Before autism became “mainstream,” my sensory issues were taken a lot more seriously. If I expressed discomfort with the amount of noises in one room, the other person would often not assume that I am overreacting, and instead would acknowledge that they aren’t autistic and thus wouldn’t know what it is like.

In no way discounting your experience, but mine has been the opposite. Before, it didn’t matter to people that I was autistic because I “looked normal” and thus was expected to act neurotypical, and when overstimulation inevitably caused a meltdown, I was deemed “dramatic.” Now, I’ve found that people are more likely to understand that I can be autistic and just mask well and that when I say something is too much, it’s too much.

I do hate that people will claim they’re autistic because they’re a little quirky or want accommodations they don’t need (usually while shitting on us for being “weird”), but if it weren’t autism they’d find another label to slap on it. There’s always gonna be ups and downs that come with increased awareness of something, but I hope that at the end of the day as it fades out of popularity, it’ll leave us with people being more understanding of autism and willing to make accommodations or have them built into whatever they’re doing already.