Wednesday 6th March 2024: OHMYGOD IT’S BEEN SIX MONTHS!?

Hi everyone!

Okay, okay, I can explain. At length, of course! That’s what I do, after all! I’ve been away. Don’t worry, I’m not dead, or in prison or kidnapped and held for ransom. I’m still here, plugging away, and, unexpectedly, really happy! But before I continue telling you where I’ve been all this time, I’ve got to share the following things™©.co.uk:

• https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/feeling-fast-and-slow-jorik-mol-tickets-845799488037
  I will be here on Monday 11th March, doing a shortened version of my 2023 Autscape Keynote on Feeling Fast and Slow. Come along – we’d love to see you there.
  NOTE: just before going to press: due to staffing shortages at Autangel, this event is cancelled until further notice. I don’t want to stress out my brilliant friends even further, so I’ll keep you updated when I learn more.
  
• https://www.outonthepage.co.uk/event-details/qnd-writers-group-pay-what-you-can-4 If you’re Queer, Neurodivergent and a writer, come join the Queer Neurodivergent Writers’ Group, run by yours truly, before going on a short break and coming back for May. Definitely contact us to stay in the loop – we’ve got big plans for QND.
  
  
• 
  Friend of the show, Serafina Kiszko, is an artist in Bristol, UK. Her show Neurodivergent Rhapsody is at Centrespace Gallery in Bristol. Go see!
  
• Another friend of the show, Kala Allen Omieza, just published her first non-fiction book with Jessica Kingsley: Autistic and Black | Jessica Kingsley Publishers – UK (jkp.com) Go support her amazing work. She deserves it <3
  
• Please add your name to the request to Ban Conversion “Therapy” in the UK. If you’re in Scotland, support and promote the work that people like Fergus Murray are doing around including ABA, PBS, Teamteach and TEACCH into the ban. If you’re in England, Wales or the north of Ireland, make sure you refer to this when you’re writing your MP: On ‘Positive Behaviour Support’ – AMASE
  
  Ban conversion “therapy”. In all forms: Ban Conversion Therapy | Stonewall
  
• This has been a long time coming, I know, but here’s a new (-ish! Sorry Pete!) video from the Afro-Asian Critical Psychology Network, about autistic people’s lives in South Korea. Trigger warnings for plenty of vile ableism, but they need and would love your support. 3Ocean’s conversation about Jung Yoo Jung and autism activism in South Korea – YouTube

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END OF ADMIN!

IT’S DANGEROUS OUT THERE, TAKE THIS!

So now all that’s out of the way, where have I been?

Well, in reality, I’ve been working! Really hard! To the point of destruction! I’ll separate all of it into individual bits.

WRITING

Over the summer, I finished two books, as you know. Teeming is still under consideration by TGLA. I checked in January, they told me at the time that they’re still discussing it and that things are taking longer than intended. But rather that than an all-out rejection, right? We’ll have to see what comes of it.

When it comes to Feeling Fast and Slow, we’re still in the editing phase. By that I mean that I still have to do about 20-25 hours of sustained work on it. Due to communication difficulties, I had been under the impression that I would compile and write all the material over the summer and that the actual putting together of the book would be a shared responsibility. Instead, the editing and compilation process is all on my shoulders. This was a big knock to my confidence and made me feel like my work had been for nothing. I lost confidence in writing non-fiction as a consequence – yet another reason why you’ve been without blogs for six month.

Still, despite me feeling rubbish about my own capacities, my initial readers have been unequivocally enthusiastic. I now have an editor with whom I have a far greater degree of trust (hi Lynda!). Wanting to spend the Christmas break writing, I instead spent the Christmas holidays sick as a dog. My partner Luke and our friend/adopted child Daria have instead provided vital editing support. I aim to finish in April now, as well as take as much rest as I need to. I’ll tell you why in a second

Now to the third book, the one on mentoring, for Lived Places Publishing (hi David and Michael!). I presented a poster for that event in Bristol back in September, I blogged about that (remember…?). There, I met another mentor, who’d actually done a PhD on mentoring for autistic students. He actually just did everything I’d already been doing! So the faff and nonsense I’d been facing wasn’t my fault (more on this in a future blog). I was advised to move on to another mentoring provider. No work has yet been done on this book yet, but many thoughts are being had. It should get done this summer, specifically it being less than half the length of FFaS.

MENTORING

A tonne of the work I had to do in September-February was the interminable amounts of admin that leaving one company (Randstad) and joining another (Bridge Mentoring. Hi Amanda!) apparently involves. For the Autistic Wellbeing Group at Bath Spa (hi Kitty! Hi Joe!), I have now been employed by Bath Spa University. I told all my students that I would be changing the company I work through. They all individually decided to follow me. 

I also now represent a student as an external advocate, which is a step above mentoring, since there are many difficult knots to untangle concerning their university. Through them, I got to know Wired Differently (hi Sara!), who interviewed me and decided to take me on as a freelance consultant and speaker on neurodiversity, specifically in higher education.

