Gŵyl

As is the tradition of us Welsh folk, may I wish you Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! It's no longer such a stretch to track down a daffodil to share with you, they've been out on campus for weeks. 

Today brought my most intense engagement of the week which as expected has wiped me out. The excellent Cynthia Kim has written about about the "fluid adaptation" required of the autistic mind, particularly in relation to the loss in skills and capabilities (most dramatically as "shutdown") that emerges as a response to situations or periods where, as she puts it, "the demands of life are too great." One of my biggest professional anxieties is that a big shutdown occurs when I'm in the middle of leading a class or, like today, a workshop. Alternatively, that as a defensive strategy I become too (aggressively) controlling - heavily managing the flow of dialogue so that I can cope with it, which is entirely counter to my educational philosophy and general state of being. In the vernacular, are there moments when I seem to "lose it?"  And if so, do those moments undermine the fluid proficiency that I can perform in my best times such that I cease to become effective at what I do.

There was one moment today where I had to reboot the whole session in part because the sensory demands (for me) became too great - too many sources of stimuli at the same time as people asking challenging questions. The reboot worked for me, but was it at a cost to the democracy of the space? These are the questions I have to ask myself as an autistic educator when the intensity of an educational encounter inevitably needs to be rebalanced by solitude and shutdown. Although today this public reflection is also serving as a means of processing and rebalancing.  And to be fair to myself, the unsolicited feedback from collagues and participants was that today was fine, and effective, and they'll want me to do it again.  Which still won't alleviate the pernicious anxiety that accompanies us autistic folk in our encounters with the social, neurotypical world.