As Leon has grown up, he has created a bank of new words which he uses, and to be honest they make much more sense than the original ones! For example, a ham sandwich is a ‘hamwich’, a cheese sandwich is a ‘cheesewich’, and if he wants to jump on the trampoline, he will say jumpoline. Safe to say reading these words on here may sound slightly ridiculous. But in actual fact, if you think about it, these words make complete sense and illustrate how literal the Autistic brain can be.

If you say to some neurodiverse children that it’s raining cats and dogs, they might look up and say, “no, it isn’t.” Idioms and metaphors can be received literally. Another example is from a book called ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’, which illustrates how different minds work. To some children, if they look at a field of cows, they would see 24 cows in it. Many autistic children/adults may see that there are indeed 24 cows in this field; however, there are also 15 cows with 12 white spots, 3,500 blades of grass, one cow is eating, one cow is lying down, it smells unpleasant (which is overpowering), the birds are very noisy, the sky has 10 big clouds and 4 smaller ones… Every single sense is overwhelmed with inputs, making many environments extremely stressful.