Sound Feels

2:45 min performance preparing steel wool for a sculpture.

This performance was from July, 2022 and I’ve shared it before in a reel on Instagram but nowhere else. I made this video to demonstrate how I experience Sensory Processing Disorder and Synethesia, which I have surrounding certain senses. I experience sensory stimuli and information differently from those with a more typical brain. My Autistic brain takes in way more sensory information than allistic brains. It’s much more of a sponge, but once it’s saturated, it doesn’t process so well and takes a lot of time and ideal settings for me to manage what my brain takes in. There are certain materials that cause my brain to seemingly short circuit, materials that don’t really pose a threat but the second I come into contact with them I feel under threat. It’s almost like my brain cannot make sense of them because the wires devoted to doing so have been tangled. Cotton balls and steel wool both present these difficulties for me. When I touch them, I hear them in a really unpleasant way. They don’t actually make much of an audible sound to me, but it’s like my body perceives them as sounds even though they are physical materials. This inaccuracy of wiring causes me a lot of physical distress. As this video goes on, you will see my ability to tolerate the steel wool diminishing. You’ll notice I have to keep wiping my hands and covering my ears. I made sounds that are not under my control. This video is not a performance in the sense I am behaving in a scripted way. These are my body’s natural reactions and I am not enhancing them for the purpose of filming. I later used this steel wool in a cement sculpture, making this experience somewhat permanent.

I’m sharing this because many people don’t know about or understand Sensory Processing Disorder or Synethesia, but both are more common for Neurodivergent folks. Some people experience Synethesia as a crossing of visual and hearing senses so they may see colors when music plays for example. I have certain color senses that attach to certain people or objects but not to sounds. Many autistic children are highly sensitive to sensory stimuli of fabrics. If something we are wearing is bothering us, it’s like our brain cannot ignore it but instead sends up flares over and over again to call our attention to the thing bothering us. It’s so, so hard to ignore a tag, an itchy material, a microfleece that makes me wish I didn’t exist in the same realm as it. Telling your child to just get over it is not helpful. Listening to their distress is. Believing them matters. Just because you may think a material is harmless, I assure you that your experience is individual and you cannot take it for granted or project it onto others. Some of us exist in a world where cotton balls are dangerous. I didn’t find this out about myself until I was in my 40’s. Prior, I thought I was just ill equipped for life in this world. That may be true, but I’m no longer blaming myself for it. I’m wired how I’m wired. Help your kids figure out their wiring without standing in judgment of it. Trust them.