Able and Disabled

TRIGGER WARNINGS: mental illness, depression, self-harm and trauma Hi There! Sorry to have kept quiet for a little bit there but as you may or may not know I have recently moved to India for the study abroad aspect of my degree! The last few weeks have been absolutely hectic, amazing and mind blowing so I thought I'd check in with you on quite an important topic; how I'm doing, how receiving mental health support aided my depression 'recovery' (which is a word I actually want to discuss) and how India surprisingly fits brilliantly with all of this. I feel that it's so important to discuss when things are getting better and becoming manageable because there are too many places on the internet where we can feed our depressive thoughts and not enough where we can receive hope. Between February and June of this year I was going through what was definitely the worst depressive episode of my entire life. I had external factors contributing to my poor mental health,...

Hey All! I'm sorry that this week's post is a day late. I took some time last night to be with friends and breathe. It's this current need for breathing space which I would like to talk about this evening. We all have the capacity for overload and stress but I do believe that there is an additional element of natural anxiety that may need considering. Today has been a tough day for me in some ways. There's been a lot that I am learning to balance, some old things in new combinations, like friendships and university, and some completely new things, such as work, and today I think it all got the better of me a bit today, making the day a bit of a challenge. However, what I think usual doesn't help, and for me this was something I have been struggling with, is the pressure to be productive. We live in a world where your value as an individual is too often based upon what you can offer and what you can achieve. While it is often positive to encourage others to aim h...

Hi Guys! Sorry for not posting as usual on Wednesday. I've actually got a bit of a cold at the moment and I thought that's what I would talk today; disability and illness. Obviously many of those who live with chronic illness would identify themselves as disability but today what I want to talk about is rather the experience of minor illness or sickness (e.g. bugs, flus, etc.) with disability, as I think it's not something that is often talked about. I would like to talk about sickness in regards to both physical and neurological disabilities and why being sick when you already live with other conditions can be a potentially frustrating experience. Please remember that when I am talking about physical symptoms that I am not a professional and that I am only talking from personal experience. I think the experience of disability and sickness that is most understood is that of physical disability. It is completely understandable that if you already live and experience a c...

Hey All! The last month or so has been incredibly stressful for me! As we near ever closer to the beginning of the new academic year for those starting or returning to university, I've personally had a lot to organise, primarily my flat, my courses and job applications. Adulting can be difficult at the best of times, but add the capacity for becoming overwhelmed that so often comes with autism and it can quickly become even harder! I think the primary reasons why my ability to become overwhelmed makes admin and adulting a little more challenging for me personally is that it involves a lot of organisation and is very often social intense. I don't wish to speak for everyone on the spectrum but I do feel like having a condition which is characterised by difficulty with communication and processing information makes 'adult' tasks a little extra challenging. There's emails and phone calls and meetings and numbers and dates and to do lists. When your takes in absolute...

Hey All! I can't even start to put the last couple of weeks into words. One thing in particular that has been taking up a lot of space in my brain has been the question of whether I should tell people I have been diagnosed as autistic, and if so who should I tell. This blog post is not an answer to these questions. I don't want anyone to feel as though this post is telling anyone what to do, as ultimately who you let into your diagnosis is a personal decision that only you are and should be allowed to make. This post is simply me collecting my own thoughts on this issue and talking about it from my own experience, partially for my own benefit and partially because it may be interesting to others, including those who may be able to empathise with my journey. Part of the package when being diagnosed as an adult is the fact that people will most likely have a preconceived idea of who you are already. Some people, especially those closest to you, may already have a pretty good ...

Hey All! This week has been a bit of a weird one thus far, and you may have guessed why from the title. On Monday morning I had my long-waited assessment for Autism Spectrum Condition. What I had expected would be a two hour appointment followed by the promise of a diagnosis by post or follow-up appointment ended up being a short chat and a speedy diagnosis. My immediate feeling was one of relief and understanding but it still something I am processing. Paired with jumping straight back into a summer job which I find a lot more overstimulating than it might seem, it all makes for a overwhelming few days. I say a speedy diagnosis, but this isn't exactly a true description. Not only am I an adult who is only just receiving a diagnosis, but I have also been going to my doctor with fairly regular complaints of anxiety and other issues for a few years now, all of which I can now see could all be, in part, components of this diagnosis. In fact, it was around the time of my a-levels t...

