Student inspires others using an Autism awareness blog

"Pants Have Value" helps address the misconceptions of Autism

A GCU student has been running her own online blog focusing on the misconceptions of autism by sharing her own experiences and stories.

Fourth year Social Sciences student Cols Young decided to create the blog to educate others about what it’s like to live with Autism and the common misconceptions that come with it. Cols does this by sharing her personal stories and experiences in the hopes to raise awareness about living with Autism.

“Pants Have Value” is a blog which exists on Instagram, and Cols uses this to share photographs and thoughts on common struggles with Autism. The name of the blog was inspired by a personal incident in Cols’s life.
She explained: “I had an incident a few months ago where I lost my favourite pair of pants and it caused me to completely meltdown.

Finding clothes for me can be difficult because of their texture and how they feel so when I find something that doesn’t make me want to rip my skin apart, I usually buy multiples of it.

The full scenario gave me the idea to start the blog in the first place, to try and explain the inner workings of my head and give context on why little, miss-able details for most are significantly important to me.”

Cols, who also contributes to the Social Sciences Blog, explained why she decided to create “Pants Have Value”. She said: “My content includes personal stories about my autistic traits.

I explain why something is a challenge for me or my coping methods on how to overcome an issue, accompanied by a photo that is the subject/topic.

My main motivation behind starting the blog was that as an autistic woman, I’ve had multiple experiences of people saying discriminatory things, i.e. ‘but you can’t be autistic, you’re a girl’, ‘but you don’t look autistic’,‘you must be so high functioning’ etc, and people would say those comments like they were compliments.

What I realised was I was educating people when discussing autism because they didn’t actually have an accurate idea of what it is and how it affects people’s day to day."

Check out Cols’s blog here

 

By Rachael McAlonan

Got a SCEBE or GSBS story? Email me at Rachael.McAlonan@gcu.ac.uk or connect with me on social media here