A new member of the team has appeared! (Yes, that is a Smash reference.)
Hello, I’m Aiden Tsen! I’m a 20-year-old Londoner who was diagnosed with Atypical Autism at the age of 13. In addition to being Autistic, I’m also multiply LGBTQ+ (bi and non-binary – any pronouns are good with me) and British Born Chinese, and I dropped out of university due to developing long-COVID.
When I was stumped as to what to do next, I started doing public speaking with a small Zoom talk for some ex-colleagues, friends and their friends. Since I started a website for it, I decided to start writing articles as well. And then when I realised I had no featured images, I started to draw the artwork for my website too!
A lot of things have happened in three months. I’ve given paid talks in collaboration with Ambitious about Autism, and I’ve got a few more paid talks that I’ve arranged myself coming up as well. Now I even get paid for some of my writing, so I have multiple sources of freelancing income. I even got to talk about long-COVID on BBC Newsbeat! My highlight though is when I got to talk at Autscape about volunteering and Pokémon, two of my special interests!
That’s how I met Nanny Aut and so we’ve been discussing how I can get involved. The result: now I’ll be contributing to Aut Thoughts on a fairly regular basis. I’ll also be helping with Artistic Autistic since I produce creative work as well, with multiple Instagram art accounts.
If there were three core pieces of my work on autism so far, they would be:
- The dual blessing and curse of diagnosis – a reflective piece on the impact, positive and negative, that finding out I’m Autistic had on me
- Autism and Language: Agitation, Part 2 – a more nicely written version of a post that I wrote while nonspeaking and unable to form coherent sentences
- Portraying Status while openly Disabled – thoughts on how I navigate being openly disabled while also keeping a public speaking persona
I’d like to thank Nanny Aut for asking me if I’d like to get involved! Autistic Village is a really cool project so I’m very excited 😊 [smiley-face]
Thank you also for reading this post! I also write about the other communities I’m part of and a lot of aspects of freelancing and work skills. So if you’re interested in me or my work, please do check out my website directly and consider subscribing to it at the bottom of the webpage!
Autistic Village 
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