An important concept in social justice circles is the idea of privilege. For those unacquainted with the concept, perhaps the easiest way to describe it is that by being born into a certain group (race, gender, economic class, etc.), you’ve automatically, even unconsciously, been given an advantage in certain matters as a part of that group. This, of course, even applies to disability: if you’re not disabled, you’re automatically granted advantages that many disabled people will have to work for at best, or may never attain at worst.

I’d write about neurotypical privilege here, since that’s the most obvious case that’d be relevant to my own disabilities, but Bev from Square 8 has already created a neurotypical privilege checklist that’s so good, I don’t think I could ever manage to outdo it. (And besides, I contributed a couple items to it myself!)

However, along with Asperger’s syndrome, I also have auditory processing disorder. It affects pretty much every act of spoken communication I participate in, so it’s not something that can be easily ignored. And I’ve noticed that many people don’t even consider how certain activities can be discriminatory to those of us with abnormal hearing or auditory processing.

I wish I could provide an outright hearing privilege checklist, but that’d be problematic given that I have at least some privilege in that respect myself. My hearing itself is OK; I’m overly sensitive to noises, and I have perfect pitch that’s a blessing for solving the Selenitic Age in Myst but a curse when I’m asked to play on a piano that’s horribly out of tune. At the same time, because of my auditory processing disorder, I do share many of the same difficulties understanding speech that someone who’s deaf or hard of hearing would have. Nonetheless, it’d be best to refer to this as an auditory processing privilege checklist, not a hearing one.

So, without further ado:

The Normal Auditory Processing Privilege Checklist

• I can watch first-run movies in any theater and still understand a majority of the dialogue without having to attend a specially scheduled screening with subtitles.
• I can watch movies on streaming services and comprehend the dialogue with the same ease that I could with a DVD rental.
• TV shows are equally accessible to me whether I record from TV or watch them online. I could drop my cable TV subscription without losing access to those shows.
• I can easily carry on conversations with several other people in a bar or restaurant, no matter how noisy the place is.
• I can easily understand what people say to me on the phone, and do not have to frequently ask for repetition.
• If I want a smartphone data plan, the minimum required voice plan of 300–400 minutes that must accompany it is not overkill.
• I can decipher the lyrics for most songs without having to look them up.
• Rock concerts are at a perfectly reasonable level; I don’t need to stand at the back or remember to bring earplugs.
• I can understand messages broadcast over PA systems without a lot of difficulty.
• Lectures are just as easy for me to comprehend without visual feedback such as PowerPoint as they are with visual feedback.

You’ve likely never thought about how many of these experiences aren’t universal, or how these situations might be discriminatory— and that’s precisely the point of this. I see so many posts, for instance, talking about eliminating cable subscriptions and going to online TV viewing; yet most of the cable-only shows I’m interested in, if they are available online in the first place, aren’t captioned in any form.

And that’s just the start. Can anyone think of any other examples of privilege experienced by those without auditory processing disorder? I’m totally open to suggestions; feel free to leave them in the comments!

Simply put, I don’t trust my perception of what’s going on around me, even after years of practicing.

And despite the fact that most people seem to think I’m exaggerating, there’s good reason for this distrust of my perceptions.

This week, I’ve been working with several driving instructors to see just how much of a hope of being able to drive I had. These lessons were funded through the state Vocational Rehabilitation program; I registered through them while taking undergraduate classes through the college’s disability services department, in the hope that they might be able to help with these persistent driving issues and other issues of independent living for when I’m through with academia for academia’s sake and must go on to search for a real job. If I continue to live in Georgia, driving may very well be a necessity for finding the technology-related work I would like; the state as a whole is hardly pedestrian- or transit-friendly, and even cities like Athens that are supposedly ahead of the curve still have a long way to go.

But anyway, the good news is that the instructors agreed that I had a really good grasp of the rules of the road and the necessary behaviors for defensive driving.

My perception, however, turned out not to be quite up to the instructors’ initial expectations.

I don’t know how it took so long for the instructors to realize this, honestly. I had tried explaining my issues, but was met with a rather confused expression and told that I was exaggerating matters. And indeed, on the first day of driving, it seemed like I was doing reasonably well for a student driver.

But as the lessons went on and on, it became more and more clear that I was no ordinary student driver, particularly given that I’d been practicing off and on since I was 16.

The first sign was when one instructor attempted to hold a conversation with me…causing me to miss a stop light. OK, probably a fluke. Until it happened again, causing me not to notice the car stopped in front of me. And so on, and so forth.

The second sign was my difficulty identifying just where the boundaries of the car were. In trying to stay in the lane, I consistently veered too far to the right, unless I specifically focused on staying in the lane— and of course, when I had to consciously focus on it, it took a bit of my attention away from the patterns of traffic around me. These spatial issues became even more obvious when the instructor attempted to take me parallel parking; I horribly misjudged both where the right-hand side of the car was in relation to the space and when the front of the space was even with the car’s back wheel, even after several repeated attempts.

Similarly, the attention problems became truly obvious when an instructor-therapist gave me a peripheral vision test, first with no distractions, then while trying to hold a conversation with me. I did excellently on the test with no added distractions— but once the conversation was thrown into the mix, it turned out that I literally couldn’t keep track of both tasks at once! And of course, it’s not merely conversation that’s the issue; as I’d been trying to explain to the instructors, any distracting stimulus can have the same effect, making me less aware of the actual dangers I need to be watching out for.

(I tend to wonder why this sort of thing wasn’t tried in the first place, before I was even sent off for the driving lessons… it might have saved a lot of frustration on everyone’s part, I think!)

