Being different

 Rather a rough week here with both the weather and a rather bad head meaning for instances I only got out the once on Sunday and I'm on painkillers and bed rest.

Anyway laying here with a few cartoons playing out on the Milkshake! block on Channel Five I was reflecting a bit on what makes me different to the point a specific reddit is a place I do check in most days for people who share the same sorts of issues as we all try to cope with something nobody prepared us for.

Most of us are broadly familiar with the development cycle of people as even if you didn't touch it in school biology classes, you'll observed different members of your family and how over time they have changed not just in looks but the sorts of things they are interested in and are more able to understand.

For most people it's a fairly linear concept, extensive needs changes to guidance that diminishes as you get older around the same point you are able to take on more responsibility to yourself understanding more of what being a grown up is.

Then suddenly you get a birthday card with a key on it and everybody says you're a young adult now as you're looking at getting a job or going to Uni.

Well it doesn't happen like that for some of us, I got stuck a few years before adolescence in lots of ways and even at that point I was more in tune with the class a year or two below ours struggling to keep up with them.

That gap got bigger and more pronounced as my peers became teens and especially by sixteen plus, just about following the subjects but very out of sync with teenage life simply because I wasn't  a teenager mentally.

People do struggle to actually understand how it is that many of us who often have autism, adhd and other issues are just like that, in many respects children who may have the gifts that come from really understanding some topics very well but many of the vulnerabilities and needs that a child have.

Often we are dismissed for "refusing" to act our age when in reality we haven't elected to not be grown ups we are only acting on our actual feelings, emotions and behaviour that we innately have because we don't have any other.

We struggle when where we are able to find work, much of the conversation not least at things like office parties revolves around adult programming, grown up leisure and  the like so we can't  talk about what we love to play with, the cartoon series we adore and our latest plushies.

And then there those occasions when what you are meaning is utterly over our heads and the times people try to take advantage of it.

None of us is perfect but please do try to understand us and don't condemn what you don't understand.