After her medical diagnosis three years ago, Morgan, 62, set up The Autistic Woman website through which she collated information and stories.<\/p>\n
“I realised we are often invisible,” she says. “We hide how we are because we are conditioned by society to blend in.”<\/p>\n
Her memoir Mothertongue, in which she revisits key life events in light of her diagnosis, has been published this month.<\/p>\n
Despite a successful career as a national newspaper journalist, Morgan, who grew up in Edinburgh and now lives in Cockermouth, Cumbria, says she always knew she did not fit in.<\/p>\n
As a teenager, she had what her GP thought was a breakdown triggered by watching The War Game – a 1960s portrayal of the effects of a nuclear war on Britain.<\/p>\n
“I’m shaking, I’m in tears all the time, I’m terrified. Every sound I hear I think is a nuclear bomb going off.”<\/p>\n
She was given sedatives, but nothing changed. Now she recognises this as autistic burnout.<\/p>\n
“It’s when you become totally exhausted with trying to exist in a world that is not designed for how your brain works,” she says.<\/p>\n
“The world to a lot of us is very loud, very noisy, very crowded, very bright, very smelly, and it’s exhausting suppressing your response to all of this and carrying on.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After her medical diagnosis three years ago, Morgan, 62, set up The Autistic Woman website through which she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678043,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-678042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}