The Hidden Reason Why Autistic and Neurotypical People Can't Seem to Understand Each Other
Content note: This post discusses autistic and neurodivergent experiences, sensory processing, and the “everyone does that” comment. It also discusses the ways in which autism and neurodivergence advocacy can inadvertently create barriers to understanding. No crisis content.
Before I say anything else, I want to say this: the neurodiversity movement has done something genuinely extraordinary.
It identified, named, and began to dismantle a set of systems that had been quietly crushing people for generations. It gave millions of people a framework for understanding themselves that was accurate, maybe for the first time in their lives. It gave parents a way to understand their children, and children a way to understand their parents. It funded and inspired new research. It shifted, however slowly, the cultural conversation around autism and neurodivergence away from tragedy and toward something more honest. And I believe, without any way to prove it necessarily, that it has kept people alive who might otherwise not have chosen to stay. People who finally found the right context for their own experience and realized, “I’m not broken. I was never broken.”
That work is not finished. The differences between neurotypes are real, they are significant, and they need to be understood, researched, discussed, and accommodated. Full stop. Everything I’m about to say comes directly out of that understanding, not instead of it.
But I’ve been sitting with something for a few years now, and I think it’s time to say it out loud.
I think we’ve come to a fork in the road in the neurodiversity movement.
One path continues in the direction we’ve been going, which is documenting, articulating, and defending the ways in which autistic and neurodivergent people are different from neurotypical people. That work is necessary and I am not suggesting we stop doing it. But if it becomes the only path we take, I think we’re going to hit a wall. We may already be hitting it.
The other path is one I haven’t seen a lot of people take yet, and I understand why. On the surface, it looks like the path that leads straight to “we’re all a little bit autistic” (blech). It looks like (without being, as you will see if you dare to keep reading) the path of dismissal, of erasure, of the comments that have been used to deny us diagnosis, accommodations, and basic human understanding.
I want to ask you to take that path with me anyway, because I promise you: the destination is not what it looks like from here. The destination is actually greater understanding, greater empathy, and something that might start to dissolve the “us versus them” dynamic that has made this conversation so painful and so stuck.
But I need you to hang in there with me long enough to get there. I promise, as someone who has lived through decades of gaslighting and erasure and dismissal, I am not going to lead you anywhere that is going to subject you to any of that.
First, we need to acknowledge what we’re up against
If you’ve spent any time in autism or neurodivergence advocacy spaces, online or off, you know the comment I’m talking about.
“We’re all a little bit autistic.”
“Everyone’s a little OCD.”
“Yeah, but everyone does that.”
I’ve written about this before, in an earlier essay about why neurotypical people often struggle to accept autism diagnoses like mine. The short version is that when neurotypical people see autism diagnoses rising, something in their social survival wiring registers it as a trend that they’re being excluded from, and one of the ways they resolve that discomfort is to either collapse the category entirely (”only severe autism is real autism”) or dissolve it (”everyone’s on the spectrum somewhere”). Both moves protect them from the discomfort of feeling left out of a growing group. Neither move is made in good faith, even when it isn’t made in conscious bad faith.
I know this pattern intimately, because I have been on the receiving end of it my entire life. Before my diagnosis, my struggles were routinely framed as things everyone dealt with. After my diagnosis, people used the fact that they recognized in my experiences their own similar experiences as evidence that I couldn’t really be autistic. If they experienced something similar, and they weren’t autistic, they reasoned, then clearly the experience itself wasn’t autistic. The logic is circular and it is infuriating, and it has caused real harm, to me and to many people I know.
So I want to be very clear about where I’m standing when I say what I’m about to say.
I am not one of those people.
I am not trying to collapse the diagnosis. I am not trying to tell you that your struggles aren’t real, or that they’re the same as everyone else’s, or that you don’t need or deserve understanding and accommodation. I have lived too much of my own life on the wrong side of that argument to ever make it from the other direction.
What I am trying to do is give you a more complete picture. Because (and oh my god please bear with me because I swear this is not going where you think it’s going to go when you hear me say this) I think the neurotypical person who says “everyone does that” is not entirely wrong.
They’re just missing something crucial.
And until we hand them the missing piece, they’re going to keep using their incomplete understanding to dismiss us, and we’re going to keep dismissing their experience in return, and we’re all going to stay exactly where we are.
The neurotypical person who isn’t wrong
Imagine stubbing your toe.
You’re walking through your house, thinking about something else entirely, and you clip the corner of the coffee table with your little toe. The pain is instant and shocking and completely overwhelming. And what do you do?
