08/08/19

Originally posted on Instagram

I put together a submission for the Edinburgh Collage Collective / Scandinavian Collage Museum project – Disrupt Climate Disruption. 

 

I have grown very fond of Greta Thunberg. Not just because she is an amazing young woman who has inspired a wave of discussion and awareness around climate disruption, but because as she does this, she does it as a young autistic person. She is unapologetically, unflinchingly, unashamedly herself, her wonderful autistic self. To me, ‘late-diagnosed’ autistic woman, it is heartening to know my younger counterparts have such an explicit role model.

 

In a way, it is no surprise to me that a Greta Thunberg should emerge; her rationale and line of reasoning is so wonderful to me because it is so utterly, fiercely, beautifully autistic, and familiar to me. If it is as bad as it is, why aren’t we doing anything? 

 

There have been vicious, spitefully ableist, specifically anti-autistic attacks launched at this 16 year old by climate change denying “journalists”. They hone in on her autism, so predictably (and yet so avoidably) to try and dismantle her argument. 

 

But she continues, she carries on, every Friday. Sign in hand. No shit given. Isn’t it wonderful? 

Collaging: ‘Mariella’

I remember when I first heard the song Mariella by Kate Nash when I bought Made of Bricks back in 2007. Now when I listen to it, I realised the words struck a chord because the eponymous Mariella is very much autistic coded – a little girl gluing her lips together with Pritt stick so she *never* has to speak. I’ve been working on and off on a series of collages of the song, and still haven’t finished – so I thought I’d upload the first two pages at least!

Collaging: Lana #1

Collage made around six months ago in response to Lana del Rey’s words on ‘hexing Donald Trump’ .

My autistic senses: #1 sound

An aspect of autism that I didn’t know until I first researched it was the sensory experience, and I imagine this is something that most people are unaware of. We see autism first and foremost as a social impairment with the sensory difficulties as a very occasional afterthought. Now however, I have realised the way I process the world around me is a lot more prescient than how I relate to other people. Since my diagnosis I’ve come to understand the way I move through the world, the physicality of being autistic, and, more importantly, I’ve been able to put in measures to help manage it. I don’t have an official diagnosis of Sensory Processing Disorder; it was intimated in my assessment and to get it on paper I’d have to go private. Besides, knowing that sensory things are an issue for me seems to be enough.

Having thought about it, one blog post on sensory processing is going to turn into a mountain, so I’ve decided to break it down into a couple (hearing, sight and touch). Today I’m going to talk about sound (clearly). Now it would be disingenuous to suggest that this is the experience of every autistic person. However, in reading other autistic people’s personal accounts, either in books, blog posts and threads on Twitter, I’ve been able to find commonality between our experiences. You read along and nod.

Through reading other autistic personal narratives, I’ve discovered ways of describing things that then show me something I hadn’t previously been able to verbalise myself. For one, until recently I had never even considered the fact that the way I see, hear and feel my way through life could be different to an allistic person. I always assumed that the discomfort I experience from sound was something that everybody experienced – they were just better at dealing with it than I. I’m now completely overhauling how I approach things, or at least slowly pinpointing the ways that auditory processing issues work and how I can work around them.

I’ve always had very sensitive hearing; whispering sends me spare. It feels like somebody tickling your ear with a feather. You can’t move away and you just get slowly more and more irritated, until you feel you might explode, physically and mentally. Understandably, primary school and high school classrooms could be a nightmare. Libraries too, as I discovered during my undergraduate degree. I was regularly internally apoplectic if somebody near me whispered, breathed too loudly, or typed loudly and unpredictably. Equally frustrating was nobody else seemed to get as frustrated as I did. I sat my Finals in a separate room, with earplugs. This made an incredible difference but still wasn’t perfect; in one exam the invigilator decided halfway through that it was the perfect moment to remove her laptop from its case and clean out the keyboard by blowing. Admittedly the fury at being disturbed seemed to mix well with the exam adrenaline and it was one of my best papers, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Loud noises aren’t enjoyable either. One morning as a bookseller, I was balancing a full till-tray on one arm whilst logging into the till with the other. The sound of the till drawer springing open made me leap backwards, sending a shower of change everywhere. Emergency sirens are the worst; when an ambulance passes by on the street the noise wipes out everything. It hurts my ears and drowns out my thoughts as it blares round and round and over and over, well after the actual siren is long out of earshot. Hearing is always physical – I clap my hands to my ears and wince and shudder.

