Penny for your thoughts – April is @Autism Awareness Month – Day 6 of 30

In a pensive frame of mind today. Now that I’ve been part of the twitter community for three months or so, it’s take stock time.

When I first signed up on twitter, I started off by following my favourite singer (and teenage crush lol) – no I’m not naming! Then a writer who’s work I always enjoyed reading. Left it like that for a while. Made one reply to a celeb’s tweet and when I didn’t get a reply, thought “humph, bit rude” it’s only when you look at their profile and follower numbers that you realise they are probably absolutely bombarded by
replies every time they tweet. Even if it’s something like “run out of milk”.

And then you get a bit more confident, you start searching for people who share the same interests or, in my case, have children with autism. You reach out to them and they respond.

The first time I started have a twitter conversation with someone in the same boat, I remember thinking “is this for real, how does she know how I’m feeling – how scared I am for D’s future, how much pride I take in the little achievements that she makes, how does she know?” You swap photos of your children and think “wow, I’ve found a kindred spirit here”.

And then leads on to following more people, having more people following back. People that make you laugh with their antidotes and jokes, people who make you cry with their life stories, people (bless their souls) who aren’t around any more due to the cruel and non-discriminating disease called cancer.

I changed my user name from Bluecrisps to reflect more of why I’m on twitter, I started blogging and am so pleased when someone comes back and reads it and says “yes, I identify” or “we’ve been through that and this is what we did”.

None of us know what the future holds for our children and, if I’m being honest, the way the Government is trying to cut and disregard the disabled community really really scares me. Any parent of a special needs child has enough to worry about. We need to take notice of the Welfare Reform Bill and DMS5 proposals as it will affect a lot of our special needs community. Sign up for Pats Petition (now closed) if you haven’t already, singularly we aren’t powerful, put us together and we have a voice demanding to be heard.

I’ve unfollowed quite a few celebrities, I’m not interested if they’ve run out of milk anymore.

My only regret is that I miss out on the tweets from America, Australia etc because I’m asleep (if D let’s me sleep that is).

So, to every one of you that reads this, thank you.