Fall 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 4

Today started as it always does on Mondays.

The onset of another week stretched taut. The day is already swelling, and the diary in my head is filling up, aswirl with scrawling lists jostling for space in my mind and my laptop and my notebook. All the must-dos and should-have-dones of all the tasks ahead, until they are opaque and blur into a buzzing black midge cloud, and I can’t see through it or above it or below it.

Too tired, too wired for sleep, I’d sweated in tangled sheets, too hot, then too cold. Hotwired to the bed, electrodes to a brain that refuses to shut down. Thoughts jammed, jerked in spasms. Images, memories jarred, jolted.

Fuck, I meant to do that, the mental jotter scribbled another-another-another thing to the list that lives inside me and does not lie still and does not sleep. An egg-timer on a frozen screen, constantly trying to rotate and refresh. Marching on the spot. Marking time.

My ears hum, the noise gets louder until I rattle, the ground below judders, a fault-line crack forging with the tremors, and I know the crash is coming. All the contents tightly bound by the elastic band in my head spool and fall away, as the band snaps shut, slackens and all the objects are in freefall, spinning somewhere in ether, far away from my attempts to clutch them back and seize them back into the crammed cupboards of my memory.

And all the little doors of these cupboards swing and slam, back and forth, drawers rattling off their rollers.

Tiny earthquakes in my chest, joggle-jam-jolt-jar. Againagainagain.

Stop – breathe – reset.

My weekly guided meditation email from For the Writers Soul arrives in my inbox. This time, instead of scrolling past, I click the link and press play. The message for this week reads,

Sometimes, it can feel like aspects of our lives are competing with one another rather than working together…like a garden that has many plants and flowers all reaching for the sun, we can sometimes feel like everything is a priority — and in competition with one another. Rather than choosing between the various aspects, we can bring elements together and help them flow so that they begin to work harmoniously together.

This feels like a portent: there are so many fragmented, splintered pieces of my life, compartmentalised in spheres that are endlessly out of orbit, disharmonic and cacophonic.  When one strays too far or clamours too much for attention, the rest are thrown off course and collapse like a row of dominoes.

All the emotions, the chiding, scolding, mocking voices, a resounding cymbal clash until your ears are ringing and there is no escape from the fallout. You want to run, but you can’t, because how can you run from your own mind?

Sometimes it feels like there is a cauldron inside me, bubbling away at the very innermost core; one filled with noxious gases and toxic waste filtered and funnelled from the parts of my body and my brain that do not work properly. Mostly, this cauldron is a slow simmer, but if left too long untended, the hot ooze of congealed slop starts to bubble, a magma rising through bone and tissue erupting into lava.

By now I should know when to expect these molten surges, feel the tremors and the split of sinew and the rush of heated blood. But it happens so quickly, without warning, that often I don’t feel it coming until it’s too late. It’s the reverse of quickening; it’s a hellfire baptism, and when the fire-tide has ebbed, it leaves behind a crater, a hollow. And then I am back in the shuck of my body, blood-drained. With each flare-up, the crater deepens, widens and I am a husk, a snail-less shell.

Since I’ve had the ADHD, dyscalculia, and dyspraxia diagnoses, and since I’ve been reading and conversing with other neurodiverse people, I know more buzzwords now. Once alien on my tongue, words like ‘meltdown’ and ‘shutdown’ and terms such as ‘Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria’ and ‘Emotional Dysregulation’ have entered my vocabulary and become plotted onto the cartography of my life so far, bells chiming with resonance.

Two characteristics which have long been unwanted companions.

Two conditions which I’d always believed were just me being rubbish at most ‘life stuff’, mostly kept in check, but during times of tiredness, overwhelm or anxiety, they would raise their devil heads, their horns twin daggers butting into me. Upon receiving unwelcome news, a let-down, an interruption, my emotions would suddenly charge into activity like an overloaded socket about to blow.

When this happens, when it starts, almost Tourette’s-like, I can’t control my impulses and behaviour – they become volcanic and I erupt. In private or public, with witnesses or none, it matters not. In these moments, I am a Fury. I cry and shout and curse and pace furiously if I’m outside and type frenziedly if I’m indoors or on my phone or laptop. I have thrown things and broken them. I have walked miles, not knowing where I’m going or when I’ll be back. I have ripped up sheets of paper and whisked objects off shelves, hurled rubbish outside and thrown it into the garden, strewing crap everywhere. The chaos builds into there is only chaos.

When calm eventually comes, after short-circuiting the power into darkness, I am drained, like a dead battery trying to recharge a surround-sound hi-fi system. Charred and ragged, a match trying to relight the buried wick of a burnt-down candle. But when the calm spreads, swelling into silence and stillness, I feel the clearing.

After all, when you unravel, what else is there left when all of it, all of you has unspooled and there is no more yarn?

I’m not sure if it makes any difference that I can now identify these signifiers. It does not make me more able to waymark my life-map, cool the cauldron’s churn, nor soothe its perpetual seethe.

