Murakami works as a writer because he captures in prose those fleeting things that place you at the scene. Suddenly the tantalising smell of grilling cheese in the air. I stop and inhale, the scent displacing me to winter afternoons making cheese on toast. I breathe and realise I am hungry.
The polytunnel smells faintly of the garlic that I planted last week. The savoury smell makes me smile. I recall cooking ragu and the scent lingering for days on my fingertips.
I sit at the allotment. I realise how calm and serene it is here. I am bringing my stress and anxieties. If I ignore the allotment, its calm and serenity never reach me. I stay stressed and anxious.
I am trying to understand rhizomatic networks. Learning to draw these, complex, intra-dependent, interweaving networks might help. I am wondering if the autoethnography unfolds in the writing of the these. I have an instinctive feeling that the order in introduction, theoretical and methodological framework, literature review. I don’t know why it should be this way, only that this will be right.
Vulnerable and knowing vulnerability. Frail and knowing frailty. Loving and knowing love.
As I walk back from the allotment the onions I have harvested are encased in a towel. They are the size of a new born baby. I smile as I remember my son at that age. Their savoury smell reaches my nostrils. I inhale deeply. My mouth is salivating as I think of the food that I cook that baby who is now turning toward manhood. The sun shines on me as I continue.
Today was a wonderful time, for the first warmth in the sun that peeped out from behind the clouds. The angle of the light is gaining height meaning that the days will soon be longer. There is a promise of spring, in the air, in the soil and in the beautiful colours of tiny dandelions and croci beginning to tentatively emerge. I spent it with a very old friend who I was lucky enough to be taught by, during my first degree in fashion design with retail management. Jane, who prefers to stay behind the camera, took a fantastic photo of me at the Museum of Making in Derby town centre in the model railway space. Despite having lived in Derby for over ten years now, I learned for the first time that the model railway was first displayed in the city during 1951. It was such a pleasure walking round with someone who has never visited before. You see your hometown with fresh eyes. It was invigorating and great fun!
When I was discharged from my section 3 and subsequently left hospital I described what had happened during those 10 weeks as the start of a journey. I didn’t know what the destination would be. I didn’t realise then how unpredictable and demanding the travel would be too. I describe this post at the theoretical possibilities of everything. Amidst all the disruption and problems I keep being handed I am desperately trying to complete some reading to figure of something of a theoretical framework,
From some of the reading I have discovered that my work is probably post-structuralist. Foucault and Irigaray are my bed-fellows. My life is certainly post-structuralist. Whatever structure I try, attempt, to maintain gets blown out by the gale force winds of change that inch themselves through the cracks and nooks of the stability. It’s a lot like living in the little pig’s straw house with the wolf blowing outside every hour of the day and night.
Everywhere I look the substance of my life dissolves. It is like sand running through my fingers. I am lost in a mountain range of ideas (theoretical) and problems (my life). Each one is bigger and less comprehensible than that which came before it. I really don’t know how to keep walking forward anymore. I don’t know if I am ever going to return to my PhD again. I feel lost and I don’t know which way is the right way to make a start towards. That journey I started. This journal I write. These feelings I write. These feeling aren’t right.
Foucault’s concept of a gaze fascinates me. He began with the medical gaze. Others have developed this idea. A clinical gaze. A neurotypical gaze. Being pinned in the sights of whatever monstrous part of the systems of power deny your menstruous difficulties. Expecting you to prove it, evidence it, assess it and review it. So much fuxking paperwork. That is what the mountain range of ideas is made from – paperwork. Paper. Work. Paperwork. So much so, that now I have realised that the quarter year that my institution has granted me isn’t going to be enough. I have to explore the possibility of an extension to my extension. How much goodwill can I expect from those post-structuralist powers, how much more scrutiny from the gaze of whatever monster’s eye I must meet in order to be seen? [oh Searows! oh Sauron!].
