You Can Do Anything You Want

By Seumas Skinner, SNP activist.

I’d never heard the phrase “Asperger’s Syndrome” before I was diagnosed at high school. I can’t even say I was really aware of Autism or other neurological disabilities then. Like everyone else at school, I just wanted to fit in, and being told that I was medically, genetically and behaviourally dif

It’s taken most of the time since then for me to come to terms with being a person with a disability. For a long time, I wanted to hide it utterly, a secret from my best friends. I was afraid of being treated differently, of my friends abandoning me because I was suddenly an unknown quantity. I hid

After the election, when I was job hunting and looking for tips on how to put across special requirements relating to Asperger’s, I stumbled across an Aspie support website which contained a list of careers that were deemed to be unsuitable for people with Aspergers. About half-way down was “Politic

As a former political candidate and organiser, as an aspiring public relations worker, that made me furious. It still makes me furious today, after working in press and public relations for major company.

People with disabilities face barriers every day. Mental, physical, some imagined in our darkest hours, most real. But none of those are a good reason for people to be told that a career area or profession should be barricaded off as ‘impossible’. People with disabilities should have every opportuni

I regret not taking the time to talk about my disability more, teaching people and helping them to understand what Aspergers and Autism means, helping to show that disabled people can do anything we want. I don’t want another Seumas sitting in a depression somewhere to think that they can’t do what