Sometimes I feel as if I live in a constant wall of sound. Tuning things out seems to be an issue, but this is difficult to explain. For example, right now, as I sit at my computer I can hear: the music from my speakers, the fridge buzzing in the kitchen, the cars outside, my typing on the keyboard. Recently when having a meal out I noticed that I was trying to listen to the conversation with my mum and boyfriend whilst also listening to the table behind us talk about how they like their coffee, and hearing the woman on the next table tell the waitress that they didn’t have a voucher. These all seem to coexist at once, I am simultaneously aware of them all.

This is why I like to wear headphones, particularly when outside. Trying to hold all these different things in your consciousness is very exhausting. Music is all-encompassing and predictable if I know the track. It is a nice feeling. I can focus on the lyrics, the notes, the different layers (e.g. guitar, bass, drums, how they all fit together) and think about what will come next. Since I got my first Walkman aged 10, I have often listened to the same song over and over. I once played “When You Were Young” by The Killers solidly on the walk to and from school for a week or so. Music becomes a predictable backdrop, an endless loop that makes it a lot easier to deal with the visual unpredictability of the outside world. This is essential on my regular commute which involves a ten minute busy, crowded, cramped and noisy layover in central Oxford.

I do occasionally wish that things were different, especially when not hearing things leads to awkward social mishaps or getting things wrong. Because I don’t seem to be able to tune things out, I often don’t hear what people say straightaway. When people expect a reply I’m only just realising what it is they said and then I seem rude, so often I try and guess, and a few times I get it wrong. What can you do though? Wishing for things to be different gets me nowhere. Instead I do my best to get by and hope that soon this less acknowledged side of autism receives more recognition and understanding in our noisy allistic world.

Collaging

07/06/2017

Content note: discussion of exercise

Just over a year ago, in the midst of a skin-peeling heatwave, I was to be found, a somewhat tired and dishevelled figure, in the upstairs of Pret on Cornmarket Street hunched over my laptop. I say tired and dishevelled because I distinctly remember a waitress giving me a pitying sympathetic smile as she cleared tables. I also remember feeling gut-wrenchingly exhausted, that all over fluey achey sleepy gnaw that comes after a week cycling from complete shutdown to uninhibited meltdown and back again, with overtones of horrible anxious energy, as if my body were still experiencing the vestiges of the previous week’s adrenaline rollercoaster. Anyway, there I was, not broken, but cracked enough to need to grit my teeth to hold the pieces together, wearing ear plugs, wishing I could let my self-consciousness give in to the part of my brain screaming at me to just put my sunglasses on and hang the potential suspicious side-glances, typing this blog post. A blog post in which I made the pact to spend the coming year learning how to adult as a late-diagnosed Autistic and to eventually finish my Finals.

So, how did I do?

In terms of degree class, I am still in the dark, but there will at least be a degree class as yes, I did it. Well, I finished my finals, I can’t really say on the adulting front, although I would say I am fairly adult now. Whatever I get on official paper to put a value on the months of revision and study, I can proudly say that I did it.

The past year has been a real struggle at times, as recorded in this Guardian article by the wonderful Frances Ryan, but it also hasn’t been a wasted one. I’ve started and stopped doing a lot of things that respectively add to and take away from my general wellbeing, which I guess I’ll outline here. This is by no means a definitive “How To Get Through Oxford Finals By An Autistic Student Who Could” type of blog post and I’d really like to make it clear that what works for me may by no means be possible for or even helpful to others, but yeah, here it is.

