I would like to say that I had an epiphany. But it was actually more of a slow burn. And it all began with Julia Cameron’s, The Artist’s Way. If you don’t know this book, The Artist’s Way, a multi-million selling best seller, is a twelve week course designed to help unlock creativity and generate more wonder and joy in your life. Before I go any further I must confess that for reasons which will become clear, I haven’t actually read The Artist’s Way but I know that the two central exercises which Julia Cameron proposes are morning pages and a weekly solo date. The second one I can absolutely get on board with. I mean, not weekly. Come on, who has time for that? But certainly in principle I love the idea of solitary time with a focus on creativity. This is in fact something I do often – I take myself to exhibitions, to write in cafes, to luxuriate in my local library or a trip to a nearby independent bookshop. I adore these solo trips. What sets them apart from other day to day activities is that they are infused with intention and devotion. I treat them like a pilgrimage. I treat myself like I am on a date. I slow down and enjoy every moment of it.

But the other must-do practice of Cameron’s just wasn’t for me. She and the many devotees of the Artist’s way, talk about the morning pages with almost religious fervour. Even the most cursory glance at the internet will produce thousands of glowing reports of this life-changing practice. Just three pages (no more, no less) handwritten first thing in the morning as a stream of consciousness, or a brain dump if you like, empties the rubbish from the mind and clears space for creative thinking. In principle I quite like this idea. It’s essentially what journalling is, a way of processing and clearing. But it turns out I am allergic to prescribed activities. To me the concept of morning pages felt like a strait jacket, the antithesis of creativity. Every single morning feels too demanding. The ‘rule’ around it makes this particular rebel less, not more, likely to maintain the practice. Similarly, I like the idea of solo artist dates but baulk at the rule-bound rigidity of this being a weekly requirement. Talk about setting myself up for failure.

I have spent years cultivating a nourishing morning routine, self-selecting practices that make me feel good and set me up for the day ahead. Writing three full pages in lieu of my beloved morning habits simply wouldn’t work for me. Briefly, I almost succumbed. Maybe Cameron and all the morning page writers knew better than I did what I needed. Maybe I just needed to find more self discipline. I mean, all those people couldn’t be wrong, right? I can’t actually remember if I ever tried it but if I did I probably didn’t get past day one. I had failed at morning pages.

The problem with ideas and practices that gain traction, saturating social media and collective consciouness, is that the voices that champion them become rigid. And the practices themselves become inescapable. It’s not just morning pages that have hovered about at the edges of my consciousness with persistence. Collagen supplements, matcha, bullet journalling have all tempted me. Turns out you need a strong constitution to resist. Like a tidal wave we can easily become swept along on these powerful trends without stopping to assess their efficacy. Or whether they even suit us.

I am a yoga teacher. I talk about yoga. A lot. I talk about how much it has helped me. I promote my classes and am open about encouraging people to try something that I think would help them. But…I also am clear that there are many different ways of accessing yoga and building a practice. I underpin all my classes with the assertion that each practitioner must seek their own voice and honour their own unique experience on the mat. I am never prescribing a rigid, narrow, linear route outside of which lies a wasteland of lost potential and fuck ups. If a practice isn’t workable, if it doens’t suit your life, capacity or budget, it’s a non-starter. We need to start normalising rejecting trends with impunity.

Realising that I could choose the practices and habits that I let enter my life was a revelation. I mean, I’d always done it that way, it just hadn’t entered my consciousness as an active thought. Knowing that I had been engaged in this small act of resistacne without even realsing made me very happy. And, for some reason, saying a hard no to the much-loved morning pages felt like the ultimate in rejecting guru pressure and believing in myself instead. Turning away happily from the all-pervasive marching army of morning page writers I’ll admit fills me with a little bit of childish glee.

I feel the same about some of the meditations I do online too. Especially the ones encouraging me to manifest something. Or ponder on the things I wish to change in myself or my life. Oh, the joy of smugly realising that there isn’t actually anything I want to change in my life or myself right now. That I’ve been doing the work for decades, thank you very much, and am content to bathe in the hard earned fruits of my labour. It might be worth considering for you too. There’s so much talk of growth and change. But what if you’re already happy? It’s not a given that you must be riddled with neurosis and flaws that need fixing. Just saying.

I guess it all boils down to discernment. And knowing yourself. And knowing that it’s okay to not follow the trend. Go your own way. Forge your own path. Discover yourself what works for you. You’ll get a damn sight more from it than blindly trailing after someone else. Those footsteps you’re treading in are someone else’s, on someone else’s path, in someone else’s life. Proceed with caution. Instead, throw out the Artist’s Way if you no longer want to write mornign pages, and create your own practices. Then run headlong down that path until they no longer work. Then create some more. You do you, baby. Because you’re awesome.

Like much of the autism community, I was shocked to see Uta Frith’s latest jab at autistic people. This one felt particularly vile given that this time she made it personal, naming and trying to invalidate an individual. This is my response.

I am going to attempt to boil my response down to three simple points –

1. An autistic person remains autistic regardless of whether you believe they are or not. In just the same way that gravity exerts a pressure on the earth regardless of whether or not you believe in gravity or not.

2. Nobody can possibly ever comprehend the experience and feeling of being autistic. Autism is so much more than the outwardly manifesting behaviours and coping strategies which constitute the visible aspects seen by others.

3. When you see an autistic person managing out in the world please remember that they are certainly masking to within an inch of their life and that what you see is probably costing them dearly.

