Emergent neurodivergent

I see life through a spiritual lens. This isn't a choice, I always have. As a tiny child with no religious input, I used to hide in corners and wait for Something to Happen. I remember curling up and lying in one spot for hours, expecting to see Fairies. Had I known about angels back then, I would have been watching for them. As I grew a bit older I tried to pray although I wasn't sure who or what to. I mentioned before that I now realise God was my Hyperfocus. Quite a good choice as half a century on there is still plenty to think about.  I have no interest in prescribing what others should think or believe. I respect the views of everyone. I can't prove anything I believe in so why should I think it has more merit than anybody else's faith? (Okay, I do find Flat Earthers... intriguing, shall we say... but then I have known plenty of Christians who have proudly held bizarre beliefs which they wouldn't allow to be challenged, so...) The more I think about neurodiver...

I took this picture a few years ago when much of Derbyshire was underwater. I was driving along a very damp lane, glanced to my right and did a double-take. Floods both fascinate and terrify me. I've always had a love-hate relationship with water. I can sit by the sea for hours listening to the waves whispering their secrets to the shoreline. I used to love swimming until the recurrent ear infections became too much (no, ear plugs didn't seem to help).  But there's something about water. In the Sixties and Seventies we drove to my Granny's every other week, and I vividly remember Mum pointing up at the banks of the Ouse (or maybe the Don?) which towered over the road in the low-lying flatlands and say, "If that gave way we'd all be dead!" Every time we went along that road I would freeze with terror, willing the banks not to give way. Whenever there are floods in the UK I am drawn to the pictures but feel that same terror inside.  Yesterday I was driving a...

  It's a popular myth that autistic people lack empathy. Dehumanising the Other has always been the first line of attack, hasn't it. However my experience has been the opposite. As I wrote earlier, I can feel pity for inanimate objects. I physically and mentally can't bear to be around trees being cut down, I kicked a beloved teacher when he organised a Piano Smash (what was  that all about? If you've never heard of them you are younger than me!) And I have a strong sense of social (in)justice. These days that is acknowledged as one of the defining traits of neurodivergent people. Who knew that the uncaring, cold, ASC types might actually lead the way in caring about the world? One of my favourite Bible verses is Micah 6:8 -  And what does the   Lord   require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy    and to walk humbly with your God. This was a verse we focused on for a whole year in the Methodist Church. I sometimes wish this was the only...

I'm musical. I love painting with words. But as for actual art, well the self-portrait on the right is about as good as I get.  I'm a natural mimic and have a tendency to break out into random comedy characters. I began with impressions of the teenage boy next door when I was 3, went on to Mary Hopkin (UK's Eurovision entry in 1970) and Frank Spencer and then invented Belinda Barrington-Blythe, who sang opera in one key whilst accompanying herself on the piano in another. The Vicar actually fell off his chair laughing at her, and he rarely cracked a smile.   Belinda Barrington-Blythe The older I get, the more I wonder who I really am. Who any of us really are. Can we really be so sure about our own identity when we depend so much on the context in which we relate to others? I'm a sister, a Mum, a Granny, an ex-wife, a preacher, a church leader, a mother-in-law, an employee... and everyone who relates to me does so from their own particular context.  I believe in life af...

I love this picture. My brother David painted it and it somehow encapsulates so much of who and what he was. We book-ended the family, he and I. 12 years between us and two siblings in between, but as a tiny child it was 'Dabid' I turned to for the maternal warmth which I seldom seemed to find in my mother. He taught me to play chess when I was 3, making few allowances for my age. I remember saying, "You can't take my king!" to which he replied, "I can if you make a bloody stupid move like that!" I had my first piano lessons from him at around the same age, and he encouraged me in my precocious love of reading.  I simply adored him and even though he was a teenager pretty soon after I arrived, he always made time for me, always loved and accepted me, didn't mind me curling up and listening to his hours of piano practice or sniffing his second hand maths books, and had a way of looking right into me that made me feel understood.  I think it's fair...

A few years ago I was bullied out of teaching and threatened with legal action because I had referred to this (very obliquely, and anonymously) on social media. I was in a bad way mentally and one day I hid away in a chapel within the Crooked Spire Church, closed my eyes, breathed deeply and offered up my terror to God. It felt like there was nowhere else to go with it. The Union was swamped with casework (mainly my colleagues) and it felt like a miracle would be the only solution. As I sat gazing on a particularly beautiful angel-filled window, listening to voices in the distance, inhaling air perfumed with incense and beeswax, I experienced a few seconds of Peace. it didn't last long, but long enough to remind me that my troubles were tiny in the vast scheme of things, and to give me a glimmer of hope.  I leaned back against the ancient wood and closed my eyes, imagining the generations of worshippers - amongst them my Grandma's family who (at least, according to my Mum) brou...

