An unusually busy phase has blown some theories I once held about neurodivergent traits and chronic illness out of the water or reframed them in a new light. Exploring the link between needing to keep busy, pain perception, sensory sensitivity and chronic fatigue.
Longing to find "your place" in the world, to reclaim your energy from the need to mask, to set parameters around exposures to sensory, social and other factors that detract from quality of life and to be fully unapologetically autistically yourself. What would your best post-burnout autistic life look like and how good would it make you feel?
What you or I need to recover our health, to maintain it and truly thrive may be completely different, even polar opposite to what someone else needs. Considering the potential relationship between ADHD and a chronic (as in, long perpetuated) state of poor health.
Perhaps more than any other aspect of chronic illness I have ever had to deal with, including chronic unrelenting pain, dysautonomia has the ability to throw your entire life into disarray, permeating every single aspect of your life in ways that can be as invisible to the casual bystander as they are devastating. Is there a bright side, things we can learn, ways of living with it better?
Bear this in mind when you consider even the best-intentioned elimination diet. Cultivating joy is central to everything if we are to thrive in life at all…and its an insider job. Take away your entitlement to prepare, look forward to and then relish, without undue fear, some of the most natural and delicious, healthy, food sources that others take for granted and you are quickly placed on a road to isolation, disillusionment and dispair. You begin to wonder what you have done to deserve such a thing…and this is certainly no route to healing!
Are sensory-sensitivities in autism the same as being a Highly Sensitive Person and what can you do, in either case, when your sensory experiences seem to play on loop, especially if they trigger physical symptoms? Sharing some insights as someone with both traits and ways I am starting to rewire my own highly sensitive responses.
I have a recovery plan and it honestly feels great (enough said)...read on to find out what!
My physical foibles (labelled such things as EDS and chronic pain) don't render me unentitled to a gloriously reimagined health future but even more prone to be open minded and eager enough to embark on the journey because there are no rules where I dwell, it is all a giant leap in the dark so why not make it a leap towards what I prefer to envision and thus create. The first step is to make friends with movement...
Sometimes we all need a little faith in ourselves, and the gentle push of momentum, to realise we can be our own rescue party. Exploring the extraordinary power of momentum in the journey of self-healing and becoming more whole.
When we are in chronic pain, or even an episode of acute pain that seems to go on and on, who do we share that with, can we even expect to share and does it make it better or worse to convey to loved ones what we are going through? Yet, do we need that outlet of saying it like it is and not feeling so isolated in our experience and, if so, where do we get that from, without stirring up the pot to make ourselves feel all the more defeated from over-talking it. This conundrum is familiar territory to anyone who lives with pain, chronic illness, even the disillusionment of daily chronic fatigue. Sharing some home truths, perhaps some helpful perspectives, from my own experience of this highly emotive topic.
Living whole 