Neurophototherapy Project

Neurophotherapy offers a gentle way in to a conversation with the self. Please do visit my Instagram and website to learn more. Share with others who might be affected. Leave a comment. I love to hear from you!

Sonia x

Masking and caring – an #actuallyautistic perspective.

What I do have is a complex relationship with masking – which I want to be honest and hopefully nuanced about.  Stigma exists, often we don’t have a choice (those of us who’ve learned masking as an adaptation).  For myself as a bilingual person, I have come to think of masking as a bilingualism wrought by the necessity of living between worlds with different cultures.

I hope to write more about masking and caring as my situation evolves. 

The unmasking #autism

But unmasking means changing habits and changing thought patterns too. Unmasking means I can begin to find my own contours and stay me shaped for longer. This makes it easier to locate myself if I have to mask. I can recover more quickly too. 

Autistic leadership.

Perhaps the main impediment to autistic leadership is not that we must design it in our own image from first principles (though this is true as all existing visible models are allistic) – it is rather that we are not yet believed in as leaders.

This is what has to change in a wider sense, so that we can be freed to make our leadership models and create the support networks to sustain them.

Networked out? Autism and ‘real time’ in professional practice.

It’s time to talk networking and how it can work against autistic art professionals in particular. I won’t talk beyond my own experience but I hope what I say can apply more widely.  SO networking. From the outside I appear relatively networked in. I have public funding, and I’m a member of an artists’ studios

A very ‘neurotypical deficit’.

Returning to the differences in processing with which I began my piece, it seems to me that as NT move speedily onwards to the next person and the next opportunity they may fail to notice many examples of autistic kindness.

What an unfortunate processing deficit that would turn out to be.

Did you just call me badass? Autism and identity – a list in progress.

But it is love in a wider sense (this is old fashioned I know) which I’m finding so missing lately. It’s been replaced by the kind of static you get from a nylon nightie pulled roughly over your head.

When only autism will do.

Yes, yes, yes…okay, okay. Alright. I boil washed another jumper! It’s becoming a thing – a metaphorical thing.  This post is about access and exclusion.  It’s about a stripy jumper made out of scratchy wool that doesn’t fit. Like that awful Xmas gift (that keeps on itching) – you really don’t want it but you have

Autistic resilience: talking up competence.

Perhaps we underestimate just how hard we’re working everyday to keep afloat in a world which does not support our divergent neurologies?

Autism: sensory challenge, overload and functionality at work.

I think that for ‘neurologically biased’ we should read neurological privilege and allow that working accommodations begin right there. But first the bias must be revealed and spoken.