This is about a stress event that happened last week at work. It’ll take a detour first, though.
It is a half million years ago. Protohumans are actively evolving, living in small groups. The world is full of dangers: Toxins in the environment, cliffs and rocks that can break bones, predators that can eat us, a lack of things for us to eat. We have to be constantly on the lookout.
Because it is difficult to destroy dangers that we’re fully afraid of, and because we live in tribes where individuals can take specialized roles, some of us evolved to be hyperaware of dangers and others of us evolved to deal with them.
For instance, some of us evolved to respond to smells in the environment: Is there edible food here? Is the water potable? Or, in contrast, will the water kill us? Is there fecal matter here that would suggest the presence of a predator? Are there dead creatures here, and if so, what killed them?
The tribal method of using this information would be: Those of us who are attuned would tell the person in charge of making decisions, who would then communicate any dangers to the entire group. There is food, let’s eat! There is danger, let’s leave!
If the smell-sensitive person is ignored, that means they’ve failed. This is their evolutionary role in the tribe. If the chieftain fails to act on their information, they have no purpose in the tribe. They might as well just go live off in the wasteland, alone.
Hi, my name is Clio, and I teach high school. It is 2024, not 500000 BC.
I am Autistic, and my particular install includes what is called “Sensory Processing Disorder”, but calling it a disorder is only chronologically appropriate. Half a million years ago, it would not be a disorder: It would be a feature.
I’d be the one telling the tribe to not drink from the pond because it is filled with toxins.
I’d be the one telling the tribe to not encamp here because the presence of corpses indicates the potential presence of predators.
Now I’m the weirdo who gets agitated at odd smells and doesn’t allowed coffee in my classroom.
(And here’s the fun part: It’s not all coffee. It’s not even a specific genre of coffee. It’s certain coffee, of a pattern I have yet be able to discern. And it can also be tea or hot cocoa that my brain has decided is coffee-adjacent, but that’s far less common.)
A little over a decade ago, I was working in the basement of a high school building that was beyond its use life. Mold was ever present, and there were several rooms that were closed off to us entirely because of environmental hazards.
At one point, the sewer line broke, filling the entire building with gasses. The students were sent home, but the teachers were moved to the ground floor cafeteria, where the smell wasn’t “so bad”. Which is to say: The smell was still really bad, but our eyes weren’t watering and our headaches were manageable.
When a few teachers complained to the Superintendent, they were told they could stay home but their paychecks would be docked. At the time, my main reason for staying was that I couldn’t afford to have my paycheck docked. I was deeply in debt, and I was on a lousy charter school pay.
Indeed: My principal had even lied to me to hire me on. He told me that I’d be getting a STEM teacher bonus, then when it came to sign the contract, there was no such bonus. I asked, he shrugged and told me he didn’t have the money, was I going to sign or not?
I signed. My choice was to sign or risk not having a job at all, and it was late August.
So I stayed.
The rumor is that someone called OSHA because rather abruptly in the morning of the second day, we were told we could go home and we’d be called back when the building was cleared. If I remember correctly, this was on a Thursday, and we came back on a Friday.
I would have taste and smell flashbacks of that event for over a year. I would just be sitting around, doing whatever, and my nose and mouth would fill with the memory of raw sewage.
I didn’t know at the time that I was Autistic. At the time, I may have been identifying as a Highly Sensitive Person, which is generally code for an Autistic person who has overall low support needs but whose lizard brain is still highly attuned to telling the tribe that the that particular feces belongs to a tiger and, worse, to a tiger that’s been eating a lot of plants lately and would really, really love a steak dinner.
In case it’s not obvious, we’re the steak.
Run.
So I didn’t know at the time that we were sitting in sewer gasses that there was a portion of my brain telling me to tell the tribe that we were in the presence of dangerously stagnant water and we needed to leave right away. Best case scenario: We get sick from some stagnant waters. Worse case scenario: The waters are filled with the corpses of Previous Steak.
Run.
