When someone who has gone undiagnosed most of their life realizes that they’re autistic, there’s a period of unpacking every perception and way of existing to realize that– no, in fact, most people don’t experience [ insert almost anything here ] the same way you do.

Or, maybe they do experience something the same way, but much less intensely. One very glaring example is when late-diagnosed musician Johnny Profane realized that he has to actually rewind and relive experiences to remember them. It was while reading Johnny’s article that I realized I was the same way— and all the emotional and cognitive resources consumed by memory weren’t so brutally expended by most people recalling an event.

I have these kinds of epiphanies daily, but the most powerful to date was the moment I put on the right noise-cancelling headphones.

Autistic Sensory Experiences

I did a lot of reading before deciding on the right headphones, but the thing that most sold me was some autistic audiophiles on a forum talking about Sennheisers. I read every description of every headphone from every recommended brand from every blog I could find, then ultimately chose to buy Sennheiser headphones that promised “spatial” sound.

Most people wouldn’t empathize with why “spatial” is so important to me. Like many autistics, I have lateralization issues in the brain– that is, there is atypical connectivity between the right and left hemispheres. I’m also dyslexic and cross-dominant. This essentially means that gremlins wired my brain as a practical joke, and it’s almost like the left and right sides of my body are in a constant battle to coordinate, well, everything. Even sound.

I have a hard time understanding if something I’ve heard came from my right or left. Hell, I have a hard time understanding left and right, period. I also can’t discriminate how far away a sound is, and I can’t filter background noise.

What’s more, my vestibular system– the system responsible for balance— is so under-responsive that it’s the equivalent of being blind or deaf; therefore, my sense of balance is contingent on my vision and my hearing. If everything is moving too fast, if there are too many sounds, I just become so dislodged from balance and physical space that it’s dizzying enough to actually cause me to faint. I have to sit down a lot, especially in loud and busy public places.

Then, there’s the synesthesia. Synesthesia happens when someone experiences more than one sense at a time with sensory input. I have multiple types of synesthesia. I hear in color and sometimes– in the best times– I see these glorious grids with bursting colors that look like space nebula or landscapes, ocean waves crashing against cliff sides or forests of ancient cedar trees.

I also feel movement with the right sounds, like the drop after cresting the apex of a roller coaster. It’s amazing when it happens, and I pursue those moments like an adrenaline junkie.

Sometimes, there are golden sparks. The unadulterated joy that I experience during these punctuated flashes make the existential sensory suffering of everyday life as an autistic worth it. I wouldn’t change my sensory profile if given the option, and I can thank Sennheiser for that.

A Spiritual Experience

When my Sennheiser headphones arrived, I waited until I was alone. This was the quintessential gear for autistic people, and I wanted to have space to close my eyes and not need to hear anything else. I decided to start with an orchestral recording of a Pink Floyd song which had caused a pretty strong synesthetic response for me before.

So, with my house empty and my eyes closed, I pressed play.

At first, it was so shocking that I had a hard time not looking behind me. In fact, I did. I jumped up out of my chair and scanned the space behind me. And beside me. I ducked.

I had never heard with such clarity, and sound had never made such sense before. It never seemed to come from directions. Sound had just existed as this cloudy morass of analog radio waves, and I had always existed as a befuddled antenna unable to tell the source of the signals I received. Now, it seemed as if I were lying in the middle of the Slovenian Philharmonic, and I could tell from where the sounds were coming, could parse out every individual instrument and every note in layers.

About sixty seconds into the song, the music crescendoed, and all of the tension left my body. All of it. There was nothing left to even support my own body, and I collapsed to the floor in a crumpled heap. I wept through quaking sobs and uncontrollable laughter. Every pore on my limbs and torso turned itself inside out and every hair stood up as if I’d become electrified by the magic of what I was experiencing.

It was the first time in 38 years of living that I felt no stress at all.

Autistic people have a relationship with language and sound that is unique, and novelist Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf captures best what happened to me, exactly, as if I wrote it myself. There’s no fiction in this passage:

After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more.

And, from Herman Melville (author of Moby Dick), in his novel, Pierre: Or the Ambiguities:

Instantly the room was populous with sounds of melodiousness, and mournfulness, and wonderfulness; the room swarmed with the unintelligible but delicious sounds. The sounds seemed waltzing in the room; the sounds hung pendulous like glittering icicles from the corners of the room; and fell upon him with a ringing silveryness; and were drawn up again to the ceiling, and hung pendulous again, and dropt down upon him again with the ringing silveryness. Fire-flies seemed buzzing in the sounds; summer-lightnings seemed vividly yet softly audible in the sounds.

