Are you Aprilness-aware?

It is, thankfully, nearly the end of another month with Aprilness. Another Autism Awareness Month – or as the ever-so-slightly-more enlightened have started to call it, Autism Acceptance Month. These are not labels chosen by the Autistic community (and I use a capital A here intentionally). This month of awareness- or acceptance-raising isn’t something any of us asked for.

Daniel Geschwind on autism

This is my transcript of Dr Daniel Geschwind’s opening speech at a hearing of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on 25 June this year. Daniel Geschwind (UCLA) is co-principal investigator, alongside Simon Baron-Cohen (Cambridge) and Matthew Hurles (Wellcome Sanger), of Spectrum 10K, a hugely problematic study of the genetics of autism in… Continue reading Daniel Geschwind on autism

This is so hard (2020 edition)

In the park in the summer By this, I might simply mean writing this blog post, but I could be talking more generally about writing anything, or communicating with people in any way, or doing anything much … or even just existing. It’s been that kind of year. *sigh* It’s been a year when I… Continue reading This is so hard (2020 edition)

Scottish Autism conference 2019: a personal perspective

My other post on Scottish Autism’s 2019 conference gives a blow-by-blow account of the conference as it happened, based on my live tweets. This post is more of a reflection on my own personal experience of the event, as a newly diagnosed autistic person attending a conference like this for the first time. When the… Continue reading Scottish Autism conference 2019: a personal perspective

Scottish Autism conference 2019: as it happened

Scottish Autism, a charity offering services, support and advocacy for autistic people across Scotland, held its 2019 annual conference in the Grand Central Hotel, Glasgow, on 14 November. I was fortunate to be supported by generous Ko-fi crowdfunders to attend the conference and live-tweet the event. This post is based on what I tweeted on… Continue reading Scottish Autism conference 2019: as it happened

A fantasia on aphantasia

Once again, I interrupt my as-yet-still-untitled long-form story to bring you a personal blog post. This one’s not quite an ‘unpost’ but might nevertheless be a bit on the rambly and ill-formed side, hence ‘fantasia’. That’s because it’s a reaction to something I discovered about myself (and everyone else) only yesterday. And when I say… Continue reading A fantasia on aphantasia

Chinks of darkness: a visual postscript

In my previous post, I described how my mood had sometimes felt almost totally dark, but with occasional chinks of light breaking through, while at other times it had seemed almost relatively ‘normal’, except that there were chinks of darkness bursting up from somewhere. This is what depression looks like at times, when I’m in… Continue reading Chinks of darkness: a visual postscript