So I spent a full work day, plus several more hours, in the midst of urban decay, my upper, conscious brain grumbling about corporate greed and the evils of capitalism and my poor life choices that led me to this situation, while my lower, subconscious brain was exhorting the chieftain to lead the tribe to safety, and fast.
Why wouldn’t she listen?
RUN.
Now it’s 2024.
Monday afternoon, last week, some of my students asked me to open a window because it smelled bad in my room. It was cold out, so I told them to deal with it. I honestly didn’t smell anything.
A student told me I was nose blind because I’d been in the room too long. That confused me, because usually I’m really sensitive to smells, but I shrugged it off.
The reason, it turns out, is that the smell was gathering at the front of the room, near the radiator intake whatchamadingy, and I sit in the back.
Tuesday morning, I had a PD session in another part of the building, so my class had a sub. I did show up before classes started to get some stuff out of my room, and this time, the smell was unmistakable: I opened the door and nearly passed out.
During my PD session, word got back to me that the Principal had let the kids in and had also noticed the smell. He was looking into moving the kids, and had propped the window and doors open.
I went back to class in the afternoon, at which point the smell was mildly disgusting, presumably because the room had aired out. I thought maybe the cause was gone, but when I closed my room up at the end of the day to make copies and came back, it had returned.
By the next morning, the building crew had taken a look. They hadn’t found anything in their searching, but the smell was gone. I posited that it was a dead mouse whose corpse had been knocked deeper into the walls; it had been on the radiator element, which was cooking it and causing the smell.
The building person shrugged and said, “It’s possible. We should be so lucky.”
Meanwhile, I was deep in a PTSD cycle: Highly irritable, feeling abandoned and helpless. My timeblindness and depersonalization was waiting in the wings. Thursday would be spent overreacting to students and avoiding eye contact with teachers. Friday was a manic haze. Saturday wasn’t much better.
Now it’s Sunday, and I’m hopeful that I’m finally through the storm. More importantly, it all makes sense now.
I smelled a corpse. That subconscious part of my Autistic brain that was installed half a million years ago to warn the tribe of a danger was activated. The leader of my tribe also knew about the smell, and didn’t act with perceived immediacy. He even left the tribe’s children in the presence of the corpse: Did he want our entire next generation to be eaten by the bear that had left its half-eaten prey behind? Did he want them drinking from the tainted pond?
Objectively, as a colleague would later assure me, the Principal didn’t do anything wrong: Having allowed the room to air out, he correctly assessed that it was a manageable smell. Even I came to that same objective conclusion later in the day.
It smelled awful, but oh well. Life goes on.
But no, my inner brain was screaming, unheard even by me: Life doesn’t go on! There are dangers here! We need to run! RUN YOU FOOLS!
So out came all the self-defeating scripts: Nobody listens to me. I have failed the community. I have no purpose. Nothing I say or do matters.
Now a lot of things make more sense. Why quiet noises, particularly music on phones, bother me: My Lizard Brain is listening for approaching dangers while the rest of the tribe sits around the fire and chats. Why certain smells bother me: My Lizard Brain is attuned to environmental risks that other people are ignoring. It evolved (not now, but a million years ago or so) so that I could be one of the minority in the tribe paying attention to things so other people could relax. I’m not a warrior, I defend the tribe in my own way.
(My upper brain has its own reasons for getting annoyed by cell phone noises in my classroom: It means kids aren’t paying attention, and my boss will be upset with me for allowing it. This upper brain/lower brain conflict often gets in the way of untangling these issues.)
Role specialization is how we became the dominant species on the planet. My installation of Autism is tied to my genderfluidity: I cannot take on typical social norms because that would compromise my Early Warning Signal features.
But while the world still has dangers, bears and tigers lurking in the shadows isn’t one of them. That part of my brain needs to chill the f*** out.
Of course, it won’t. That’s not how evolution works. Instead, my higher brain needs to acknowledge that there are times that my lower brain is just going to do this, and my higher brain needs to let it have its freak out while managing the emotional system fallout as well as possible.
In cases like these, knowing isn’t half the battle. Knowing is the ENTIRE battle, and now I have strategies for the next time this sort of thing happens.