This blog has been very cathartic for me this year. I can have random garden-related decisions and in writing them down enable conclusions to be made or persuade myself I’ve had the awkward conversations. I had set out to find work just as we entered into the pandemic as it was the thing that I always felt I lost when I was diagnosed with MS almost fourteen years ago when my daughter was only a few months old. But I’m not sure I’ve been successfully applying for jobs I have the ability for?

Have employers also recognised the same characteristics which my now teenage daughter has inherited from me when she was diagnosed on the autistic spectrum? Perhaps I’ve been running from understanding my own place on that diaspora. Perhaps this is what makes me difficult to employ (or is it my age?) in the 2020s when subtle misunderstandings make me think it should be easy to fit me into a complex working environment and actually make me wholly unsure where I fit into a hugely nuanced contemporary workplace?

Maybe I need work to be set out in black and white and the shades of grey complicate it for me? I’ve failed online applications in the past (although I can play online scrabble till the letters start to blur) because they are set up to find people who have certain round personalities and who fit into certain similarly circular holes. That the questions can categorise my online abilities so precisely is somewhat bewildering to my almost fifty-year-old self.

But unlike MS, it is believed the autistic spectrum placement runs through generations whereas MS is not conclusively felt to be inherited but certainly occupies a similar slot in the human genome, as yet undetermined. Do I need to chase this up and put myself on the already stretched NHS waiting lists? Or can I make a self-diagnosis? MS was devastating to my ‘new mum’ world and an ASD confirmation could well be a step too far. Although it’s just a sign that I work well on my own so blogging is fine! It’s a conundrum waiting to be discovered, or is it?