It's a miracle I got in

........and probably will hardly manage to again, as I may have forgotten my password ready. After a zillion things going wrong.....including the fact that all my brilliant ideas for a handle were already taken. Great minds. 

I have not been diagnosed and won't be, I don't live in the UK and no doubt more ties to my lovely home country will be cut still further in the next year. 

It was just seen as craziness when I was a kid, in the 1960's. It could be a spectrum thing but it could be something else. The red flags for the A word for me are that I regressed at 18 months and no longer spoke using grammatically correct sentences. Tantrums and obsessions during childhood, being scapegoated at high school and repeatedly being criticised from student years onwards for not engaging in enough eye contact. 

But it is on the other side of the boot too as I teach at a high school for children who wish to specialise in the arts, and many are now getting diagnoses of dyspraxia, dyslexia as well as the odd autism I do feel the need to know how to work with these kids. 

I would love to hear from older people who are only now recognising the hidden thing after all these years. Or from other teachers also confronting similar things.

The most important thing is my art incidentally.

Parents
  • I have just been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, at the age of fifty one, two years ago I was diagnosed with Coeliac disease and more or less have handled both on my own.  I would love to meet up with autistic people in Leicester, but have had no response from the 'Monday Club', they are facing cuts due to austerity measures.  Anyway the good thing about being diagnosed is that I can come off anti-depressants after being on them for eighteen years for anxiety and stress, my liver was beginning to complain.  Now I am learning to handle being autistic ally aware, having coped with it unaware since birth.

  • I had IBS, that was one of the things that helped my GP get a diagnosis set up. Apparently Coeliacs and IBS is a common thing in ASD people. My GP was very competent in noticing the things that led to my diagnosis.

    "Autistic ally aware"  I like that! It's a state of mind I'm gonna explore!

  • I have IBS too and cut out wheat, which helps. I was tested for food allergies a few years ago when my cough started getting worse. The scratches he made on my arm were agony, but the results for airborne allergies told the story about the latter. House mites indoors were the culprit and ragweed and mugwort outside and maximum scores for each! Short of wearing a mask or bubble over my head at all times I still don't know what the solution to that is!

    I did go for acupuncture in my 20's and was told I had a metal imbalance, looks like metal is still ongoing. The weak spots with metal are the gut as well as the lungs. Lungs, incidentally, can manifest as obsessiveness and issues with getting close to people.......

  • I've been doing that! Just looked and the cat pics are back too. I've got to be doing something else wrong! Well, practice makes perfect!

  • You have to keep clicking on where it says 'load next,', then all the new responses show up. That's how it seems to work anyway. There are these grey vertical lines on the left that seem to indicate where an extra hidden thread might lie. 

  • Lol, it's disappeared! Well you got it anyway. The picture posts have disappeared now! Or I still can't work out how these threads work!

  • About them looking like mini ocelots? They sure do....

  • You both have cool cats!

  • Huh, where did my reply go? Did you see my reply about the Bengal from the other day @nexus9?

  • How old in this one?

  • Ditto.... she I said a fellow wild animal in life’s urban jungle! .... she also has more Instagram followers than my son! 

  • Nice looking kitty Elephant in the Room, here is mine

  • I’d think I’d be cross if called “exotic”.... exotic/neurodiverse.... hey.... potato/potaarrrto lol!

    i also have a Bengal...

  • She is beautiful and has a look of genuine wildness about her. The neighbours can tell she is a mix of some kind. One mum kept observing her, calling her a lounge leopard. She also thought she looked very Bengal. My other cat is very pretty too, she is a tortoiseshell and tabby mix. She has nothing if my other's restless temperament though. 

  • Meditation does help. Unfinished animal is an understatement. There's no end to the changes in behaviour that our species inflicts upon itself, lol!

    You have a Bengal? Cool af! Even if she is a cross she's bound to be big! Lol, yeah they do look wild, like mini ocelots!

  • Mine has never moved in to a new house, she just visits! She has managed to dart into everyone's flat along my corridor at least once. I have to lock the front door by key as she can let herself out otherwise. She got out once without my knowing and I found her on the 9th floor. 

    Apparently Bengals also have a similar lack of regard for territory so I have to advocate for her Bengalistic tendencies although I don't call it that. The house rules stipulate 'no exotics' even if she is only maybe just a cross. Some neighbours are fond of her but one  was outraged to find this large, wild looking beast strolling and sniffing around her flat with total impunity.

  • The way the threads load is very confusing. It's like trying to nail a fart to a wall. They've got a mind of their own!

    He's only 7, that's good! My dog was 19 when he died, so lets hope you get 12 more years.

    Cats are the golddiggers of the pet world! They will just up and go for a nicer bowl of food! They know how to finesse us humans to a tee, lol!

    The best thing about waking the dog up is that they wont mind. Cats will probably move out and find some quieter place! 

Reply
  • The way the threads load is very confusing. It's like trying to nail a fart to a wall. They've got a mind of their own!

    He's only 7, that's good! My dog was 19 when he died, so lets hope you get 12 more years.

    Cats are the golddiggers of the pet world! They will just up and go for a nicer bowl of food! They know how to finesse us humans to a tee, lol!

    The best thing about waking the dog up is that they wont mind. Cats will probably move out and find some quieter place! 

Children