Identifying Progress in My Blogging Experience

After a nice relaxing weekend, I was ready to get back into blogging. Brainstorming about a few different ideas, I decided to write a post about various "life hacks" that I use when doing chores. As an autistic person, there are a number of chore-related activities that I've learned to make easier on myself by modifying how I do what I need to do, whether that's wearing headphones and dishwashing gloves for doing dishes, or making a list of every single meal I like so that I have ideas when it comes time for meal-planning. I feel like I did a pretty good job on this one, although I hope I didn't make it sound too much like I have everything figured out, since I am still making it up as I go along. 

I also recently started reading the book "The Reason I Jump," which was written by a thirteen-year-old nonspeaking autistic person, and I would highly recommend it. I'll probably make next week's post a book review on this book, analyzing its representation of nonspeaking autistic people.

Throughout the course of my blogging, it's been interesting to see how this occupation has been impacted by my sources of identity, whether that is my identity as an OT student, my identity as an autistic person, or my identity as a person of faith. In this process, while each of these things have impacted my sense of identity, I've also had a growing sense of seeing myself as a writer, and maybe eventually finding some identity in that label as well. I've found enjoyment in writing before, although not usually for in-class assignments, but it's been really interesting writing something that isn't a Star Wars fanfiction, but that I am still highly invested in representing well. As I've continued this different media style, it's been fun to see this skillset continue to grow, and I've even gotten a few likes on one of my more recent blog posts on a different social media account. 

Overall, with this identity comes a desire to do well in my chosen role. I hope to do a good job in representing the topics I care about, and I hope to bring visibility to some of these issues. In this implementation, one area I have improved most in is my proofreading. I have a habit when writing longer segments where I tend to jump from one idea to the next mid-sentence. I go back and finish those thoughts at the end, ordering them in a way that makes sense, but sometimes I miss a spot, and without proofreading the entire thing, I may end up leaving a thought very unfinished. However, including this step into my process has greatly improved the quality of my writing, so I plan to continue doing this as I make progress on my blog.

As I've continued my blog, I have had a lot of time to reflect on my growth as a person since being diagnosed as autistic, which is one of the main topics of my blog. In a sense, making this blog has been almost a record of my occupational biography. In our readings last week, we learned that an occupational biography can be a story of sorts to describe a person's changing self-identity while going through a variety of life changes that change how they interact with the world around them, and thus, how they participate in occupations throughout their lives. For me, I can easily say that this reflection on the changing nature of identity and occupation are major topics for my blog, and even motivators for starting this blog to begin with. Without my autism diagnosis, I wouldn't have known to adopt this identity as a part of myself, and it wouldn't have influenced my decisions in terms of occupations such as graduate school. Without my diagnosis, I wouldn't be studying occupational therapy at all, let alone writing a blog about autism for a class in this program. In this way, discovering this identity has had a huge impact on both my occupations and my occupational biography. In a sense, my blog itself acts as an occupational autobiography, as I catalogue my occupations from the perspectives given to me from this change in identity.

To summarize, this week has been relatively successful with blog-writing, as I have motivation and ideas for the next few week's topics. I've gotten to think more about why I chose this particular occupation and how it has shaped my views of myself and my identities, and I have seen how these identities have, in turn, shaped my past and current occupations. 

Here is a link to this week's blog post, and I hope to continue with this productive streak for my next week. Thanks for listening!

https://autisticot.blogspot.com/2022/10/life-hacks-part-1-kitchen-chores.html