a year, just past

i just looked up, it is january and a whole year has passed where i haven’t been able to be present in my work.

i didn’t stop creating, but, I didn’t show up anywhere. i let myself drop out of sight so that i could build a cacoon around a small slice of the world where i was needed most.

late 2022, after much research, i was coming to the realisation that i might be autistic. i had been diagnosed with ADHD the year before but while researching it i learned about the high rates in which ADHD cooccurs with autism and i felt like i had (dramatic i know) found the answers to finally understand myself.

cue months of deep introspective work learning from videos and articles and books written by autistic people for autistic people. i had dug up this buried treasure i had been unknowing searching for since i was little.

2023 and the beginning of a school year for my small human of 6 years and in the lead-up to him starting the year it was becoming more obvious to me that i wasn’t the only one who might be autistic. i stumbled upon pda, a profile of autism that can present itself as anxiety, sensitivity to emotion and demands, loss of autonomy and difficulty with authority.

all the pieces fit.

pieces that told the story of my little person and how he exists in the world.  

epic, amazing, revolutionary…but how can i possibly advocate for this small person when i only have my research, my word and my basically minus advocacy work.

my little human was becoming more dysregulated and anxious, not sleeping and obsessing over starting back at school. in the hopes that his transition might be a little easier i started the process of working with the school. there were meetings, changes and back and forth discussions but despite it all i felt like i was being disbelieved. maybe i was wrong. Do crazy people know they are crazy?

it only took two days at school before my little human had the meltdown that (though i didn’t know it at the time) set us on a path toward leaving school all together. Meltdowns were becoming a daily thing. school was becoming a battlefield for both me and him where traumatic experiences were building up in a big pile that threatened to overwhelm us.

i tried to trust those who were assigned to us as teachers and ‘allies’ but they were slowly breaking us both, and my small human who is usually so sweet, timid and smart was slowly becoming a different, more aggressive and dissociated child. within the first 2 weeks at school, despite the amount of information and discussion we had had, he had been restrained, yelled at, and made to feel that he was stupid.

with significant adjustment and many meetings, we just, got through term 1. 10 weeks of torment and broken routines that resulted in him being depressed and burnt out to the point that there was no choice but to leave. No choice but for me to stop work, leave my new studio and stay home with him so i could climb out of the depression and burn out with him.

we entered a cycle of questioning and trialling different ways of existing.

trialling different ways of learning and existing in the world that made us feel ok.

Researching and meeting with different types of school, everything from stiener to montessori to private school.

i read books about how we learn and the history of learning. the place industrialisation, capitalism and psychology have in our current system and how that affects us.

i came to the realisation that school might not ever be a good place for my small person but that this wasn’t wrong or bad. It simply is a different way of approaching the world.

whilst researching learning i was also researching psychologists and diagnosticians who might be able to clarify my research and put to rest this niggling feeling that maybe I was actually a terrible mum who was making terrible choices that were going to have life long consequences and cause further trauma. Finally, in November 2023, with the help of family, we received his formal diagnosis of adhd. asd with a pda profile….finally, validation of all the research and conclusions that i had made almost a year prior.

so, i took a big breath. i was right, i had been right to advocate for him and i had been right to ask for the support i was asking for. yet the resistance i had received from the school was so wrong. i felt such anger and rage at the treatment that we had received and the lengths at which they chose to disbelieve the information i had provided them with.

it was a year of sacrifice.

a year where I dropped almost all of myself in a bag and shut it away in a draw so that I could help pull my small human out of a hole that he should never have had to find himself in.

a hole that should not be there but is.

a hole that science, psychology and history sees as but that our society chooses not to fix.

a hole in a system that is broken.

a system where we send our little, vulnerable people to learn how to work so that we can go to work and earn money like our parents and their parents did.

but kids should not have to work so hard to be seen and given the correct care. they should not be made to feel stupid because they don’t experience the world like others do.

kids should be seen for who they are and nurtured to be their best selves.

we should not have had to go through the uncertainty, rejection, gaslighting and stupidly high medical testing just so the people who are paid to teach would treat my child the way he needed them to treat him. the way I said he needed them to treat him

but we did.

it’s been a ridiculously hard year.

but, now we are living a very different life.

i learnt about myself and where i need to heal.

i learnt about education and the history of our society, of witch trials and ideas around what it is to be a strong and outspoken women or someone who doesn’t show up as ‘normal’.

i learnt about the history of neurodivergence and the role our good friend Charles Darwin has to play in our societies understanding of our place in it.

i learnt that even though its hard, can stand up for what I believe in. i am stronger than i think.

we know we are autistic. we value our nervous systems. we nurture our brains the way that they need and reject what is ‘normal’ if it doesn’t serve us.

‘should’, ‘stupid’ and ‘normal’ are not words we like to use as they don’t help us live our best lives

now, instead of wondering why i am so weird, i am grateful that my brain allows me to deep dive into things i care about.

i am grateful that i see the world differently because it allows me to make the work that feeds my soul.

i am grateful that i can listen to an audio book about neuroscience, greek mythology, history trees or Jungian theory while drawing detailed artwork.

sometimes, for no obvious reason, i am incapable of what others find easy

sometimes i am really good at something for no obvious reason.

sometimes i know a lot about something i find interesting and very little about other stuff.

after 2023 i know why.

and i am grateful

PS. I know, there are no capitals. It was a choice, and it was so much more work to achieve then I thought. I had to edit it to take them all out.

I liked the idea of taking them out and push against the idea of having hierarchy in the letter structures. I am PDA too guys. Why should I do what I am told…

But omg its a lot of work to try break the system.