details that you have to focus on at once. And
all these details of information come in at once,
equally loud, and they all compete for first place.
Even now I never know what to focus on and
which details are important to me and which are
not. I never see the global picture; I only see the
details. And the details are never consistent; they
always change.
When someone talks to me in a chaotic place, for
example, there are too many other forms of information that all come in just as loud. Their words
are just one percent of the information, and very
often, I just don’t even notice that they are talking
to me. Even into my twenties, people often got
angry at me, or they thought I was deaf because I
didn’t respond to them. But when I had a hearing
test, it turned out that my hearing was extremely
good. I can hear sounds and frequencies that
other people can’t even hear. The woman who
administered the test was amazed by the result.
In a world of too much stimuli, when I am working on a drawing, I only have to focus on one
thing—the details of my drawing. This is one of
the reasons why I love drawing so much.
Seeing the whole world in tiny little details can
be exhausting and chaotic, but it also helps me
with a lot of things. I see certain things that other
people just don’t see. I see tiny mistakes that
22
Zoom Autism Through Many Lenses
need to be fixed that everybody else overlooked.
Some details also really fascinate me, details that
other people don’t see, and it makes me really
appreciate certain beautifu