Generally, many of the teens who went to my high school came from families that were far better off financially than mine. At some points, I was saving money given to me at Christmas and for my birthday by my grandmother and my Aunt Cile and Uncle Lawson…and I would use it to buy thrift store clothes for me and small cheap gifts for my friends from Pic ‘N’ Save/MacFrugals.

Thrifting in the early 90’s with 20 dollars generally wouldn’t get you anything anyone trying to survive the high school social pecking order wanted to be caught dead in. But, I was very artsy…so I leaned into that. I chose the most unusual things I could, paired them with massive amounts of rings, bracelets, necklaces, hip scarves and just rocked it like it was everything I wanted to be. I felt a little more comfortable being seen as deliberately making an artistic statement than mercilessly teased and trashed for being poor. And, by senior year, I was known as the gypsy woman by students from all grades that I had never even met. I was voted best female artist by my senior class, so my cultivated persona was clearly found plausible.

Everyone just assumed the orange and purple sunglasses I wore to every class flowed from the same veins of reasoning. She’s rebellious, she’s an artist… that was just to be expected. But not really.

I hate artificial lights (like the one shown in the Ross picture above). I can do better with them if there are windows present and natural lights rays to dilute those beams, but otherwise it’s like little bits of sand burrowing into my eyes, spawning hooks once inside, and screwing up into my brain and clawing their way down into my stomach if I have to spend more than an hour or two under them. The headaches could get debilitating, and were often attended by a certain ambient level of nausea. But colored sunglasses totally filtered and changed all of that for me, making my classroom days feel more comfortable and doable.

There are different approaches to helping a kiddo who is believed to have significant behavioral problems adjust to public spaces. My view is and has always been that many of the reasons an individual on the spectrum might not do well in a public area has nothing to do with behavior. They are experiencing physical sensations based on the way their nervous system is processing the world around them- but everyone looking at them is just thinking it’s all about a behavior and a choice. So my opinion is that for our son, whose sensory differences are significantly more profound, helping him adjust to and tolerate as much sensory input as possible during a period of higher neuroplasticity would be the most effective strategy to getting him to tolerate and eventually embrace certain environments outside of the home.

For him, behaviors in the home definitely won’t generalize to the outside world. A concurrent approach tackling both safety in the home and in the public was what I felt would be the only way to give us a chance of helping him acclimate to both before he got too big to safely help…before his mental wiring became a little more rigid with time.

Our work has been a progression of tolerance and an acquisition of skills that is still ongoing. Four years ago, Tony could barely tolerate 2 minutes in the Ulta pictured in this post- even with French fries. Literally he’d be trying to flee and push his way to the exit sometimes within 10 seconds…if he was even willing to walk in at all (and plenty of times he wasn’t). This is a store that has intense smells and offers up an overwhelming amount of visual input. We can now go in their for 30-40 minutes with waiting for up to 10 minutes in a line without french fries or any sort of edible treat and he’s calm and comfortable with that. We all know I love me my beauty products…so it’s an improvement that has worked towards making both of our worlds feel happier.

That is my why for some of his programs…why would I put him in positions to need to block him from pushing towards something in public, why I would expose him in incrementally increasing doses to environments that he had strong sensory aversions to. Because that was the best hope I saw for being successful in helping his system learn to process certain things differently, to expand his world past our house. Only time will tell where we get to with all of this, but already it’s made a positive impact on what Tony feels comfortable with and what our family can do together. So, once again, I may have chosen to pursue something in a seemingly unconventional manner for some, but I stand by that choice as being in the best interest of our son and our family as a whole.