You know the drill. An employee is moving on and we all chip in to give something that says, ‘Hey thanks for being decent and replying to my emails, you were okay to have drinks with, we probably won’t speak again but let’s make promises to catch up sometime’.

What do you spend the collection on?

A voucher…. An ‘experience’…. What actually do you know about this person?!

One of my old employers really knew me. I felt the joy of being ‘seen’, which also led me to receiving an ace leaving present. I was given a ballet dancer picture (I’ve done ballet for ages), made up from words that reminded them of me.

A common word? ‘Fidgety’.

This is not new.

Here is a poem that I found in the family loft that I wrote as a little human (my handwriting is worse now):

My restlessness has some benefits: I’m a high energy trainer, I’m a motivated member of a team, and my physio likes that I don’t sit around for hours.

When at home, your quirks and niches are ‘behind closed doors’. It is only on returning to ‘Society that we notice norms… and, wait a minute, no one else does that?

For example, I was in the office for a meeting and, to maximise time and to keep me stimulated, I did my strengthening exercises on a chair.

At home, I never second guessed this. But when people were there, it felt kind of weird.

Weird is not bad. Diversity is a glorious thing with many benefits.

On re-integration into society, what do you think you will notice about yourself?

Winnie the Pooh says something very wise about all this:

 “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”—Winnie the Pooh

Hold onto you Thingish-ness. Society needs your difference.