Neurodiversity Member Network member shares his story for Disability Pride Month.
July is Disability Pride Month, a time to highlight and celebrate the varied identities and rich history of disabled people, as well as challenge the stigma that sometimes surrounds the topic and prevents people from speaking up and getting support.
To mark the occasion, Daniel Robinson, a valued member of our Neurodiversity Member Network, has kindly offered to share an insight into his journey to into engineering as a disabled engineer, finding his crowd, and achieving disability pride.
Over to you, Daniel!
My journey
I have always struggled with fitting in, I think mainly because I found communication and interaction with people and the environment hard. I would say I wasn’t very sociable, my mum would say I was anti-social! I didn’t understand why I needed to interact and have lots of friends and go out doing things. I was happy on my own doing my own thing, I just didn’t feel the need and found the way people interacted a bit strange.
In life people expect you to behave in a certain way - other people seemed to have this additional language (body language) that I didn’t have, and what I now know as empathy.
Who knew other people had feelings that were affected by what you do or their circumstances! At school, I struggled a lot with reading and writing, later on I found out that I was dyslexic but only recently found out this can also affect the way you process things. At school and college, I was always the kid on their own or in the library, which was fine.
When it came to interaction, I would just copy (mask) what everyone else did. I found people used to laugh at what I said, it wasn’t meant to be funny, but I think they thought I was joking. This I have learned to use to help me interact better, sometimes though they might laugh, and I don’t understand why
Once at a conference, we were handed out some documentation and the person presenting started contradicting what the document said. I politely pointed out that he was contradicting his hand out, his retort was, “ok mate, calm down”, and everyone laughed. I didn’t understand and had to ask my colleagues if they were laughing at me.
I really started having problems mentally when I was 18, this was when I wanted to start interacting with girls. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t behave like they did on TV. If bought a girl some flowers and said I liked her, she was meant to say how lovely and live happily ever after. The world began to make less sense, how I thought everything was meant to be, wasn’t.
I struggled on working my way through trying to understand other people and their strange ways. I am married and have three children, and if a child was unwell, my wife did the comforting, and I was more than happy to clean up. If they fell over, it wasn’t uncommon for me to stand over the child on the floor crying, trying to figure out why they had fallen. The fact they were lying there crying was a secondary thing. My brain was thinking 'if I find out why, I can stop it next time.'
I ran my own business for 13 years, and my customers liked the way I worked. I was reliable, efficient and good at what I did. Due to family and other pressures, I went to work for a housing association, this was a difficult period as I went from controlling everything to having little control. I also didn’t realise at the time that I was ill - it turned out my thyroid gland had packed up.
On my return to work I found things had changed, the way jobs were given had changed, we merged with a company which brought more changes - everything kept changing. This was when I started to struggle with OCD and mental health problems. In my own way, I was trying to keep control. Well, I lost control in the end and was told to get myself signed off and that I couldn’t be in work.
After seven months of being off, seeing mental health professionals and a psychiatrist I was diagnosed with OCD and Aspergers syndrome now combined with autism.
I was given details of an adult autism group, it was like finding my tribe, where I belonged. It was ok to be me, it didn’t matter if I said the wrong thing, twitched, shouted out a bit, they understood I could be me.
After many years working in the company I joined after being self-employed, I have moved from electrician to Qualified Supervisor, my bosses consider me as Senior Qualified Supervisor and people come to me if they are not sure of something. I have created policies and working practices that are used across the company by our team of 70 electricians and apprentices and my fellow Qualified Supervisors. If I say something wrong or I'm struggling, it's ok - my colleagues understand me.
Yes, life at work is a struggle every day, for example, balancing my needs with my colleagues, and trying to prioritise what to do first. Sometimes it gets too much and my brain freezes, recently it happened and my old boss phoned me up, she said “you’ve got yourself in a pickle, is there anything urgent that needs doing?”, I said no and she said “turn off your laptop, go do what you need to do to calm yourself and I will see you tomorrow”.
My strengths are that I'm a hyper-focused, task driven, diligent, rational and process driven thinker with a constant need to learn and understand what is going on in my industry. But some of these can also be my weakness, which causes me stress and makes me very tired. It can be hard to switch off my brain as it likes to always be planning and thinking. At the end of the day, it's just a matter of understanding how someone ticks.
A huge thank you to Daniel for sharing so openly. What makes you feel disability pride? Let us know below.
