Making invisibility more visible as someone with hidden disabilities

A recent experience I had, as someone living with invisible disabilities, including its positive outcome, just goes to show the importance of speaking up for your needs, of feeding back when things don’t work out and of urging venues and organisers to try harder in the future. Some, if not all, will listen and, in time, things should get better. It will also take a lot more education of the general public for things to really improve, which is something I hope we are all prepared to work towards, as we each do whenever we stand up for our challenges or dare to speak out and educate people regarding what isn’t so immediately obvious about our disability experience, utterly life-encroaching though it may be to us. We have every right to be able to expect to take part in, and enjoy, experiences that able bodied people are able to take for granted and, if it takes a few tweaks and accommodations to make that happen, then we should be pushing for those until we get them. Yes its very hard to do, and we need to pick the right time (for us) to be more vocal as it can take a lot out of us when we are already struggling but we also have to think about contributing, when we can, towards making our invisibility more visible, in all aspects of life until, little by little, people start to see us more clearly.

Being a passenger is not an energy-neutral activity and other hard lessons of pacing

There are a few activities, and these will vary from person to person, that are not as energy-neutral as they look for someone that is neurodivergent. Coming to realise which activities these are, in your daily life, can be a game-changer when learning how to pace in order to gain a more consistently stable footing in your health.

Menopause…the time when “my autism broke”

Many women report that menopause was the time when their autism became much more pronounced or even a problem in so far as they were attempting to continue the status quo of their largely "adaptive" life as before yet that ability to mask and appear typical suddenly flew out of the window. It may even be the time when they first realised they were autistic, such were their adaptive skills up to that point.

If you are a woman who even vaguely suspects you have ADHD…

Women with ADHD tend not look like men with ADHD; we often hide it, we work around it, we express it differently and we harness it in ways that allow us to excel and do our suffering in private, we even seem to feel about it a different way to most men, so its absolutely essential to find other women and hear what they have to say if you are going to work out if this is really you!