Having spent my late teens and early 20s in and out of various waiting rooms (GPs, mental health clinics, A&Es) in various shades of “oh-fucking-dear”, I am loath to write what I am about to write. I have shuddered internally as a litany of well-meaning medical professionals extolled the virtues of regular exercise – one doctor even going so far, as he filled out my Prozac prescription, to grin at me and cheerfully say “Of course, jogging is MY anti-depressant!!!”. I have nodded in faux-agreement at suggestions of yoga or mindfulness or yoga and mindfulness before hightailing it out of the room to crawl back home and hide immobile under the duvet. So I am prefacing this with the disclaimer that I am fully aware that exercise as a means of improving or maintaining mental health is something that can be inaccessible to many folks for many reasons, be they physical, mental or financial.

That said, with my mental health improved to the extent that I was no longer glued to a mattress or sofa with fatigue or anxiety (usually both), with access to a decent local leisure centre and with the help of a patient and motivating boyfriend, I have been able to integrate exercise into my general routine and have felt all the better for it. In fact, sometimes I get up and go to the gym/pool voluntarily. On my bike. I know, I can’t believe it either. I can’t really convey how much or how exactly this has helped, but it has definitely made a significant difference. A good part of this is probably the fact I’ve had no choice to get out and move more, having swapped a room in college in central Oxford for a flat eight miles away from Oxford city centre, 3/4s of a mile from the bus stop, but whatever, it’s really helped. I am now the sort of person who wants to tell you, at length, that you really should try yoga and yoga will really make such a difference to your life (now before I start waxing lyrical I’ll move on).

Mindfulness as well has really helped, and this comes after years of convincing myself that “MINDFULNESS DOES NOT HELP ME” and “THERE IS NO POINT” and “I HAVE THE KIND OF BRAIN THAT CANNOT BE QUIETENED BY SUCH HOCUM” and “SITTING IN A CORNER TIED UP IN MY THOUGHT SPIRALS OF EXISTENTIAL DREAD WILL DO ME *JUST* FINE THANK YOU VERY MUCH”. I’ve been using the Calm app (which does have a paid version but the free version is pretty good by itself) and trying to do something every day (which the app facilitates, I can’t say no to a good “you have an X day streak” carrot) has helped and there is a point to it after all.

This probably really proved its worth as the summer term began and I had to stop thinking “Oh Finals are ages away” and switch to “Oh fucking hell here we go.” Any mind is a busy one but an autistic mind is even more so. My thoughts have a tendency to latch on and lock in, which is very useful sometimes, but when it’s not something productive it’s an absolute bloody nuisance. So, commencing the week before Trinity term officially started, I began to obsess about failure. I don’t mean “If I get a 2ii my life is all for naught” thoughts of “failure”, I mean I genuinely had myself convinced that I was going to fail every single exam. (I’d of course quickly passed over the former worry in favour of the more catastrophic and tragic latter one, because why just obsess when you can obsessively catastrophise?) Cue a week of me in a state of intense on-edginess, frequent wailing and sobbing and intermittent moments of clarity which were quickly re-swallowed by the “You’re going to fail!” backing track.

It was understandable really; I was grappling with having to resign from a job I really really loved to sit these Finals, the memory of last year, the potential of reliving last year and that all-encompassing impending doom feel of said approaching Finals peppered with chronic impostor syndrome. I spent a couple of days as term started doing my “everything is OK” face before a final joyful extended low key meltdown day that involved floating between revision classes weeping and ugly crying in good measure. Luckily, my ever-patient tutors were able to discern my state (wasn’t difficult to be fair, at polite enquiries into how returning was going I didn’t say “not bad ta” but rivalled Donna Hayward realising something had happened to Laura in sudden onset despair). With the help regular encouragement, pep-talks, genuine sympathy at my predicament and eventually returning work that proved I do actually, contrary to my self-imposed truth, know a fair bit about my degree content, I got through it. With that atrocious start to term/Finals panic out of the way, I mellowed enough (with the help of mindfulness) to get myself up to and through the remaining exams. It was a struggle, though not an intolerable one, and it’s now done (!!!)

