I love having the kind of friends who will text me to let me know they’ve spotted nearly-black calla lilies at the store, because they know how much I would love to see them.
I also love that I have successfully eliminated fluorescent lighting from my home, so that the nearly-black flowers in question go from looking like this:
very nearly black indeed
to this:
wasn’t expecting that
Autistic Wordpainter 
ooh — avoiding fluorescent lighting, the gift that keeps on giving. Not just for pretty flowers anymore.
Yes, ridding my home of fluorescent lighting was one of the first steps I was able to take in controlling my environment, back when my autism was first diagnosed and I was looking for ways to reduce my sensory input. It was amazing what a difference that one change made right away.
I think people with autism aren’t the only ones who could benefit from that. My office has fluorescent lights but I never turn them on — I light with lamps in the corners. So much better.
Oh, absolutely. Fluorescent bulbs are good for no one.
They are really beautiful! Especially in the second picture.
I have the CFL bulbs all over my house. So my house is lit with fluorescent light, right? I take ebay pictures in my bathroom – the only room in the house with incandescent bulbs.
I know they’re cost effective and energy efficient and all that, but… *shudder*
and they can often drive sane people mad …
They’re soul-sucking! For actual real!
I got caught up in the cost effective and energy efficient part but I don’t really like the light they produce. I get a lot of headaches. Connected? I know the fluorescent lights in Home Depot can trigger a migraine for me. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I’ve filled my home with them. I just realized that even the “natural light” lamps and bulbs I bought are fluorescent 😦
I started getting regular headaches just from being at school when I was very young. I tried telling my mom that I thought it was the lights. She insisted that was nonsense, and that it had to be my vision, but doctors confirmed that at that time my vision was perfectly sound. It was like clockwork: within half an hour of being at school, I would have a headache, which would dissipate a few hours after I got home.
Imagine my sense of vindication when I took matters into my own hands as an adult and ran experiments to figure out where my headaches were coming from, and it was the damn lights.
tl;dr: get rid of them. They are a blight and not worth the monetary savings if they’re negatively impacting your well-being.