Category: support

A Perfect Day

It's my birthday soon. My husband asked me what I'd like to do for the day. Which is a big, open question. The biggest and most open, yawning-cavern-like question, based only on my own desires. I am thinking. What would my perfect day look like? For a start it would involve a lie in. A … Continue reading A Perfect Day

How to help an Autistic

Last year I was sent this wonderful Ted Talk to listen to. I wasn't sure of its relevance at first, but it soon became clear. Here it is, well worth a watch: Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen It got me thinking about so many of my problems, and they are all … Continue reading How to help an Autistic

The Day my Autism Saved my Daughter’s Life

  I wrote this back in October. Then I decided not to post it. Why? Because I feared judgement.  When it happened I blamed myself. I should have been watching every second. I should have been better. I had run a risk assessment of the field: I'd noted no heights to fall from, no water to fall … Continue reading The Day my Autism Saved my Daughter’s Life

New Year’s Eve

Here I go again. Travelling off to see people for New Year's Eve. Quite the social butterfly. I'm sitting, strapped down, wings tucked in, as we race through the windy, Welsh roads. All corners. Welsh roads skirt every obstacle, and when your country is built of valleys carved by water and its wayward passage making, … Continue reading New Year’s Eve

Happiness

Everyone's searching for happiness. Everyone. We've got a world which tells us that if we could just live here, own this, wear this, holiday here, have these friends, have this job, and on and on and on, we would be happy. As an autistic rule follower I was lucky that I grew up in a … Continue reading Happiness

Hyper-focus

Perhaps the functioning labels aren't so bad, if they could just be applied to me at different times. It's been a month of ups and downs, of achievements and limits. I have gone from the high energy and hyper focus of high-functioning-Rhi, to the shutdown and inability to do the simplest of tasks of low-functioning-Rhi, … Continue reading Hyper-focus

Accessible Autism

Access to services doesn't just mean that services need to exist, it means we need to be able to access them. I'm not good at contacting people. That is an enormous under-exaggeration. I am terrible at contacting people. If it needs to be done by face or by phone, I may never do it at … Continue reading Accessible Autism

Gaslighting

Being an undiagnosed autistic has many challenges. When you compare your reactions to things with other people's, you feel like you're getting it wrong. When other people take things in their stride, and your brain feels like it's expanding inside your skull to the point you can't think, then you feel like you're overreacting. And … Continue reading Gaslighting

I’m sorry…

Saying "I'm sorry" doesn't mean I don't still have to do the processing. I know you're sorry you're late. You've broken a small social contract, and sorry should be enough to mend it, but it's not the social contract that is troubling me. You're sorry you didn't let me know that plans had changed. You … Continue reading I’m sorry…