I couldn’t have got here with all the support that I have already mentioned (as well as that which I haven’t), I will be eternally grateful to all the people who have in- and advertently helped me through the past while. And me, I am a whole lot grateful to me too.

Collaging

Just a quick post this evening to *finally* get around to uploading some collages I scanned quite a while ago. Whilst I adore my job as a bookseller, working in retail during the Christmas period has been rather stressful and at times somewhat frustrating – It feels like I’ve just been spending my evenings either burnt out and trying to recharge or about to burn out and needing to conserve energy. I’ve had to be fairly strict about self-care and not overexerting myself and was *so* proud of myself when I made it through December without any major shutdowns (and thus not missing any shifts).

I love The X Files. I also love finding books about the paranormal and UFOs and such, and it was super fun to source images and text that went with these pictures. Plus glitter. Always lots of glitter.

I made another X Files themed collage recently and I can’t wait to upload it some time soon!
Anyway, I’m off to hibernate until the New Year (when I’ll be back with BOOKS! And MORE COLLAGES! And of course MORE AUTISM!).

On shutting down

I’ve been meaning to write something about meltdowns/shutdowns for a while and the other day the latter happened, so I’ve put this post together from things I scribbled down during and after!
Shutdowns are an unfortunate side effect of processing emotions and senses differently and can come completely unexpectedly, but from the outside I suspect it doesn’t look like what it is. I dreaded letting work know that I couldn’t come in two days in a row, because how could I explain this? My hope with this post is to a) help any allistic readers understand what this is and b) maybe help any (newly-diagnosed) autistic people vocalise what this process is (assuming of course that my experiences are common – please let me know about this!).

I’ve had to call in sick to work today. I didn’t see it coming; I felt a little shaky when I got up and helped my partner get out the door for 7.15, but after coffee, toast and cereal, I felt a little more grounded. I was about to stand up and get showered and dressed, but the quick thought process of visualising what I needed to do – stand up, walk to the bathroom, remove clothes, turn shower on, put on shower cap and so on, right up to opening my drawer, choosing and putting on socks – made me freeze.
For a few seconds, everything seems suspended; I feel trapped, locked in one position while the traffic outside shouts at me. My body feels anxious and poised for flight, an intense urge to move quickly but I also feel unable to move, utterly unable. The thought is there but the action just won’t happen. At the same moment, my mouth feels welded shut; even if I wasn’t on my own, I wouldn’t have been able to call for help, and I’m not quite sure how anybody could help anyway.
I suddenly realise I’ve been tapping my fingers together, drumming out a rhythm. It’s like coming to for a second and I grab the notebook and pencil I’d left on the coffee table and begin to scribble, replacing the tapping with the movement of writing and the soft sound of the pencil on paper. I think in sentences the majority of the time and just letting my hand pour out the thoughts that are speeding through my brain, along with the sensory aspect, helps quell the feeling of impending doom, staving it off somehow.
I force myself after two minutes to break out of the hypnotic writing to stand up and totter to the bathroom. I throw up. I sit on the toilet seat and shake all over.
I give up and practically crawl into bed and lie still under the duvet. A few hours sleep should help me recharge and feel slightly more alive; the waves of anxiety and sensory overload are physically and mentally exhausting. I’ll feel tired and groggy and guilty later, convincing myself that I either failed or brought this on myself, on purpose. Losing control of executive function so suddenly and completely is frustrating, especially when you have somewhere to be and an obligation to others to fulfill.
I sleep until 4pm or so, drifting in and out to use the bathroom or stumble to the kitchen to grab handfuls of cereal out of the tub to hold off the hunger. I wake up properly, groggy but with a bit more energy. I manage to eat the lunch I packed myself that morning. I make dinner, spend the evening in the pyjamas I’ve worn all day, feeling tired and very low.

