As those who visit my blog regularly will know, I am autistic. My assigned staff put “highly sensitive” rather than autistic on my basic info sheet. This isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it is definitely incomplete. Not just because autism encompasses more than sensory processing challenges and because the hyped-up term of “highly sensitive” doesn’t come close to describing my level of overload, but also because in certain ways, I am not hypersensitive at all. Today, I want to talk about the ways in which I am, in fact, a sensory seeker.
The main aspect in which I’m a sensory seeker, is reflected in the way I approach food. I love love LOVE spicy food. I also love crunchy food. I can’t stand mash, because that is about the polar opposite of both. Honestly though, I find the texture matters more than the flavor, since mash didn’t get better with lots of black pepper on it and I can handle bland yet crunchy foods.
I also chew on hard candy. Like, I’ve tried sucking on it, but I really can’t manage to do that for more than a few seconds before I need to break the candy. Another example, but I’m not sure whether this is sensory seeking or lack of proprioception and/or coordination, is the fact that my staff tell me my spoon always clanks against my teeth quite loudly. I also realize now that drinking my coffee quite hot is probably a sign of being a sensory seeker.
With the sense of smell, I have a love/hate relationship. I love my essential oil diffuser, but don’t usually wear perfumes and can’t really stand anyone else wearing them.
In the tactile sense, I’m definitely a sensory seeker. This doesn’t mean I like all kinds of touch. I mean, I can’t stand it when people unexpectedly pat me on the back. Truthfully though, it should really go without saying that you should never touch another person without asking them first.
However, I love tight hugs, or used to before I broke my collarbone in 2019, which never properly healed. I also love to be rough when brushing my hair and am probably a bit rough when brushing my teeth too. When I wear my hair in a ponytail, it has to be tight too. And my shoelaces can’t really be tied too tightly. And yes, my spouse took up the challenge, only to tell me that, even though I didn’t think they were too tight, they actually were.
I of course need to mention my weighted blanket here too. It is 12kg, which is between 20 and 25% of my body weight. That’s on the heavy side as far as I’m aware. Of course, I got it when I still weighed nearly 20kg more than I weigh now, but then I’d often end up adding another weighted blanket on top of it.
Another aspect of sensory seeking I need to mention is being in constant motion, even if it’s small movements with my fingers or toes. I am not diagnosed with ADHD, though sometimes I think I could have it. I wasn’t extremely hyper as a child – in fact, my parents would describe me as a quiet child. However, I was definitely jumping onto lots of things. I no longer do this, but mostly because I can’t due to my decreased mobility. Now that I think of it, honestly I’m pretty sure that my need to walk a lot, is also a sign of sensory seeking and/or hyperactivity.
With respect to the sense of sound, I’m not generally a seeker. I do listen to soothing music on my music pillow when trying to get to sleep, but that’s it. I can’t stand background noise. Like, some staff suggest we have music on in the background while we play games, but I really can’t concentrate then.
Lastly, of course, is the sense of sight. I’m blind now, obviously, but when I was younger, I still had some sight. I definitely was a sensory seeker when it came to the visual modality. The most striking example is the fact that I’d often make shadows on my desk with my hands and look at them.
There are many other ways in which I express sensory seeking, but you get the idea. All this being the case, don’t discount my sensory overload just because I can be a seeker in other circumstances.
Also linking up with Senior Salon Pit Stop.
A Multitude of Musings 
I think you’re raising an important topic that isn’t often talked about. I guess a lot of people, even those who do have some more idea about sensory-related issues, always assume that they are only about being hypersensitive to some or all stimuli, and being hyposensitive, or both hypersensitive and hypersensitive to different stimuli is not mentioned so much or not seen as a sensory processing problem.
