On Being Tender Headed Whereas Black and Autistic
Autistic sensory experiences express themselves in many forms, some of them less obvious, and more specific, than others. We’re grateful to Natasha Nelson of Supernova Parenting for discussing the very real and distressing sensory experience of being autistic, Black—and tender-headed.
Natasha: So good morning, you handsome and gorgeous lot, I just wanted to discuss and address sensory processing and Sensory Processing Disorder. So, let’s get into it!
So, you have eight senses, you have five external senses and three internal senses, and those senses dictate how you experience the world. The five that everyone knows or has been taught, of course, are sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching; I believe I covered all five. But then you have internal senses, you have the sense that tells you “Hey I need to pee,” you need to go to the restroom, “Hey, my heart is beating, hey, my armpits are sweating. That is your interoception sense. You have a sense that does movement, that’s all about movement and how you move in the world, and that’s your vestibular sense. And then you have a sense that’s about your body movement, meaning your body in proportion to other parts of your body, where your head is as opposed to your feet, and that’s your proprioception sense.
Now, why is this important? Because this dictates how you experience the world, and the way you experience the world could be different from how someone else experiences the world, depending on your senses. So, here’s what happens: When you have a sensory experience, from smelling something, to touching something, to tasting something, to needing to pee, there are sensors that go to your brain to tell you that experience is happening. If someone has some type of sensory processing disorder, where they’re not getting the same amount of sensors a neurotypical person would get, or a person that doesn’t have any issues with their senses would get, then they may get more signals to their brain or less signals to their brain.
Why is that important? Here’s how that looks: so let’s say I am a Black woman, with kinky curly big hair, and I’m getting my hair done. And I get more signals to my brain when I’m experiencing the sense of touch, tactile. So every time someone’s combing my hair, whereas a neurotypical person gets maybe ten signals to their brain to say “Hey they’re combing your hair, your scalp is being yanked a little,” I might get twenty, I may get fifty, I’m getting more signals to my brain. So that experience for me may feel like someone is dragging me across the god damn floor by my scalp as opposed to a person who’s sitting and just saying “Oh they’re tugging a little bit with the comb.”
Right? And then, on the flip side of that, you can have someone who isn’t getting as many signals to their brain, meaning when someone is combing their hair, they’re yanking and pulling and blowdrying and frying, they don’t feel a thing. It’s whatever honey, whereas a neurotypical person may get ten signals to their brain, that person may be getting five, or two, or one. And so they’re not really necessarily feeling the experience.
Why is this important? It signals to your brain. Your brain dictates how you experience this world. So when you say that a person is exaggerating their pain, no, they just have different pain signals than you. But that experience for them is very real, because how your brain processes the world is how you experience the world, so if a person tells you “this hurts me,” it hurts them. Just because that same experience doesn’t hurt you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt them. If someone says “this is bitter and I don’t like it because it tastes bad, and it tastes good to you, they experience the world different than you in taste. They may experience the world different than you in sight, something that may not be as blinding and bright to you may be blinding and bright to them.
So when we’re talking about children and getting their hair done, and a child days “ow, this hurts,” here’s what I’m gonna tell you as a person who has Sensory Processing Disorder, and autism, and PCSA? PSA? whatever. You don’t have to have autism to have Sensory Processing Disorder, I repeat: you don’t have to have autism or ADHD to have Sensory Processing Disorder. But as someone with both who is tender-headed, as it’s called, the pain never goes away, the tolerance for the pain built, because people told me beauty was pain, and so I allowed people to pull my fuckin’ scalp out, because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. But the pain never stopped.
Thank you for listening, and I hope that’s really helpful, and that we can have some empathy for other people, some empathy and also some understanding that everyone doesn’t experience the world the same way we do. Love y’all!
Transcription by Joe Rosa.
