Once upon a time

 Once upon a time I thought I would leave school, go to a good university, choose a career and either stay in one job working my way up the ladder or move between companies as I climbed the ladder. After all, that’s what the school careers service told me everyone from that school did.

School was structured. Home life was even more structured with constant after school activities. I knew I didn’t have friends. I knew I got bullied for being different. I knew I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong. But I knew how to succeed in lessons, learning and structured clubs. I won drama prizes, school prizes, music awards. I got a place at Oxford.

And then it fell apart.

No structured social interaction, largely self-directed learning. Cue mental health difficulties and under-performance.

I scraped a lower second. I watched others ace career interviews while I floundered.

I am now 57. My life has had impact. But I have never achieved in the sense that others achieve and I was expected to achieve. I have not had a solid career. However much I can explain that in terms of parenting and health – well, those are the socially acceptable explanations rather than my truth. My truth is I have never felt I fit in, never felt adequate, never understood how to play the games needed to build a career.

Age 57, I had an autism diagnosis. How different life might have been if that had been known when I was 17. I have an inkling of how different life might have been as I watch my daughter benefit from a self-understanding I never had, a phased transition from the structure of school to the free-fall of university, and a love for herself as she is.

It is too late for me to benefit from current awareness of neurodivergence and changes in the workplace. There is still time for me to support the daughters of today so they can benefit from self-understanding and awareness that the workplace is not the only option. For many, like me, entrepreneurship or being their own boss will be the way forward. Through the work of PinkGold Ltd, I look forward to opening doors and helping them on their way.

When I left Hereford

I'm still experimenting with styles. 

I blogged before about how I use writing to work out what I think. That's still true for how I approach data analysis; writing is a key element of analytic work. 

Here, I've used writing to work out what I am thinking and feeling. I wanted to see what happens if I use artifacts as a lead-in to exploring things that are less tangible.

When I left Hereford, I kept my first toy. Yellow Ted travelled with me. He grew up with me as I grew into an adult, and a parent myself. Technically he is now my husband's. I could think of no greater gift of myself to him than the one who saw all as I grew up. My own memory of childhood is almost non-existent.

My father died, and I have been clearing the family home. I found the loft toys. I had remembered none of them. Yet as they emerged from the loft, parts of my childhood emerged with them and I remembered me as a child holding them and playing with them. These flashes of first-hand childhood memory left me motionless, not breathing, then blinking. So different from all previous, second-hand childhood memory, my dissociative dispassionate observation of another life, a different child.

Yellow Ted is now back where he belongs. With the toys from the loft. With the cot duck, floppy bunny, the spirograph, and Cubby who was too delicate and precious to be allowed to play with me. 

The loft toys did not grow up. They remained in my childhood. And my childhood remained as separate from the adult me as the lofted toys remained from Yellow Ted.  

Those flashes of me as the toys emerged from the loft are the first taste of a me that crosses the generations within me – child, young adult, parent to children. I am disconcerted, scared and curious. 

For now, cot duck and Cubby sit on the mantelpiece at home. Their friends are back in their storage bag. There is only so much memory one can handle at a time.