30 Days of Autism Acceptance: 19
April 19th: Do you enjoy music, or do you find it overstimulating? If you do like music, what kind of music do you prefer?
I do enjoy music, though my early listening was colored by my inability to distinguish words in conversations and my echolalia, which led me to mishear and then repeat the wrong lyrics. Later, my anxiety over the unknown would keep me from listening to new music on my own, even if it was from artists that I liked, because I didn’t know what to expect. Instead, I listened to the same albums over and over and over.
Lately, I listen to a lot of what I call “drone” music, particularly while I work. This is ambient work that is calm and settles in the background, and I find that it settles my brain and makes it a lot easier to focus for extended periods of time. I also find that I audio “stim”, where I will listen to the same song on repeat over and over and over, usually for one specific movement or phrase that really strikes me.