This is the second in a series exploring my own neurodivergence. You can read the first part here.

I have been contemplating how important it is to me that conditions are just right. How particular I am about things being exactly as I think they should be, or else I feel discombobulated and cannot concentrate on whatever I am doing, whether it be eating, sleeping or working, sitting on public transport or chatting with friends in a coffee shop. How much it matters to me that I am sitting with my legs off the floor, in low light and that whatever I am listening to is so quiet I almost have to strain to hear it or else I feel claustrophobic. That there must always be a cushion to hold or a table to press up right against my stomach when I’m sitting still and heaven forbid that the light so particular to late afternoon has coloured the room the kind of dense grey that makes me want to pick up my skirts and dash for the hills wailing like a banshee.

I was thinking about how overwhelming supermarkets secretly are to me. How all the different smells compete and create a cacophony of muddly thought, so I quite lose the train of it and forget what I have gone in for. How even if I am there for nothing but a pint of milk I need to push a trolley around the shop or my brain seriously considers abandoning said milk in the middle of the aisle and going home to a lifetime of tea with no milk at all.

I have dwelled on why it is that the wrong pair of knickers can completely ruin my day, and how a day that doesn’t start with the coffee I like doesn’t feel like a day at all: that if there is no coffee in the cupboard I will somehow spend the rest of the day aware of its absence and doing something akin to waiting. For I am almost always paralysed by my need to do nothing other than wait: an afternoon appointment rendering an entire morning useless, or the wait for someone to arrive home almost unbearable unless I sit stock still and watch Scooby Doo to pass the time, for not in a million years can I commit to one task when I am busy waiting for something else. How absolutely frantic I feel inside my head when someone announces they are going to do something, but then rolls over and goes back to sleep or moves on to another task so I secretly want to scream do it NOW because I cannot bear the anticipation of an idea floated but not committed to.

I was thinking too, how often I feel on the side-lines of any given gathering. How I offer an inordinate amount of time to wondering if others will notice how odd I can be, how awkward, how clumsy. How I offset the fear of being found ridiculous by becoming seemingly both crazy confident and ridiculous, suddenly Lily Savage in everyone’s else’s midst, with so many stories to loudly tell and a laugh that might light up the room but that I experience in absolute detached fright, wildly appalled by this other me. She who will have me waking up with a hefty horrible dose of social remorse no matter how many times those who love me tell me I was fine. That my voice only grates in my head and that I am otherwise a joy.

I have wondered why it is that if something isn’t exactly as it should be, I want nothing to do with it. That the work I set myself must feel good to me or else I will abandon it, perhaps till a later date, perhaps till never, for I will have become so consumed with shame that it isn’t good enough. That if the house is even remotely untidy I will down tools and let it descend into madness, but that if it is immaculate I will be primping and preening it further into perfection until someone else messes it up and I become so appalled at my ability to control my domestic masses I give up all over again. And I have wondered why it is that deadlines are so elastic to me and it is only if you stand with a gun too my head that I will do what needs to be done just in the knick of time and not a moment before, because all those other moments are for sitting frozen with the kind of anxiety that looks like laziness and is in fact a whirligig of coaxing myself to do those things that would in a jiffy, dilute that very same sense that the world is too much for me.

I have become mired in shame. Squinting hard at my inability to do or be what I have told myself is “normal” and endlessly questioning whether other people feel as I do, whether I wear my “not normal” like a badge and other people KNOW and simply make allowances for all that marks me out. I have considered too that what has long been diagnosed as depression, is in fact simply the confusion and the burnout so long associated with neurodivergence. That it is not so much that my mind has been numbed by sorrow over the years but that it has become frayed at the edges with the sheer effort simply fathoming how to survive even the most ordinary of matters. With the constant dividing and sorting of all those things I feel too deeply and conversely, fail to feel at all.

At the age of fifty-two, so much bewilders me, evades me, scares me. So much that other people take in their stride I plot and plan and worry about and more than that, I hide. Disappear, lay low, give up. Or I dress it all up as funny, quirky and ok, when there is so much of me hoping that there will be a grown-up along in a minute who will take my hand, and wipe the hair away from my clammy brow and tell me that it will all be ok. That no-one is coming to shout at me, or arrest me. That they will walk to the post office to post the letter, that they will choose the kitchen, that they will remind me to take my vitamins, take a shower, choose a life.

I have been thinking about my relationship with food. With money. With my body. How all of it strikes me as little wars to be won daily. How my obsession with routine and ritual exists because it has always been my way of trying to contain what seems to be a whirligig of things to be done, things I don’t want to do, things I cannot avoid doing or else there will be consequences I would almost rather endure than do the tiny things that would prevent them. I have been thinking about how tired I get in large company, the fainting in theatres and concerts, how I stand always at the sidelines, watching myself trying to make sense of it all, forming experiences into sentences that romanticise the truth because it is the only way I can stomach it.

I have been thinking too about my nails bitten to the quick. About how much sensory feedback I need to feel alive. About the noises and phrases I repeat to myself and use to fill in gaps in conversation. About how my home birdiness exists because the world frightens me and I can barely work out how to get from a to b, about how when no-one is looking I plait and knot my hair, about how clothes are so complicated because I need them to be simultaneously tight and yet somehow barely there so there are no zips or buttons poking at my skin and about how friendship is hard because my object impermanence means I do not remember how good friendship really feels until I am reminded to seek it out. How terrible I am about birthdays and anniversaries and how often I struggle to attach meaning to things that others seem to find almost overwhelmingly emotional. I have been dwelling on the way there is always only this moment for me. That I do not store memories like others seem to, so there is barely any yesterday and so very often satisfy only what I need in this moment without consideration for the impact on tomorrow, because tomorrow is such an obscure concept to me, that I rarely consider it beyond seeing the days ahead stacked and falling away as I muddle my way through them.

This then is the real work of my unveiling. It is admitting that so many of the things I do, the choices I make, the way I live… all of it, all of it is a carefully constructed means of coping, surviving, even sometimes thriving! That I get so very tired because what might be as instinctive to everyone else, the simple act of something as daily and necessary as brushing my teeth twice a day, takes constant, exhausting thought or else it all just slips away, lost to more interesting pursuits, to staring into space or trying to get clarity on that which should be obvious. It is admitting that a life that has felt to me like a series of calamity, crisis and trauma, is but a consequence of what it is to try too hard to disguise what I have found unacceptable in myself.

This then is the real work, because renaissance cannot be simply the revival of what was, but must be rooted in the truth about who we are and what we need once we give ourselves permission to understand what that actually amounts to. What is too much. What isn’t enough. Where the lies we have told ourselves begin and end. Who we are when no-one is looking alongside careful examination of why we may have decided that there are parts of ourselves simply not fit for public consumption, and what we need to do to find peace somewhere in-between. How we even begin to give ourselves permission to let go of all that creates and exasperates paralysing anxiety, and in the process fashion a life that supports us, nurtures our deepest interests, satisfies us creatively and emotionally and above all, makes us feel safe, seen and valued.

And how above all else, it is necessary to allow ourselves to grieve for who we might have been if we only known better before today, and essential to understand, nay perhaps to accept, that there will be ugly days and sad days along the way to meeting a version of ourselves we are not yet familiar with.

This then is the real work. Let it begin. Let it unfold.

Trust the process in all its messy, beautiful glory. Messy, beautiful us.