The sensory difficulties I describe elsewhere on this website belong to my past. My senses have normalised. I did not simply become better at hiding the same discomfort or forcing myself through it: the experience itself changed.
I can describe what was missing because I have resolved those difficulties and now have another basis for comparison. Had I remained within the earlier experience, I could not have explained the difference as I can now. I could not be aware of what I was unaware of, know what I did not know, or understand what I did not understand.
A morning during National Service
One morning around mid-December 2002, during National Service, I woke with a spontaneous realisation that there was life force in everything around me, especially trees, animals and people. I experienced the world as alive, and myself as alive within it. There was more happening here than logical computation.
Later that morning, an unsolicited revelation of romantic love struck me. I suddenly experienced the feeling from a young woman’s viewpoint. I was alone and could take five minutes to recuperate. I realised that I had emotions, and that emotions were something I could experience from within, not just facial expressions and behaviours to recognise from outside. Understanding Feelings I Had Not Experienced gives the full account.
When the world acquired depth
My earlier experience of my body and surroundings is described in Autism Speaks. I experienced the world as flat and my body as something I had to direct from a distance. I did not have the ordinary comparison that would have made the missing dimension obvious.
The fuller sensory breakthrough came later, around mid 2004 after I finished National Service. My experience of my body and three-dimensional space changed. Seeing in 3D seemed to click into place. It felt like a major reset, extending to how I could handle sensory information rather than merely adding depth to a picture.
Taste also normalised. The old imbalance between little pleasure and strong aversion no longer confined me to Safe Mode. But it took time to work out and accept the newly accessible sensory experiences.
I did not suddenly acquire new senses. I developed the ability to engage with the senses and emotions I already had. In what I call a breakthrough, something that had required conscious logical computation became naturally available. Access did not arrive with complete familiarity or skill. I call the learning afterwards calibration: making sense of the newly accessible experience and learning how to use it in everyday life.
A yellow taxi and human individuality
A further breakthrough followed while I was writing stories in 2005. My characters had begun to have their own thoughts, feelings and choices instead of being props I moved around to construct a plot.
One night, I paused from writing and looked outside. As a yellow taxi passed, I suddenly saw myself, and then everyone else, within the great story of Life. I understood more of human selfhood and individuality: each person was living a life, not merely appearing in mine. I describe that moment in Creativity & Story Writing.
This was not the same as the much wider breakthrough in Relational Meaning in June 2018. Different dimensions opened at different times.
Macau, 2006: encountering Waldorf Education
During my visit to Macau in 2006, I encountered Waldorf Education for the first time at a workshop led by an experienced practitioner. The course was not designed for me or specifically for autism. Nevertheless, its exercises were very helpful to me.
I was not only being told about experience. I was being invited to participate in it. Several activities resembled exercises I later encountered in Applied Drama.
Sound Forest
The exercise I remember most clearly was Sound Forest. One participant closed their eyes while the others moved randomly around them, making sounds associated with nature and animals.
Without vision, we attended to the space around us through sound. Hearing became a way of engaging with three dimensions rather than merely identifying a noise. The sounds had places and movements around a person who was also present within that space.
What mattered to me was learning to work with the experience. It was not a test in which the only goal was to supply the correct name of the animal.
The “I AM”: thinking, feeling and choosing
We discussed individuality: what was this “I” or “me”? Thinking, feeling and willing were approached as aspects of an integrated self. I use “choosing” to express an important part of what willing meant to me.
We also considered sympathy and antipathy: the pull towards what we desire and the push away from what we dislike. I needed to learn to steer between these forces rather than have them steer me.
This did not mean removing desire or aversion. It meant discovering myself as the one who could bring thought, feeling and choice into a response. What attracted me was not automatically what I should pursue, and what repelled me was not automatically the whole truth about it.
Looking beyond five senses
The workshop introduced a wider way of thinking about senses than the familiar list of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. This helped me look beyond the obvious physical inputs and notice ways of processing experience that I had previously overlooked.
“Warmth” was one useful example. Physical warmth, and the warmth we experience in an encounter with another person, are not identical. Yet attending to the quality of warmth could change how I noticed an experience instead of reducing it to a collection of physical facts.
The familiar five is not an exhaustive scientific list: body-position sensing, or proprioception, is also studied. That does not establish every category in the framework I encountered.
I came to think of some of these as “processing senses”. I use that expression to describe what the framework helped me attend to, not as a claim that each category is a scientifically established sensory system. The wider account of senses in Steiner’s work provides context for that approach.
