It's been a while.......
Life takes over, and all your well laid plans to change the world become the clutter at the bottom of your in-tray, while you are bringing up your children, looking for work, trying to pay your bills and keep your head above water!
When I read back on my "post gated-retreat" blogs I am almost ashamed that I no longer seem to be fighting the system with the energy and determination I showed back in May 2015.
Life moves on, but believe me, my passion remains the same.
Tomorrow I finish my training with User Voice, which will enable me to run surgeries at Probation Offices for other service users, seeking their opinions of good and bad practice. I have been involved now for about 6 months, and gradually I am seeing how this amazing charity is fighting at grass roots level to input change into the rehabilitation of offenders. "Only Offenders Can Stop Re-offending".
This has really rung true... OK, so I am not an offender, but I have such a strong knowledge of the system and of serving time that I can talk to other service users on their level, and they appreciate it. The majority of comments at surgeries are about the need for more ex-offenders to be working within the probation service, as they understand where service users are coming from.
My personal life has been the driving force since my last blog entry in August 2016. Sometimes fate shines on you, this has been a rare event in my life, but sometimes someone gives you a break. As a Christian I like to believe that a higher being had a plan for me and made my life complete, but maybe some of you may believe in fate or karma or......
But even meeting your soul mate is not without trauma. The love of my life is by no means simple. In fact, she has a complex set of behaviours, and my time on holiday has really helped me to help her with her lifetime of issues. Diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder it was very easy to see, straight away, that this was not an accurate assessment. In the female estate, the ladies really do have a myriad of mental health problems, most of them untreated or ignored. Many had BPD, and so I became very familiar with that BPD specific risk taking behaviour. And that behaviour was simply not present in this person sent to save me. 30 years in adult mental health services had simply served to confuse and fail this vulnerable lady.
As you will know from reading these blogs, my household is made up from many people on the autistic spectrum. We are an eccentric, dynamic, anxious, highly intelligent, hypersensitive, neurotic, odd family. But we have served a purpose... as my love and my future sees in herself the behaviours that my boys exhibit.... the boys who were denied their own identity by DWP in their corrupt prosecution, the ones who now have that identity back and also have back the financial support I was imprisoned for claiming!
We are a self analytical group of intelligent beings; keeping an analytical diary at uni was never a problem for me. But for one who has never looked beyond what the professionals told her, this has been a steep and painful learning curve.
Why in 2017 are we still failing girls and women in autism diagnosis. My future wife has waited until she was 50 and had met my crazy family before she was able to see that her issues lay, not in chronic depression, but in her brain differences, her different thought processes, her chemical make up. What would her life have been like if this had been discovered as a young teen?
When I worked on Induction in Bronzefield I was used by staff to filter out those with a probable autistic spectrum disorder. I spotted them as soon as they walked in...... many of these should never have been sent to prison. In fact, probably all of them. Being autistic in prison is torture, with no social communication skills, probably convicted of a crime you didn't even know you were committing, it must be unbearable. Mixing socially with people you just cannot understand, and probably not understanding why you are even there!
One of my future aims is to open the eyes of the judicial system to offenders with autism. God forbid my autistic children ever end up at the mercy of our corrupt courts and judges. I pray for change and understanding over the next few years and I will use my excellent engagement skills to work on changing perceptions.
But, on the whole, life is good. Very good. Excellent! I have one more date to report before my licence is over. I have a life partner, who is everything I could ever want, and I have a wedding to arrange! July 2017 my life moves onto a new phase. But I will never forget my experiences, the people I met, the ones I still have to meet and the ability I have to change the system. I won't stop. Ever.