You hop. You rock. You grab your foot and shake it. You might flap your hands or wave your arms. You might yell the same word over and over again, usually a cuss word, very fast, as a kind of verbal rhythm that helps you ride out the pain. You do all of this involuntarily, without thinking about it, because your nervous system just took on an acute burst of sensory input so intense that it needed an outlet.
What I just described is stimming.
Now picture a different scenario. Someone has had one of those days where everything went wrong at once. They got devastating news in the morning. Then another piece of bad news at lunch. By the time they get home that evening, they are already at the edge of themselves. And then their partner, who doesn’t know any of this yet, is sitting at the kitchen table tapping a pen.
Tap… tap… tap… tap… tap…
And the person loses it. They snap, or they burst into tears, or they have to leave the room. Something they would never normally even notice has just sent them over the edge.
This is sensory overload. Specifically, this is what happens when a sensory threshold gets breached by one small thing after the threshold has already been pushed to its limit by everything that came before it.
We even have a phrase for it in everyday language. We call it “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
That phrase is literally a description of sensory threshold dynamics.
Because, of course, a straw cannot break a camel’s back on its own. It can only do that when it lands on a load that was already at its maximum. The “breaking” is what comes after the sensory threshold has been exceeded.
So when a neurotypical person looks at an autistic or neurodivergent person and says, “I experience sensory overload too, I experience stimming too, I experience meltdowns too,” they are not lying or exaggerating. They are not making it up to dismiss you (except for the ones who are trying to say it dismissively, which is another conversation entirely). Most of the time, they are accurately reporting their own experience.
They’re just missing the part that explains why yours is different.
On Thresholds
Every nervous system has a sensory threshold.
It’s the point at which incoming sensory information exceeds the nervous system’s ability to process it in real time.
Past that point, the system does what overwhelmed systems do. It sounds the alarm, it looks for release valves, and it prioritizes survival over everything else.
What most people don’t realize is that this threshold isn’t a fixed line that’s the same for everyone. It’s not even really a line. It’s more like a load limit, and that load limit is shaped by how much sensory information you’re taking in to begin with.
Research shows that autistic and neurodivergent nervous systems quite literally process more sensory information at rest than neurotypical nervous systems do. We’re talking more actual sensory data, coming in from more channels, at higher resolution, processed more deeply, even when nothing particularly stimulating is happening.
Neurotypical nervous systems have something that functions as a filter. It’s not a conscious process, exactly. It’s just the way those nervous systems are built. A lot of sensory information that’s technically present in the environment gets de-prioritized before it even fully registers to the brain or nervous system. Things like the flickering of fluorescent lights, the hum of an HVAC system, the slight scratch of a clothing tag and the overlapping conversations happening across a room get filtered out. For a lot of neurotypical people, this information simply doesn’t register in any significant way.
For autistic and neurodivergent nervous systems, it all makes it through. Every bit of it, and at full volume.
This means that by the time an autistic person has woken up, gotten dressed, and arrived somewhere, their nervous system has already processed an enormous amount of sensory data from the tag in their shirt to the sound of traffic to the particular quality of the light in the room to the smell of someone’s coffee to the aches and pains of their body to the dread they have about socializing that day to the ambient noise of other people just existing nearby. All of it has been taken in and is waiting to be processed.
But before it can be processed, even more sensory information comes in unbidden.
The load is already heavy before the day has even really, properly begun.
So when something happens that would normally be manageable, it sometimes isn’t, because “manageable” assumes a starting point that doesn’t apply. When the neurotypical person’s pen tapping sends an autistic person over the edge, for instance, it’s not because the pen tapping is objectively intolerable. It’s because the pen tapping landed on a load that was already at its maximum.
And this is why the neurotypical person saying “I experience that too” is both right and incomplete. They do also experience it. They experience it at the coffee table corner and the pen-tapping moment and the bad-news-on-bad-news day and having to hold their pee when they really, really gotta go. Those are the moments when their nervous system’s load approaches its threshold. They know exactly what it feels like to be there.
What they don’t have is the experience of starting every single day already close to that threshold, because they can’t quite imagine what it would be like to take in the world at that volume and at that resolution without the filter running.
What this means for advocacy
I want to say something that might be the most important part of this whole essay, and also the part that requires the most trust from you.
When the neurotypical person says “everyone does that,” and we respond by insisting that no, actually, our experience is completely different from theirs, we are, technically speaking, doing to them exactly what has been done to us.
I know, I know. Please, just stick with me a little bit longer. I’m not taking you anywhere painful.