When cloth became a doll
A piece of cloth could be wrapped into a doll. Its material had not become something else, yet its function and our relationship with it changed immediately.
The object was more than a list of its physical properties. What we created, how we understood it and how we engaged with it helped shape the experience. A piece of cloth could become a participant in a story.
This was a small, concrete encounter with a possibility I later understood more deeply: meaning is not exhausted by the material carrier.
Discovering the childhood I had missed
Passing an object, passing a baton and joining group games exposed another absence. I realised that I had not truly experienced this part of childhood: shared play.
Here was a non-work activity in which being together and participating could be enough. It did not need to produce an object, improve a grade or accomplish some other useful task to justify its existence.
I had occupied the years called childhood without fully entering this experience of it. The games were not merely lessons in turn-taking. They allowed me to encounter a way of being with others that I had missed.
Understanding through the body
I could explore another perspective by literally embodying it: crawling like a toddler, or pretending to be someone else. Instead of only thinking about a viewpoint, I could try moving and responding from within it.
That did not give me complete knowledge of another person’s life. It gave me another way to discover questions and limitations that abstract reasoning had not revealed.
For this sensory learning, reading and researching could prepare me, but could not replace participation. We can try to prepare ourselves by reading everything, as though cramming for an exam, while postponing the experience through which the learning becomes possible. The breakthrough happened while “taking the exam”, not merely preparing for it. Words compressed experience into standardised concepts; learning to work with the sensory world required encountering it. Naming can also change how we respond to an experience, rather than simply describing something that remains unaffected.
During the Macau visit, I also began appreciating combinations of flavours, including elements I would previously have found unpleasant. New friendships brought experiences of warmth and companionship. The change was continuing to enter ordinary life, not remaining an isolated insight.
July 2010: reconstructing the human operating system
In July 2010, I attended another Waldorf workshop involving drama, storytelling, arts and crafts. Its impact was not as great as the 2006 workshop, and I do not remember the details as clearly. I believe it helped me unlock more of myself and become more accepting of my physical body.
As I remember it, we discussed archetypes, including why a prince rescues a princess. What follows is how I understood the discussion, not necessarily how the teacher explained it.
To me, masculinity is direct, forceful and active: choosing and controlling. Femininity is indirect, gentle and passive: submitting and following. I understand these as the yin and yang of how Life works, applied to relationships. They are complementary patterns, not fixed assignments to men and women.
A biological male does not have to express only masculinity. A woman can rescue a man, and a man can express femininity. Romantic partners can take turns in these roles. Through this lens, I understand how an interaction can become a struggle when both try to control it, or stall when both wait for the other to lead. The following and submitting I mean are willing, not imposed.
Fairy tales gave these concepts recognisable forms. Their meaning did not have to be announced as an explicit lesson. It could be transmitted silently through the story. My understanding was that I needed to know a pattern before I could deliberately depart from it. I was trying to reconstruct parts of the human operating system that I felt I had never built as a child.
Having a foundation gave me possibilities to work with. It was not a command to remain within the first example forever. My earlier confusion about fiction had involved treating stories as facts. Here, I was learning to approach them as forms carrying human meaning.
From a little sadness to much more
I also remember exploring degrees of emotional expression. We moved from a little sadness to very strong sadness, expressing ourselves as best we could, then went back in the other direction. We did this with happiness and other emotions too.
This was different from naming an emotion correctly. I was trying to express different degrees of it. Recognising a feeling, expressing it and learning how to live with it were not one task.
August 2010: exploring bodily postures
In August, I attended a Feldenkrais workshop where I was asked to try different body postures and get in touch with my body. I believe this may have helped me integrate my body better.
Being able to perceive my body was not the end of learning to accept it and live through it. I believe these later experiences helped me continue that process.
A starting point for relationships
I was asexual until the 2010s, and my own romantic interest developed during that decade. This was different from briefly experiencing romantic love within the earlier vision.
I believe that an emotional understanding of masculinity was fundamental for me to begin participating as a male partner in a heterosexual relationship. But it was only a starting point. At that time, jealousy, responding tactfully to a partner, sustaining sexual interest and maintaining attention to each other still presented mysteries. I came to a deeper understanding later, through more years and experiences.
November 2017: biographical studies and the cycles of Life
In November 2017, I attended another Waldorf workshop and encountered biographical studies. It gave me a way of considering a life beyond the familiar sequence of childhood, school, university, work, a midlife crisis, more work and retirement.
A life could have stages and cycles that those milestones did not adequately describe. Adulthood was not simply the long interval between completing education and stopping work. Development could continue within it, with different phases carrying different significance.
