Social Anxiety Kept Me From Meeting George Michael
In 1986, twenty-two years before my autism diagnosis, I had a chance to meet one of my musical heroes, George Michael. I hadn’t met George before, and the prospect of spending hours with him in the close confines of a recording studio thrilled and terrified me in equal measures. At around 10 pm that Friday evening, I was told that George was on his way to the studio and that I should make my way over. Immediately, the panic set in. My stomach began to churn with anxiety, and the excuses began as to why I couldn’t attend the session. Read More
ANNA C. WILSON A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING MY MOTHER, AUTISM AND ME
Anna C. Wilson’s book A Place For Everything, describes her mother’s autism diagnosis at 72 years of age. Watch the video. Read More
Clinical Depression – How Meditation Saved My Life
In February 2019, my world crashed into a life-shattering wall of all-consuming clinical depression. Following 6 months of increasingly poor mental health, I could go no further in any direction. I feared that I had plunged so deep into the well of despair and hopelessness that perhaps life was simply to painful to carry on. Read More
Autism Meets OCD
OCD-ACTION Annual Facilitator Day – Birmingham 2017 On November 4th, OCD ACTION kindly invited me to speak about autism at their annual facilitator’s event in Birmingham, UK. This is due to the rise in people with OCD asking them for advice who are also on the autistic spectrum. I spoke for around an hour to groups of OCD support groups from around the country, that are brought together each year Read More
AUTISTIC! is the term offensive?
AUTISTIC! is the term offensive? Should you call someone autistic? When I was diagnosed with High Functioning Autism in 2008, I was told that I was definitely autistic by the psychologist. I don’t know why, but the word autistic sounded like a throw back to the days when the word retarded was acceptable for people with a learning disability. In fact words such as retarded, abnormal and maladjusted were used to describe children like me Read More
The big secret
As an autistic person… I have always assumed that there was a sort of secret that everybody in the world new. Everybody except me. I had always thought that everyone understood the social rules. There was hidden knowledge of how life works, that everyone shared, apart from me. Before my autism diagnosis, I had no idea why this was. My long entrenched low self esteem, informed me that I was Read More