It’s Neurodiversity Celebration Week and I’ve been thinking about how strange it feels to even be writing that sentence.
When I started the Through My Eyes blog, it wasn’t really meant to be something public. It was more of a way for me to process things that had never quite made sense in my own life. Why certain environments drained me so quickly. Why social situations often felt like a set of unwritten rules that everyone else seemed to understand instinctively. Why I could appear confident on the outside while internally replaying conversations for hours afterwards.
Writing the articles has slowly helped me understand those patterns better. In many ways the blog began as a personal exercise in trying to make sense of autism in my own life. What I didn’t expect was how many people would read it and quietly say something like, “That’s exactly how I feel but I’ve never been able to explain it.”
So while the blog started as something for me, it has gradually become something else as well. A place where people who are autistic, or who work with autistic people, or who live alongside autistic family members can see a perspective that might feel familiar.
The aim has never been to speak for everyone, because autism never works like that. It’s simply one lived experience shared honestly in the hope that it might help someone else understand themselves, or understand someone they care about, a little more clearly.
Over the past few months I’ve written about masking, social grey areas at work, and the quiet mental energy that goes into navigating environments that often expect you to behave in ways that feel unnatural.
Over the coming months I’ll be writing about things like autistic energy, decision making, burnout and even something slightly different for me… why dancing has quietly become one of the few places where my brain actually settles.
If anything in the blog resonates with you, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. You might recognise parts of your own experience in it. You might see a colleague, partner, parent or child in it. Or you might simply have a different perspective to add.
All of those conversations are valuable. Because the more we talk about lived experience honestly, the easier it becomes for people to understand that autism is not a single story.
And if even one sentence somewhere in those articles helps someone understand themselves a little better, then writing them has been worthwhile.
