Anchoring as access to purposeful play

This International Day of People with Disabilities, The D*List is embracing play, and what that means to us as disabled people. We called for community submissions and how people incorporate play in their lives. In this submission, Nicolina Newcombe describes how anchoring to something meaningful is a form of play for her, and more recently, that's been travel.

Travel is a kind of play, but for me as an autistic person, it only works when it aligns with my special interests. This year, my brain lit up at the idea of going to Neurodiversity Pride Week in the Netherlands. Partly to see where the movement began, and partly to explore my ancestral roots in Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel, since it was my first time on the European continent. A mix of Neurodiversity Pride Week activities, meetings with disabled leaders, and sightseeing with my Mum and local relatives created the scaffolding that makes travel enjoyable and accessible for me. 

I need purpose to play. I won’t go on holiday for no reason. Strange things are hard work, not relaxation. Instead, I look for an anchor to something meaningful, and the holy grail of meaning is found in my special interests, which currently revolve around autism and disability rights. My special interests are my play, even if they look like work to other people. Scheduled meetings with disabled leaders are the pinnacle of socialisation for me. Name drop incoming, but connecting with Soufiane El Amrani from Inclusion Europe, Daniel Casas Ballester at the European Disability Forum, and Tjerk Feitsma Founder of the Neurodiversity Foundation made my holiday. Shared interests make the unfamiliar familiar. And I got to give speeches, which I love. 

Not having people to go with can be a barrier to travel for me. Few friends have the will, spoons, and enablement to do something big like that. Conferences and disability events serve me well because people there aren’t bored of me talking about my special interests, they are expecting it, and they don’t realise I am always like that. I’m not changing my behaviour because I am at a conference. I’m at a conference because this is my behaviour. Being by-and-for neurodivergent people, the Pride Week events suited me particularly well because I got to connect with others who share my experiences.

I also went to Iets Drinken, described as “the national networking drink for normal to gifted adults with a form of autism” (let’s just say Aotearoa New Zealand is generally more progressive around neurodiversity). I don’t know about networking, but I did get an enthusiastic rendition of Gaston from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast for an audience of one. Reserving a pub for autistics is a good idea. I realised that our autistic culture is so strong that our autistic similarities were much more significant than our ethnic cultural differences as Pākehā and Dutch (I hadn’t expected those differences to be large, but they became noticeable once I was there).

Another play-type benefit of my trip was accumulating talking points for conversation with people who have some common special interests. Dinosaurs: The Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden had a herd of Triceratops and a T. rex poo. Astronomy: I got lucky with an unexpected private tour of the oldest operating university observatory in the world, dating back to 1633. They even built an open street on either side so the telescope could pivot further. Lego: I saw amazing installations at their stores, and printed my own minifigure, complete with a sunflower lanyard. Social justice: joining 150,000 people at Draw a Red Line for Gaza by The Hauge, just days before the NATO summit. Historical items: like the one you can find by Googling “Rijksmuseum” and “voilà mon choix”. While at the Torture Museum I thought deeply about how often these instruments might have been used on unusual or non-compliant autistics, and the plight of PDAers in medieval Europe. 

There were also challenges, for example, asking where the toilet was in the Paris underground somehow escalated to two security guards with medical packs responding to me. And that was on my way to Disneyland. I missed an important event entirely because the Universiteitsmuseum Utrecht, Utrecht University Museum, is not a museum at Utrecht University, which is the reason I could not find it. The opportunity to meet Romano Sandee and learn more about his autistic travel guide at www.AutiTime.com passed me by and I was so sad. 

I ended the trip having been confirmed as New Zealand Country Coordinator for the Neurodiversity Foundation, the organisation behind Neurodiversity Pride Week, which now runs in 62 countries. So, watch this (metaphorical) space for Neurodiversity Pride Week Aotearoa New Zealand 2026 (actually watch this exact space).

If play is meant to be voluntary, enjoyable, novel, exploratory, and rooted in curiosity, then travel absolutely counts. Thank you to Alta Sacra for body doubling me to get this article written. 

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