[KyleJune]

I didn't get diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, but I did get diagnosed with Autism at a young age and have sensory issues. For example, I was a very picky eater, didn't like wearing socks or shoes, clothes with tags or graphics on them were very irritating for me to feel. My parents didn't really limit my screen time. They had given up on trying to make me eat different foods. I mostly just ate chicken nuggets and frozen pizzas. I didn't go to any sort of special school, I just went through an average public school. I can give some advice from that perspective.

I didn't really start expanding my diet until my 20s. It's hard to describe the sensory issues to others but how I would describe it is that even though I know something is food, my brain has trouble processing it and I'll end up having a gag reflex to trying many foods. What I'd suggest and what I ended up doing to expand my diet is finding safe foods, and then trying to find ways to add new foods to it, slowly expanding what is considered a safe food. For example, I ate pepperoni pizza and to help myself expand, I started adding different toppings to parts of the pizza, that way I could try something new but still have plenty of a safe food to eat if I end up being unable to get it down with the new food.

Small incremental exposure to the things that trigger negative reactions can help reduce those reactions and get them more use to it. I did the same for social situations, pushing myself to do things I'm uncomfortable with, like taking a speech class in community college, trying out to be in a play, and joining school clubs about topics I'm interested in.

In addition to this, don't be too hard on yourself about the situation. There is only so much you can do and a lot of it is out of your control. Even though my parents weren't too involved, I was lucky and turned out alright. All that extra screen time lead to me going into software engineering. I've been able to work my way up to being an engineering manager.