James Finn
2 min readJan 2, 2024

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Here's one I bet the professionals never thought about! For background, I'm an autistic person getting on in years who has struggled with sensory overload all my life. Loud televisions, traffic noises, music, vivid colors, etc, have set my teeth on edge since I was small, sometimes causing physical symptoms like nausea.

In the last several months, I've been plagued with very dry skin on my hands, something that's hardly unusual for people my age. But, omg, with my sensory issues, you'd think it was the end of the world. The redness, itching, and (quite mild) pain are like sirens in my head. Sometimes I feel like I can't even think properly because of how distracted I am.

So, I slather lotion onto the backs of my hands frequently, but god forbid the lotion be greasy or perfumed, because that's just throwing different sensory logs on the fire. Even water-based, scent-free lotions make my skin feel weird, something I'm frequently aware of in a quite negative, distracting way.

I'm sure many aging people experience the same problems with dry skin. (I'm sure, because as a detail-obsessed artistic person, I googled it. Lol)

But I bet few people would stop to think about how a person with sensory-overload issues experiences chronic dry skin. To most folks, it's probably a fairly trivial problem, whereas to me, it can feel like a five-alarm fire — with all the sirens and hoopla that come with that.

After a casual search of professional literature, I haven't found any mental-health-industry expertise on the subject. I'm not sure any researcher or clinician has even thought about the problem of dry-skin sensory overload in older autistic people.

Maybe because nobody asked us? Hmmm .....

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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