Welcome to The Autistic Joy Project
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about joy and how to find it. When there’s so much negativity and suffering all around us, and so little we can do about it as individuals, it can be hard to stay cheerful.
As an autistic, physically disabled person (I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and MCAS), I don’t have the strength or energy to go out into the world and campaign for change. I don’t have the mental or physical resources to alter the big picture.
That’s why I decided to launch The Autistic Joy Project on Substack, Instagram and Facebook. I wanted to focus on the small and the quirky. To seek out – and share – the insignificant, everyday things that bring me moments of happiness, in the hope they might help others feel a bit lighter and brighter. To pay attention to the details, patterns and subtle variations in shade that lift my heart.
Finding happiness in colour
Like many autistic people, I’m prone to black-and-white thinking – it helps reduce uncertainty in a world that often feels chaotic and threatening. In my eyes, things are either good or bad, right or wrong. But I’m also very keen on colour. Whether it comes in the form of museum cases of ceramics arranged by shade (the ones above are in Glasgow’s Burrell Collection), a box of cakes from a Turkish patisserie or a beautiful rug, a splash of colour brings a smile to my face. It provides a moment of distraction from the bad stuff filling the news – the wars, the climate crisis, the bigotry, intolerance, corruption, inequality...
I could go on but I won’t, because I want to hold onto the positives. For me, they include bookshelves arranged by colour, bright flowers, interesting typography, my favourite blue trainers, and my friends’ Patterdale terrier, who – as you can see – gives excellent side eye. The Autistic Joy Project is a way of sharing these and other joyful, everyday things – from books to meals, household objects to wonders of nature, old photographs to new experiences – to spread some happiness.
Be part of The Autistic Joy Project
It’s why I’d love you to get in touch and share some of the often overlooked things that make your life more pleasant and the world more bearable. You might even want to be a guest blogger. You don’t have to be a ‘writer’. It’s just a case of taking some pictures of things that bring you joy and putting together a few sentences or, if you’ve more to say, a few hundred words about them.
Whatever your age or gender, whether you’re neurodivergent or neurotypical, I look forward to finding out what makes you joyful!
