One of the first songs I wrote when I started writing back in December 2021 was Too Loud.  I wanted people to understand my sensory overstimulation issues.  I wanted people to think about us on the spectrum who have some of our senses turned up to 100 compared to a NT’s level of maybe 10.  This song is really raw in the fact that I lay out how scared and self-conscious I am because of feeling so different and not being able to communicate with the world and people the way I see NT’s doing it.  Another fun fact about this song is in the line “I think I’ll just pretend, I think I could be like her,” I’m talking about “masking.”  This is something that largely women on the spectrum experience, but a lot of others do too.  Masking is an autism term used to describe the act of pretending or acting like someone else in a social situation.  It’s basically like, we see other people behaving or interacting in a socially appropriate way, so we mimic that behavior so that we can fit in as well.  It doesn’t come naturally to us to know what is the right way to behave in a social situation, so we look to others to see what they’re doing.