This July marks ten years since I made a life-changing phone call. It was one I’d put off for months and would be the start of a process that’s happening to this day. On 12th July 2011 I called social services about myself – and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.…

Venturing out into the city I love after more than a year of shielding has given me loads of opportunities recently to see the world from new angles. Last night I did this in a very literal and dramatic way.

Bovie and I had been for a swim at my local hydrotherapy pool.…

As a child I loved Lego and it’s younger sibling Duplo. I was a proud member of the Lego Club – in fact 35 years on I still have my membership badge!

And I still love it, but as a dyspraxic with Tourettes, the fine motor control required for more grown up Lego projects has always been in scarce supply for me.…

Tomorrow I have a phone appointment with the pain clinic. I’ve been under their care for a few years since I began experiencing chronic pain probably caused by the long-term impact of my tics, and being a wheelchair user.

I haven’t had an appointment in quite a while because my pain is generally manageable thanks to a mix of medications and other approaches.…

Yesterday I wrote about feeling sad and frustrated with myself after a tense day at work. Mostly I feel positive about my body and brain but unusually, yesterday, I felt less good about being neurodiverse.

As well as writing about how I felt I also tried to draw a map of my thoughts and feelings.…

It’s Friday evening and I’m exhausted and sad. Ines, my support worker, is changing my sheets in the other room, Gogglebox is on in the background, and I’m fighting back tears, and have been all afternoon and evening.

As a warning to you, I’m not feeling very proud of, or positive about my neurodiversity at the moment, and I’m feeling annoyed and worn out by my own behaviour.…

Last year I wrote about an approach to help manage challenging situations that I’d been introduced to – it had as its acronym: STOP. I created a drawing to go with it to help me and my support team remember it.…

It’s almost the end of the Easter holidays and I’m back at work after some much-needed time off. But it’s not just regular holidays that are important to my wellbeing: short breaks every day have always been crucial to helping me study, work and stay focussed.…

Leftwing Idiot, among other things, is a self-confessed Sneaker Head. As he often reminds me, he’s been that way since secondary school when having the wrong pair of trainers was a risky business. Apart from the occasional wild goose chase across town for an exclusive release (and a controversial amount of storage space in the castle) this obsession has had very little negative impact on me.…

We’re a year into a global pandemic and it’s disrupted most people’s lives significantly. It’s been a period of sustained uncertainty, with the way our society works repeatedly and abruptly changing.

While this will have been tricky for most people there are some specific new challenges for people with tics, as guest blogger Serena touched on at the end of last year.…