I am trying to keep to a basic structure. Walking every day. Yoga at least once. Not staying up too late. Drinking enough water. Focusing on the positives, the small victories. Staying out of sight.
Returning to my growing space after three months in hospital was difficult. Much of the work I completed during the three months before my admission had gone to waste. I had not been able to harvest my beans or my squashes and pumpkins. The winter crops I had grown to see me through the hungry gap (typically May when your over-wintered crops from the previous year are all gone and nothing new is available yet) had all died because they were not planted out and watered.
Initially I felt sad for all the lost effort. Then I began to look past the superficial waste.
Borlotti bean plants that were not harvested last autumn. Some of the beans are still viable when you open the pods.
I realised that the rotting vegetables would feed the soil, insects, birds and animals. Investigating deeper into the plot; I realised that there was still a multitude of crops that had survived the winter and poor care. There was a plethora of beetroots, carrots, onions. Self-seeded coriander had sprung up everywhere. I discovered an allotment treasure of the first jerusalem artichokes I harvested from my plot after planting a dozen or so tubers last year – nothing appeared to grow the first season so I gave up on it.
Self seeded coriander acts as a green manure and tasty addition to what has been left growing untended, It intermingles with onions whose green tops are sweet when added to noodle bowls and broths.
As I learned more about how to adapt my growing and gardening style I learned valuable lessons beyond the initial gardening approaches that I have always used and relied upon. The beans that were left on the vine would fix nitrogen into the soil. That green manures could be used at different times of the year beyond only over winter. One organic gardener suggests using white mustard in your polytunnel before planting tomatoes and cucumbers in them. I plan to try this idea.
Beds are slowly cleared of weeds. Much of these were a resting place for dead nettle over the winter. Apparently nettle indicates you have excellent quality soil…
In being faced with a plot that is four months behind schedule, with only weeks to pull it back I have had to consider new ways of working. Chop and drop is a technique that I have avoided in the past; however like many things, once I think it through and adapt it, I can often make it work for me. Chop and drop is less effort and aligned with the general state of my plot anyway. Many things have dropped and rotted on their own, without any intervention from me.
What has touched me the most though, is the kindness of people.
These are salsify plants that I grew from wild seed found elsewhere on my allotment site. I discovered this evening that salsify are frost resistant, so this may be yet another plot treasure that I have yet to unearth.
When other plot holders found out about my admission several people stepped up with offers of help. Our site coordinator kindly removed the types I had collected from my plot and the surrounding hedges. He has used them to weigh down the covers for his manure pile. Another neighbour offered to share their pumpkins when they learned my harvest had all been destroyed. My son has offered to come and help with the mulching and covering (after we negotiated a fair daily rate of payment). I do not mind remunerating him. It is a joy to spend time with him doing something I enjoy, as an equal, as nearly an adult.
I would like to explore autoethnographic writing about my allotment. When I completed my Kiva retreat earlier in January I walked to my allotment and spent time there, in reflection and contemplation. I have returned to this piece of autoethnographic writing, We Reap What We Sow, embodiment and urban allotment gardening, many times. The author works in Birmingham, the city where I was born. They write in 2012, the year my son was born. They speak of their hormones and the challenges these cause for them. There are many connections between this author, their writing and me. Like the rhizomes that spread under the soil. Like the mycorrhiza that links soil to plant. There are connections everywhere if we can be open to seeing and experiencing them.
Vulnerable and knowing vulnerability. Frail and knowing frailty. Strong and knowing strength, Loving and knowing love.
I listen to a lot of music. It helps me process my emotions, recognise my emotional state in the moment and regulate my sensory system. This latter aspect was highlighted in the sensory profile that was created within my inpatient care plan; that I use music, in surprising ways, within the context of my sensory diet.
Music expresses my emotional state better than I ever can verbally and usually in writing. It’s an example of my personal beyond-language communication. A different extrapolation of the same phenomena that was described be a co-author who drew images to express emotional states and knowledges and was sometimes the only speaker of the language in question (Jackson Perry et al., 2020).
