Monday 16th September 2024: At Autscape

Hi everyone,

News!

Yup, the tired got me again. Just when I was about to publish more blogs in a single month than in the entire previous year: 4 in 12 months v. 4 in 4 weeks. But 4 in 5 weeks ain’t bad, especially in comparison. I’ve had to promise my mother to no longer rush myself and beat myself up if I somehow don’t manage every single week. It’s a habit, that.

Life is a lot more chill this year. That includes me being able to write my diary, which I’ve managed daily for a week. That’s the first time since probably 2022! I need that too. Journaling keeps my brain clear. It organises the past and makes it the past. Otherwise I’m dealing with all of the past in the present. It’s processing time. And yes, I have already bought a brand new page-a-day diary for 2025. Sue me.

As some of you know, I’m awful at being ill. Which is even more comical since because I’m so atrocious at it, I’m ill for longer. Whenever I’m tired, my usual next step is to get angry with myself for having the indecency to be tired. I know. The idea! In my final therapy session with this particular therapist, I was vituperating and fulminating about the fact I’d just been to a conference and just had Covid, so I should really be getting on with work again. I bet you can see the problem here.

You can’t therapy away all of that. You just can’t. It’s a combination of an awful lot of indoctrination and the deep-seated idea that I’m only as good as the last thing I did. Which, if you include a lack of blogs, was literally nothing, Monday last.

That’s, er, yeah that is silly, now I put it like that.

Access to Work

Access to Work is also coming through! I am typing this on my brand new computer, wearing my new earplugs and noise cancelling headphones at the same time. I will hopefully receive my new software packages and office supplies this week. It’s weird to finally feel that the government has my back for a change!*

• In that the Labour government looks unlikely to increase benefits payments in line with inflation over the past 16 years when the incomes of disabled people have plummeted from an already-not-very-high place before the 2008 financial crash, is not looking to increase the affordability of housing, is not going to change council tax banding to a system that doesn’t massively benefit the wealthy, is not going to increase taxes (specifically not on wealth), is not going to put in systems of positive discrimination, is not changing the increasingly exclusionary working hours and social expectations, nor challenge the HR industry for failing to serve the needs of marginalised people, and, least of all, is not going to be seen to ‘pay people not to work’ like with furlough or the vast amounts of results validating universal basic income. On a level of pure logic, if they so desperately want disabled people in the workplace, they’re going to have to pay up. Everyone who’s disabled in the UK, diagnosed or not (because waiting lists): get on it. It might take some time, but it’s vitally important. It should be rolled out as a basic human right, across the world. Paid for by Elon Musk, who cannot attach his name to it. Just his money.

Autscape

Very excited to finally talk about Autscape this year. It was truly fantastic, as it was in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023 (I was working in 2022). It was always going to be an odd experience, especially since this was the first year I wasn’t in a massively weird, new environment (2019), chairing sessions on Zoom (2020), co-hosting the entire thing on Zoom (2021) or giving a big fuck-off talk on the first proper day (2023).

It also might be the one Autscape in which I was patient 0 of a small outbreak of novel Coronavirus 2019. Yup, you’re reading the words of the Typhoid Mary of ‘Scape. Which is a thing to be, I suppose.

I have written about Autscape before, on this blog AND in FFaS, which I will now be able to finish – using all this beautiful equipment. Hooray! But that means you won’t find my memories of it in this particular blog. Sorry not sorry. Instead, I’m focusing on this Autscape and this Autscape only.

I ended up running around an awful lot. It feels amazing to be an ‘insider’ somewhere. I always felt outsider-y, to whichever group I aimed to be a part of. Something, somehow, always made me external to all those communities. No more: so many people were asking for me, wanting to talk to me.

The venue was the same, the food somehow stodgier, everything was more expensive, but I didn’t care. I was just so happy to be there. I laughed so much. I didn’t get an awful lot of sleep, either. I just spent much of my time engaged in conversations. Joyous, hilarious, silly, funny people were everywhere. It felt like how summer camp should have always felt, but never did.

I made a lot of jokes about being one of the popular girls. I felt magnetised – people were drawn to me, I was drawn to them. I linked people up, Clarissa Dalloway stylee. I could – and would – be myself, including taking unflattering photos of myself. Like I said in the previous blog, that included moments where I lost control. I cried when I found out Steve had died. I had one difficult conversation where me and a nice autistic Junior Doctor had an hour-long disagreement where we talked not quite over but more alongside each other. That didn’t mean we had a screaming row – we might have had one had we been more tired – but half an hour later we were sitting next to each other in a seminar and, at the mention of autistic conflict, theatrically winked and smiled.

When it comes to actual events, I felt like I didn’t attend as many programmed events as I did in 2023, let alone 2019. I did run another Home Group. This was a daily moment of pure joy and, also somehow, growth. But that bit isn’t my story to tell. Beside the homegroup, I loved Joanna Lawicka’s talk about Applied Needs Analysis – a direct assault on conversion practices in the care for autistic children and young adults. I was lucky enough to chair that talk, too. Afterwards, I told her daughter: “Your mum is so fucking cool!” She is. We have evil plans for world domination bubbling away in the background.

I also did facilitation for a workshop on autistic sports (I did the most exercise of anybody in that room) and another one on theatre and drama. That was very fun. I didn’t do my Gary Barlow-bit during the performance evening, or attend the 5-minute sessions, but those were already pretty busy. I might have been able to stay another day, but I did need to get home at some point.

I missed Luke, really badly. He couldn’t afford to come this year. Next year he IS coming. I feared that his magnetism might dull mine, because he is a charismatic so-and-so, but that is a genuinely silly thing to fear. I want him to have endless conversations about everything from etymology to 1990s video games to alexithymia and trauma to my 56-year old friend and mother of three accidentally teaching a seriously rude word to a 10-year old. We cried laughing.

In short: excellent, would go again.

Speak next week.

Jorik

P.S. I should have shaved for that photo. Sorry mum!