autism

History of a health burnout; what the past can teach me now

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Such as we are experts in anything, those of us with long term health issues also possess a rich hoard of hard-won experience and insight into what made us chronic in the first place. So, what can we take from all the years of navigating our way through the experience of chronic illness as a means to averting a delayed recovery from covid or other trigger virus, especially when we notice any similarities with what we have been through before? Can we now take the overview in order to notice and better understand the patterns, weak spots and trip-wires of chronicness before they become ingrained this time?

Rediscovering your life-force through movement

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

Apart from being essential for wellbeing and general health, movement can help remind me where all my muscles are in space (given my proprioceptive equipment can be a bit compromised...), can also help me to be upright without my autonomic system always spinning off into a panic at the idea of gravity. Otherwise, when I forget I have a body (I'm autistic so "out of sight, out of mind" is pretty much my modus operandi) I very quickly lose the joy of it! Exploring the importance of having enough space to move about in when you have chronic conditions and are neurodivergent.

Can silence and loneliness cause pain and other interesting observations

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I'm noticing an effect...where too much quiet or lack of human connection can trigger massively increased rigidity in my body, poor breathing habits, temperature disregulation and other dysautonomic effects and massively increased pain, especially small fibre neuropathy. So what do people have to say about this; how might it be connected with chronic pain conditions, autism, social isolation, old age and more?

The positives of finding out you are autistic (if you are)

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

Before you realise you are autistic (if you are), all you tend to know is the outline of your autistic self, as in, the shape that is left where you don’t fit in with other people’s experiences. It’s a bit like drawing a portrait of someone by filling in the background and leaving a space where the person is standing; what they call a negative space composition, in art terms. You get to know what you aren’t…but not what you are. Such an approach tells you a lot about all the misfitting bits but nothing much about yourself and that, in itself, can be a source of ongoing trauma because it can leave you feeling like a blank. Finding out you are autistic begins a process of filling in all the blanks and getting to know who you actually are.

The effect of chronic stress and early-life trauma responses on long term health

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Looking at what we already know about the effect of chronic unaddressed toxic stress and early life trauma-responses, specifically from the perspective of neurodivergence, and its possible link to chronic health issues.

Neurodivergent behaviours as seen even more clearly under pressure

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I now see how the bizarre dance that some of my more contradictory-seeming neurodivergent traits do together "hots up" at times of extreme emotional or circumstantial stress. Yet its at times like these that its even more important for me to keep them working together...

Finding a happy medium (or, when your ideal doesn’t turn out to be so idyllic)

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

We tend to think we want some extremely strong version of what we think we long for on the full spectrum of choices, and often it’s the very opposite of what we currently have, but that’s usually just a reaction. The best life we can ever live is never a reaction but a choice. Making our own choices, rather than reacting, is how we get to upgrade our experiences of life by becoming mindful of what we really want and going after that. Life becomes its own upgrade when (perhaps forced by circumstances that challenge what we thought we knew) we get to surprise ourselves with what we find out about ourselves and then to be utterly, ruthlessly, honest about what we really want, which often turns out to be quite different to what we used to think that we wanted, perhaps for a very long time until now. This is the gift of the thing that challenges our normality, whether that's an illness or some other set of circumstances that, initially, seem to present more of something you craved...perhaps more time, more quiet, a slower pace...but as ever, there is a happy medium to be found. Realising this is the very first step to attaining it!

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.