Just A Quick One...

Since the pandemic and lockdown means I can't do what I was planning this week I'll need you all to help me out.

The original plan was to go out and survey the folks in my local area on their thoughts and views on autism. Since I can't do that now, I've turned it into an online survey and I'm opening it up to anyone and everyone instead of just my local area. Please click here to take the survey and share as much as you can. I'll be keeping the survey open until the end of World Autism Awareness Week.

Thanks to all for your help.

As always, don't forget to please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

World Autism Awareness Week 2020

Next week is World Autism Awareness Week (30th March to 5th April), making now feel like the perfect time to come back from my blogging break. There's been lots going on while I've been on break, mainly the country-wide self-isolation caused by Coronavirus at the moment. Even in the midst of the pandemic I've been hard at work on a project to raise funds for an autism charity.

The charity that I'm supporting is Autistic Inclusive Meets, which is an organisation based in London and run by autistics, for autistics. They were chosen through a Twitter poll and won by a landslide. To visit their website please click here. So what's the project I've been working on? It's been quite a fun one for me to work on because it involves my most recent interest and it's something I've never done before. I've made a custom Pop vinyl figure of my favourite autism advocate - the brilliant Christa Holmans, a.k.a. Neurodivergent Rebel! I was planning to run through the process of making the figure and the things I've learned, but it'd make the post too long so I'll probably do a separate post just to go through it.
Disclaimer: The custom vinyl figure that I've made as shown and described in this post is NOT an official Funko product, and has in no way been agreed, licensed or endorsed by Funko.

This is now going to be delayed due to us being on lockdown here in the UK, but the plan was to sell the figure (pictured at the bottom of this post) on eBay with the listing running from 30th March to 5th April - the entirety of World Autism Awareness Week. The full selling price (minus postage cost) will be donated to Autistic Inclusive Meets. I fully appreciate that the Coronavirus pandemic is affecting many of us financially, which is one of the reasons I've chosen to delay it. The main reason though is that with us being on lockdown we can now face fines for leaving home for non-essential reasons. Once the listing is up on eBay I'll let you all know, and even if you can't or don't want to bid it would be a massive help if you could share the listing on social media. It's for a fantastic cause, and it's a great opportunity to get your hands on your own mini Neuro Rebel!

While we're on the subject of the pandemic, it is also affecting the other activity that I had planned for next week. Making and selling the figure of Christa was obviously for the purpose of fund raising during WAAW. I was also planning on raising awareness/acceptance by going out into my local community in York and surveying people on their understanding of autism, their their thoughts on it and generally getting a picture of how the people in my local area view autism as a whole. That's now not doable, so I might look at turning it into an online survey and trying to get a wider view of autism rather than just from my local area. If I can do that I'll add a short special post on Monday with a link to share.

A massive thank you to Christa for getting on board with the idea and supporting me by sharing the eBay listing when the time comes. Support from one of the more well known advocates means a lot to me and hopefully together we can do some good for Autistic Inclusive Meets.

As a final note I want to acknowledge that I know that some people dislike and disagree with World Autism Awareness Week because after all, autism exists for more than one week per year and we need acceptance rather than just awareness. I completely agree with those points and I'll be addressing my view on WAAW itself in next week's post. In the meantime, please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. My Facebook page and Pinterest account are brand new so I'd hugely appreciate a boost from lots of new followers, and now you can even buy me a (metaphorical) coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: The custom vinyl figure that I made of Christa Holmans. Funko Pops are short figures of around 3.5inches in height that have over-sized heads compared to their bodies, large black circles for eyes and no mouth, giving them a cartoonish appearance. This figure has Christa's oval-shaped glasses, her green, blue and purple hair which is shorter on one side, red Converse shoes, dark grey trousers and a lighter grey t-shirt featuring a rainbow infinity symbol which is currently the most recognised symbol of autism.]

I'm Taking A Break

I'm going to be taking a break from blogging and social media now. Without boring you with all the details I've got a lot going on at the moment and I need some time to a) process everything that's going on, and b) take as much down time as I can since I haven't had much of it for a good couple of years now.

There's been issues going on with my rats and my cat, there's big changes coming in at work that are going to affect where/when I work, my mum's been in hospital for a few days and I've just not been in the right head space for a while now although I'm feeling better than I did a few weeks ago. You might have noticed that instead of posting weekly it's been a bit hit and miss recently, and that's why.

I'll be back eventually with new content but it's best for me to leave it alone for now. I probably won't be posting much on the blog Twitter, although might still use my personal Twitter sometimes.

Positives Of Autism

I feel like a big part of autism advocacy focuses on the negatives in highlighting our struggles, whether that's imposed by society or by our atypical hard-wiring. I think it can sometimes be a bit much to keep looking at the negatives so this week I wanted to look at some of my positive experiences instead to demonstrate that it's not so much doom and gloom as it can sometimes appear to be.

