Ridgeway Cottage anyhow

Since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, there has been the opportunity to attend all manner of exciting events from the comfort of your own home, without travelling and being out there in the real world. I like this. I have got used to Zoom and Teams and video conferences is now part of my everyday life. This week I was able to attend an Art & Justice Research Symposium, still do some mum things and have lunch downstairs. I have never been to Bethlem Gallery and I have never met the artists who presented their work, but there they were on my screen and I was able to use the chat feature to talk to them directly and ask questions. I seriously think that is a wonderful thing and it just feels like more of a connection.  Yellow O'clock - Portraits of my Diagnosis - 1st August 2017 Bethlem Gallery and Museum of the Mind are situated on the site of Bethlem Royal Hospital which is a psychiatric hospital with an extensive history, has an important part to play in mad studi...

I’ve stopped defining myself as suffering from insomnia because otherwise it would make my whole life a tragedy. It’s not even correct to describe myself as a “bad sleeper” because that implies that there is the potential of a better me existing: a superior Susie whose worth is more significant because she sleeps. Right from day 1, this has been a complaint and judgment made against me. All of the worst diagnosis of disordered existence measure your ability or inability to sleep. I regularly fail to achieve the recommended hours. I once spent a night in the Royal Free Hospital, to see if “someone could get to the bottom of this.” It’s ironic to note that I wasn’t quite sure what the point of this sleep deprivation trial was at the time and google wasn’t available at the time (early 1990s). I’ve just googled it and still haven’t got a clue, but it seems I could pay a lot of money if I wanted to investigate further at any point. I doubt I am the only late diagnosed adult to have been...

What I would like more than anything else as a result of my PhD, is for research about autistic people to be directed by, include and be accessible to autistic people and so I have started to look for people that might be interested in contributing their creative stories. The first person I spoke to was Esther Whitney following the Play a Part : Beyond Stereotypes conference in September 2012. Esther is currently completely a Masters in Research  in Education exploring the lived experiences of autistic adolescent girls in mainstream education. As part of her plan for her thesis, she created the following art work to express her own lived experiences of being an undiagnosed autistic student in a mainstream school. Esther Whitney 2021 They say a picture says 1000 words. I often feel that art explains my experiences as a autistic person far better than words ever could and for me 'the artist' I find it a relief to be able to communicate on such a deeper level my experience than ...

I started writing this blog in 2010. When I look back at the first post which is here , I feel exactly like I did in that moment but at the same time, like an entirely different person. A blog is only a snapshot of carefully curated thoughts however, I remember and relive them with such clarity, it's no longer a surprise that I can't remember the dull, mundane and boring aspects of life.  I stopped writing for a really long time because I couldn't articulate the tidal wave of emotions I was feeling after my BOGF diagnosis in 2017. I did in fact get two free labels (ASD and PTSD) even though I only ever signed up for an ADHD diagnosis. I couldn't talk about certain aspects of the process or the consequences because it is not just a story about me. My body did, entirely keep the score as I painfully discovered.  A lot of the things I wanted to say, where things that people didn't want to hear. Society is very selective about what subjects are appropriate for discussio...

Happy 2019!  Fireworks over Alexandra Palace - this is what fireworks meant to me for years I appear to have taken a break from blogging, not because I wanted to but because I couldn’t find the words. I wonder if writers’ block is just a fancy way of saying, “I lost all of my words.” That’s what happened to me, I lost nearly every single one of them for quite a lot of the time for over a year. There were of course a million thoughts in my head, going at a million miles an hour but they were all caught in a massive tangle of scribble. There was no way of logically stringing them out into sentences.  Scribble it Away  That’s how I feel about fireworks. However it might be more accurate to describe the millions of trapped unspoken thoughts as a blaze in a firework factory. The easiest response to explain is the sensory overload. They are pretty, there’s no doubt about that, but they are so noisy and triggering for my hypersensitive sense of smell. I can feel the crackle of f...

At last, things are starting to get a little bit easier and I can start getting on with the whole living thing. After the overly complex stitchery I started on one of the flowers for my embroidered dress at the beginning of the week, it felt like I would never get it either right or finished. My mood darkened, but I kept at it and then suddenly it was finished. The kitchen is no longer the sensory nightmare of the last couple of months, as long as I am the only one in there. I even managed to gather a harvest from the allotment and make a potato curry with my homegrown produce. I’ve also managed to not only go properly outside but took on my own autistic/ PTSD challenge. In true over the top ADHD style, I went on a day trip to The Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace, the perfect overwhelmingly stimulating environment to anxiously await the boy’s Kent Test results. If I can cope with needle-felted Sherlocks, then I can probably start to engage in some of those day to day act...