I now have more mentees than I’ve ever had and, for quite a few of them, I am working harder than ever. I’m concerned that universities as a whole seem to be cutting back on disability support that was par for the course only years ago. Not Bath Spa, evidently. But most of the others! I’m excited to make even more of a difference than before.

TEACHING

Despite not teaching a summer season of EAP at a university this year, I have still taught more than I ever have these past six months. I was teaching GCSE English to a young autistic person online, until we decided that he’d be better served by face-to-face tuition. I still teach him French though! I also started teaching beginner German and beginner Japanese at Bath College (hi Emma!). This has been a wild ride, very intense, but utterly rewarding. I am happy to put this on my CV, even though my Wednesdays at Bath College are intense as a consequence.

I have been in contact with Bath Spa’s English for Academic Purposes team and it looks like I might be working with them over the summer. Watch this space!

GROUP FACILITATION

I am still happily running the AutAngel LGBTQIA+ peer support group (hi Carrie! Hi Caroline!), every other week. This is really fun and please contact carrie@autangel.co.uk if you are interested in hanging out with me and some other autistic queers once a fortnight.

QND WRITERS GROUP

As stated above, we are now in our fourth month of running QND monthly, via Out on the Page (hi Paul!). I say ‘we’, because it’s not just me. We, meaning Seonaid and I, are currently applying for Arts Council England funding to continue and build QND up to what it really can be.

TALKS AND CONSULTANCY

These have been a bit slow going recently. The last talk I did was in October, in Amsterdam (that story is coming in another blog, it’s too good not to share).. That was at Autminds (hi Robert!) Of course, the entire country is once again tightening its belt – a belt that seems like it hasn’t got any holes left to tighten harder, but that’s what living in a capitalist hellhole seems to result in, it seems. I was asked by a local NHS trust how much I’d charge for CCF training, I told them, and they immediately shut down the conversation. If their budget is lower than £200 for a single talk, then the value they place on neurodivergent patients and staff is likely even lower. Ah well.

Still, if you or your organisation want to book me for an event or CCF education for staff, you know where to find me.

ACADEMIA

I have been asked to apply for a Research Fellowship in disability studies at Bath Spa, focused on disability and the worlds of art and culture. That will likely happen sometime this Spring. I have two proposals.

One is Revolution (hi Emily and everyone else!!!), which is about breaking performance training and remaking it with the double empathy problem in mind. We will be working on how to use our brains to make beautiful art, rather than be stamped out by neurotypicals who don’t ‘see’ it. More on that soon. If Revolution members read this, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I want to work on the application together!

The second is on Autistic Stylistics. A name that’s both catchy, and not very inclusive under current diagnostic limitations, but it will be a study in just how authentic neurodivergent writing will look. How do we represent ourselves? What do we, as neurodivergent writers of fiction, focus on? How do we build character and plot? And what does that mean for how our work is received by a publishing industry unaware of its own neurochauvinism? This will also involve reference to the QND Writers’ Group, which could serve as a testing ground for some of my ideas.

The project I want to do on neurodivergence in EAP students is not moving as fast as I would have preferred, but I am involved in a study on the prevalence of disabilities in international students in the UK, which will provide a quantitative underpinning to the work we’re going to do on exactly how to fix the inequalities I’ve found as an English language teacher in the private and University sectors.

I’m still on the board of the STRATA study, which is proceeding apace (hi Dheeraj!).

I haven’t had the time to write an article on the main ideas in Feeling Fast and Slow for Damian Milton’s new collection of writing on the double empathy problem. Hopefully next time.

Lastly, the project on therapy for trauma. in autistic people. I am seeing a therapist every week and I have been for about 5 months. It’s intense stuff, we’re going over some really deep things, childhood things. I need to keep reminding myself that deep therapy, the kind that we’re doing, takes energy. It’s intense stuff. It needs to be. That’s why it takes so much out of me, on a Monday night.

WHY THE BURNOUT THOUGH?

So I was really burned out. Like, really burned out. All of this work, the lack of news on so many fronts, the knocks to my confidence, it all brought me to a place of being really quite depressed back in September. It was all made worse, because Luke appeared to be facing capitalism as a final boss. He’d worked his butt off from January 2023, doing his CELTA. He started medication for anxiety and worked through some very deep and painful stuff in therapy. He was also starting to do café work again. When he graduated from the CELTA, he got his first teaching job at a summer school. It was really amazing apparently. It was also 70 hour weeks. Five of them, too. By the end of July, he was completely mentally broken. He’d never worked as hard in his life.

He needed to take August off, he had no capacity to work any longer. This made life tricky, since I didn’t work during August either – I was writing two books, after all. By September, he was slowly starting to apply for teaching jobs again, as much as he was still burned out. We needed to pay rent, after all. He finally got one, teaching English to Chinese primary school children, online. That was about 20 hrs a week. Great. He was also still working through a lot – burnout from the summer and the first half of the year and in October, his grandfather passed away. Therefore, he needed lots of alone time and couldn’t manage much in the way of housework.

