It’s been about a week since I wrote and posted here. I have had all kinds of posts running through my head but nothing that has come to fruition and formed into anything like a remotely coherent blog post.
I have also been kind of busy in my thoughts in relation to the forthcoming Victorian Autism Conference. It’s one of those great big events that brings together therapists, researchers, autism organisations and the like. There’s good things and bad things about these great big events, even if in reality they are really designed with the professional class in mind.
This time around there does appear to be an effort to include actually autistic people. With a number of speakers being autistic people, including keynote speakers. As well as this a keynote speaker this year is Steve Silberman, of Neurotribes and Wired magazine fame. He has really come to prominence within the autism world. His wonderful work Neurotribes is perhaps the best possible piece of writing on autism that a non-autistic person could create.
I had planned to attend the conference as it was going to be my first big autism conference that I have attended. It will be all new to me, and I hope a positive thing.
It turns out though that I am not just an attendee but have been asked to be a presenter and contributor at the event. I am thankful for the opportunity to give a talk about my experience as a participant in the AutismCRC research academy last year. This was a fantastic experience and am happy to contribute to this. As well as this I will be a member of two panel discussions one which will talk about diagnosis and the other about disclosure.
I have my talk written, the powerpoint is completed and submitted. Now it is just the battle of the nerves, and the possible sleepless night. The tossing stomach has arrived on queue, as expected and all the self-doubt and questioning of myself has begun.
I’m fairly certain it will be all ok, that I will manage to deliver this talk with some level of professionalism and authenticity, but right at this moment, I am pretty much scared shitless.
It’s going to be thrilling, overwhelming, wonderful, exciting, hard, fun, exhausting. See you on the other side I guess.