The next morning I wake up heavy like I’m weighed down by something inside me. I’m pinned. I sit up and immediately slump back down again. I try and get up, pour coffee, and sit on the bathroom floor for half an hour, contemplating the shower. It’s the same feeling as yesterday of being suspended in motion but muted by extreme tiredness and stirred up by anxiety, the kind that grabs you by the throat and makes your chest go all tight. I manage to shower, manage to put on clothes, but the feeling I’ve been pushing back eventually comes crashing in in full force; rising stomach, short breath, loudness like a wave. I manage to summon up the strength to type a surprisingly coherent email before I curl up and snivel myself back into agitated sleep.

Collaging #2

Until halfway into my (very slow) cycle ride home, I was berating myself (and the heavy shopping bags on my handlebars) for having ‘splurged’. Eventually, though, I reasoned with myself that splurging £20 or so in Poundland and the charity shops wasn’t so bad, as splurging goes. Besides, Poundland’s craft supplies game is currently about 100/10 and I couldn’t resist.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of my free time collaging at the moment, mainly in the evenings after work. I tend to gravitate towards collaging or computer games, and I guess an evening spent constructing the perfect theme park is slightly less of an ego boost than filling a page in my sketchbook. As well, I have had a fantastic haul in the local charity shops recently; the people donating to charity shops here have amazing taste in coffee table books!
I’m quite particular when it comes to sourcing collage material when out charity shopping, otherwise, I’d end up with piles and piles of second-rate stuff that I’m less likely to want to use. I tend to go for books with a higher image to text proportion. the higher quality the paper the better, and I usually try and spend less than £3 (although I broke this and went up to £3.49 the other day when I stumbled across this in the Oxfam bookshop)…

I’ll round this off with a quick selection of my latest collages, you can guarantee that with the clocks going back and 12 days off from work, I’m going to be buried under quilts watching TV and ferreting away through my new stack of books!

 

Collaging

I’ve been thinking about bring self care/nice things into this blog; one of the things that has really helped me wobble less has been making sure that I make a concerted effort to do things I enjoy, especially now that I’m working a fair amount.

I started collaging when I was in my pre-teens and have kept going on and off, slowly graduating from freebie catalogues to fashion magazines to my current habit of accumulating old vintagey photo books from charity shops and a small mountain of adhesive gems, sticker and craft paper. I usually stock up on cheap A4 sketchbooks from The Works (the paper quality is still p good) and keep with the same one til I’ve filled it.

There’s something really relaxing about cutting things out and rearranging them into something else and I find the high concentration element particularly good for letting my brain recharge and reprocess whilst I fiddle about with the scissors and glue, and hopefully have something to feel proud of when I’m done. Most of the time I just tend to flick through my various folders (there was some semblance of a system a year or so ago, now I tend to organise by books, and I have nearly a whole ringbinder of cat photos lol) or books I haven’t deconstructed yet, and then glue some things randomly together. Lately I’ve been working more towards a general theme per page and am quite proud of the last few things I put together, so thought I’d share. I’m thinking of generally starting a regular ‘self care’ tag for posts, so I guess this can be #1.

no points for guessing what I was going for here (and agh that lil red line)

Marguerite Duras double spread, made with photocopies from my Duras anthology. Quote from L’Amant (1984) – ‘The story of my life does not exist. Does not exist … No path, no line. There are vast spaces where one leads people to think there was someone, it is not true, there was no-one’

This glitter paper is one of my current favourite things to use at the moment; I got a huge pack from Hobbycraft for very little money. I guess you can also see in the above two that flowers are one of my favourite decorations; after cat books the thing most likely to make me squirm with glee in the charity shop is a gardening book or a photographic encyclopedia of flowers or something.

I wanted something to stick on my locker at work so decided to make a small Kafka piece with one of my favourite pithy little quotes from him “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”

I never know quite how to describe what I do in my sketchbooks or talk about it, so I guess that’s that. Other than, collaging is great; you should try definitely try it if you’re that way inclined.