On sensory experience.

The world arrives at us differently. Not more, not less, differently. The fluorescent light that nobody else registers is a fluorescent light I have been counting for an hour. The background music in the restaurant is not background. The seam on the inside of the sock is a fact of the day. The smell of the perfume on the person three rows over is information I did not ask for and cannot put down.

Sensory experience is the layer underneath everything else we describe about autism. Our thinking, our communication, our connection, our distress, all rest on what our bodies are receiving from the world moment by moment, and on how much spare processing we have left after receiving it.