Autastic Review of The Year.

Well it's been a packed year here at Autastic Towers so thought I'd do a quick overview of the highs and lows of 2024 with a special mention to those who deserve extra credit.

Warning tho' there'll probably be some time jumps (a bit like Doctor Who when it was good) as some of the stuff is either ongoing or linked plus expect heady amounts of swearing.

And slight sarcasm.

Enjoy.

 

 

Bizarrely looking back I spent most of January coping with my (stress based) psoriasis hitting my ears again and going very deaf with sensory nightmares and throbbing headaches ahoy...imagine being drunk without the fun bits.

In a lovely bit of symmetry I'm sitting typing this in exactly the same situation, albeit now with the pesky psoriasis now also covering my legs and back.

Joy.

Also in January we had yet another new social worker assigned to the Cassman seeing as he was almost 18 and they've left it so long he was moved over to adult services - which means we need to start the whole assessment process regarding additional support for college again....only they actually hadn't swapped him over at all and then gave us yet another worker (hi Sarah) in May.

Obviously tho' it wasn't worth having a meeting about college till August (the day after he enrolled to be precise) which after 18 months of them doing absolutely fuck all left them 4 days to put support in place.

That 4 days included the weekend by the way.

The meeting went as well as can be expected when an inexperienced SW turns up with her boss in tow to 'check' she's following the SW rule book and if nothing else proved that it's not just Autistic folk that have no social skills, speak in a really boring monotone voice and refuse eye contact.

Gordon (for that is he) spent the entire meeting telling me all the things SW couldn't do - because a man said they couldn't - before getting upset that I dared to quote the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) at him (although Glasgow City Council, the Scottish Government and by default SW have allegedly signed up to it he hadn't read it and seem a wee bit put out when I helpfully offered to print it out for him) and all whilst looking at his watch because he had a "busy schedule" that day.

Bless.

Anyway to no-ones surprise Sarah cried off in August, but not before sending us a really patronizing letter accusing us both not do enough to 'alleviate' the issues we have regarding support ourselves and deciding that because Cassidy's adult disability payment had been cancelled in May (the new Scottish Social Security system isn't set up for twins and/or multiple claims from one address so Amelia's went thru' fine, Cassidy's got cancelled and after flagging the issue Embeth's was done by phone) that it meant that he wasn't actually disabled so had no need for support.

Take all the time you need for that to sink in, I'll still be here when you recover.

As an interesting aside, of the 15 Autistic young adults referred to Partick Social Work for support assessments absolutely none of them got any support put in place at all.

With means either they know way much more about Autism than anyone else or that they're just really shit at their jobs.

Hint: it's the latter.

January wasn't all bad tho' - I did do a couple of rather splendid commissions and got to celebrate at The Admiral Bar's yearly Bowie night (adding 4 plus hours of rather stunning visuals to the mix if I do say so myself) so swings and roundabouts really.

 

Mine's literally being able to do my job well and not hide the fact that my organisation isn't fit for purpose and most of my staff are clueless children.

 

February was fairly quiet for us, with nothing (excepting waiting for meetings obviously) to go wrong or get in the way with the yearly Frightfest illustration gig which meant we had rather more energy than normal come March when we finally had someone from housing get in touch with us about an outstanding repair all thanks to our (former and sadly missed) MP Carol Monaghan.

 You see just before lockdown (!) we found a teensy tiny leak in our bathroom which we reported to our housing officer who then promptly forgot about it....cue 4 odd years of an occasional visit to see where it is (example: "It might be the boiler" - checks boiler - "No it's not but I'm just a boiler guy so I'll have to send someone else!") culminating in a now collapsing kitchen floor, wobbly toilet and water pressure so low that the shower and washing machine don't work.

Joy.

 

At least the toilet's working now.

 

 

To be honest the majority of staff we'd dealt with had been really great and understanding regarding having a house of 4 Autistic folk and how the repairs/upheaval would affect us as we politely kept apologizing for the house being a wee bit messy at the time due to the fact that not only had we taken a break from redecorating and the like (due to the fact that we're going to have to box everything up for the full repairs) and that it was almost impossible nigh on impossible to organise a bulk uplift of rubbish etc. due to no-one at the city council actually wanting to do it.

Anyway after a fairly pleasant meeting with our (new) housing officer, this information was translated as a perfect excuse to contact Social Work to  raise a 'concern' that the house was untidy and that we needed respite as we obviously couldn't deal with the kids.

Seriously.

Obviously the fact that housing had totally failed to complete a simple repair job after 5 or so years is totally OK.

As you can imagine we were a wee bit surprised by this.

As was, it must be said the girls actual (utterly fab) Social Worker who couldn't believe it had happened.

So after dealing with a totally separate Social Worker (who couldn't understand why the issue had been raised), then dealing with housing in order to file a complaint I'm was at a point where any goodwill/energy I had re: getting the repairs done has totally evaporated and to be honest the thought of having to interact with housing ever again made me feel sick to the stomach.

Which was pretty lucky really because after promising to do the bathroom in May they decided to just leave it half (quarter?) done.

True the leak appears to have stopped (thanks to a new toilet) but we now have a huge hole that goes from the bathroom to the kitchen and still no water pressure.

It seems they 'forgot' that the stop tap for the water was in the kitchen (behind the washing machine) and because it was a bathroom repair they couldn't move the aforementioned washer to turn it off.