The exploration of my digital personal data, in the early days of my PhD, led me to recognise that curated lists of content, for example bookmarks, music or video playlists, are an important part of digital personal expression in data which had versatile and subtle uses. Meaning emerges from these sites in unexpected ways. My YouTube music recap from September to November 2025, broadly covering the period I was hospitalised and detained, offers insight into my emotional states and their neurodivergent expression when I seriously ill, experiencing despair and desiring to die. Perhaps you might follow the link and listen to it whilst you read the remainder of this essay.
The individual songs collected by YouTube’s recap are evocative and insightful, in unanticipated ways.
Phoebe Bridgers ‘Funeral‘ conveys the alternating guilt and dejection of long term and severe negative emotional states. Max Richter’s, ‘On the Nature of Daylight‘ was the song I intended to end my life to, encompassing in my imagination, when trapped in a tiny grey room with very little natural light or sound: the beauty of a sunset; the bittersweet nature of life and living; the experience of slipping backward into unconsciousness, in the strands of it’s melody. It is the saddest and most beautiful piece of music.
Searows was an artist I discovered by change following algorithmic recommendations provided by YouTube after listening to Phoebe Bridgers. Two Searows tracks ‘I can and I will’ and ‘To be seen‘ became fundamental in my music habits during these three months. They were played repeatedly over and over, expressing my need in hospital, to stim, cycling back and forth through something familiar and comforting when I could not move in my instinctively autistic way, for fear of the normative standards that are the benchmark for stable behaviour in hospital. These are enforced, like Foucault’s panopticon (Foucault, 1995) through virtual and in-person monitoring twenty-four hours of every day.
Foucault's panopticon. A straight line. Staring down at me, meeting my eye every hour of the day. Unblinking. The red eye of Sauron Repeating. Reaching through my optical nerve, into the fibres of my being. Here in hospital. My chest rises (and falls) like the day. My heart beats. Measured and reported. Repeating, to my wardens. As the ache inside of me, my heart, longs for home.
The masking of my movement, my embodied ways of knowing myself and my neurodivergence (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2025) was not conscious. Rather, my compulsion to camouflage and mask (ibid) is ingrained and instinctive, an unwelcome synthesis (Perlow, 2019) that I cannot separate from my authentic selfhood. This music helps me define myself and it. Draw the line and establish where I end and it begins. Understand what is performance and what is me. Offers a place of resistance from which to regain myself. As Searows sings in ‘to be seen’ “Is this the face that you gave to me? / Do I belong to myself? / Am I the same when you look at me? / Or am I somebody else?” an ironic lyrical round to fixate upon when I think about the many thousands of pages of data that I have generated during a three month inpatient stay.
Knowing the system inside and outside makes it easier to understand the spaces you can quietly inhabit and be yourself. Sometimes these exist in the physical tangible domain. For example, in hospital, the only place where you could guarantee you would not be observed through a door pane or camera was the toilet. This was why I resorted to sleeping on the floor of mine for several night. This and because it was the only place that I was able to maintain some degree of control over the sensory onslaught of noise, of smell and of light that was imposed upon me every fifteen minutes on level three ‘obs’.
Sometimes the places exist, as it did for me, in the digital domain. Like this recap, music was the place and way that I was able to express myself autistically, neurodivergently in a way that passed for normal. Part of the trick, as it were is to understand the borderline, the boundary that you need to skirt along in order to achieve what you need. Sometimes you need to be sane. Other times you need to be mad. Sometimes you are mad and can’t show it – like I needed to be in hospital. The idea of being detained on a section 3 was terrifying at the time. Being in hospital for up to half a year was terrifying. Being stuck on repeated section 3s was even more terrifying; a reality documented by other autistic women/female perceived people (Quinn, 2022).
