ways that affect their lives, and people who don’t. I hope you’ll humor me.

6. Feel free to reply to any of my emails with questions or comments!