autistic adult – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Publication date Thursday, March
28, 2024
Price £18.99
EAN\ISBN-13 9781800961395
Hardback
288 pages

Description

To the outside world, Emily looks like a typical girl, with a normal family, living an ordinary life. But inside, Emily does not feel typical, and the older she gets, the more she realises that she is different.
As she finally discovers when she is 16, Emily is autistic. Girl Unmasked is the extraordinary story of how she got there – and how she very nearly didn’t.

Still only 21, Emily writes with startling candour about the years leading up to her diagnosis. How books and imagination became her refuge as she sought to escape the increasing anxiety and unbearable stresses of school life; how her OCD almost destroyed her; how a system which did not understand autism let her down; and how she came so close to the edge that she and her family thought she would never survive.

In this simple but powerful memoir, we see how family and friends became her lifeline and how, post-diagnosis, Emily came to understand her authentic self and begin to turn her life around, eventually becoming a mental health nurse with a desire to help others where she herself had once been failed.

Ultimately uplifting, Girl Unmasked is a remarkable insight into what it can be like to be autistic – and shows us that through understanding and embracing difference we can all find ways to thrive.

I should have realised
Long ago
There’s something a little off
About me.

Everyone knew how
To act
To react
To interact
Inate instructions calling time
Picking up the rules and the rhyme.

No one told me the rules of the game
Or even that we were playing, with
No choice but to play.

I learnt the rules, or a strange
Version thereof from
Books.

Because nobody bothered to sit down
And explain the rules of the game, or
that I had to play.

So when i say or do
The wrong thing, try remembering
You knew the rules, how to act, interact, react,
And I’m still learning with every book I read.

I wrote a poem last night, it’s had some compliments from a number of people. I’m quite pleased with the metaphor and hopefully it gets the message across.