So the instructors have recommended that I go through sensory integration therapy, with the hope of both gaining better judgment of the spatial relationships between my body, the car, and everything outside, and finding ways to better divide my attention between so many competing stimuli. Hopefully this will prove effective; even if not for driving, it should still help with other weird perceptual issues I deal with day to day (perhaps making me a safer pedestrian, at the very least!).

Now if only real estate developers and street designers would start designing places to be even remotely as accessible to pedestrians as they are to drivers in the meantime…

So today, I thought I’d talk about what sensory overload is like for me.

First of all, it’s important to note what sorts of situations can actually make me feel overloaded.

My quirky auditory processing can lead to sensory overload quite easily in the right circumstances. In particular, it’s not so much the loudness of sound as it is the noisiness that makes me feel overloaded (though loudness does have an amplifying effect on overload). What I mean by ‘noisiness,’ for lack of a better explanation, is how cluttered and how dissonant the sound is; for instance, a bunch of people having separate conversations at the same time, or a bunch of TVs tuned to different stations, would be ‘noisy,’ while instruments playing in harmony would be far more bearable.

Visual stimuli can also be overloading, and here, too, it’s more a matter of noise than brightness. Though the brightness of light does have an amplifying effect on how overloaded I feel, once again, it’s not the primary cause of overload. What I’ve found produces visual overload most easily is rapid motion, particularly rapid flashes or flickers. Indeed, it need not even be motion that’s visible to most people; for instance, I find it very uncomfortable to look at a CRT computer screen with a refresh rate of 60 hertz or lower, because I can literally see the screen flickering. (I do not have this problem with LCD screens, as they are constantly lit.) Visual clutter can also contribute to overload, though it’s not the sole contributor; one only needs to look at my cluttered apartment and how comfortable I can be in it for evidence of that.

So what does overload feel like, then? In some cases, it leads to a feeling of physical discomfort, for lack of a better explanation, though I can’t really describe how it feels uncomfortable; in those cases, the only recourse is to escape to a less stimulating environment or to cover my ears or close my eyes. In other cases, the effect is a sort of ‘shutdown’ of the affected senses, in which some information is lost as a sort of automatic compensation for the overload. Honestly, I’m not sure which reaction is worse: though the painful sensation obviously feels worse, the sensory shutdown can actually be more dangerous. Just imagine trying to cross a busy street when you can’t be sure you’re getting the whole visual signal, and you’ll have a pretty good idea why that’s the case.

(This is also among the reasons why I prefer not to drive, particularly in heavier traffic: the heavier the traffic, the more motion there is to constantly keep track of, the more cluttered the visual environment, and the more quickly I go into this sort of sensory shutdown.)

So if I seem to be oddly uncomfortable with light or noise, or if I seem to be spacing out for no apparent reason, please ask me whether the environment I’m in is comfortable. You may be surprised to find that something which is perfectly comfortable for you may very well be completely unbearable for me.

Long before I had an Asperger’s diagnosis, I had been diagnosed with auditory processing disorder. For those unfamiliar with that diagnosis, what it essentially means is that my hearing is technically fine, but the way my brain processes auditory input isn’t quite normal.

You know the so-called ‘cocktail party phenomenon’ that’s such a marvel to psychologists, where people can pick out a single person’s voice among a crowd of conversations in a noisy restaurant? I don’t experience that. When a bunch of people are talking at once, all I hear is a jumbled, incomprehensible mess. It might be slightly more comprehensible if the speaker I’m trying to listen to has a voice with a distinctive pitch compared to the crowd, or is speaking slightly louder, or is located closer; even then, however, it’s a struggle, and I still have to pay an awful lot of attention to extract that one thread of conversation from amidst all the noise.

(Needless to say, because of this, the college bar scene is not my ideal social environment. But that’s another post entirely.)

Distortion can also render speech incomprehensible. Phone calls, particularly on a cell phone with spotty reception, are frequently an exercise in frustration; even on a land line, higher frequencies (which make up common consonant sounds such as ‘s’ and ‘t’) are muffled due to the limitations of the phone system itself. The situation is somewhat less troublesome when I’m speaking to someone with whose voice I’m already familiar, as I’m already accustomed to that person’s speech patterns and can thus extrapolate more easily from the muffled signal. The same is true for environments with a loud echo; I can recall quite a few assemblies held in the gym back in middle school and high school where I couldn’t make out half of what the speaker was saying.

Even with a clear, distortion-free signal, there’s no guarantee that I’ll necessarily make out what someone’s saying. If someone has an unfamiliar accent or unusual speech patterns, for instance, I may have to go through a sort of learning period before I can really understand ‘on the fly’; most people seem to adapt much more quickly than I can. I also have some trouble understanding fast speech, particularly if I’m feeling tired or overloaded.

One other interesting thing I’ve noticed is that, when I’m really trying to comprehend something I hear, I’ll mentally translate it into written form, like a sort of mental closed-captioning. I think this might be one of the reasons I have so much trouble with faster speakers: doing this translation requires a sort of buffer, which overflows far more quickly, particularly if I’m feeling overwhelmed to begin with. A related quirk I’ve noticed is that sometimes this translation comes to a halt, or at least occurs to an incomplete degree, when I encounter some word that I can’t convert to a visual representation.

Given this, then, I suppose it’s no real surprise that I prefer text messaging and e-mail to phone calls, and that I prefer to watch TV and DVDs with captioning enabled.

Ironically, however, I also have perfect pitch; it seems that my auditory processing is far better suited to music than to speech. This leads to another rather interesting issue: I can carry a tune quite well, even remembering several layers of accompaniment, but lyrics are sometimes a mystery to me even after several listens until I’ve seen them in print (or, at the very least, listened very closely to separate them from the accompaniment).