So, this blog becomes another digital place where I can be myself. A sanctuary to retreat to when I need to be myself. Not an academic/ a partner/ a parent / a citizen / a tenant. As I did with and through music when I lived on the border, for a little, while between lifeing and deathing.
Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Day, A., & Krazinski, M. (Eds). (2025). Exploring autistic sexualities, relationality, and genders: Living under a double rainbow. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003440154
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (2nd Vintage Books ed). Vintage Books.
Jackson Perry, D., Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Layton Annable, J., & Kourti, M. (2020). Sensory strangers: Travels in normate sensory worlds. In H. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, N. Chown, & A. Stenning (Eds), Neurodiversity Studies (pp. 125–140). Routledge.
Perlow, E. (2019). ADULT WOMEN WITH AND WITHOUT AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER: PERSPECTIVES ON THE MENARCHE/MENSTRUATION EXPERIENCE [Master of Arts]. Texas Women’s University.
Quinn, A. (2022). Unbroken: Learning to live beyond autism diagnosis. Welbeck Balance.
I started blogging in 2009 I think and continued on a different blog for another four years using a wordpress hosted platform. Back then, Facebook had only reached the masses for about eighteen months, maybe two years. Social media was a novelty, an unexploited paradise of consumption and audience participation that promised new and exciting ways to communicate with each other and form communities around the world. It was so different from blogging, where you simply wrote into the void. The digital equivalent of presenting to an empty lecture hall, with the hope that someone might stumble in midway through, find what you were offering of interest and decide to stay a little while.
There were no likes, no comments. No infinity feed of content to scroll forever through. There was no instantaneous dopamine hit received from algorithmic approval. The only way to check if people liked your content was to have blog comments enabled and to check back regularly or endure the pain of using Google Analytics to track site visitor stats.
These methods of audience engagement were relatively anonymous though. Commenters did not have to use their real names. Although online was a friendlier and smaller world than it is today, people were still more cautious than they were in the early nineties. Using your real name or posting personal information was still not advised.
In this older context of audience, there was no readymade society of followers hanging on your every digital release. You didn’t know if your friends followed your blog, unless they told you about something they enjoyed, usually in a face-to-face interaction or over a phone call.
You wrote a blog for a few reasons:
You wanted to
You had something to say
You wanted to be a part of a digital community that coalesced around an interest or topic.
Which brings me to the point of this post. What is the purpose of my blogging today, on the 3rd February 2026?
I am at the point where I am done, on the whole, with social media. I deleted my Twitter account several years ago. Linkedin in increasingly homogenous with it’s rain of “I’m delighted to announce my latest role / publication/ fart.” posts, mainly prompted by the site AI bot suggesting a post about the latest profile update a user has made. Facebook is the place that pulls me back the most, mainly because there are friends and one family member there that I only speak to on this platform. Even their number dwindles as others become disillusioned with Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
So I have decided to write for myself again. For no other reasons that I have something to say, because I want to. I want to stand at the front of a digital lecture theatre and present my thoughts, ideas and life. I hope that this will be somewhere that someone, at some time, will stop because they like what they see and what to learn more.
Part of the labour I undertake at this time is making sense of the last four months of my life. I don’t know if making sense is the same as sensemaking (perhaps this is something I might tease out later in these keyboard strokes). I don’t want this to be a place, a space, of performativity though. It needs to be somewhere I can be myself because I spent far too long being another person, a different facade, a mask, a facsimile of myself in hospital. Here I am unfettered from the constraints of academic form and convention, medical and diagnostic limitation. The imposition of infrastructure and its meaning is gone.
I never stimmed in hospital because of the constant surveillance. I didn’t realise until I came home and my body fizzed and popped of its own accord. Others noticed it too. The subtle trembling of my hands that weave back and forth around my body, snake-like and serpentine. Ann saw these all the way from Tasmania. Called them ‘wiri’. Told me about the Maori dance in which they represent the life-force of the natural world… shimmering water / heat haze / the rustling of leaves [tree family, branches of kin].
