Autism Stories
Why I Walk With Eyes Closed
A meditation on other ways to see the world…
Just now I walked my neighborhood road. It is calm, lightly traveled, of smooth pavement and sure footing. A squall-line had formed to the northwest and came closer, wind preceding the rain. My ears filled with the wind’s breathy moan and I felt her touch as I walked in the presence of mystery. And then I closed my eyes. I knew the road, I could hear if any person or conveyance approached, so my eyes kept closed for step after step after step. The mystical presence deepened, and the living flame inside me burned hotter and joy and awe rose and merged into a singular feeling that has no name. I in such gifted times feel most alive and connected.
Walking with eyes closed rarely is this magical, but for me it is connecting and comforting and life-giving. I have walked with eyes closed for much of my life but never understood why. Perhaps the why matters little from a wide-angle perspective; yet at this stage of learning about my autism, exploring the why is consequential.
My recent autism diagnosis leads me deeper into self-examination and, as many others have written, I see myself through a different lens. I notice my many traits, call them quirks, call them features or autistic expressions. Each is a spice in the melange that is my autism.
As I have become more aware of one feature, my sensory sensitivities, as I have come to know them, patterns rise to the surface. My primary sensitivities are sound, smell, touch, and sight, especially sight. I hyper-see and hyper-notice.
Instinctively I gravitate to the dimly-lit, to forest not beach, to dawn and dusk not the fullness of daylight, to tunnels and covered bridges and foggy filtered days. To live with me is to fight over a room’s lighting, the dimmer switch becoming a battlefield.
Why have I always seen what others always missed? Why was everything so visually loud? I started to become aware of and understand my visual sensitivities with my therapist. Often I feel like my eyes are being shouted at by the world, I told her. Often it simply overwhelms me.
And yet, when I walk with eyes closed everything becomes quieter; my mind slows, I become aware of my body, how the breeze brushes my skin, how my almost bare feet touch the living earth. My non-visual senses come out from hiding to guide me in ways more subtle than sight.
In neurodivergent terms surely this a , one that calms me and helps me feel more present and connected and even joyful. When I walk with eyes open, my other stims express: my fingers rub together or snap open and shut like a duck’s bill, or I swing my arms forward and back all together, not alternating as with normal walking. With eyes closed, my other stims retreat and I simply walk.
I must confess an enduring fantasy, one that perhaps will become real in its own time. I am with someone who knows me deeply, and I know them. They know my love of walking with eyes closed, so they take my arm, as a bride takes the arm of her father, and they say, “close your eyes and walk with me.” And we walk. I feel such safety, such caring. I am led through back streets, past gardens that I know by smell and close to a fountain that I know through sound and smell and the faint touch of mist. I feel the comforting hand on my arm guiding but not leading, keeping me safe but offering freedom. I close my eyes and feel into this fantasy and realize it brings me to a place of joy and connection.
These past days walking more with eyes closed I realize that it feels like walking in a poem, edges softened, each step meaningful as a poem’s lyrical words. I know I am blessed to be able to see and also to have the choice not to see for a time. Many others lack that choice.
I am left to wonder how much quieter is the visual world to neurotypical people. I start to envy them, but envy fades into mourning. I mourn for their sensory limitations. I have the gift both to see the world in so much deeper detail than they, but also to be able to regulate my sight, to turn it down, to close my eyes and walk and to enter my beloved mystery.
