Imagine you're driving.
Not on some empty country road—on a highway. Rush hour. Every lane full. You're doing your best to keep up with the flow of traffic, stay in your lane, get where you're going. Same as everyone else.
Except nothing looks right.
The Signs
Every stop sign feels like a yield. You know it's red. You know it's octagonal. You know what it's supposed to mean. But the signal doesn't land with the authority it seems to carry for everyone else. It doesn't hit your brain as STOP. It hits as …probably stop? Maybe slow down. Definitely do something. You're already calculating: Is anyone coming? How fast? Do I have time? What's the right amount of stop here?
Other people just stop. You're running an algorithm.
Every traffic light is blinking yellow. Not red, not green. Never a clear command. Just—proceed with caution. Which sounds reasonable until you realize that's your default state in the world. Perpetual caution. Perpetual assessment. Every room you walk into, every conversation you enter, every interaction—blinking yellow. Proceed, but carefully. Watch for cross traffic. Don't assume you have the right of way.
Every intersection is a roundabout. No clear "your turn" signal. No light telling you when to go. Just a continuous flow you're supposed to feel your way into. Merge when there's an opening. Read the rhythm. Anticipate what the other drivers are about to do based on…what, exactly? Speed? Angle? Some instinct everyone else was issued at birth that you never got the manual for?
Every speed limit sign is out of focus. Not missing—you can see it's there. You know there's a number on it. But you can never quite read it in time. So you're always slightly unsure if you're going too fast or too slow. Too much or not enough. And you're checking—constantly—watching the other cars for cues about what the speed is supposed to be.
The Noise
But it's not just the signs.
It's everything else on the road.
Every other car has its blinker on. Left, right, doesn't matter—they're all signaling something. Blinkers are supposed to communicate intent. They're supposed to say: I'm turning, I'm merging, here's what I'm about to do. That's what facial expressions do. What tone of voice does. What body language is supposed to tell you. But when every single car has its blinker on, the signal becomes noise. You can't tell which one matters. Which one is about to affect your lane. So you treat all of it as potentially critical. All the time.
Horns are going off. Not because you've done anything wrong—or maybe you have, you honestly can't tell—but someone behind you is impatient because you hesitated for half a second too long. You're already doing your absolute best to read a blurry speed limit sign at a blinking yellow light in a roundabout, and now there's the added weight of knowing you're getting it wrong in real time. In public. With an audience. The horns aren't information. They're judgment.
And the sun is right in your eyes.
It has nothing to do with driving. It's not a signal. It's not information you need. It's just there, flooding your visual field, making everything harder for no reason. That's the fluorescent lighting. The background music in the restaurant. The tag in your shirt. The hum of the refrigerator. The texture of the chair. None of it is relevant to the conversation you're trying to have or the task you're trying to do, but it's consuming bandwidth you desperately need for the things that actually matter.
The Gap
Everyone else is just driving.
They're checking mirrors, switching lanes, turning on the radio. They don't notice that the signs are clear because they've never known them to be anything else. They don't think about the lights because the lights just work. Green means go. Red means stop. Simple.
And you're in the same traffic, on the same road, in the same world. But your windshield is smudged and the sun is blinding and every sign is just slightly out of focus and everyone is honking and all the blinkers are on and you're still expected to arrive on time, in the right lane, at the right speed, with a smile on your face.
That's what autism is like.
Not the inability to drive. Just the impossibility of reading the signs.
The Protocol: You are not a bad driver. You are driving with a smudged windshield, blinding sun, and signs that were written in someone else's language. The road is the same. The rules are the same. The hardware processing them is not. Stop blaming yourself for hesitating at an intersection that never once gave you a green light.