A few weeks ago I had my end of year one to one with my team leader at work and I was quite surprised about how positive she was about both me and my contributions to the team. There were 2 big things that have contributed to how I've been over the last few months. The first one being my autism diagnosis. I came out to the team not long after that and immediately felt a lot more free to be me as my team leader commented in my one to one how much I've come out of my shell since then. The second thing was that my old team leader left around July/August-time last year leading to our current team leader - who was already a part of the team - stepping up to take his place. She's done a much better job and has done wonders for not only my confidence but my overall happiness in the job.

Every now and then team leaders at our place delegate little tasks to people to help ease their load of team leader stuff. There's never been anything that I would have felt particularly comfortable doing until my current team leader took over. She identified one of my strengths in that I like to keep spreadsheets of things like my monthly performance stats as I find it helps me keep on track and know what I need to do to hit targets and when. So once she spotted that she gave me a kind of performance analysis role where once a week she asks me to find whatever stats and figures she needs about our team so that she can take it to the team leader meetings to report to the managers. It doesn't feel like a particularly big or important thing to do, but that's probably because I've always done it anyway, the only difference being that I've now scaled it up to get stats of the whole team rather than just me. So even though it just feels like a small task to me, it really has made me feel more included in the team and that I can (and do) make a valuable contribution. Inclusion in my job can be important, especially as I work from home.

Some other things that she said in my one to one were that I contribute more in team meetings with things like sharing canned responses to use, I'm more willing to approach team leaders and managers for help when I need it and that I'm one of the strongest members of the team in terms of in-work behaviours. These are all things that either I don't realise because it's me and I struggle to see any non-physical changes in myself, or that I just don't think are big things - again probably because it's me. Our end of year reviews ask us to rate how we think we've performed over the year out of 10, and my team leader was shocked that I only put 5 for myself when she would have put at least 9 based on the time since she took over. I think that's partly because of my autistic tendencies to want to do things right (I kind of feel like that's just standard and nothing particularly special), and also partly because I tend to under rate myself. Clearly one of the things I struggle with most is looking inward and assessing myself for how I really am.

Although autistics do have a whole load of struggles that are unique to them, there are also strengths that come with autism but human nature can make it hard to see the strengths through the struggles. In my case it just took 1 person at work to identify what I'm good at, what I enjoy and that I am different from the rest of the team to massively turn things around. There have been times in this job where I've felt like I was crap at what I do, not valued and really wishing I could get out. The only thing that really changed that for me was a different perspective from a different person. I also think that if I had my current team leader a couple of years ago I wouldn't have had to fight so hard for reasonable adjustments to be put in place. It just goes to show that acceptance is vital, and that goes for both self-acceptance and acceptance of each other.

Don't forget to follow me on social media. My Instagram handle has now changed to DepictDave to match my Twitter handle @DepictDave. Please also hit the Subscribe button just under the header to keep up to date with my posts, it really helps me out.

Autistic Christmas

It's my final blog post of 2019, which means we've just had Christmas. I hope everyone had a great Christmas. Because this was the first Christmas since I started blogging I thought it's only fitting to review the experience of Christmas from an autistic point of view. I know that depending on the circumstances it can be a tough 3 days for us neurodivergents, and if I'm honest I'm no exception. But let's start with the positives.

This year is the first year that I did Elf On The Shelf, which I quite enjoyed. I tried to use my own ideas as much as I could but there were some stolen from the internet. I'll leave pictures down at the bottom but if you follow me on Instagram you'll have seen some of my favourites such as one of the elves getting attacked by a Facehugger from Alien, the wrestling match vs my John Cena action figure, and the most popular one was the recreation of the pottery scene from Ghost. Coincidentally, 25% of my 2019 Instagram posts have come from this month, and it's all because of Elf On The Shelf! The other positive is the presents I got. My wife pre-ordered Delain's new album for me, which comes out on the same day that I see them live - so with any luck I might actually end up getting it a bit earlier. From the kids she got me a wooden coaster with outlines of all the first generation Pokémon egnraved onto it, and a bracelet with the kids' initials engraved. My mum and dad got me my joint best present (alongside Delain's new album) in the form of a 3 month subscription to the WWE Network. I'll activate it in a couple of weeks so that I can catch WrestleMania before the 3 months runs out.

