JungleLand

Being a teenager is hard. You experience so much change in such a short amount of time. 5 years is the entire incumbency period for a British Prime Minister, in which so many things can be pushed through. The same happens with your body. Hair sprouts, limbs grow and your perception of the world can evolve, deepen and darken. This doesn't mean we all start watching Donnie Darko endlessly and wearing black hoodies and listening to My Chemical Romance. But it does mean we become more intimately connected to one another, and one anothers' fears and anxieties. Even if we aren't aware of it. The struggles of teenagers are layered and complex and I certainly won't be able to provide a thorough and meaningful breakdown of the human condition between the ages of 11 and 16. But to throw undiagnosed autism into the ever-spinning tombola of neuroses that exists within every teenage boy is to complicate my experience growing up, whilst making the world that little bit more mysteriou

For an autism outreach seminar that I was lucky enough to be invited onto as a guest speaker, on 24 March, the very first question I am to be posed is: what is it like living in a neurotypical world? What an extraordinarily jarring and deep question. What a thing to be asked as an opener.  For neurotypical readers, consider this as a similarly daunting question: if you were indefinitely trapped in a fairground, what would you do? Would you go on the rides, over and over and over again, praying that the fun and the repetition would translate into a meaningful routine that helps lift the haze that clouds your strangely newfound and puzzling existence? Would you take stock of your surroundings, mapping the fair so you know where to go, who you encounter, what to do, how to do it, and when? Would you willingly enter the House of Horrors, dragging the weight you feel in your stomach around until your insides feel the muscle memory to ignore the adrenaline shots every time the room feels too

Sia, the Australian singer-songwriter, has received a fair bit of backlash for her recent ventures into the realm of the autistics. For the unaware, she has made her directorial debut chronicling the daily life of a non-verbal autistic girl called Music and her relationship with her sister, played by Kate Hudson. Early hopes for a reconstruction, in the popular mind, of what it means to be autistic slowly slid into peat, and Sia's subsequent Twitter tantrum has unveiled a particularly nasty underbelly as to how we may  want to see autistic people. Very, very early responses to Sia's project were ones of promise and hope. Was the hugely diverse and wildly heterogeneous autistic community finally going to get adequate recognition, from a popular, accessible pop star? Was this the film that finally laid out the complex and broad range of emotional needs that some autistic people cannot expressly request? Was her film anything other than an insidious, shameless promotion of her own

Pandemic. Lockdown. Boris Johnson. Tories killing British wildlife. Anti-vaxxers. Scousers and Mancunians uniting over their hatred of 5G masts. And then burning them down. A lot has happened since my PhD-induced hiatus from writing these pieces.  I don't think I can provide too much regular, original and exclusive insight into lockdown as an autistic person, and for that I recommend @commaficionado and @emkburke  on Twitter, yet I can and  am allowed to get irrationally and unnecessarily worked up over minor things that most people would not let enter their lexicon of labours and daily travails. So let us crank that hood open and warm this engine up, baby. Firstly, 'social distancing'. It is literally a term that makes zero contextual sense, being misused daily. A term that reeks of medical advice that has been given by a Tory-strongarmed scientific adviser, a vignette of Westminster itself: desperately requiring something catchy to paper over near-total indifference to h

A bad thing happened to me. I won't be doing a grand reveal, like some sort of whimsical, bearded magician. I don't want to publicly talk about it in explicit terms. But I do want to reflect on how we all process trauma, autistic or not. We, as a culture and a society, especially in Britain, especially in England, are particularly bad at giving ourselves, or rather being given, time to cope, reflect and act on what we've exeperienced. Talking about abuse, or grief, or anxieties is almost haram . Being open about not just feelings, but also the way in which past trauma has shaped you as a person, as a father, mother, sister, etc., acts as a foam battering ram against the sturdy, wooden gates that protect the perfect, stoic, beer-swilling utopia that some people feel England is. No matter the assurances we get from rich or affected public figures that its okay to talk about your feelings, it is still taboo. Ellen DeGeneres posts about profound senses of isolation from her mu

"T here is no country in the world that does not practice tattooing or some other form of permanent body decoration..." - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man , 1871. --- I remember on Tattoo Fixers , a show on E4 about people getting their disastrous tattoos covered with more tasteful artwork, a man getting a zombie tattooed over his entire pelvic region. The plane of pelvic skin where one's hair would otherwise grow flashed an ominous-looking, drooling, somnambulent zombie. It looked fairly cool. But the clincher came when the audience realised he also got the entire length of his penis fully tattooed in the colour and tones of a zombie's outstretched finger. Both designs matched up to give the artwork a feral and desperate look, combining comedy with a kind of toe-curling disgust, with the longing for the safety of your bed, far, far away from anything else that could possibly bring that thing to attention. Can you imagine maintaing both: a) your dignity and b) your