Places that you go to calm down / escape

[Misery]

I was thinking about this while going over that thread about stores being super bright/loud, and when I have to experience that, I always try to find a place where I can retreat to, to calm down, hide out, keep to myself.

I'm wondering if any of you guys have your own sort of special zone that you can turn to, when you are having sensory issues.

This is mine:

Strange room in a strange house... we only just moved here recently. But this room turned out to be perfect... it's pretty obvious what the previous owners used it for (and yes, the projector is still there, I havent learned to use it yet). But with the deep red walls, the black ceiling, and even the weird black curtain "door", and lights that can be toned down... yeah. This is my place to escape to when feeling overwhelmed.

Also applies to the dog, it's his place to go when he feels like hiding from his chaotic sister.

Only problem is that there are no ceiling lights in the back half of the room, so the board game desk in the back needs the screwball lamps. The lamp in the picture is stupidly made of metal and burns with the heat of a thousand stars (AKA, never touch it when it's been on for awhile).


How about you guys? If you have any pics of places that help you to deal with sensory problems, feel free to show them here. Or even just describe them, if you'd like.

I do think having something like that is really beneficial... a useful thing for those on the spectrum. But of course, what works varies from one to the next.

 

[BrokenBoy]

I live with my dad and 2 roommates, so I if ever need to escape, I just go outside and slouch over to a bench and lie down being depressed.

 

[Aspychata]

That chair is giving me Darth Vader vibes. ☺ Cute puppy.

This state is so pretty, l will pull off and stare at cows, birds, ocean, lakes on a regular basis.

My tiny box house has a bit of a privacy vibe and is set far back from busy road that l feel happy in it she says as the garbage truck pulls up. Lol

 

[Martha Ferris]

When I need to get away when out in public I go to a bathroom. At home when I feel overwhelmed I focus on just living in the moment and blocking everything else out. Sometimes, to get away from the animals, I go to my room and close the door.

 

[Raggamuffin]

Woods near the office when I'm at work.
My bedroom when I'm at home.

Being around nature certainly helps calm me down, although it depends what is upsetting me at the time. Going to the woods didn't calm me down at all today. Getting away from people is the main plus though. When I see people and I'm not in a good mood, I begin to feel awkward. Today I was just stood on the footpath in the woods, focusing on various things, and feeling pretty rubbish. Someone walked past and looked really concerned that some random guy was stood not doing anything. Maybe? Whatever I was picking up from their body language, it wasn't positive.

Hopefully I'll find a flat near a park when I'm looking at places to buy in a few months. I'll need somewhere close to a place that can help me unwind. Anywhere too scenic will be out of my budget though. But a place that's decorated how I want should help. Just have to hope I don't have noisy neighbours.

My dream home wouldn't even be big. No bigger than a park home. I see tiny/skinny bungalows and I think that's the dream. So long as it's detached, so you don't have to hear people next door. A small place, but lost amongst a huge front and rear garden. If the garden could have a lake too - then I think I'd be sorted. I think it's more about location though - I want to see hills or mountains on the horizon. Where I live at present is a large area that's below sea level and flat as far as the eye can see.

Being near water relaxes me. The sounds and view is quite relaxing and hypnotic. Also I get to feed swans and other water birds.

Driving can be relaxing too - especially at night. There's nothing more calming than driving home after having socialised. When I get to unwind, listen to my music. Especially if I can watch a sunset as I drive. Shame my car is the "sensible car" because another enjoyable aspect to night time driving is to open her up a bit and put your foot down.

Ed

 

[Misery]

Driving can be relaxing too - especially at night. There's nothing more calming than driving home after having socialised. When I get to unwind, listen to my music. Especially if I can watch a sunset as I drive. Shame my car is the "sensible car" because another enjoyable aspect to night time driving is to open her up a bit and put your foot down.

Aye, driving is pretty great for this! Well, if you have the right sort of area to do it in... I imagine doing it in a crowded city or something wouldnt help much. But something like a country drive? Oh yeah... very helpful for unwinding.

My dream home wouldn't even be big. No bigger than a park home. I see tiny/skinny bungalows and I think that's the dream. So long as it's detached, so you don't have to hear people next door. A small place, but lost amongst a huge front and rear garden. If the garden could have a lake too - then I think I'd be sorted. I think it's more about location though - I want to see hills or mountains on the horizon. Where I live at present is a large area that's below sea level and flat as far as the eye can see.