So I leave this day with a better understanding of my selfhood. My shaking, tremoring, quivering energy that sometimes I can control and which sometimes controls me. This is not something to be ashamed of. It’s not something for others to ridicule as those who were supposed to care and protect did when I was a child. This is root [energy]. This is branch [energy]. This is leaf and life and love [energy].
You simply need wisdom to recognise it.
Kiva Haikus
Suspended in still. Awaiting growth: with tree friends. Being myself. Finally.
Tree mothers and tree fathers. Embrace me in their branching lineage.
I have been thinking about how to start writing on my blog again for a while. Most of 2025 it was unavailable because the hosting company I previously used was taken over and getting my files out was a nightmare. Then I got detained under the mental health act, for about two months between October and December.
Being sectioned, again, was an experience I don’t really know how to talk about yet. I’ve had many inpatient admissions in the last six years and a reasonable number of section detentions. You think you know how they are going to go. Consider yourself an old hand. Then something appears unexpectedly, and sideswipes whatever stability you had achieved out from underneath your feet.
So you end up in hospital. Again. Only this time it’s the longest inpatient admission you’ve had in over a decade and the first ever section 3 detention you’ve ever had. A section 3 is a frightening experience. It is being in hospital and held by law for a maximum of six months before it can be reviewed. Many autistic people end up on repeated section 3s because hospital doesn’t suit them. It makes them ill; the environment, the drugs, the constant scrutiny. So they/you/we always appear like were not recovering. Always unstable.
I was lucky that after I was moved to the enhanced psychiatric I had an understanding and compassionate responsible clinician who perceived the anguish I was suffering in hospital for myriad reasons and discharged me to home.
It has not been simple or easy since I came back from the other place again. There are still assessments to complete. Meetings and reviews to be held. Appointments to keep and support to arrange. I might write more about my hospital experience here, or I might not. There are things about it that I did, had to do, that I am not ready to share yet.
I am spending time in nature, as much as I can. With my family, my partner and son, who I missed terribly when in hospital (you know when you have been away too long when you call returning to the ward “going home”). I am trying to write, but feel blocked. It has become a demand. Writing a blog post has become a performance. Reading my very earliest forays into blogging, it was refreshing to see how open and spontaneous they were. There was all manner of content on their pages, unencumbered by SEO scores and headline analysers. I just logged on and wrote. So this is what I am going to do now. Log on and write.
Hopefully some meaning and sense might emerge in the coming weeks and months. I could do with some.
Not too many this month as it has been head down and write to get ready for my PhD year 1 viva. The allotment is looking really lovely at the moment, as is my back garden. The many different colours and shapes in the leaves and plants are really calming to regard when I have a few minutes.
I am hoping to start posting more in the next few weeks. I have missed writing about my life. Things are a lot more stable now after a really bumpy few years.
An impromptu roast dinner went down a treat, with little M (who is now taller than me) turning out to be a dab hand at carving!
Our latest feline family addition, Viper the Bengal, is growing up fast into a beautiful and fun cat.Experimenting with arts based research methods as a means of accessing meaning in experience
Hi, my name is Jenn. I’m recruiting for a one-to-one support to work with my son who is a bright energetic eleven year old who is an autistic ADHDer with sensor processing differences.
Role details:
Term time only (Derby City school holidays), based in our home and around Derby City.
Tuesday afternoon 1345 to 1645
All day Thursday 0930 to 1630
The role is employed, on a PAYE basis, £13.00 per hour, with tax, NI, holiday pay and pension covered. The successful candidate would hold an enhanced DBS or be prepared to secure one.
The successful candidate would need to be a driver within their own vehicle as the role involves taking M to planned activities in the Derby area. Mileage is paid at £0.45 per mile. Business insurance would be required for role related transportation.
