empathy

Music festivals and the like: The biggest win isn’t pushing through but getting real about what you can and can’t do

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

As someone who is both autistic and who has disabilities, I've learned the hard way that the most important thing is to keep getting ever closer to living within my actual capacity (not some pipe dream based off "what I have done in the past" during all those years when I tended to try and normalise my behaviours), knowing my limitations, tailoring my life more and more to what feels good without all the compromise and stepping away from circumstances that have too high a toll, in terms of physical consequences and overstimulation from crowds and such, to be any good for me.

Slowly inching back outside after a crash

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Of course you want to get back out there doing normal things, just as soon as you feel remotely ready, but there's a right time and a right way to do this with ME/CFS. Exploring some of the expectations, the risks, the difficulties and the lessons of inching back outside again.

When your autistic bluntness “gets you into trouble”

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

Even the closest relationships in the world can be put to the test when you are operating from different neurotypes, not least when under additional pressures. Combined with a propensity for "blunt, outspoken" delivery and a "lack of filters" in the case of at least this autistic individual, such a situation can lead to miscommunication and hurt...or an opportunity for increased self-awareness, compassion and compromise.

The importance of finding your place

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

So many of us put up with living in less than ideal places and circumstances, especially if we feel we are stuck with them, but what if they are the missing piece of the whole health jigsaw. If we also happen to be neurodivergent, feeling "out of place" can be become such an innocuous-seeming sensation across the course of a lifetime because we become so acclimatised to feeling like a misfit in a lot of situations; our version of "normal". This makes it all too easy to ignore times when we are really in the wrong place or situation, when we should be doing something about it, especially when our health is being badly impacted. Clues might be subtle but we, of all people, are past masters at piecing together all the signs and patterns that tell us there is a better kind of life waiting for us somewhere, one that better fits the way we are wired.

Cultivating the fierce self-compassion you need to keep your essence intact

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

Unnecessary exposures to sadness, negativity and grief suck vital life force out of people; take this from a hypersensitive person who knows all too well the cost to health. Learning how to fiercely curate the amount of exposure to negativity that we can cope with as an exercise in self-compassion.

A quest to know myself better through synesthesia

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I’m beginning to sense that in synesthesia lies the key of so many aspects of my long running chronic pain. If I could only gain a better viewpoint of what actually happens to me when I sense things, I suspect I might be able to catch a glimpse (like some sideways-on reflection of myself reflected back at me in a shop window) of some of the causative aspects of pain where no other provocation for pain seems to exist. This feels like a worthwhile line of enquiry for anyone who is neurodivergent and weary of how unusual levels of pain never seems to abate, especially as I think it is possible to have one of the less talked-about versions of synesthesia and not even realise it since it is your version of normal.

Exploring the link between hypermobility and neurodiversity

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

The very fact of constantly having to adapt, to meet alien-feeling situations on their terms, when others just slide into circumstances like a hand into a well-fitting glove, exhausts systemically when we don’t even notice how much we are having to do it, how much we are constantly having to bridge the gap between what is and how we are. This may have been damaging our health for years, as surely as long term smoking or heavy drinking, only we didn’t realise it until it was too late to avoid the consequences to our health. This is why I am passionate about helping other high adapters, women especially, to realise, embrace and advocate for their neurodiversity early on in life. It seems to me, autistic women often have a sort of hypermobility of a more subtle kind; one that enables them to become whatever people expect of them…but at what cost.

When stress and excitement are much the same thing: mechanism of a shutdown

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

I simply can’t be this finely tuned autistic person and not have a reboot setting to clear static off the lines. Exploring the anatomy of shutdown, how it is received and why it might be necessary.

Who I am, how I choose to live; an autistic reappraisal, one year in

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

Diagnosing as autistic is just the very first step. Reappraising you choices, what truly motivates you, how and when to engage with others, how much of yourself you have been giving up to conform and what you are going to have to let go of to become more authentically yourself...these are the next steps in the ongoing journey of overhauling your autistic life.