Now onto my struggles. Christmas day was horrible for me once we left the house. We went to my mother-in-law's for the day and all of their side of the family came too. When I say all of their side, I mean she's got a big family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, 3 sisters etc as opposed to my side where it's just me, my mum and my dad. My sister, brother-in-law and neice would have been included in that if we didn't fall out with them a few years ago but that's neither here nor there. I hate it when the whole family get together like this because there are far too many people around in too small a house for how many there are. Because of how many of us there are there's always too much going on - too many conversations, too many conflicting interests, too many people trying to involve themselves with the kids etc. Plus the fact that my in-laws have recently got a new puppy. As much as I love dogs - or just about any animal for that matter - he gets really hyper regardless of how busy it is and he ended up upsetting my son, breaking a pair of sunglasses and knocking the Christmas tree over while I was trying to cheer my son up. My kids have been better behaved too with me having to stop and start my dinner several times to deal with various things they wanted, all while we were sat at the table which realistically was a bit to small for all of us but we managed.

My wife told me to go home a couple of times but I tried to stick it out. I had to nip back home for something after dinner anyway as we only live around the corner from my in-laws so I just stayed home for a while and sat in a dark room till things had settled down a bit. I went back just as they were finishing unwrapping their presents, so I probably timed it quite well. I know that really I should have gone home earlier than I did, but the whole "look after yourself" and "you don't have to stay if you don't want to" thing is a lot easier said than done. Half the battle for me (and I know quite a few autistics can relate) is giving myself permission to leave when I need to, and admit/recognise when I'm struggling regardless of whether others are or not. Just because everybody else manages ok it doesn't mean that we have to and it's ok to admit when you're struggling. Long story short, internalised ableism is a bitch.

Then we move onto boxing day, which wasn't as bad. Boxing day is usually when we have my family round but they had all come down with diarrhoea and sickness so they couldn't come, which was a shame because my 9 year-old niece was going to come over as well which would have been great fun for the kids. We've re-arranged seeing my side for tomorrow but it depends whether my niece can still come. Aside from my side coming to our house, boxing day is also round 2 of the day before but at our house instead of the in-laws'. Before everyone came round we went out for some shopping to get the last few bits that we needed for the buffet we were putting on, which even though I was knackered from the day before was nice to get out and take our time for a bit before the madness ensued again. The wife's side filtered in more slowly this time so it was a bit more manageable, as well as them being late. With it being in my own house I felt more comfortable to just wander about freely and spent some time in a different room reading to the kids, installing the WWE Network on my PS4 and a few other bits to stay out of the way. By the time they dug out the karaoke machine though it was time I cleared off upstairs. I plugged my headphones into my phone for some music and played Pokémon Yellow on my GameBoy Colour. I came back downstairs after everyone had gone, then once the kids were in bed we chilled and watched Big Fat Quiz Of The Year before we went to bed ourselves.

So yeah, I'm glad Christmas is over and we're back to normal now although I still feel exhausted from the "festive" few days. We took the kids shopping today and we all spent some of our Christmas money, which was nice. I'll leave you with a few of my favourite Elf On The Shelf pictures. As always, hit Subscribe to keep up to date with new posts and follow me on Twitter too @DepictDave. If you prefer Instagram you can check out all my Elf On The Shelf posts at The_Big_Shaw although I'm planning on changing that to DepictDave in the new year to make it exclusively blog-related. I'll let you know when it happens.

[Image description: Our 2 elves (the one in green and red is called Crimbo, the one in red and white is called Imbo) having a wrestling match against my John Cena action figure. They're in a wrestling ring that I made out of a square cardboard box, some paper straws as ring posts and some pipe cleaners as ropes. The ropes are red, yellow and blue to represent the 3 main brands of WWE; Raw, NXT and Smackdown. Crimbo is face down, unconscious on the box while John Cena has Imbo up on his shoulders in position for his finishing move the Attitude Adjustment.]

[Image description: Imbo is laid flat on his back on our TV unit with a Facehugger attached to his face that I made from PlayDoh. Crimbo is sat next to him leaning back against the TV with his hands over his mouth in horror.]

[Image description: Crimbo and Imbo are sat on our TV unit recreating the pottery scene from the movie Ghost. Crimbo has his hands around a large wooden bowl from my kids' play kitchen while Imbo is sat very closely behind him gently holding his arms and leaning around to one side over Crimbo's shoulder.]

1 Year On

It's been a year now since I was diagnosed autistic, and although I don't feel any different in myself as such, I know from feedback from other people that it really has changed my life in some aspects - all for the better. Since my first year as a diagnosed autie has now come to a close, and the end of not only 2019, but the 2010's, is fast approaching I wanted to have a look back at what my diagnosis means to me.

The main thing I wanted when I was going through the diagnostic assessment was closure, and I certainly got that straight away alongside validation that I'm not just awkward or an oddball. I'm me because I'm autistic, and I'm autistic because I'm me. For a few years before diagnosis it kept playing on my mind whether I was autistic or not, and the whole "am I/aren't I?" was really frustrating for me. Although I was self-diagnosed at the time I didn't feel like I could come out as autistic to people because I didn't think anyone would accept a self-diagnosis outside of the online autism community. It enabled me to open up both personally and professionally, which leads me onto the next benefit that I've gained from diagnosis...

