Under pressure: the EDS anxiety link

Hard science has uncovered a mechanism whereby the same collagen abnormalities in EDS that make joints especially flexible seem to affect blood vessels, making those with it prone to accumulation of blood in the veins of the legs, an effect that may lead to exaggerated cardiovascular responses to maintain the output of blood from the heart. This and other foibles, which I feel are versions of the same response, put those of us with this issue under immense pressure and strain, all the time, as our version of "normal" so just imagine how much we then react to any additional triggers, to which we tend to be hypersensitive (I share my about theory about that too...), setting off our nervous system at regular intervals in a way that has nothing inherently to do with mental health...although, no surprise, it can start to manifest as anxiety over time. Joining some dots and celebrating just how much people with hypermobility type EDS deal with as their daily benchmark...plus some practical ways of making it better.

Executive burnout

How do Aspie women compensate for their weak spots; do they, perhaps, make the very specialism of them? Shining a light on this newly realised paradox in my own life in case it illuminates a trend in how Asperger women cope with a world that demands so much that is quite alien of them.

The Aspie butterfly effect

Adult women who discover they are Aspie’s are like butterflies; for they have been tightly bound in an ever-increasingly alien and limited format for what felt like too long and then, ultimately, the  extreme straightjacket effect of some sort of chrysalis experience prior to emerging through their diagnostic epiphany...

Like a child

What is maturity anyway; what constitutes adult behaviour...and who says so. This isn't a rebellion manifesto; its autism, the way it is already wired so how does that look as a parent or a child (and both put together)? Here's celebrating its many plus points from a personal perspective.

Another kind of mind

Late diagnosis with Asperger's could so easily have left me feeling stranded in no-man’s land but actually, in realising I have - really - been exploring my own particular wiring all my life (often through my bafflement with it, before I knew what it was), I discover I have found my life specialism; also my gift. Because I have truly come to regard this state of mind as giftedness; it is SUCH a precious gift once realised...

Impressionable: a breakthrough in working with super-sensitivity

At the risk of this sounding like an over generalisation, it seems to me that neurotypical people mostly take in their impressions of the world through their heads and their fingertips whereas, as someone with Asperger’s (and I have read about this trait a lot in Aspie accounts), I seem to take in my impressions … Continue reading Impressionable: a breakthrough in working with super-sensitivity

Skimming the top off female Aspie emotions

The common assumption goes that people with Asperger’s lack emotion, are cold and logical, even disengaged but,in the case of women, I suspect this is a textbook misnomer and very far from the truth; though perhaps we feel too weary at the prospect of having to contradict it, as I know I do, since our emotions are not so easily explained by neurotypical criteria. Rather, my exprience and research suggests we have too many emotions; great seething storms of them rolling in; but there's something different going on, to do with how we experience and then decide what to do with them...