In dismissing their experiences entirely, we are dismissing their actual real experience in order to defend the category. And however justified that defense is, it does have a cost. And that cost is that they stop listening.
They stop listening because being told your experience isn’t real, or doesn’t count, or is categorically different from someone else’s in ways you can’t perceive, doesn’t make you more curious. It makes you defensive. It makes you dig in. It makes you, paradoxically, even more certain that you were right to begin with.
We already know what it feels like to be on the other side of that dynamic, because we live there. And knowing that, I think we have an opportunity to do something different.
What if we said: “You’re right. When you stubbed your toe, you stimmed. When your threshold got pushed past its limit, you went into sensory overload. That is real, and it is exactly what you think it is. Now let me tell you why my threshold is closer than yours on an average Tuesday, and why that means I still do need accommodations that you may not need.”
That’s an invitation. It acknowledges their experience as real and then uses that real experience as the bridge to understanding something they couldn’t otherwise access.
The neurotypical person who can look at their own toe-stubbing meltdown and suddenly understand why fluorescent lights might register the same way for an autistic person is not a person who has been told to stop trusting their experience. They’re a person who has been handed a new lens for looking at it.
And a person who understands you from the inside, from their own felt experience of something parallel, is a much more reliable ally than a person who has accepted your reality only as an act of charity.
Because that’s a person who is now capable of empathy where before they were only capable of dismissal.
What I’m not saying
Again, I want to be precise about this, because precision really matters here.
I am not saying autistic and neurodivergent people are the same as neurotypical people.
We are not.
I am not saying our struggles are equivalent to theirs.
They aren’t.
I am not saying that neurotypical people experience sensory overload at the same frequency, intensity, or baseline proximity as autistic and neurodivergent people do.
They don’t.
I am not saying that recognizing shared experiences means the differences don’t need to be accommodated.
They absolutely do.
What I am saying is this:
Many of the mannerisms and behaviors we associate with autism and neurodivergence are not alien. They are overwhelmed human responses. They are what human nervous systems do when they hit their load limit. The difference is where that limit sits, and how quickly and how easily it gets approached on any given day.
Autistic and neurodivergent people live much closer to that limit, much more of the time, because we are processing more without adequate time to fully process it all before more sensory information comes flooding in again.
That is a real difference.
It has real consequences. It requires real understanding and real accommodation.
But the way there is not by insisting that neurotypical people have no idea what any of this feels like. They do. They just don’t live there the way we do.
And until we acknowledge that one true thing, the wall between us is going to stay exactly where it is.
Where I’m hoping this goes
The neurodiversity movement has done the necessary and vital work of establishing that we are different, that those differences matter, and that the systems around us need to change to accommodate them. That work has to continue. I’m not arguing that it shouldn’t.
But I think the next step, the step that actually moves us out of the place we’re stuck in, is building the bridge, and not at the expense of the differences, but alongside them.
We need to adopt the principle that two things can be true simultaneously. We are different and we are more alike than either of us has been willing to admit yet. Both of those things are true at the same time. And I think holding both of those things at once, without collapsing either one, is the thing that will actually and meaningfully change the conversation for the better.
The straw breaks everyone’s back eventually. We just get there faster, and more often, because we’re carrying more than most people ever see.
That’s not a deficit. That’s just a higher resolution perception of the world.
And maybe, if we can find a way to say that in a way people can actually hear, we can stop fighting about who’s allowed to feel overwhelmed and start building something that works better for all of us.
If this resonated, I’d love to hear about it in the comments, especially if you’ve found language that bridges this gap in your own life. And if you’re new here, this essay is part of a larger conversation I’ve been building at Chronically Misread. The archive has more context for everything I’ve touched on here.
As a late-diagnosed autistic woman, this gave me language for something I’ve struggled to explain even to myself.
What especially resonated was the idea of baseline load and threshold proximity. I’ve spent a lot of my life comparing my struggles to what I see other people managing and assuming that if something seems “manageable” for them, it should be manageable for me too.
But this article articulated what I’m learning - that I’m often starting the day already carrying a much heavier invisible load — sensory processing, chronic stress, hypervigilance, physical pain, emotional responsibility, masking, grief, all of it layered together before the visible demands of the day even begin.
The “higher resolution perception” framing was especially meaningful to me because it doesn’t pathologize the experience, but it also doesn’t minimize the very real cumulative cost of living that way.
And I deeply appreciated the nuance throughout the piece - especially the point that building understanding requires acknowledging shared human experiences without collapsing important differences. That felt unusually compassionate and honest.
Thank you. 💯
Yes! This has always been about thresholds and quantity, not that we are entirely dissimilar creatures.