Hey. I’m Giulia. I’m a second-year biological sciences student and the president of Autisoc this academic year. The theme of this month’s student curator project is neurodiversity.

While most of the media Luana (VP Voice) and I have curated is about autism, neurodiversity is an umbrella term for many other developmental disorders such as dyspraxia and ADHD, or mental health conditions like OCD and depression.

I suppose part of the reason I wanted to focus on autism is because I’ve had a complicated and long journey when it comes to my own experiences with it. I was diagnosed with autism at about 10 years old. I did not know what autism was. It started as something that I was suddenly and warranted me being taken out of lessons to receive social training.

While I may not have understood what autism was, the people around me understood something was off and let me know that I was not the same as them.

It remained this way for a few years until I was 15 and just coming out of the pandemic. Due to the massive amounts of bullying that is almost par for the course for anyone growing up neurodiverse in the years prior, I had decided to ‘stop’ being autistic. That meant repressing my interests and heavily monitoring everything I said.

Two years later I realised I could not do this and that it was making me feel anxious and trapped. I could not handle being my fake self and every moment as that person felt like being sucked into a void. In an act of desperation, I overcorrected and everything around me collapsed. I lost my friends at college and while this was most likely in my head, it felt like my classmates saw me as ‘other’. I became bitter and angry.

Currently, I have mixed thoughts on the state of being autistic. In recent years being autistic has opened doors to do things such as this student curator project and running the University’s autism society, but the years prior still exist. I’m simultaneously trying to build a future for myself where I don’t need to hate myself but also trying to have something similar to what the years I’ve lost would have looked like if everything had gone differently.

That brings us to this student curator project. I want this project to be both for neurotypicals who may not know about the ways some people’s brains may work differently and for neurodivergents who may be on their journey to acceptance or even realisation that they may have ADHD or another type of neurodivergency.

We’re planning on doing events like a panel and a movie screening alongside the reading list. Keep your eyes peeled (not literally) to find out when those events are happening, and I hope you find this student curator project interesting and engaging.