On Our Mind

Posted on 2 Apr 2024

For World Autism Acceptance Week, which runs from 2 to 8 April, we’re sharing the experiences of colleagues who are living with autism and the challenges they face.

Fay Taylor wasn’t diagnosed with autism until her early 40s. Growing up she didn’t fit in, and she remembers numerous instances of being pointed out by peers as different. She drifted through various jobs but found her vocation as a Speech and Language Therapist in the Community Intellectual Disability team at Nottinghamshire Healthcare, after researching about language development to support her daughter, who was also diagnosed with Autism. Fay share’s her story…

“Growing up I knew I didn’t fit in. I remember numerous instances of being pointed out by peers as different, and, when I was a new year 7 at secondary school, I was pulled out of a corridor by some much older girls (who seemed like absolute giants) who shouted eagerly at their peers, “You’ve got to get a look at this girl, she’s really weird.” Looking back, I don’t quite know why I didn’t realise that this was not something that I should be having to put up with, but it was a much less tolerant era, and I just kept my head down and got on with things.

“I coped through teenage years by getting into the heavy metal cliques where we all actively pursued being different and standing out, and so my differences generally ducked by under the radar. I never really gelled socially, never found a tribe of close friends, but did manage to get a group of acquaintances I could at least hang around on the periphery of. I was academically very able, and being in top sets for subjects provided a bit of a buffer zone for bullying during the school day, but I dreaded the bus journey home, and I was assaulted multiple times for saying the wrong thing or looking at someone “funny.”

“I drifted through various jobs, training as a teacher but never fully being accepted as one of the staff team and always on the temporary contract moving on and never settling; before I had my own children. My youngest daughter has always clearly been neurodivergent in a range of ways - she was diagnosed at an early age with dyspraxia (now called Developmental Coordination Disorder) which also affected her speech quite significantly, and once she developed intelligibility in her speech it became clear that she also was autistic, and she was diagnosed in 2020.

“From my own research trying to support her language development, I had become interested in communication and returned to university to retrain as a Speech and Language Therapist. The combination of my daughter’s diagnosis, and the sudden loss of all my routines during the pandemic, combined with the sensory overload of safety announcements on tannoys and bright yellow and black warning signs everywhere made the penny drop that there was definitely a lot of the features I saw in my daughter in myself. I was diagnosed with autism during my final year at university.

“I went through a huge period of mentally running back through incidents in my life where I’d just assumed I was a rubbish person and destined to mess things up. Reviewing them I realised just how much I’d been set up to fail by circumstances beyond my control. The times at school where I’d been told off for saying something “rude” but the thing I had said had never actually been explained to me and I was just in trouble and told “you know what you said” yet again. At one point for an entire year, I was seated around the corner from the rest of my class hidden behind a filing cabinet because I was “trouble”.

“I joined the Trust as a Speech and Language Therapist (SLT) after I graduated, working in the Community Intellectual Disability team and I can definitely say that I found my niche working here. I’m in an incredible position where I can use the way that my brain is wired to understand many of my client group better. I sometimes pick up on sensory elements that haven’t been noticed before (echoey dining rooms being a particularly regular one) which might be leading to behaviour that is challenging; or I can understand there’s a logical reason behind a particular behaviour which hasn’t occurred to others before. There’s also a particular joy in getting to spend time with another autistic person and having a conversation in the wonderfully free flowing, sharing of information about topics that interest each other, bouncing from topic-to-topic autistic conversation style which can leave others observing it completely baffled at the speed it is moving. The fact that my daughter’s current massive area of interest is Pokemon and I know my Pikachus from my Pidgeys is not something I had anticipated being a big part of my professional tookit - but it is!

“I find change difficult to process, I make the odd social slip-up and I struggle with various elements of sensory overload. For me, I find visual overload the hardest to process - lots of movement in the corners of my vision is particularly challenging for me, so busy spaces, and frustratingly, motorway driving with multiple lanes. The power that understanding it is a result of how my brain works causing that anxiety is phenomenal though and it means that I can function so much better than I previously did.

“I look back on the person I was before I was diagnosed and my SLT role in the Trust, and I genuinely cannot believe I’m the same person now. My diagnosis and the understanding that has given me has been the making of me. I’m glad that we’re moving toward a more accepting world than the one I grew up in and that I understand that I’m autistic and I can use that as a strength instead of something to try to hide or apologise for.”

Visit the Trust’s Neurodevelopmental Special Service web page for more information on this service.