It allowed me to get permanent adjustments made at work, whereas before I was diagnosed my adjustments were on a three-month revisionary basis, and even before that I had to spend months fighting for any adjustments at all. I won't go into details about what happened but my diagnosis helped me make my adjustments permanent. And with the intention of helping any readers who may be having similar struggles, it shouldn't get to the point where one of the reasons you're seeking a diagnosis is to provide evidence to your employer. In the UK the Equality Act 210 means that reasonable adjustments can and should be made even without a formal diagnosis. This is of course subject to criteria, but a quick Google search should help check if you meet them.

This blog is another thing that diagnosis has allowed me to do. It helps me advocate for autism by spreading awareness and acceptance. Admittedly I only have a small following so far compared to some of the advocates I look up to (look on YouTube at Neurodivergent Rebel, Yo Samdy Sam and Invisible I just to name a few), but I've had comments and feedback that show that I am helping and making a difference to people, and that's the whole point. It doesn't matter as such how many people I help through this blog (although obviously the more the merrier), just as long as it's helping somebody then it makes it all worthwhile. Without my diagnosis I probably wouldn't have started blogging back in March and it all comes back to the validation I got from it.

On a similar note, people have said that I've come right out of my shell ever since being diagnosed. I recently had my end of year one-to-one with my team leader at work and I was surprised at how positively she views my last 12 months. I personally don't see myself as any different but it's great to hear how pleased she is with my progress and how I'm joining in more with the team, putting ideas out there and so on. My wife has said the same thing about me coming out of my shell so it must be an all-around difference in me rather than just at work. At the end of the day it's about knowing who you are as a person and accepting that it's ok to be you. My diagnosis has definitely helped massively with that, and although I can't speak for everyone in terms of whether diagnosis is right for them, I would say that it can massively help when going through certain struggles. I also know diagnosis isn't possible/accessible to everybody, but if you do have the opportunity, my advice would absolutely be to give it some thought.

I hope everyone has a merry Christmas and I'll be back with the final post of the year the day after boxing day. Don't forget to subscribe with the button at the top of the page, and follow @DepictDave on Twitter. I'll leave you with a picture of my autism Christmas jumper that I designed myself and forgot to include earlier in the month.

[Image description: Me taking a selfie in the mirror wearing my autism Christmas jumper. The jumper is red and the design is a green Christmas tree with a bit of brown trunk showing at the bottom. The tree is decorated with randomly placed baubles in the shape of the infinity symbol. The baubles are in 3 different colours to represent autism; red, gold and rainbow. Across the middle of the tree is the hashtag #AutieAndNice in gold]

Election Results

It's the day after the 2019 UK General Election and I along with many people am crushed by the result. I genuinely don't know whether to lose faith in the British public, or whether to call foul play on the Tories. Either way, the election result plus the fact that I'm currently on my way home from a week's holiday means that I haven't got the spoons today, but I wanted to quickly address what the election result might mean for autism.

The first and most obvious thing is the letter to the party leaders from the National Autistic Society that I linked you to in a post a few weeks ago. It's been a while since I checked the number of signatures on the letter but last I checked it was about 13,000 which is well over their 10,000 target. Regardless of the number of signatures, I highly doubt that it's going to get a look in with Boris still in power. The letter was asking the election winner to make publishing the updated autism strategy a priority as soon as the election was over. As pessimistic as this sounds, I'd be highly surprised if the Tories even give it a second thought, and that saddens me.

The other effect it could have is when the NHS is inevitably sold to America it's going to make assessment, diagnosis and support of autistic people a hell of a lot harder... As if it's not already inaccessible. I explained to someone on Twitter that just because assessment through the NHS is free it doesn't mean it's accessible. I had to ask my GP multiple times for referrals. My first referral was unsuccessful because the assessors didn't believe me, and although my second referral was successful it took 18 months from being referred to receiving my diagnosis. The wait in other parts of the country is longer. Autism services in the UK are massively underfunded and under prioritised making it inaccessible as it is, never mind once we lose free access to NHS services. It scares me where the Tories' policies and attitudes will take us when it comes to autism. I count myself very lucky that I got diagnosed when I did.

Don't get me wrong, not all autistics want or need a diagnosis but the ones it would make a difference to are the ones who are going to suffer. If there's a silver lining it's that as a counter to the government's attitude towards disability, the autistic community (and probably the disabled community as a whole) will most likely band together, advocate, educate, spread awareness, spread acceptance and continue to support each other even more. I've got no faith in the government but I've got every faith in us as a community and I hope I'm right.

That's all I'm going to say this week. If you enjoy my blog and find it interesting or helpful please hit the subscribe button at the top and follow on Twitter @DepictDave. I guess the message today is be kind to each other and support those who need it.