Explaining Where I’ve Been and Talking About Billie-Jade

How to start this, how to start this, how to start this? Oh, well look at that, I started this. How to continue though? I guess the best course of action is by explaining where I’ve been and why it took me a bit to update this. The first reason is because I’ve had other things on my mind and the second is that due to the first, I’ve actually lacked the motivation to work on anything creative. While I still don’t have much personal motivation, there is something I promised someone that I’d do a bit ago. This person wrote a brief description about me, so now it’s past my time to do the same for them. That person is the woman you see pictured above, aka Billie-Jade aka Girl on the Spectrum.

We got to talking quite simply enough, I was looking for ways to promote and grow my blog and stumbled across hers. After reading a few of her posts and liking them, I reached out via email and received a positive response back. She was willing to work together. GREAT! Then life throws me a curve ball in the form of what you saw in my two previous posts and yeah…

Now, before I continue please let me state now that I’m sorry if any of my language in this post (such as high/low functioning autism or other similar words/phrases) offends you. I’m never trying to offend anyone, simply use words I know as descriptors in order to best explain my point. If anyone would like to kindly point out which words would be better, that would be extremely helpful. With that in mind, I’m bringing this up here, because in a previous post a commenter brought it up to me.

Anyway, back to Billie-Jade. Aside from the fact that she seems to be a high functioning Autistic Adult like me, the thing that drew me into reaching out to her is the fact that her blog appears to be a great contrast to mine. While I speak from a more personal perspective, she often speaks from a more analytical perspective with sources she’s researched. As a result, I figured that our two blogs would play well off each other. While she does talk about personal stuff from time to time, the majority of posts are more the research type, something which I’ve been wanting to incorporate into my posts from time to time. That said, my favorite post that she’s done to date is titled Autism Health Passport, something that should be available in the US if it’s not already. If someone could please let me know if it is, that would be very helpful.

In the meantime, my favorite line in this post is shown above, as it’s something I do myself. While I can explain my health on my own, it’s only to a point. Like Billie, I too would much rather and often have, said something to the affect of, “I’m fine” just to leave the environment and continue on with my day as I feel too overwhelmed to deal with whatever I’m being told in the moment. One of my fears is something serious being wrong with me and being unable to voice it due to fear of not being believed or told it’s nothing. This is something that often stops me from calling my doctor likely when I should. Well, that and other factors which I will go into into into another post.

Back on track, I reached out to Billie-Jade because she was so relatable to myself and how our two blogs played off each other. I’ll be honest, when I did first reach out, I didn’t even realize she was from the United Kingdom. When I found out she is, that only solidified my decision even more, as it’s interesting to me if no one else, to see how Autism is handled and treated in our two different countries, her in the UK and me in the US (United States). For a more in depth look about that topic, please just click here to be directed to her amazing blog. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

She truly is an amazing woman whose blog was nominated and won the award for being one of Twinkl’s top autism blogs of 2020. Whether you know who Twinkl is or not, it’s still quite an accomplishment to be nominated for and WIN a prize such as that. It’s something that I can only hope to achieve one day, be it through Twinkl (who I’ll admit here I know nothing about), or someone else. To simply know that my work is meaning something to someone. To actually have something I could print out and be proud of relating to my blog. If only, if only.

I will admit that even with as cool as that would be, it’s not the true reason I work on this. No, that reason is honestly for all of you in the hopes that it helps prove yo you if no one else, that there is someone out there like you, who can relate. Like I said previously, it’s the main reason I chose to contact Billie-Jade in the first place. Our blogs are so similiar yet so different. While I do hope my blog someday accomplishes what hers has, I am currently content with where I am.

Thank you all so much for reading and I hope to see you back here for my next post.