I can relate soooo much to what you say about being a sensory seeker in terms of food. For me it’s also that I have lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, and the gustatory bit is not just tastes or flavours but textures just as much, so that makes me even more of a seeker in this regard. When I was a very young child I happily ate a lot of salt on its own, which my Mum used to say that I probably did because I’ve always had low blood pressure so it must have been an instinctive thing, and while I agree that it could have been part of it, I think it was also largely sensory. I don’t really do that now, or only rarely, but I still seem to have a bit higher tolerance to very salty things than most people. As for spicy food, I think it’s a very underrated coping tool to deal with all kinds of self-harm urges, right next to holding ice cubes that a lot of people recommend. Speaking of ice, I actually like sucking on ice cubes, as I’ve generally always had a lot of love for ice and feeling it ever since I remember. And unlike you I actually really love sucking on things like hard candy and feeling them for as long as possible, though crunching them feels really fun as well.
With touch I guess I’m for the most part quite highly sensitive but I suppose that’s genetic as my Mum is very sensitive to touch and Sofi kind of is, too.
And with sound it really depends how I’m doing mentally. I’d say by default I definitely am a huge sound seeker, but if I’m feeling emotionally or sensorily overwhelmed it doesn’t take much in terms of auditory stimuli to make me feel even worse.
Interesting that your assigned staff labelled you as highly sensitive instead of autistic, and weird since you actually have the autism diagnosis so I wonder why they felt the need to put something different instead on your sheet. I must admit that lately I’ve started to dislike this label, particularly that it doesn’t really specify to what one is highly sensitive. I used to identify as such myself, but I’m starting to see that it’s so insanely broad that it seems like some sort of meaningless container for all kinds of things that don’t even have much in common with each other, some that are healthy like introversion, empathy or neuroticism, and others that are not necessarily, like a lot of it overlaps with autism or SPD or AVPD or BPD or even PTSD or autonomic nervous system stuff. So I guess it can be potentially harmful if someone has a real mental or physical condition but it gets downplayed as “high sensitivity”. And when you do the HSP test it’s hard not to score as an HSP, because who is going to say, for example, that they don’t have a rich and complex inner life. For everyone, theirs will usually feel rich and complex I guess, and we hardly have anything to compare it to. And almost everyone is highly sensitive to something, but I guess hardly anyone is highly sensitive to everything.
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Sorry for being late to reply, for some reason the Jetpack app wouldn’t let me and I was too lazy to go onto my computer and find your comment on my blog itself or in the wp-admin area on the computer.
I completely agree about feeling weirded out by that “highly sensitive” label. I guess my staff tried to simplify my issues for her coworkers, but then again as a qualified support worker one should know the basics of autism, so my guess is she doesn’t really see it in me or wants an excuse so the staff don’t need to employ a truly autism-friendly support approach. After all, I’ve heard many times that I don’t seem autistic even by staff who work with average-IQ autistics, so yeah I guess they never heard of masking. Then I get told “you could handle ___ last time, so you should be able to handle [slightly different thing] now too.”
Re your appreciation for salty foods, I don’t experience that personally. What though is lexical-gustatory synesthesia and how is it promoted when you eat salty foods? I mean, I seem to remember it’s when words evoke tastes/textures/etc. but your comment made me believe it’s the other way around.
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Haha well I don’t think there’s any particular link between lexical-gustatory synaesthesia and salty foods, more so than any other foods, I just happen to like salty foods and at the same time have lexical-gustatory synaesthesia. And you’re right that technically lexical-gustatory is word-taste, not the other way round, but my synaesthetic experiences sort of work both ways for me. So with the lexical-gustatory thing I can feel a particular taste when hearing/reading/thinking of a particular word, but also when I’m eating something, it’s sort of inevitable that I think of the word(s) that I associate with that taste or texture. It actually feels rather abstractive to me that other synaesthetes could not have this working both ways, but then I guess my synaesthesia is a bit weird in that I’m not even really sure it’s actual synaesthesia, my experience just seems quite similar to what people describe with synaesthesia for the most part with some small differences, so I call it synaesthesia so that I can have a name to call it and some way to refer to it even if perhaps it’s not a 100% accurate term.
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I also Chew hard candy
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Thanks for sharing and glad I’m not alone (though of course a dentist would say otherwise).
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