This also opened a wider possibility for me: the birth and death of a person could be part of an eternal cycle, rather than simply the beginning and end of a story. A biography could be considered within a larger movement of Life.
Encountering this perspective in 2017 was different from the fuller experience of relational time that opened in 2018. I could encounter a way of understanding a life before experiencing my own past, present and future with the later sense of personal significance.
July 2018: movement and a lived biography
My wider breakthrough in Relational Meaning occurred on Tuesday, 12 June 2018. The IPMT experience came afterwards and deepened it.
The 2018 IPMT programme in Penang ran from 8 to 15 July. There I experienced Eurythmy, a form of movement practice, and experienced another sharpening of my senses. While I have encountered Eurythmy before, but this is the first time I performed it together with a large group of people, and the first time I completed an entire dance instead of merely postures. My understanding is that it is insufficient to simply imitate the movements; we must experience and embody the true form that each dance represents, and this is an experience that cannot be properly described in words. I experienced it as a sacred dance that shares the power of creation.
My understanding of a person’s autobiographical experience also deepened. A life was more than information about events: it belonged to someone who had lived it. This connected with the relational experience of time that had opened in June.
These experiences deepened what had opened in June. Their value to me does not establish every medical or philosophical claim associated with the programme.
August 2018: giving the Spoken Word physical form
The Waldorf workshop I attended in August 2018 had two teachers, an unusual arrangement in my experience. Each contributed a different perspective. The workshop focused heavily on the Spoken Word as a vehicle of Creation.
We were asked to attend carefully to how we spoke, marking our consonants clearly and noticing the movement within words: rolling sounds, repetitions and the way a word unfolded as we pronounced it.
Words were not merely written symbols carrying definitions. Speaking gave them an audible physical presence through our own bodies. What had existed as text became an event in the room.
Typing words into a speech synthesiser and speaking them myself were different experiences. A synthesiser could make the words audible. Speaking required me to form them with my own breath and voice. I was not only choosing a message; I was participating in its physical expression.
The spoken exercise had its own purpose. It did not make writing or synthesised speech lesser ways of communicating. Here, the act of speaking was itself part of what I was exploring.
The workshop also placed considerable emphasis on digestion. I came to picture the senses and mind as connected parts of a whole-being process through which we receive, work with and integrate experience. This helped me connect exploring sounds and movements in manageable degrees with returning to earlier experiences from a different position in Life. I develop that personal understanding, including equanimity and a backward-review exercise, in Digesting Experience.
A correction that made an old script visible
I pronounced the name of one teacher incorrectly, and also mispronounced “tribal”. The other teacher took me aside and carefully corrected my pronunciation.
That did not immediately solve the problem. Some pronunciations had become scripts I used without realising they were wrong. I had learnt many words from written text, and knowing a word on the page did not necessarily mean I knew how to say it. Until somebody pointed out the difference, a familiar pronunciation could continue unnoticed.
The correction made me aware of something I had not been checking. Becoming aware of the mistake and changing the established habit were different tasks.
There is a practical implication for the kind of management work I might pursue. I would want to work carefully on pronunciation and delivery so that they support my credibility rather than distract from what I am saying. I do not need to imitate someone else’s personality, but I need to make my intended meaning clear.
Learning to be heard without becoming overbearing
I also discovered that I still feared speaking. I needed to express myself confidently and clearly, with enough volume to be heard without overwhelming the listener.
An autistic friend seemed to have only two volume settings. At one setting, nobody could hear him. When someone pointed this out, he spoke with the volume of a platoon sergeant.
The difficulty was not simply knowing that speech could be too soft or too loud. There was a range between those extremes that needed to become available in practice. Confidence, clear expression and suitable volume were connected, but they were not the same thing.
My earlier language and speaking history helps explain why “speak up” was not one simple adjustment. Ease with words, an established way of using my voice and the expectation of an unpleasant response could pull in different directions.
Performance as sacred participation
The teachers emphasised that performance was sacred. They spoke about theatre in ancient Greece as a space for inner transformation, not merely public entertainment. This reminded me of Japanese Kagura.
There is a historical basis for connecting performance with the sacred: Greek dramatic festivals included worship of Dionysos, while Hayachine Kagura includes ritual dances and stories of deities. These are different traditions, but both help me look beyond entertainment as the only way to understand a performance.
What interested me most was what the acting did to the actor. The way I came to see it, performing could affect the actor even more deeply than the audience. The performer was not only presenting something for other people to watch, but entering an experience through the act of performing.
I had dismissed the arts as unproductive activities, much as I had dismissed play. I came to understand another possibility: soul play, in which we explore with our soul.