Hey All! As you will have gathered from my last post, very few things make me as happy as Winnie the Pooh. It is one of the things that I turn to for comfort when I am most overwhelmed and it has been something that has bought me joy for as long as I can remember. This last week is one that I found particularly overwhelming, and at times I have most definitely struggled and found myself feeling especially overloaded. For this reason I felt like writing something a little lighter today and I thought I would tie one of my very favourite things to one of the key themes of this blog: mental health. One only has to step foot into the world of the internet to find many theories about the various characters of Winnie the Pooh representing different mental illnesses. I'm not entirely sure how much I agree with the illnesses attached to certain characters and like many retrospective theories about children's media I think that these theories can be a little stretched. However, one ...

Hi All! Sorry for the delay in writing this post. As you may have noticed I try to post here at least once if not twice a week, but it has been about a week and a half since my last post. However, I hope that the following story will explain my slight absence. While disability does not always make it impossible, it can make it difficult to achieve certain childhood milestones; climbing trees, learning to swim, being on a school sports team. Indeed, all these goals are still achievable but I think it would be wrong to deny that their attainment may be less simple and for this reason I think that the success of some should not devalue the struggle of the individual. For me one of these struggles was learning to ride a bike. Cerebral Palsy does not remove one of their right to ride the two wheeled vehicle, but my natural lack of balance and poor coordination had never lent themselves to this particular skill. I had tried over the years but with little success. Possibly the moment whic...

Hey All! I recently discovered that similarly to the 'Baby on Board' badge TFL (Transport for London) also offers a 'Please offer me a seat' badge. The 'Please offer me a seat' pack is available to request for free on TFL's website and comes with both a badge and a card. The message on the card sums up pretty well why I like TFL's approach to this scheme: "Please offer me a seat. Remember not all impairments and conditions are visible." I wanted to use this week's post to discuss why I think this idea is so very brilliant but also some of the personal challenges I've experienced regarding the badge's application. I really admire the way that TFL has approached this idea. I've had my pack for a short time now and the online application was incredibly easy and non-invasive. There is no where on the form that asks you to prove or even disclose your reason for your requesting the badge. I've had people question me about ho...

Hey All! If you have been on Facebook, Instagram or maybe even Snapchat this week you will have noticed that the 14th to the 20th of May is Mental Health Awareness Week. Of course I absolutely love the idea of Mental Health Awareness Week! I'm more than happy to be an advocate for anything that encourages people to talk about their mental wellbeing and maybe even seek help. However, this year I've been struggling with what to post online, hence I have procrastinated this very blog post until Sunday evening. The reason I've been struggling to know what to say that my annual social media post sometimes heavily contrasts my approach to discussing my own mental health in person. Every year I post something on social media, this year my blog, about my own struggles with mental health issues (especially anxiety) and of course I talk about you need not struggle alone, how if you reach out there will be someone in this world who wants to listen and hopefully help make things a ...

DISCLAIMER: I AM ONLY ONE PERSON WITH CEREBRAL PALSY AND I AM NOT A DOCTOR. THOUGH MANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS ARE COMMON SYMPTOMS OF AGEING WITH CP, MY EXPLANATIONS MAY NOT BE MEDICALLY PERFECT AND I WILL MOST LIKELY EXPERIENCE THESE ELEMENTS OF CP DIFFERENT TO SOME OTHERS WITH THE SAME DISABILITY. Hey All! Anyone who knows me in person will know that I often joke about feeling old for my age, whether that be due to my taste in tv shows or my taste in music or my general personally. Indeed, I am an outspoken Golden Girls fan. However, the presence of Cerebral Palsy in my life does have the ability to take this feeling to a whole other level. I feel as though despite the increasing presence of both children and adults with CP in the media, discussion around the symptoms and impact of the condition focus far more upon the perspective of the child experience. Of course, many of the symptoms we experience never fully go away and the extent to which they effect you will depend upon the seve...

Hey All! It is officially exam season, yay (not)! As a first year this is my first ever assessment period as a university student and I am half way through my exams for this year, an achievement that has required a lot of rewards and a heavy dependance upon the Lilo and Stitch soundtrack. What is also new is that around 6 months or so ago I was diagnosed with Dyslexia. Of course Dyslexia isn't something new, in the sense that it doesn't only become a problem post diagnosis. However, I think that the difficulties that lead to my diagnosis definitely became more obvious during A-Levels and the beginning of university, most likely because of the shift in how I was expected to learn. I had always benefit from teacher-led and multi-sensory education, as well as class-based reading, so what felt like a sudden turn towards independent study was a lot to adjust to. I had never benefited from read and learn type of methods, I had always need tasks and activities, a way of using the in...