The Cat Came Back

These little concertina pillars are my journal, a small shift for a big result, moving away from the overwhelm of the blank page, and the historical trauma of fine motor skills frustration, they are a good example of creative adaptation through the magic of difference. More than journaling, these little towers are a measure of my gains. Everyday I am writing down my gains in my concertina journal - a productivity hack to bolster motivation and confidence, through acknowledgement of what's been achieved in a day, not what's yet to be done. We nurture this and other micro actions in P A I D - the positive autistic Identity declaration sessions. Next series commencing soon.

Make sure to check out our freshly published narrative review titled Neurodivergence, intersectionality, and eating disorders: a lived experience-led narrative review.

Link: https://jeatdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40337-024-01126-5

“The indiscriminate use of a narrow range of manualised therapies, assessment tools, and public health campaigns for different demographic groups is problematic, as each group experiences unique underlying factors in the development of EDs and may require different, sometimes conflicting or opposing, forms of support and formulations to recover. However, hegemonic conceptualisations of feeding, eating, and EDs do not incorporate such diversity of lived experiences, a limitation that impacts all stages of ED care.”

my inner cat purrs for me when the world outside is chaos

Thank you Neurokindred for the listing in your referrals directory - http://neurokindred.com/directory/mentor-certified-coach-peer-support-and-creative-development-groups/

Borderline Personality Disorder - no offence intended to anyone receiving care under this category of 'disorder', this research is important and poignant, especially for clinicians who have little to no experience treating neurodivergence and different ways of being.

"The term ‘personality’ is a broad, heterogenous, and non-specific construct that refers to a variety of individual characteristics such as emotional responsiveness, interests, values, self-concept, interpersonal communication, cognition, and behaviours (Mayer, 2007; Plaks, Levy, & Dewk, 2009). As such, the framing of someone’s personality as supposedly ‘disordered’ is dehumanising as it pathologises personhood based on culturally-situated and time- dependent metrics of acceptability and worth. Indeed, as stated by Hartley et al. (2022): “the construct itself, and the ideology that surrounds it, is inherently stigmatising, because of the way it positions dysfunction within the individual, and encapsulates and legitimises pejorative judgements about ‘acceptable’ behaviour or personhood.”

The dichotomous assertion regarding what constitutes a supposedly normal or simple personality versus an abnormal, pathological, complex, and/or unstable personality is a form of systemic oppression rooted in (Western-centric) hegemonic normalcy (see Logan & Karter, 2022; Rost, 2021; Kidd, Spencer, & Carel, 2022; Plant, Hyde, Keltner, & Devine, 2000; Armstrong, 2017; Harding, 2020), as was highlighted by Equality and Diversity (2012): “the mental health system throughout history has medicalised, condoned and ‘treated’ oppressed communities by assumed beliefs about our inherent inferior and unstable nature.” Such epistemic injustice is fundamentally antithetical to the core ideological premises of the neurodiversity paradigm and the social model of disability (Hartley et al., 2022).

from the amazing research paper:

Eating Disorders and Neurodivergence: A Stepped Care Approach By Laurence Cobbaert and Anna Rose (nee: Millichamp) on behalf of Eating Disorders Neurodiversity Australia (EDNA)

deconstruct past time to reconstruct present time

I love an A R C H I V E and this one is great, thanks for all the good work.

New button just dropped. Kudos to on Tumblr for the design! Feel free to use this to link to the site on your own website.

[id: a purple rectangle with a temple that has an infinity symbol in the middle. It's labeled "Autistic Archive".]

Having little to no language fluency in expressing my autistic identity for 40 years of my adult life (aka selective mutism), I found ways to express myself through songwriting, and the experimental arts including sound, video and performance work. Now that I am developing ways to speak about who I am from a proud autistic point of view, I am offering support for creative expression to others, or to support others in their own ways of expressing their lived experience that is not language based. Without my creative communication, I would not have been able to participate socially in the ways I have managed to. I am hoping to participate more and more in my community and in broader social contexts within the arts, with the skills I have now honed. Come join me over the holiday season to find rewarding and creative ways of self expression that reinforce a positive autistic identity.

Everything is crystal clear by Jacqui O'Reilly stop motion animation by Jacqui O'Reilly

Through patient pathways of equity and learning (and a whole lot of undying passion) I graduated with a Bachelor of Media Arts (Honours) in 2022 from UNSW Art, Design & Architecture Sydney Australia. Pictured here with the Vice-Chancellor of the university at the graduation ceremony in 2023, this was a really good day.