Hello everyone, first off, I’d like to wish you all a happy new year. While it was hopefully an improvement for most of you over 2020 and 2021, 2022 was still a scary and uncertain time, with the war in Ukraine, an increase in energy bills, and it never being more apparent that climate change is “happening” as opposed to “going to happen”. So I’d just like to express my hope that, well, in 2023 there will be more hope!
I’d just like to talk about some changes to the blog that I’ve decided on after a lot of thought. This came about for a few reasons. Firstly, trying to juggle writing a blog and other things, such as a music college course and writing and recording an album. Secondly, I need a better way to manage my difficulties with attention span, namely, my attention span is either 100% or 0%, with nothing in between. And lastly, I wanted to cover so many more topics with the blog. Where are the album reviews? How come my blogpost on the history of the electric organ is still incomplete? Why aren’t there a lot more blogposts on cycling or my favourite places?
This blog grew out of a series of Facebook posts I put up for Autism Acceptance month in 2022, then I quickly grew tired of Facebook as a medium for blogging, so I set up this WordPress blog. Soon I expanded the blog to talk about pretty much every subject that interests me, but the aim was always to have autism as the central focus. This was because I always saw autism as the most important subject I talk about, despite the progress in autism acceptance, I think we are far from safe from it all sliding back. So that’s why the original plan was, one blogpost on autism a month, and only a blogpost on cycling or astronomy etc if I had time. Then this changed to, at least one blogpost a month on a subject I came up with, “What Is Autism”, and only posts on anything else if there was time. But this isn’t going to work anymore, and I’ll explain why.
It has become too difficult to juggle my various life interests, and on top of that, an attention span that just, well, for good or bad, just does whatever the hell it wants. It’s hard to push myself to write about autism, when all I can focus on at that time is music, or cycling, or astronomy, or whatever subject my brain will decide to hyperfixate on next. While autism is what got me into blogging, it’s even in the name of the blog, making sure it’s the main topic of the blog I’m finding just isn’t sustainable. And the truth is, I don’t enjoy blogging about autism, any more, or any less, than any of the other subjects I blog about. So here is how things will change.
There will still be at minimum one blogpost a month, but it will be on any subject I choose. I might finally start working on those album reviews! Or maybe there might be some blogposts on subjects I haven’t even thought of yet. This doesn’t necessarily mean there’ll be less autism blogposts, because I might find that doing no autism posts for two months, but four in a single month after that for example, works well for me. And my hope is, that the autism posts will get better, because now I have the option to spend two or there months working on one, making sure it is right, instead of getting stressed out trying to hit the deadline of one a month.
I know for some of you who read the blog, the main topic that interests you is autism, and I hope it’s not a disappointment that there might be less autism posts, but I felt that changing things so that every subject I want to write about was given equal importance was the only way forward. I also hope that the readership of the autism blogposts might increase this way, because people might be drawn to the blog because I have a lot of posts on astronomy, or cycling, or music, and then one day they decide to take a look at one of the autism posts and then their perspective is changed. So my hope is that all these changes will radically improve the blog. And I’m looking forward to it, maybe I’ll finally get that blogpost on the electric organ done!
Ponderings Of An Autist 