One of my friends runs a nature book group at our local library and I enjoy participating occasionally. For February we read Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty, and I absolutely loved it.

Dara is a young boy living in Northern Ireland, and he wrote this book when he was 14 years old. He’s autistic, as are his two siblings and his mother. His father is the only one in the family who is neurotypical.

As I began reading this book, I was immediately impressed by his writing skill, and it almost made me embarrassed about my own less-descriptive writing. His use of language is lovely, particularly for his age.

Of course I felt a kinship with him as a naturalist, but what I didn’t expect was to relate so strongly to his descriptions of his life as an autistic person. I’m not autistic, but I found myself saying “Me too!” over and over again.

My neurodiversity is in the form of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS, also known as a highly-sensitive person or HSP). What this means is that I have a very low tolerance for things like bright lights, repetitive or continuous noises, and many fragrances. A dog barking incessantly, neighbor kids playing basketball in the driveway (thump thump thump OMG), or the annual army of leafblowers can drive me to distraction, making it almost impossible to read or write. And scented lotions, perfumes, and colognes often give me a migraine that lasts for 12 hours or more. So while I don’t have a diagnosable “disorder,” my SPS definitely impacts how I function in life. A friend told me that she was reduced to tears, curled up behind her sofa one day when the leafblowers and lawn mowers were just too much. I’ve been there myself many times, and often leave home just to get away from the noise in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, I live in a society that gives you the “freedom” to make as much noise as you want, regardless of who else is impacted by it. I should write a book about being a highly-sensitive person in America, but I don’t think I want to deal with the abusive comments that would surely come my way. My country’s bully culture often isn’t kind to us.

Research has shown that about 30% of the human population has my particular form of neurodiversity, although most of us don’t talk openly about it, so you may not realize that you have friends or family who experience life in this way.

Neurodiversity refers to the idea that neurological differences, such as those seen in autism or ADHD, reflect normal variations in brain development. Neurodiversity is often contrasted with the “medical model,” which views conditions like autism or ADHD as disorders to prevent, treat, or cure. There has been a push to move away from this idea of pathology and more toward a more nuanced perspective with variations of what is “normal.”

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/neurodiversity

Dara’s accounts of his struggles to appear “normal” or fit in with neurotypical people really hit home with me. For example:

Autism makes me feel everything more intensely: I don’t have a joy filter. When you are different, when you are joyful and exuberant, when you are riding the crest of the wave of the everyday, a lot of people just don’t like it. They don’t like me. But I don’t want to tone down my excitement. Why should i?

Diary of a Young Naturalist, p. 64

I’m aware that I express my enthusiasm more overtly than most people around me, and sometimes I wonder if people think I’m odd for that. (Actually, I know they do.) This happens frequently when I’m excited at finding an interesting insect or watching a bug doing something fascinating. I get giddy and try to share it with anyone who happens to be nearby. And I love feeling that sort of childlike joy and wonder, but like Dara, I’ve noticed that it seems to make some adults uncomfortable.

Here’s a passage in which Dara is writing about watching ducks:

We rarely think of all that effort being made below the water, those webbed propellers whirring so the bird can glide with such ease and grace on the river. It’s just like being autistic. On the surface, no one realises the work needed, the energy used, so you can blend in and be like everyone else.

Diary of a Young Naturalist, p. 165

I love that description, and it expresses how I feel perfectly. Sometimes I explain it this way: Imagine you’re a neurotypical person and we’re together at a public program with dozens of other people, listening to a speaker in a large meeting room. While we’re both enjoying the talk, my attention is constantly distracted by various things in the environment: someone two rows ahead of us tapping his foot on the chair, a too-cold breeze from an A/C vent over our heads, the setting sun shining in a window beside us and hurting my eyes. Those things may not seem like much, but as my brain notices and processes each of them, it’s working harder than the brain of a neurotypical person who isn’t distracted by them. This is why I’ll feel tired after this program, and why my brain needs regular downtime to rest from a perpetual state of overwhelm as it processes so many tiny details of my environment everywhere I go.

I hope that’s clear enough to give you an idea of my particular type of neurodiversity. If you want to read more about SPS/high sensitivity, I recommend Sensitive by Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo, and The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron.

Dara also writes about how he’s more comfortable around animals and nature than being with other humans. I find this as well, partly because animals don’t judge me for being different. If anything, I think some animals can sense that I’m different and they seem to be drawn toward me. I like that.

I’m grateful that this book came into my life (thank you, Sherry!), and that I was able to participate in the discussion about it in our group. It felt life-affirming and gave me the motivation to get back to working on my own book, which I’d put to the side after convincing myself that nobody would want to read my story.

I had another wonderful similar experience the other day, and I’ll share that with you in my next post. I’m hoping to get back to a regular posting schedule here after not writing much in the past few months. Now that it’s officially SPRING!, it’s time to get back to the things that energize me, and hopefully entertain and educate you, my lovely readers. Thanks for being here for the journey with me!

P.S. I’d love it if you’d consider sharing this post with someone else among your friends and family; you never know who might be helped by learning about this the way that I was when I first learned about it.