Growing in to Autism

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It is also packed full of useful information including facts and suggestions to help make the lives of Autistic people easier. and the journey to find oneself and/or rediscover their true self in adulthood, strikes at the core of this incredible story. My diagnosis gave me the courage to stand up and advocate both for myself as an individual and more broadly for autistic people around me; and slowly, progressively, that gave me the confidence to begin taking my mask off. This book is perfect for anyone who is autistic, wants to learn more about autism, or just wants to read an interesting story about a person discovering themselves and being totally human.

But from the inside looking out, she was struggling to make sense of her place in the world, constantly feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, and convinced that her challenges with daily life just meant that she had to try harder. Professor Sandra Thom-Jones is an autistic woman, and the very proud mother of two autistic adult sons.

Written with deep reflection, humour, and in part from a place of introspection, Sandra Thom-Jones has endured, as has her beloved family.

In articulating her experience of the world as an autistic person, the author also helps neurotypicals to view ourselves through another lens. Growing in to Autism is a book for everyone, not just those adults seeking a clinical diagnosis of autism. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and looked forward to reading about Thom-Jones' experiences as an Autistic woman. You will want to lend it to your neighbour, your child's teacher, your best friend, your lover, even your boss.Hopefully, they have also made it a little bit easier and safer for my autistic colleagues and students to take the same steps to make their day at work or study a little bit less exhausting.

I realised that I had spent so much time and energy masking who I was so that I could meet the expectations of other people that I had lost sight of who I actually was. Lots of detail about the way in which the author experiences the world around her and the difficulties she has faced and have been exacerbated by her delayed diagnosis. She regards autistics as of high intelligence particularly in analytic skills (her maybe but surely not all), they are rule abiding, and hence trustworthy and reliable, and creative in thinking outside the neurotypical box. I know that growing up I would have been much more comfortable being referred to as “autistic” than the terms regularly used by my peers to describe me -words like weirdo, freak, and others I wouldn’t want to put into print. I was diagnosed autistic at 44 and this book was recommended to me as one that would be useful, and it was.I had many conversations with my husband where I tried to explain that I felt my life was passing me by and I was missing something fundamentally important, but I couldn’t work out what it was. This memoir provides a clear demonstration that many Autistic people can meet these subjective descriptors of success—in Thom-Jones’ case, marriage, children, reaching the level of Professor and Pro Vice Chancellor of a university—yet still have many support needs. Often these appear to have been honed over many years of experience, particularly since learning about her Autistic identity, and finding supports within the Autistic community. I wanted information to be easy to find and accessible to people with different levels of knowledge and experience of autism. This will also be a great book for non-Autistic people who would like to learn more about autism, particularly about the experiences of Autistic adults and how to support them.