That would have been manageable, if he was just paid for his labour. He wasn’t. He was only paid for a week in September, due to holidays in China, for October after Christmas had been and gone and for the rest of the year when we were already well into 2024. It was bad. We were eating into our savings and my mental health went into a tailspin.

I couldn’t work out anymore, so I gained weight. Each moment of my day I was either working, doing housework, or being too burned out to do much except watch youtube videos and feel guilty about the work I wasn’t doing.

Then, in late November, Luke’s mental health started improving. He started being able to do more around the house again and I thought that things were slowly getting better. One day, when I was at Bath Spa, I was doing the AutWell group when I got a call from Luke. He’d been doing his High Intensity Interval Training and, while doing jump-squat-burpees, he heard a snap in his knee. He got himself to hospital. Result? A broken meniscus.

Luke couldn’t do anything for about four weeks. He needed bed rest. I was already doing everything, now I was doing even more. I did it happily, but I was already running on fumes. I couldn’t go on like this. No surprise that when we went to Luke’s parents for Christmas, I got very sick with a chest infection.

Daria and her sister Hana stayed with us between Christmas and New Years, meaning that I actually celebrated NYE for the first time since, well, at least 2014? Odd, that! But it was fun.

Back to work in December, still battling through the chest infection. I was asked if I wanted to meet with someone for an Access to Work application for me. Access to Work is a benefit by the UK government that seeks to support disabled workers in finding and retaining work. Wired Differently has a policy of recommending AtW for all disabled workers and collaborators. That day came, and I met with a WD employee (hi Theresa!) who would help me apply.

The application was really stressful. I don’t know about you, but I am happy to do applications for everyone in the world but me. I get shy and want to hide away. Theresa allowed me to be honest. She asked me: “How many hours do you work, a week?” I said: “Well, let me check my calendar. About 38-41?”
“Ok, and now add emails and invoicing.”
“….”
“It’s OK, you can say it.”
“…65…”
“Sorry what?”
“65 hours or so.”
“Ok. You really need this, don’t you?”
“Yeah….”
I don’t want to have a heart attack before I’m 40. This will help prevent that.

Just before Christmas, Luke had a job interview at a school for autistic students not far from us, in the countryside outside of Radstock, near Frome. He got hired on the spot. He gladly and enthusiastically accepted. But capitalism had a final form for Luke (and Jorik) to battle. They needed a new DBS (a police check, for you non-UK people) and to get his references checked. All of that would be done by an external company. Therefore, he wouldn’t start his new job until early February. At least he’d been paid by the Chinese company, even if it was several months out of date.

When he started, early last month, I took two weeks off. The first four days I didn’t speak. At all. All I could do was sleep, read and recover. Talking was too much for me. I needed rest instead. The Tuesday of February half term, we went to Rochester, Kent, to see Luke’s grandmother and have a few days’ holiday. It was wonderful. Most importantly: I brought neither my laptop nor my phone. I… recovered? I really did!

The week after, Luke was at work every day and I did a big Spring clean of the house. It’s actually habitable now! I was still tired and not 100% recovered, so Luke forbade me from doing the 20-25 hours on Feeling Fast and Slow that still need doing. My publishers have been truly wonderful in giving me that space. I need to remember that these people need me alive, not just the product I’m expected to deliver.

I’m writing this now from my sofa. On Friday, I did an autism and dropped my laptop on the wooden floor. The screen is ruined. However, through the magic of HDMI cables, I’m using my television as a makeshift computer screen. Through the magic of rest, however, I didn’t put my head through the wall when it happened. Instead, I had a cry and accepted that this is the cost of being disabled. It’s okay, there’s always solutions. I have friends to support me and a partner who now isn’t in a capitalism-induced dungeon fighting his way through throngs of irritation.

On Monday, I went to the gym for the first time in maybe eight months. I didn’t stay long, only an hour. I weighed myself, I was 100kg. That was more than I’ve weighed since 2017. But it’s also understandable: looking at the year I’ve had, my body was like: batten down the hatches! It’s time for war! So it’s been holding on to every calorie it could get and I was eating to keep me going and not crumble. That’s a reaction that I could not have had without these two weeks’ rest. I’m going to have two more in early April. Thanks to Luke now working along school term hours, I will actually have holidays again. He’s the best. Last night, we just lay in his bed, making each other laugh with the help of Sunny Ralph Sunflower, who’s obsessed with apples, a giraffe called Oliver (I’ll write about him soon) and Lucas Fox, a brat who lives in a bin.

I’m so, so sorry to have been away for so long. I’ve missed you.

To really drive this video game analogy I’ve been referring to properly into the ground, I’ve been holding back the final boss all this time, while Luke was gathering his memories and recovering his strengths, to come and set me free, while we finally seal the boss away for good.

LEGEND: that makes Luke Link, Ganon represents Capitalism- which I guess makes me Zelda? So THAT’s why I hold the Triforce of Wisdom. Oohhh…. (hi Finn!)

In short, yes. I’ve been away. But I’m back. I love you all. Speak very soon.

Jorik