This is the sixth post in my autism awareness month series. The previous ones tried to explain mechanisms. This one is harder to write, because it's about a typical evening at the dinner table.
A reader commented on post 3 that the color blindness analogy has a limit: color blindness doesn't fluctuate with how you're feeling or what's happening around you. She's right, and autism does.
The sensory threshold isn't fixed. It doesn't move day to day. It can move minute to minute. The same sound that was fine an hour ago becomes unbearable. The same touch from the same person that felt fine yesterday is suddenly intolerable. Not because something changed externally, but because the internal load crossed a line that isn't visible from the outside.
Here's what that looks like in practice. I'm at dinner with my family. A normal dinner, with normal quiet conversations between two adults and four children. At some point the noise becomes too much: multiple conversations, overlapping voices, a specific pitch. I ask everyone to speak a bit lower, or one at a time. They try to help: they start whispering. This actually makes it worse, because whispering is a different frequency problem, not a volume problem. So I ask again, more precisely this time. Now I'm the one enforcing rules on everyone for what looks like no good reason. I don't want to leave, as I'm genuinely interested in what's happening, and leaving would be rude. So I stay. And eventually I reach a point where I simply can't continue, and I leave the table, not dramatically, but not quietly either, because by that point I've already absorbed more than the system can handle.
From the outside it looks like an overreaction to nothing. There's no visibly valid reason for me to be upset about the situation. The buildup was invisible.
The coping strategies most of us have learned — don't leave abruptly, stay engaged, don't make others uncomfortable — are exactly the ones that prevent the only real regulation option available in the moment. The polite thing and the functional thing are in direct conflict. And we've been trained, often the hard way, to choose polite.
Over time, extended periods of this produce what's called autistic burnout. Not laziness, not mood. A system that has been running above capacity for too long and needs to shut down. For many highly functional autistic people, it often kicks in their 40s, after decades of invisibly costly adjustment.
Which raises a question: why does the same sound feel fine one moment and unbearable the next? That's what the next post is about.
This is part of my April 2026 autism awareness month series. First published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-10.
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