I am looking for an individual with experience and understanding of the needs of autistic children and young people. This could be gained professionally, via education or qualifications or caring or parenting for similar children. The role involves spending time with my son (day/times are non-negotiable) in our home, the community in Derby, his dad’s horticultural land in Spondon and accompanying him to planned activities, rock climbing on a Tuesday afternoon and swimming on a Thursday morning. The role is during term time only so would fit well with anyone working around their own family commitments. Beyond the planned activities (swimming and rock climbing) the role’s requirements are flexible. Planning and managing activities to purposely fill the remainder of the day is essential.
Professional qualifications in child care, education or a relevant related field would be beneficial, however a lack of these would not be an issue for the right person, as the fit between my son and an ability to build a relationship is key to it’s success.
The successful candidate would develop a close bond and understanding of my son, his triggers, moods and needs. They would be able to work closely with our family, and integrate into a busy household with discretion and confidence at all times. It is essential that you are able to work in our home and within our family unit, taking input and participation from family members when and where required or desired, along with an ability to manage M on your own as you will spend time around parents who are working during the role’s hours.
My son is a very bright young man with a wide variety of interests. One day you might be playing with lego or building amazing creations in Minecraft, the next visiting a museum or historic building. The following are requirements for the role, however flexibility within it is required, according to what M needs and can manage on a day-to-day basis.
Developing an awareness of what calms, alerts, and triggers M and use this to support him and ensure he is able to complete his activities calmly and with confidence.
Supporting M to understand what to expect in new situations as much as possible.
Monitoring M food intake and providing a snack or drink if he needs it and at meal times. providing wherever possible a healthy balance of food (he likes sweet stuff!).
Allowing M a sense of control and being prepared to negotiate.
Acting as a point of contact between parents and the providers of swimming and rock climbing activities in the first instance.
Planning and developing a range of engaging/educational activities inside and outside our home within the local area to Derby (all costs covered by parents in advance).
Supporting M with age-appropriate chores and encouraging independence wherever possible, within the scope of his capacity.
Providing M with choices within work/day so that he is taking the lead
Preparing and readying for what is happening next e.g., ‘in five minutes we will be stopping our playing lego and getting ready to go out.’
Being aware of the kinds of situations M finds anxiety provoking, for example noisy environments: providing support at these times. Preparing Mylo for changes, to activities and alerting to transitions which are coming up.
Having fun and enjoying yourself together!
I would really love to be able to offer this role to someone who is working around other commitments. If you would like to know more or have a chat, please give me call on 07948 554 136, or email me with a CV at jen.a.layton@gmail.com.
In the last two weeks, I took delivery of my first ever solo-authored book chapter, in the wonderfully named tinfoil hats: stories by mad people in an insane world. The contribution that I made was hard-won life experience; it talked about some really difficult unpleasant and often traumatising experiences that I had when my son was much, much younger than he is now and I knew far less about myself than I do now.
The publishing press ‘Autpress‘ and the fabulous editor, Phil Smith were incredibly supportive. They have also extended other opportunities to publish in their ‘Spoon and Knife Anthology‘ series, however I am going to have to focus on some PhD study work for a little while before I consider doing any other independent writing.
The day in April, when I sat and read my chapter, was quite a strange experience. The act of holding a book in one’s hand, with your own writing contained within it was quietly powerful. The words took on a greater meaning than when I had sat and read them back during the editing process on google docs.
I guess the reproduction of them, in a printed (rather than a virtual) format also contributed to this, however the act of acceptance of my words, my thoughts and my perspective, as worthy of sharing was strangely validating. It kind of made up for all the crap I have dealt with in the last two years, which I am slowly emerging from. As I am discovering, like when I wrote ‘bleeding insanity’ that there is often meaning in the challenging and difficult periods of one’s life. It’s not always obvious at the time, so you simply have to keep going until the beauty and meaning reveal itself. I’m discovering that living, and PhDing is like that more generally. I don’t have a bloody clue half the time if I am spending my time on the right things, but you just have to keep moving forwards and hope for the best.
If you’d like to purchase a copy of the book, a link can be found here.
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