I was diagnosed with autism after I got sober. The timing wasn’t coincidental. Sobriety stripped away what I’d been. I was diagnosed autistic after I got sober. The timing wasn’t coincidental. Sobriety stripped away what I’d been using to manage a nervous system running at a very specific, very demanding frequency. Suddenly I had to actually understand what it needed.
Color was part of the answer. Not the whole answer — but a significant one.
What Autism Has to Do With Color
For many autistic people, sensory experience is heightened and specific. We often know precisely what feels wrong — the fabric that creates distress, the room that’s too much, the social script that costs too much energy to maintain. We’re less practiced at identifying what feels right, because we’ve spent so long managing the wrong.
Color, it turns out, can feel very specifically right. My brain processes hue the way it processes music or texture — not as decoration but as sensation. The first time I laid out 150 pigments and worked with them in the morning before my nervous system had to do anything else, something organized. Not me organizing the colors — the colors doing something to me.
The Hyperfixation That Became Expertise
Autistic hyperfixation gets a bad reputation. It’s framed as excessive, as a problem to redirect. But here’s what five years of deep color study produced: I know more than 150 colors by name, by feel, and by the emotional response they tend to create in other people. I can identify the difference between Cobalt Blue and Strong Navy in low light. I can match a person’s natural coloring to a specific pigment within three or four swatches.
That isn’t a disorder. That’s expertise built through the kind of sustained attention most people have to force and that I could not stop doing if I tried.
Hyperfixation, given the right subject and enough ground, becomes mastery.
What This Means in Practice
When I work with people — especially those who identify as neurodivergent, or who have sensory sensitivities they’ve never had language for — I approach it through the body first. Not through theory. Through the physical response to holding a swatch.
Many of the most meaningful sessions I’ve held have been with people who arrived saying they’d “never been a color person.” What they meant, I’ve come to understand, is that color had never been offered to them in a way their nervous system could receive. Too much choice. Too much performance pressure. Too much noise around the process.
A Dash-Dye session removes all of that. You hold colors until one holds you back. Then we go from there.
For Neurodivergent Visitors
If you’re autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent and curious about color as a sensory and regulatory tool, some options that may be useful:
- The small-group and one-on-one sessions at the House of Ann are quiet, unhurried, and held outdoors
- The Color Frequencies post explores how different hues affect the nervous system at a physiological level
- Chromotherapy: Healing Through Hue covers the research behind color as physical medicine
- You can reach out ahead of a session to describe any sensory needs — I’ll accommodate them
Book a session: morejoystudio.com/connect/
Color Frequencies: What Vibration Are You Wearing?: morejoystudio.com/color-resources/color-frequencies/
Chromotherapy: Healing Through Hue: morejoystudio.com/color-resources/chromotherapy/
Read also: Sobriety and Creativity: morejoystudio.com/philosophy/sobriety-and-creativity/
