A poem for Neurodiversity Pride Day 2025

This is a poem from my 2014 collection, ‘Map Reading for Beginners’. I wrote it in 2010 about a trip to Oxford in January of that year, for the purpose of having a MEG scan. This, it was hoped, would reveal how my brain was wired and whether there were genetic implications with regard to my children’s autism.

Years ago, neurodiversity had yet to be recognised as a thing, autism wasn’t considered a hereditary condition, and my family had long been deemed something of an anomaly for containing not one but two autistic children. As a result, we got roped into several scientific studies over the years. The one with the MEG scan came comparatively late in the day and was the last one we participated in. It was researching the molecular genetics of autism, and involved hours of videotaped interviews and tests over quite a few years. (I remember I was told I’d achieved the highest score they’d ever recorded on word recognition, but was really rather rubbish when it came to spatial awareness.)

On the day, after being stripped of metal, wired up by the wrists, forehead, eyelids, cheekbones, and that tender spot behind the ears, and clamped into a sort of all-body salon hairdryer, it turned out the scanner wasn’t working properly, and I drove back home to Bristol with whatever mystery my brain possessed unfathomed.

This poem has added poignancy for me now, as fifteen years later I’m waiting for an ADHD assessment. I see now that a diagnosis back then could have been really helpful, not just for me but also for my two other children, who, like me, didn’t tick any of the boxes when it came to the Triad of Impairments – which was how autism was diagnosed back in December 1993, when my autists were two and four years old respectively – but who could well be interestingly wired themselves and would have benefitted significantly from support and understanding, had their (possible) neurodiversity been recognised.

I feel frustrated by this, but at the same time, I have to acknowledge that's where medical science was thirty years ago, and maybe our participation in all those studies helped to bring society's understanding about neurodiversity to the point it's at today. I'm sad too, though, because if these divergencies had been picked up, the dynamics between me and my children might have played out differently, and we might all still be in each other's lives.