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After starting the year with two weeks of all-inclusive bliss in Egypt this January, I was feeling rested, recuperated, and rejuvenated. For two weeks, I’d done little more than sunbathe, read, write, eat and sleep, and I was excited to get back home with the clearest of minds to start the new year afresh. Within a couple of hours, though, that R&R had pretty much been reversed.
When I arrived at Sharm El Sheikh airport, I was greeted by a long, winding queue. The queue led to a guard who was clearly asking something of the passengers waiting at the door. I have done a lot of solo travel and visited plenty of airports, but I’d never experienced a queue before even entering the building before. This change alone was the beginning of the end of my calm state of mind.
As an autistic person, I like to be prepared. I process the world in a bottom-up way, which means that at any given moment I’m taking in a constant supply of information and sensory input from my surroundings. My brain isn’t the best at understanding context, so it needs to craft together each puzzle piece of information in order to make sense of the situation and the world around me. Research has shown that autistic brains process, on average, 42 per cent more information at rest than their non-autistic peers.
As you can imagine, this can be pretty overwhelming. In an airport, for example, there are probably a hundred or more different conversations happening in the departures hall alone. My brain is trying to keep track of all of them – it’s not sure what piece of context it might need from where so it has a difficult time prioritising which conversations it needs to hear and which ones it can zone out. On top of this, there will be the occasional tannoy announcement, which will take me off guard and add to the already overwhelming concoction of noise that my brain is trying to process.
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