THINKING ABOUT BRAIN IN ANALOGIES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FASD CHANGEMAKERS – Part 3 of 3
ANXIETY – Anxiety is like being trapped in an Escape Room game played in the dark, being unable to use (because you are not allowed to or don’t have one) a cheat sheet to solve the puzzle that turns on the lights and unlocks the door. Maybe not even knowing what the puzzle is to […]
THINKING ABOUT BRAIN IN ANALOGIES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FASD CHANGEMAKERS -Part 2 of 3
UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE – Game of Charades Most people with FASD are good at language output – at talking – but very poor at interpretation – making sense of what is being said – independent of cognitive ability (IQ). And what people expect from you is almost always based on how well you speak. Think about […]
THINKING ABOUT BRAIN IN ANALOGIES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FASD CHANGEMAKERS – Part 1 of 3
Last year, 2022, Kat Griffin (another member of the ALC of FASD Changemakers) and I did a plenary keynote at a conference on FASD and employment. We were asked to talk about what employers and job support people needed to understand about brain function in areas that affect/occur in employment situations. So, we spent quite […]
SHAME, BLAME, SELF-DOUBT TO SELF ACCEPTANCE
“Shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances life puts on us” *Ann Patchett* “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself” *Anais Nin* “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change” *Brene Brown* If you trip and fall and skin your […]
EQUITY VS EQUALITY IN FASD
When the Adult Leadership Collaborative (ALC) of FASD Changemakers did our second Lay of the Land Survey on Quality of Life for Adults with FASD, I was the one who did all the background research and definitions for quality of life because that was what we thought we were going to try to measure. The […]
STRANGERS IN A STRANGE PLACE – MEMORY & FASD
“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce.” Thich Nhat Hanh I wrote this blog originally as the opening remarks for a pre-conference day on memory for the international FASD research conference in Vancouver that was to have occurred in 2020. That was before COVID messed up the […]
A JOURNEY TO HEALING
“Our stories are not meant for everyone. Hearing them is a privilege, and we should always ask ourselves this before we share: “Who has earned the right to hear my story?” If we have one or two people in our lives who can sit with us and hold space for our shame stories, and love […]
ORIGIN STORIES AND DESTINATIONS
ORIGIN STORIES AND DESTINATIONS – DO THEY MATTER? “There’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours began.” […]
PART-TIME MEMORY: The Reality of Our Reality
I want to tell you all a story. Trust me, this story leads into my blog subject on memory, and things related to my memory – and that of everyone else with FASD that I know. Just before Christmas I was working (when I am not taking forever to write my next blog, I work […]
REPRESENTATION
As a person with FASD I never saw myself represented in television or books. The closest character I could relate to was Amelia Bedelia because in the books she would take everything literally, like if someone asked her to “draw the blinds” instead of closing the blinds she drew a picture. The representation ended there. […]
THE LANGUAGE OF DIAGNOSIS: The Unintended Messages in the Language We Use
On May 30th of this year, I was asked, along with Kat Griffin, to give the annual Salzberg Memorial Ethics Lecture for the Provincial Health Services Association of British Columbia. I wrote the lecture that we both delivered, which we did on behalf of the Adult Leadership Committee of FASD Change Makers, so it is […]
GOING FOR COFFEE: AN OBSTACLE COURSE OF STIMULUS
Picture an air filter. What does it do? It stops all the dust and bits from entering your home and filling your house and body with all sorts of things they don’t really need. I liken this to what happens when I get what always feels like an attack – an overload of sensory stimuli. […]