Yeah, totally agreed on this one. That was the problem with the house I just moved from... well, not noisy neighbors, though their stupid kids swarmed like ants out on the road. But just the LOCATION.... ugh. Constant car/truck noises, bad traffic, and the scenery was crappy things like a bunch of houses from the front window, a super zoomed view of one house from the side window, and this bloody stupid wall (to ineffectively block car sounds) in the tiny backyard.

New house is in the absolute middle of bloody nowhere... VERY remote. And yeah... difference is night and day. This sort of location, I think a lot of people on the spectrum would do well in, if they could find a house/whatever in such a place.

Cute puppy.

I made sure to inform him of this fact and he farted at me, so... there's that. A sign of appreciation?

 

[Barymore]

Nature, definitely. Walks with the goats or dogs, rides with the horses (I know, way cool). If its really, really bad: bathroom floor with the blinds down and door closed - dark, quiet, cool.
Yup, that happens sometimes.

 

[Gerontius]

I made a cosy little nook in my apartment that's just nice. I live in a 15x12 studio (the bathroom & closet are a separate room, and the kitchen is a galley in a tiny bit of a hallway.) The corner is a big tall bookshelf with lots of books, a green wing-back chair that I can sit in & relax. There's an old dropleaf breakfast-table there as well, pushed against the wall, with a few things on there--a black telephone with a cold bakelite handle, an old coffee syphon, a flipflop- or "wigwam"-style toaster, and a huge 1920-ish electric fan, still wearing most of its black paint, that works without too much issue. It gets hot here. There is no air-conditioning, and it is routinely 85 degrees Fahrenheit and humid. I sit in the chair and turn the fan on low. All day and all night the soft whirring of the electric fan becomes a white-nose backdrop to everything.

Sitting in the chair, on my right side is a tall radio in a walnut cabinet, an old Sears Silvertone from the early '30s. It used to work but I'm in the process of fixing it. Many good programs come on over AM here, and I enjoy listening to Nat King Cole or Glenn Miller. Also, at nights on weekends sometimes I can get lucky and find the old serials--Duffy's Tavern, The Shadow, Dragnet.

There is on my left, across from the table, an upright organ. I salvaged this for $2.23 or thereabouts thanks to a barter. It is in a quartersawn oak case, Eastlake carved, with a long white keyboard. There is a set of worn pedals on the bottom, testament to 128 years of music. The organ, said to be a "Palace" model by the stenciling on the front of the keyboard, is missing its top but still speaks of colorful Gay Nineties lifestyle. It plays well and can fill the place with music.

Across the room is an antique bookshelf crammed with vintage hardbacks, atop which is an Edison wax-cylinder phonograph with a huge curving horn hung high above the machine. There is a lamp here with two globes near the phonograph, and then against the wall an old rosewood "melodeon" dating to the 1840s. It appears at first glance to be a tiny hallway table. This instrument was similar to the pump-organ, but far more primitive--its keys are yellowed ivory, cold to the touch, and it does not need carving and painting to denote its worth. It is said to be the last survivor of its make.

In the corner there is an Art Deco cabinet, veneered in walnut and trimmed in a geometric pattern. Opening the front reveals the speaker and the control panel, very modern in 1929. This is yet another radio, an old Radio Electrola by Victor Talking Machine. In the top is of course the Victrola, and though it does not work yet it will soon. I use the radio on this one a good deal, as it is doggedly reliable--the antenna is wired to sixty feet of doorbell wire tacked round the ceiling of the room.

And then, after a box of ancient victrola records on the floor, my desk.

The desk is a good one, but a trifle battered. It is a long heavy thing sitting in front of the two windows of the apartment, looking out on the buildings and the pavement below. There is a green fan with four brass blades sticking out of the mess, and a braided wire trailing off onto the floor. There is a copyholder mired in papers, a coffee-cup or two, inkwells and fountain pens and books piled up--a candlestick phone sticking up from the mess like the corner of a fence long since covered in drifts of typewritten snow. The drawer without a knob on it hangs open, revealing office supplies and carpentry tools nesting together. On top of the desk sits a huge cast-iron typewriter, deep sober black, tall and heavy and bristling with nickeled knobs and keys--it is an old Woodstock "Correspondence" Five, printing a black and businesslike line to match its heavy businesslike appearance. In front of this desk of chaos and gravity is a delicate 19th-century chair, not the kind to sit in but the kind to keep pushed against the parlor wall, reupholstered in a burgundy floral chenille. I sit here when I work--they don't match but maybe I like them this way.

Then a small table, completely unremarkable, and underneath it an incongruous but quite necessary router for my wireless internet.