There was a murmur of it getting done during the summer but the idea of moving everyone out to a strange house during the summer holidays was frankly ludicrous so since then we've heard nothing.

The new toilet is nice tho.

March was a mix of the bloody brilliant with the utter shite.

The massive highs (Frightfest!) and lows (everything else!) hit so hard that I was barely functional by the end of the month - gotta love Autistic burnout.

 

 

April saw me resigning from work due to a disagreement with the man in charge on what constitutes an Autism friendly environment - I define it as an open, honest work place with reasonable adjustments available when needed and the mad idea of listening to the Autistic staff member when it comes to talking about Autism and related issues whereas they defined an Autism friendly environment as one where they could bully and insult everyone, changing the rules to suit whilst ruling the project like their own wee fiefdom.

Suffice to say I really can't be arsed with that kind of thing from anyone and wasn't surprised to find it shut down a few months later.

Fuck around and find out anyone?

On a plus point we did enjoy 'celebrating' Autism Acceptance Month so to that end I'd like to list all the organizations, businesses, local authority and Scottish Parliament types who've supported it in Glasgow and beyond:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers (he types sarcastically).

 

May was pretty good if I'm honest, our little film AUTISM PLAYS ITSELF won the Best International Short Documentary Award at the Toronto Hot Docs Festival which meant much celebrating as we prepared for even more festival showings and maybe, just maybe an actual UK premiere whilst in real life the aforementioned cancelling of Cassidy'a DLA happened.

Happy 18th birthday young man!

To be fair the staff at Social Security Scotland (and we've dealt with a lot) have been nothing but brilliant tho' hopefully the idea that an issue like this would take 8 weeks to sort has changed to something a little more realistic (clue: it's still not sorted).

This dragged on into June and by the time we realised they couldn't just re-instate it and it'd be a brand new claim Cass had finished school which meant that we'd have to wait till the end of August to get his supporting letter.

This obviously confused SW who originally said we could just change the date on the old one and were then surprised when I pointed out that this would be fraud. Interestingly enough tho' at no point did anyone at SW offer to fill in the actual SW part of the application.

It's almost as if they didn't know about it due to sheer incompetence.

That couldn't be the case tho' could it?

 

 

July was much of a muchness with the usual cancelled SW meetings, more lovely commissions (this time for Paul Wady's Edinburgh fringe show) and news that  AUTISM PLAYS ITSELF would have its UK premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival on 19th of August as part of the Out of Competition Shorts Programme. 

High excitement factor!

August was mental (and to be honest I've still not recovered) as I flitted 'tween attending the Fringe (Cass and the girls first festival experience), seeing our film have it's UK premiere - as well as an audio only version feature on the Radio 4 series Short Cuts hosted by Josie Long - and was shiftly brought back down to earth when I realised that absolutely nothing was going to be put in place for Cassidy and college leaving us two choices:

He doesn't go or I take him and work as his PA every day for free.

In case you're wondering why Rho couldn't do it she's busy escorting the girls to and from college because after 3 years nothing has been put in place for them either.

Good job we don't need to work/shop/tidy/have lives isn't it?

Team Autism Assemble!

 

 

As you can imagine September was completely taken up with college escorting and PA-ing alongside trying to shop, work and do normal things like laundry (luckily we have a launderette up the road.

As an amusing aside my (stress-related) psoriasis flared up again so the left hand side of my head ended up solid causing deafness in that ear. 

October saw me not only being able to finally reveal the faux 70s horror movie poster art I'd done for Robin Elliott-Knowles sequence in The Stimming Pool - a hybrid film that presents the possibilities of a world informed by autistic perspectives and perception but also the (aforementioned) Social Work season finale when they decided to cancel any support Cassidy had in place (which to be fair was absolutely fuck all) because, as mentioned earlier, we've 'made no effort' to do anything to alleviate the situation.

Obviously the fact that we had to wait for the schools to return to get supporting letters, having to escort the kids to college/work at college 3 days a week alongside then having to do laundry, shopping and the like on the other 2 days (as well as trying to get the house sorted - still - wasn't seen as reason enough to give us the support to begin with.

To give our situation some (serious) context, there's only Rho and myself, no family and no friend support group which means if anything happens to one of us (even something as minor as falling ill) the whole routine of college, shopping, laundry etc. falls apart.

This happened in December when I lost my hearing totally due to that pesky stress-based Psoriasis  at the same time as being hit by the flu...Cassidy had to miss college and Rho was left doing everything else.

Frankly just thinking about the pressure we're under is terrifying.

And my highly intellectual, well thought out opinion on Social Work?

Shower of utter useless bastards the lot of them. 

And yes, you can quote me on that.

 

November was busy, busy, busy between meetings with the Alasdair Gray Archive (exciting project stuff), the launch of the Autism Through An Autistic Lens exhibition I was involved with in Stirling and finally (after years of badgering) getting invited to join the Autism Cross-Party Group at the Scottish Parliament. 

And yes I did behave.

Which leads us to December and our wedding anniversary (26 years!), my birthday (55!), Christmas shenanigans and the International Day Of Persons With Disabilities.

We celebrated by pointing out to any politicians, organisations online that mentioned it that:

 

As a plus point I did get an email from Take That on my birthday (and no it wasn't just because I'm on the mailing list they really care!).

So that's it for our year in Autism.

Next week it's back to normality with escorting, college, letter writing and more campaigning for not just support for us but change for everyone.

Will it happen?

I hope so but I'm not holding my breath.

Happy New Year all.