With this new insight, sometimes I think I’m falling further into the crucible; drowning in it, perpetually trying to keep my head above the scalding swill, as though I’ve somehow unconsciously succumbed to the parameters of neurodivergence, straitjacketed in its grip, when I know I should shrug it loose and rise above the parapet, strengthening the rational, logical, clear-thinking parts of me.

How is this so?

It is not something I want, much the opposite.

In my neurodiversity support group, I wince at others’ casual use of the ‘disability’ label in conversation. I have never considered myself to be disabled; moreover, it is a diffability, not a disability.

But I know I also need to accept that there is much that limits my reasoning and ability to deal with the everyday and the unexpected. That the perennial deeply-ingrained  ‘masking’ (there, another buzzword) we neurodiversers do, cemented from early childhood, comes almost naturally, yet we wonder why we are so tired afterwards. I did not realise until very recently that this was something I did, something I’d learned and repeated and repeated without thinking all the way through my life.

Nor did I understand why some things nibbled and gnawed, why these wounds did not heal, why so many others around me – family, friends, colleagues – seemed to take things in their stride and did not ruminate the way I did, did not take disappointments or inconveniences or upsets deep into themselves.

Now, at least I have the benefit of hindsight. That the strange little rituals and obsessions that took root in childhood were ways of both masking and retreating. The endless lists of words and names. Collecting and cataloguing stickers and erasers. Cutting out photographs of hairstyles or desserts and collating them into scrapbooks. Poring over A-Z street maps and telephone books.

The habits of twisting strands of my hair around my fingers, spooling them into near-dreadlocks. Picking at my cuticles, any dry or rough patches of skin. Chewing off my nails until they were ragged and raw.

This evolved during my late teens into disordered eating and chaotic drinking; binges, whereupon I would frequently lose all sense of perspective and inhibition. It continued through my twenties, thirties and even into my early forties. Weekday abstinence would rupture into all-night drinking.

At first, a place of refuge, a placebo of joviality, brushing off the difficulties in a simulacrum of reckless fun. But once the invisible threshold where ‘just one more’ becomes one too many is crossed, you’re toppled into a never-never-land where the devil is real and he’s taken up residence in your head again.

Never physically alcohol-dependent, I’d rarely crave it during the week, but any social occasion permitted me to indulge, and once I’d started to drink, I found it increasingly difficult to stop – nor want to. Needing release, relief from a brain that refused to shut down, I sought oblivion through obliteration.

After too many disastrous moments, I quit, this time for good, almost six years ago, at the age of forty-five.

I found it easier than I’d expected. A tail-end Gen-Xer growing up in a small semi-rural town in the eighties and early nineties, drinking was a rite of passage, as ingrained into everyday culture as cigarettes and video shops and the Stock, Aitken & Waterman bubblegum-pop factory.

At crisis points, we’re often pulled towards edges and liminal spaces. For me, it is the sea and she is a summoner, whispering, join me in eternal undulation, slip off your human skin, and become selkie. Become free. Leave the wasteland and become water and sea creature.

But of course, this is also a simulacrum. This is an ephemeral space, is only meant to be so, and not one which should be the final crossing. The state of intoxicated desolation is only meant to be fleeting, a place we can physically and psychologically come back from.

When I realised that habitual drinking was subconsciously propelling me further towards the Rubicon, I vowed not to drink again.

Doing so, five years later, I still find myself, on occasion, stumbling towards that familiar path to the no-go zone, but I always stop short before I reach the crossing. I’m halted by many things, not least the reopening wound of a person dear to me who crossed that threshold and never came back.

This is common, I am beginning to realise, with deviant brains like mine. In some way, they are like fuses that blow quickly, candles that burn bright, flames flickering like firedances, but the wax residue builds up and up and spills over the candlestick and splatters the surrounding surfaces. There is chaos, mess, fallout. Stains left that linger long and won’t scrub out.

All the time, I am learning. More about being neurodiverse, more about the world and my precarious place in it, my tenuous grip on life. And how certain small acts of being and doing can ground me.

Despite myself, despite the sea throwing me into her depths and spitting me out, flinging me back onto the hard land, despite knowing the times I was close to free-fall into her ink-black opaqueness, I know I will not again teeter on that ledge, swim far from the shore.

Instead, I choose to write. Write out the dysphoria and dysregulation, rage and despair and fuck-it-all-ness.  I will choose the way of the sea turtle. Sometimes I am encased in my shell. It gets wind-battered and sea-blown and I retreat. At other times, I float, I swim. I swim words with every stroke.

I will let the sea carry me but not claim me. I will try to move with the tide, accepting the ebb, enjoying the flow, not fighting, but facing each wave-crest, pulling myself back up each time it knocks me over.

When I hear that siren-call from that place deep inside me, I listen to it. But not for long enough for it to entice me into its murky waters. Instead, I acknowledge it and soothe it to sleep.