Autism

My intuition is fantastic, I trust my gut on everything because it's never let me down. I think it's amazing how countless generations before me were able to hone this instinct to become what it is today. Those that ignored these feelings ended up paying for it with their lives, while those who listened managed to pass on their genes, eventually passing the trait to those of us here today.

Which is why when I get a bad feeling about something, I sometimes imagine a crowd of my foremothers/forefathers standing there going, "GO! GET OUT! NOW!" as if they can see the danger that I can't.

As to neurodivergence, I've spent a lot of time learning to know myself. I wouldn't be surprised if being different from most folks causes a lot of us to self-reflect. For me, that self-reflection includes evaluating what I feel and why I might be feeling it. Having different mental filters for stimuli, I know for a fact that I consciously recognize things that most people don't - usually little visual details, or background sounds. Surely, there's far more that my subconscious brain is picking up on that I am not consciously aware of. So when I overwhelmingly get the sensation that something is wrong, I react - usually either by investigating what is causing it (if I'm stuck somewhere, like at work), or by leaving the situation (if I'm in a public place that I can freely leave.)

(Slight tangent) Sometimes I think of us as "the canaries in the coalmine" so to speak. With our different sensory experiences, we might be the first people to notice distressing stimuli, but that doesn't mean we're the only ones affected. For example, how background traffic noise increases stress levels - everyone can feel the effect, sometimes without knowing why. But usually it's us neurodivergent folk that are the first to say, "My god, it's way too loud here!" And we're right. If it's too loud for us, it's probably too loud for others too - they just don't consciously realize it yet.