JungleLand

** Content warning: This piece contains ableist slurs ** The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel that reads so much differently the second time you read it, owing to a major "apostolic" twist . The movie, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, is also a noticably different experience once you've revelled in the twist . After you've taken in the twist , and you cast your eye back over the story, meaning starts to crystalize through the unpanned and frosted glass. Until then, you're comfortable going along for the ride, enjoying the book/movie in-the-moment as it taps in to a nervous sense of anticipation. Something is coming. And as the payload drops and the twist explodes, your very place in the world shakes along with it.  I wasn't diagnosed with autism until I was 23. For 23 of my 24 years on this Earth, I had been living alongside, and ensconced by, my own Tyler Durden. My own Tyler Durden didn't cultivate my anticapitalist sentiment and use i

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