All Tangled Up

Activist Charli Clement on their debut book, All Tangled Up

Where do Neurodiversity and chronic illness collide, and why should it matter to us all?

We are all inherently a tangle of genetic codes - and yet this is so often underestimated when it comes to receiving medical attention. To be tangled up in Neurodiversity as well as Chronic Illness can be incredibly complex - yet we have yet to fully reckon with what this means. Charli Clement is an activist and educator, who has also previously been on this newsletter; I interviewed them about their debut book, All Tangled Up, to find out more. You can buy the book now.

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Hello Charli, and welcome back to The Disabled Feminist newsletter. Thank you for agreeing to this interview. Congratulations on the publication of your debut book - what was the impetus, what sparked the idea? 

Thank you so much for having me, Lydia! All Tangled Up in Autism & Chronic Illness is the result of over a decade spent searching for my own answers surrounding my health and neurodivergence, where I've never felt like there's any information or understanding available around the crossover of autism & chronic illness, neither for individuals themselves nor those who work with them or love them. I've been handed endless leaflets that tell me what my diagnoses should mean and how I should experience them or what will help me, and it's never reflected the way I experience my body, brain and the world. A couple of years ago when I was starting to spend more time discussing this experience, I realised I had so much more to say than a piece of social media content or a 20 minute presentation could give. 

Why is it that the connection of the book you wish to untangle, so to speak, is so poorly understood do you think? 

There's still very few studies about co-occurring autism & chronic illnesses - I actively celebrated when a study was released last year that detailed that hypermobility, chronic pain and dysautonomia are more prevalent in the autistic population. It's a really common experience to not only be autistic or only be chronically ill, for reasons we're not totally sure of at this point in time, but most people don't recognise this including in clinical settings.