On the Other Side of Sensory Sensitivity: The Things That Are Beautiful

Everyone knows about sensory pain. Fewer people talk about sensory joy — and it is real.

Most of what is written about autistic sensory experience is about pain.

The lights that are too bright. The sounds that are too loud. The textures that are wrong in ways that go beyond the reach of language. The smells that translate immediately into nausea. These are real. I have lived all of them. The sensory sensitivity that makes certain environments genuinely difficult to navigate is not a preference or an overreaction.

But there is another side of sensory sensitivity that rarely gets written about, and I want to write about it now.

The same nervous system that finds certain sensations unbearable finds certain other sensations extraordinary. The volume is turned up in both directions.

There is a specific quality of light in the late afternoon — a slant of it, often in autumn, through windows with dust particles visible — that stops me. Not because it is impressive in an objective sense. Because something in the way light works at that angle registers as profound in a way I cannot fully articulate. I have stopped mid-sentence to look at it. I have stood at windows for longer than seemed socially appropriate. I have cried, once, at a particular sunset, not from sadness but from something closer to gratitude that the light existed.

Music is different for me than for most people I know. I do not mean I enjoy it more or that my taste is better. I mean it lands differently in my body. Certain pieces of music activate a physical response that is more like being moved than like listening. The pleasure is not aesthetic at a comfortable distance — it is immediate and full.

Texture can go the wrong way, and it can also go the right way. There are fabrics I seek out because the sensory experience of touching them is genuinely restorative. There are objects I keep because holding them produces a calm that I have never fully explained to anyone who did not immediately understand.

I love the smell of specific things with an intensity that people who know me find disproportionate. Petrichor — rain on dry earth — produces something close to happiness. Bread baking. Certain combinations of wood and old paper. These are not preferences. They are experiences that register as significant.

I think about this sometimes in the context of how autistic sensory experience is usually framed. It is usually framed as deficit. The sensitivity is the problem. The goal is tolerance, management, coping.

And yes: I manage. I have strategies. I know what environments to avoid and what tools to bring to the ones I cannot avoid.

But the same sensitivity that makes some environments genuinely painful makes some experiences genuinely extraordinary. You do not get one without the other. The volume knob is one knob.

I would not turn it down.

I would rather have the light in the late afternoon and the music in my body and the smell of rain after heat and the wrong texture sometimes and the right texture restoring something I had not known was depleted. I would rather have a nervous system that is alive to the world in both directions than a comfortable, buffered experience of everything.

This is part of being autistic too. Not just the hard parts. The beautiful, specific, overwhelming, restoring parts.