Autism and Mental Health: My Story (so far)

This post focuses on my personal experiences with mental health conditions (mainly anxiety) as an autistic woman, and aims to spread awareness about mental health and autism.

Sorry, who are you?

Happy International Day of People with Disabilities! This post will talk about another neurological disorder that has been linked to autism and which has made my life extra difficult; face-blindness!

Searching for Aliens When You Feel Like One

What is astrobiology? How did I get into the field? And how does it relate to being autistic? This post talks about aliens.

Please don’t touch me

I want to talk a little bit about meltdowns. Why do they happen to autistic people? What do they look like? What should you do in that situation? Hopefully this post should clear up any misconceptions around this topic, and help any autistic readers to understand why our brains do this thing.

“She’s not ill, just weirder than we first thought”

There are good and bad ways to talk about autism, and this is especially important if someone has opened up to you about being on the spectrum. I want to talk about the effects of the words we use on those around us.

Being overwhelmed: Autistic version

My friends often ask why I squeeze my nose with both hands so often, and I in the past I explained it as a nervous tick. I was kind of right, because it’s a stress response associated with autism called “stimming”. This post will explain a little more about what stimming is and why it is important to understand.

I am “Literally” Confused

Can you imagine taking things so literally that you vandalise your own home? I can. This is a brief and hopefully funny insight into my difficulties with understanding “hidden” meanings (sometimes they weren’t that hidden).

My University Experiences

I’d like to talk a little bit about my experiences in higher education (so far, I still have more to go!). I wasn’t diagnosed with ASD until my final year of university, so it has taken a lot of reflection to recognise how it affected me throughout my degree because I had to learn what

Masking in autistic females: why we don’t “look” how you expect

Very early in my journey towards a diagnosis, I read that autism is more commonly diagnosed in males than females. When I looked into this further, it became clear that autism is commonly missed in females due to multiple factors, including a lack of knowledge about how it is presented in females, misdiagnoses and masking.

My Diagnosis

This is an insight into my journey towards a formal diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, which I received in December 2019. Although this is only one example of a route taken to get a diagnosis, I hope that some readers may find it useful to see how I went about it! Although I was diagnosed