Ashleigh's Blog

Calendars, to-do lists, organised bullet journals with cute headlines... We've all fallen for them. In fact, there are whole sections of TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest dedicated to "studyspo" - the art of showing off fancy, colour-coded stationery designed to make work or study look glamorous and fun.  I should know, because I feel like I've tried every productivity tip, every study method, every pastel gel pen set you can think of but the result is always the same. I get at most a couple of weeks of pure bliss, getting everything done that I want to and then the belligerent dopamine-hungry goblin in my brain throws its toys out of the pram and calls it quits. Suddenly all of my routines are gone, Pomodoro method is out of the window and I feel once again frustrated at myself for not being able to do what everyone else does.  When I realised I was neurodivergent, this meant unpacking everything that I knew about productivity. First, I felt a huge amount of relief that...

TW: self-harm, suicide, eating disorders This week I was listening to a podcast [1] about the link between autism, self-harm and something called 'alexithymia' which is common in autistic people and is basically the inability to identify or express your emotions [2]. In this podcast, Dr. Rachel Moseley reads out some statistics which were seriously concerning:  "Autistic people without intellectual disability are on average dying 16 years earlier than non-autistic people... One of the most common causes of death is suicide." "There's some suggestion that autistic people are 9 times more likely to die of suicide." "66% of autistic adults report suicide ideation and up to 35% report attempt. These numbers are really frightening but also unsurprising to me, given that I myself have struggled a lot with mental health issues, self-harm and suicidal thoughts and the majority of late-diagnosed autistic adults, and in particular women, that I have seen spea...

I'm unbelievably nervous to make this post but I have a lot to talk about and instead of explaining to each individual person in my life, I'd rather just be lazy about it and explain it all in one go.  Just over a week ago, I was assessed and diagnosed with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). Although this has come as a surprise to some of the people close to me and will undoubtedly be a surprise to many more people, this wasn't particularly shocking information for me. To give you a bit of background, I was a fairly happy child until I reached about the age of 6. I think from what I remember and what I've been told, I was always a bit odd but no one really noticed or cared for those first few years because it's easy to just assume that's how little kids act.  At the age of 6, we moved from London to Surrey and this meant a new school for me. As soon as I got there I think my differences were quickly noticed. The whole 5 years that I was at that school I was bullied...