PSA: “But you were fine with X before, so you should be fine with Y, or you should be fine with X now.”

sweetandsavageautistic:

NTs, DO NOT tell autistic people this. You don’t get to decide what we are fine with in terms of our senses. Let’s do spicy foods for example. Say I decide to order some chips and salsa at a restaurant and I find that the salsa’s kind of spicy, but I can handle it. Now let’s say I go back to the same restaurant a week later after a stressful or anxious day. I order the chips and salsa, but when I get it, I find I can’t handle the spiciness of the salsa because the conditions of the day are different than when I got the chips and salsa before. If I ask for the waiter to take the salsa back, are they gonna tell me “but you were fine with the salsa last week, so you should be fine with it now”? Of course not. They’d most likely take it back. 

Likewise, just because an autistic person is fine with something once doesn’t mean they’ll be fine with it EVERY SINGLE TIME. Maybe they were having a good day. Maybe they had more spoons. There are a ton of reasons why they were okay with it then. But it doesn’t mean they’re fine with it every time. It’d be the equivalent of you going into a jewelry store, getting your ears pierced because you wanted to, and then the next time you go into that store, they try to pierce your ears again because “you were fine with it last time, so you should be fine with it now.” 

If an autistic person, or just anyone with Sensory Processing Disorder tells you they can’t handle something at that moment in time, respect that. 

On top of it, just because we can handle one thing doesn’t mean we can always handle something similar. For example, I can bake chocolate chip cookies. Because I can bake chocolate chip cookies, is anyone gonna suddenly assume I can bake a ten-layer cake with peach frosting and vanilla fondant in the shape of the Fleur de Lis? Probably not. (I mean, that’d be pretty awesome if I could, but no, I cannot bake such a cake at this current moment in time.) If you can handle getting blood taken, can you handle getting a tattoo? You were fine with getting blood taken, so you should be fine with getting a tattoo, right? No, not always. 

And whatever you do, DO NOT just throw someone who has SPD into a situation that you know will overwhelm them. (I’m looking at you, Whitney Ellenby.) If you want them to be able to handle it, help them cope with it and take it a little bit at a time. We are people too, and as such, consent applies to us as well.