It only occurred to me the other day to google Autism and anthropomorphism. Thinking back, I suddenly grew suspicious   of my   very strong tendency to attribute emotional intelligence  to things: to imagine it being possible to hurt a car's feelings for example, or my tendency to apologise to doors if I bang them. This was undoubtedly learned behaviour because my mother dealt with my countless phobias by teaching me not to hurt things' feelings:  Don't scream! The Hoover will be sad it's made you frightened and many similar phrases seeped into my psyche and took root. I did the same with my children and now they are doing it with theirs. Watching other parents, I don't think that is so abnormal.  What feels possibly less like other people is the fact that in my sixties I still feel guilty for 'separating a stone from its friends' with a careless kick, work out which ducks are friends and which are lonely when I'm by the river, and feel sorry for lights ...

So many lightbulb moments these days... sudden realisations about the past, a relieved understanding and acceptance that my experiences and behaviour were completely consistent with who I now realise I was and am. I remember Mondays, when Mum worked her way down our three-storey house stripping the beds and throwing the sheets to the foot of the ground-floor stairs, where I lay in the tangle of laundry rocking my head from side to side, convinced that if I did it for long enough I would activate the magic needed to get me to Fairyland.  When it first occurred to me that I might be autistic, I raised several objections to the idea. One of them was that I didn't stim. But looking back, it's clear that I did (and still do).  I used to rub my head from side to side in bed, making my hair rough and tangled, a classic rhythmic stim, I now realise.  I was an obsessive thumb sucker until I was 10 or 11, and along with the thumb sucking went the ear twiddling - a habit I was never...

Fear was a huge part of my childhood. I don't have very many memories. I've always assumed it's because my brain was so focused on terror that it didn't lay many down.  I wa s born by emergency C-Section (referred to by Mum as 'you almost killed me') and it sounds as if the trauma set me up for life. I'm told that at 3 days old I almost jumped out of the cot at the sound of a loud thunderclap. Having had my own babies, I guess that was probably one of Mum's highly exaggerated stories but there's no doubt that my early childhood was a daily struggle to cope with noises that other people often weren't even aware of.  Back then, certain emergency vehicles had a siren which was like a high-pitched warble. I could feel this in my body before it was audible, and would stiffen like a pointer dog - eyes wide, hands over ears - long before my family heard anything. They knew what was coming though! I don't think my super-acute hearing was ever seen as...

49 years ago today I made the decision to follow Jesus. As I was in an   Evangelical Church, I said the time-honoured prayer to ask Him into my life . I didn't even realise it was Armistice Day, although that seems a peculiarly appropriate day to have done it. I'd struggled since being a little girl with self-hate; not sure where it came from but my relationship with my Mum was not great, I was the youngest of 4 very accomplished children and in my head I was definitely the runt of the litter.  I found a Puffin Diary (remember those?) in which I had faithfully filled in the Memoranda  section every week for a year with the phrase, Never forget that you are the most horrible little girl in the world. I was 9 years old that year. I'm not sure why I thought that was the case, nor why it needed to be remembered - I think I was trying hard to be different but I just couldn't do it. I remember how it felt inside my head when I went into a rage, remember wishing someone would...

Looking back, I can see very clearly that I have had a lot of special interests over my life. As a little girl it was dinosaurs, cars and my Mum's collection of incomplete sets of cigarette cards. When I was three and a half I wrote my first book - a heavily-plagiarised (ie copied out) mash-up of How and Why Wonder Books (Dinosaurs, Prehistoric Mammals and I think one other). I still remember the thrill of writing out the long words and seeing them appear on the page.  I read voraciously, books I shouldn't have been anywhere near but I was the youngest by a long way of four bright children so there were plenty to choose from. My bedtime book of choice at 4 was Mayes Handbook for Midwives . I remember marvelling at the 'shiny baby' (aborted foetus) opposite page 112, and I remember shouting downstairs to ask, "What's a plakenta?' [sic] I devoured Thurber cartoons and short stories, My Family and Other Animals and as I grew slightly older, one horrible book ...

Reader - we need to talk, you and I.  We need to have a heart-to-heart, find out what we have in common, see if we can't cheer each other along the road a little.  I'm 63 and waiting for assessment for ADHD, which I am confident will show up with me at the appointment. As would Autism, if they only had the resources to check for that too. Still - it's a start.  Although I'm a not-yet-card-carrying Neurodivergent, I have of course done extensive research and hours of overthinking about how on earth I missed realising for so long. After all, I was a Special School teacher with a noticeable affinity for the Autistic pupils.  I regularly had screaming fits triggered by sounds nobody else could hear, when I was tiny. When I was 3 after someone said, "What a cloudburst!"  I sobbed in terror for half an hour   as I waited for the bits of cloud to hit. I have tickertape synaesthesia (didn't even realise that until a decade ago) and prosopagnosia (face blindness) w...