In the corner there is a console phonograph, built in 1928--a somewhat scarce model of Brunswick Panatrope, long and low in a walnut case on four turned legs. Two doors in the front cover a grille backed with a harvest-gold fabric, and behind the grill is a huge spruce horn--when this phonograph is on, it can fill the apartment with music and the hallway too, so I keep the doors shut most of the time. Under the lid all the fittings are in an oxidized gunmetal. A serpentine tone arm carries one steel fang to the surface of the records. When it is closed, it looks like a small Art Deco sideboard, except for the iron crank to wind the motor with.


It's hot in here. It's cold in here. The heat doesn't work, the air-conditioner hole is blocked off. Sometimes it is so hot I go naked but for my scapular and my spectacles. Other times, it is so cold that my hands cramp and I cannot stop them shaking long enough to strike the typewriter keys. It is humid, it is parching-dry, it is loud with the noise of the ghetto in the street below, it is silent when it is three in the morning and the rain roars down onto the roof of the battered diner in the parking-lot below. The roof is stained with leak marks. Yet it's home. Home is where you hang your hat. If I am to live alone, then I am to make my apartment into a nice home, a cave, a habitat.

It works.

 

[Gerontius]

Driving can be relaxing too - especially at night. There's nothing more calming than driving home after having socialised. When I get to unwind, listen to my music. Especially if I can watch a sunset as I drive. Shame my car is the "sensible car" because another enjoyable aspect to night time driving is to open her up a bit and put your foot down.

I agree, Ed-- Night time driving is fun.

I don't go fast at night, though; I have an old, old '90s Corolla and so I put the windows down & just let it chug along on backroads or through empty streets at about 30 or 40 miles an hour. Sometimes I'll drive it fast but it has weak headlamps and I prefer not to outdrive them.

Night driving is a relaxing way to get around.

 

[Raggamuffin]

My old Ford Pumas headlights were so weak I drove with full beam and didn't get flashed by other drivers. I guess it was fairly mild compared to other cars, especially considering how obnoxiously bright modern headlights can be - especially on Mercedes Benz.

Ed

 

[Gerontius]

My old Ford Pumas headlights were so weak I drove with full beam and didn't get flashed by other drivers. I guess it was fairly mild compared to other cars, especially considering how obnoxiously bright modern headlights can be - especially on Mercedes Benz.

Ed

Mine has cockeyed headlights so full-beam will bother other people. Those bright lights on new cars though really are a problem--We are going way too fast these days, I think.

 

[watersprite]

• my bed
• a close-by trail to an overlook
• my cx-5, with the sunroof open and driving on a quiet road
• sitting on the wall of the dam up at the lake

 

[Tom]

This is basically in my front yard. Something about it and the moving water's sound is calming and restorative.

 

[Wulven]

Outside. Where the wind blows free.

 

[watersprite]

@Tom You are a fortunate human being indeed to live there.

 

[ZebraAutismo]

I go to my bedroom and sit in my arm chair.

 

[Tom]

@Tom You are a fortunate human being indeed to live there.

Yes, I think so too. We were the first people to look at the home and I took one look around at the landscape and told my wife, yes, this one. I hadn't even looked inside the house yet.

But it can get a little hairy during prolonged rains. It has flooded in different places before. About 75 people lost their lives along it in 1955. It casued some issues for me early on due to anxiety.

So I have had to learn a lesson. There are good and bad sides to most things. One is not really in control of anything. If it's not flooding, it's wildfire, or bears or just carpenter ants wanting to move in with you. We are the first to lose power and the last to get it back. We even spent one fall in lockdown more or less because a homicidal manic stalked the area for a month. Helicopters and spotter planes cruised overhead 24/7 and swat teams crossed the property every few days. So make the most of what is good and try your best not to worry about what tommorrow may bring. There will be plenty of time to worry about it when the time actually comes.

 

[LadyS]

I just sit on the floor of my closet with the lights off, only when it gets unbearable.

Driving also helps. There is a small wetland park nearby that I sometimes go to when I need time to think.

 

[Bort]

I just go to my bedroom. If I'm not home, then some place outside where I can walk. I also enjoy going to the library where I can just spend time browsing the books.

 

[Gift2humanity]

An arts centre in our little town, there are some amazingly talented and interesting people there.
I can be myself unashamedly and no one judges me and I feel welcome.
Sometimes a part of me gets too depressed to go, yet I get days when I hang out there, write, sing, draw, do poetry and of course, sing.
I like meeting new people, especially the interesting ones.