Emily S

I'm a late diagnosed ADHDer, mum to an incredible autistic 5 year old, and apparently someone who looked at an already fairly chaotic life and thought, "You know what this needs? Running."

Neurodivergence has become a pretty big part of our family story. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 28, after spending most of my life wondering why seemingly normal things felt approximately 400% harder than they appeared to be for everyone else. Then, this year, my son Elliot was diagnosed with level 2 autism.

Watching him navigate a world that isn't always built with brains like his in mind has completely changed the way I think about disability, inclusion and what "support" actually means.

Because autism isn't just a quirky list of strengths. It can be beautiful, hilarious and fascinating, but it can also be bloody hard. It's watching your child struggle with things other people don't even have to think about. It's fighting for support, explaining the same needs repeatedly, questioning whether you're doing enough, and becoming fluent in an entirely new language of assessments, reports, acronyms and funding systems you never particularly wanted to learn. Constantly rehashing the negatives and the "deficits" with every professional you meet, while fiercely holding onto everything wonderful about your child, because after listing their struggles over and over again, you need to remind yourself that none of those things come close to defining who they are. It's accepting that the childhood you had planned for your child and the future you dreamt about for your family is vastly different than you imagined. 

It's also getting to know a brain that sees the world differently and realising that different was never the problem. A world that expects everyone to function the same way often is.

So I'm running for autism. For Elliot, obviously. But also for every autistic kid who has been labelled difficult when they were overwhelmed, every adult who spent years wondering why life felt harder for them, and every family fighting behind the scenes for their person to be understood.

I'm not particularly interested in making autism sound inspirational, I'm interested in helping build a world where autistic people get to exist as themselves, with the understanding, accommodations and support they actually need. So, if that requires me to run an unreasonable number of kilometres while my ADHD brain repeatedly forgets why I signed up for this, then apparently that's what we're doing.

Please donate.

Mostly for autism.

Partly because if I have to commit to running for the entire month, I’d like to make it considerably harder for future me to quietly pretend I never agreed to this.