I’m not a religious person, but this was the spiritual and transformative magnetism of synesthesia and sound– when the right formula, like divine mathematical engineering, brought my senses into alignment.

I’d tried on high-end (to me, though they were really mid-range) headphones before, but something was different with the Sennheisers. The distinction was in the way the sound was distributed left-to-right, and with the timing and resonant contours, that fleshed out this full-bodied spatial soundscape for me.

It might have been the first time in my life that breathing was ever easy, and I hadn’t even realized how hard it was until then. After the initial shock and emotional reaction dissolved over a few days of manic revelry, it became clear how much easier they made my life. I could navigate the world without dizziness because sound wasn’t so disorienting. They empowered me to be more active.

I wasn’t constantly startled by every sound no one else noticed, and somehow it helped me to better coordinate the left and right sides of my body. Again, this is only something I’ve experienced with Sennheiser, which led me to reach out to their engineering department (more on that shortly).

I wasn’t alone.

The Autistic Community Responds

Using the hashtag #AskingAutistics, I took to Twitter and Facebook to ask autistic people about their experiences the first time they tried on a good set of noise-cancelling headphones. Here are some of their responses (some are paraphrased or edited for clarity):

Like a separation

Like a ‘door of my control’ closing

Like a settling quietness

Like time evaporated

Like I could take my breath

Like distance

Like stepping away

Like being me

— jon adams (@soundcube) December 14, 2019

• It felt like I was turning the world’s volume down to a more tolerable level… Glorious.
• I cried for an hour! The relief was more profound than I could have imagined.
• Astonishment. I had NO idea I was struggling with noise until the noise was gone. I never, ever go to public places without them now. I have SO many more spoons without having to fight to focus.

I could breathe, and I hadn’t really realised what shallow breaths I was surviving off before. I could relax my whole body and sit up straight without feeling weighed down by an invisible ceiling. My thoughts drew smoothly back into order.

— earthyellie🌾🇪🇺 (@mermavis25) December 13, 2019

• It set me free. I am able to participate in a lot more social events typical for people my age (pubs, clubs, and political protests).
• Oh my G-d, it was magical. They’re like sunglasses for your ears!!! I never leave the house without mine now.
• I cried. It finally gave me some power over my surroundings.
• The very first time? I was in Curry’s and tried a pair. I felt so emotional. It was like sucking all of the noise out of my head and sending it away. It was absolute bliss, and I had to buy them. I didn’t have to process all of the noise for the first time ever. I wondered if that’s how NT’s felt. I could concentrate and hear myself think.

I actually cried in solidarity when I read that one: I wondered if that’s how NT’s (neurotypicals) felt. I could relate hard to all of these, but that is the beauty of disability accommodations: being able to feel a peace that you didn’t know was even possible with the right supports.

Like going from a howling freezing gale into the warmth of a summer glade.

— Ann Memmott PGC🌈 (@AnnMemmott) December 13, 2019

• It’s like taking a deep breath after coming up for air when swimming. Massive quality of life improvement.
• I’d used cheaper ones before (that didn’t really cancel anything, just physically blocked some sounds), so the first time I wore properly-noise canceling headphones, it was like a weight off my shoulders. I could still hear to an extent, but the persistent machine noise was so much less intrusive. Being able to wear these in public also makes a huge difference on days I’m teetering in the edge of overstimulation.
• It was like the world finally stopped crushing me. Ambient noise causes me a lot of anxiety and fatigue, so just feeling like everything was finally clear was almost magical. Definitely worth the $400 for headphones + longterm service plan for when I inevitably break them.
• Blessed, blessed *silence*. I cried because I didn’t realise how quiet life was with actual noise-filtering ability.
• My whole body finally relaxed, and I dropped like a sack of potatoes lmao

As you’ve read, I definitely relate.

I could breathe, and I hadn’t really realised what shallow breaths I was surviving off before. I could relax my whole body and sit up straight without feeling weighed down by an invisible ceiling. My thoughts drew smoothly back into order.

— earthyellie🌾🇪🇺 (@mermavis25) December 13, 2019

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Terra Vance

I’m an industrial and organizational psychology consultant, parent, former language arts teacher, former DBT counselor, and founder and CEO of NeuroClastic. My passions are in social justice, diversity, inclusion, literature, science, and disability rights. I’m an unpaid volunteer. If my writing has been meaningful to you, you can
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