The value was not confined to producing a polished performance. Entering it could itself become part of our development. We might discover something through the act that was not already available for us to express beforehand.
This understanding of performance as sacred directly helped me towards the later breakthrough of performing for Rta.
2019: more than the self I already knew
During my drama course in 2019, a female participant with some experience in drama encouraged me to challenge myself. Rather than choose a familiar role, I should try something very different and exercise parts of myself I had never exercised.
She suggested that we act as a heterosexual couple, but I would play the woman and she would play the man.
A previous revelation or vision had briefly allowed me to experience romantic love from a woman’s viewpoint. It did not prepare me for this role. There were far more dimensions to being a woman than that one experience had opened. I was trying to inhabit a particular person in a relationship, not merely reproduce the feeling of being in love.
I did not do well. But the attempt showed me the limits of what I knew, and those limits were an opening rather than a verdict.
Drama was not only about who I was. It could explore who I might have been, given a different situation. What if I had been born female? In another country, culture or racial community? In another era? The self I thought fixed could have taken a different shape.
I could explore a queen in ancient Egypt, a thug in a poor country, a technology billionaire in the United States, or a refugee in a war-torn land. Not because a brief performance would let me know their lives completely, but because each possibility challenged the narrowness of the life I had mistaken for the whole of me.
There was not only a fixed me to express, but a potential me taking different forms in different circumstances. The me I thought I knew had never encompassed the whole. What I understood as the true self was wider than any single character I could define.
The understanding of performance as sacred that I had encountered in August 2018 helped prepare the way for what followed.
Then another breakthrough occurred in class. Chasing that true self, or trying to finish its definition, was not the answer. Following Rta and playing my part was.
The insight came just before I was due to perform. I asked for more time to digest it and for somebody else to go first.
When my turn came, I let go fully of the old self I had been holding on to. It was not me, yet it was me at the same time. I no longer needed to defend a familiar personality before I could enter the scene.
Inwardly, there was no other audience. I performed only for Rta, following my role in the drama of Life.
Even if I was clumsy, even if I failed, even if I was imperfect, I could still do what the role required. I did not need to become an ideal version of myself first. I simply needed to offer the missing piece I was meant to bring to the world.
Following Rta did not mean accepting every role someone else might impose on me. It meant attending to the Life before me and finding a fitting way to participate, rather than making every situation serve the preservation of my old identity.
The question was no longer only “Who am I?” It became “What is mine to do here?” I did not have to settle everything that I could ever be before answering through an action.
The old self could loosen without the person disappearing. The role could be imperfect without the contribution becoming meaningless. I could enter the scene, respond to what was there, and let Life take a shape I had not rehearsed.
2019: discovering that I could connect with children
In 2019, I was allowed to stand in part-time for a Waldorf teacher who was busy. I helped direct the children and played with them. One little girl liked me and stayed close as we interacted.
I had never realised that I could connect well with children. It was an enriching experience while it lasted. I do not see childhood education as my calling, but this part of myself could be useful if I become a father one day.
Not every discovery had to become a career. Sometimes, participating in an ordinary situation revealed a possibility I had not known was mine.
Access is not the same as familiarity
Two comparisons help express the distinction. In Gregory and Wallace’s account of a man gaining usable vision after early blindness, he could recognise some familiar objects yet badly misjudged the distance to the ground from a high window. Being able to see did not make every visual judgement immediately familiar.
The review of John Elder Robison’s Switched On describes newly accessible emotional experience following transcranial magnetic stimulation. His publisher’s description of the memoir also sets out the disruption that followed. His route was different from mine. The comparison concerns discovering and adjusting to a dimension of experience, not identical causes or a recommendation for that intervention.
I am describing a history of change, not a course that other autistic people must reproduce. In my case, a breakthrough opened possibilities; practice, relationships and participation helped me learn to live with them. The later experience also made the earlier absence describable.
The everyday comparison is concrete. Noise no longer disturbs me in the same way, and spoken words no longer suddenly turn into gibberish. Human touch no longer feels intrinsically alien or uncomfortable, although social boundaries still matter. Pleasant tastes are as strong as unpleasant ones. I have a sense of three-dimensional space and can notice and enjoy subtle flavours, smells and bodily sensations.
The capabilities gained through my breakthroughs have not regressed in my experience. Fatigue and emotional states have varied. I noticed that my fatigue varied considerably with the nutritional supplements I took; this was separate from whether a breakthrough capability remained available. An old habit can also persist after a capability opens; the legacy scripts required their own work.