I have written a lot about how it felt to grow up with undiagnosed autism. In fact, I am currently two thirds of the way through writing a book about it. You can read some of it on here. I have talked about being fobbed off by my GP when I first approached him to request a referral for diagnosis. I have talked about the struggles I had at work, with social situations and the additional challenges of being autistic while parenting small children. I have talked a lot about my school experience and the general, pervasive and damaging level of anxiety and metal illness I developed from not knowing what was wrong with me for decades and struggling with so much of day-to-day life with no recognition or support. But here’s the thing –

It wasn’t that my autism didn’t exist over those long and difficult years before I got a diagnosis. I was still autistic before I knew I was autistic. I found the world baffling and difficult, but I learnt to adapt. I learnt to hide it. I learnt that meltdowns and shutdowns behind closed doors were part of my every day. I had no idea what was happening to me, just that these extreme reactions seemed to be floor me when I rubbed up against ‘real’ world.

Incidentally, I often hear people referring to the ‘real world’ with regards to whether or not we as parents or educators are preparing our neurodiverse or highly sensitive kids for their entry into it. There still seems to be a bizarre idea that providing adaptations and modifications will create cosseted, pampered young people who are ill-equipped for life. In my decades of experience of working with young people in mainstream education, not to mention parenting my own autistic children, adjustments do not make moving around in the real world any more difficult. Offering compassion and reasonable adjustment does not mean a person is being unprepared for what’s to come. But I can tell you what really does fail to prepare a child for the real world – having them develop with zero sense of self, safety trust or autonomy. Having them grow up with out-of-control anxiety, existential questioning around their own being, having no understanding or care around them, not having the language or understanding to explain their experience, being invalidated, gaslit or ignored. Those things are damaging. These are the things that caused me to retreat into my head, develop wild, unhinged coping strategies and ultimately go completely off the rails.

As far as I know from watching Chris Packham talk openly and honestly about his own autism experience, he grew up feeling very much the same as I did. Even before the language of diagnosis, we were still autistic. We will continue to be autistic long after Uta Frith and the rest of the ‘experts’ who seem hell bent on their quest to invalidate autistic people, have got bored or moved on. I was autistic when I was at school. When I was at sleepovers. When I went into hospital. When I kissed my first boy. When I tried to go to university. When I was giving birth. I will be autistic when they wheel me into a nursing home and I will be autistic on my deathbed. Labels, or lack thereof, make absolutely no difference to this.

I am also assuming that, like me, Chris Packham, who received his diagnosis at 41, felt a mixture of relief, I-fucking-told-you-there-was-something-wrong-with-me and grief. Oh, the grief. I am still working through it, two years post-diagnosis - the childhood I didn’t ever get to have and the multitude of things that broke or collapsed under the weight of not knowing. The underachieving, the inability to pursue opportunities, the exhaustion and burnout, the misdiagnosis, the chronic anxiety and depression, broken friendships and messed up jobs. And most damaging of all, the relentless, inescapable, crushing sense that there was something different about me. Something broken, defective and incurable.

Eventually the grief began to recede. Just a smidgen. And the relief and joy began to move in. It has been a steep learning curve assimilating this new understanding. Like a tsunami it has rolled into my life, washing away the berating, critical voice and cleansing me of decades of toxic self-loathing. Like a floodlight has been activated, my diagnosis brought the truth about my struggles into sharp relief.

I guess its an impossible ask to expect someone to understand the felt sense of something they have never experienced. Which is what makes Uta Frith and her views so infuriating. And pointless. Like attempting to describe the taste of a strawberry to someone who has never eaten one, I cannot conceivably describe to you to experience of feeling autistic. I can talk to you about what a meltdown feels like. Or how it feels when I touch soft, floofy things. I can monologue on the joys of solitude and catalogue the reasons why I feel the ‘real’ world isn’t logical or kind enough for my liking. But I can never convey the internal, cellular sensation of living in an autistic life. Likewise, Frith and others like her can never pretend to understand being autistic, rendering her views irrelevant.

Being autistic is way more that just the manifestations that are visible to an outside observer. These autistic behaviours which are often products of the collision of being autistic with living in an inherently NT world or ways of managing extreme sensations are not the autism. The autism is what courses under my skin every time I leave the house. The spikes in anxiety when I go anywhere new. It is the dread that follows me everywhere. The relentless intrusive thoughts about illness that dictate my wider life. Most of all it is the feeling of living inside my skin. It is not separate from me. It is me. There may be an awful lot of debate and wrangling about what autism is and isn’t at the moment, but I can only say one thing with certainty and it is that I know this statement to be true. Whatever is ‘decided’ about autism, whatever name changes occur over the next couple of years. Whatever experts have to say on the matter, nothing will change the fact that I feel autistic. I know I am autistic regardless of trend, backlash, criticism or anyone else’s belief. And so does Chris Packham.

Imagine any other scenario in which it would be deemed acceptable to question the validity of someone’s diagnosis. Imagine saying to a diabetic, well, I’ve never seen you injecting insulin or go hypo. God, everyone’s becoming diabetic nowadays. There wasn’t this much diabetes about back in my day. We just sucked it up. Well, yes, occasionally someone slipped into a diabetic coma, but they were only the profoundly diabetic. Or I don’t think you’ve got depression. I’ve seen you at after works drinks so you’re clearly fine. And you have a job so, come on, buck up.

And, if you still need convincing of the power and pervasive nature of masking (another thing Frith has decided doesn’t actually exist) I can assure you that my husband remains the only person who has ever seen me unmasked. Let that sink in. Not my parents. Not my best friend. Not my work colleagues.

Last week I met up with a dear friend. She has known me for twenty-three years. I spend a lot of time with her. She is the kind of friend where we talk about everything and anything, with nothing too embarrassing, intimate or funny to be off the table. And yet…

We went for lunch. The town was busy and I was feeling particularly vivid – by which I mean I felt too defined, like I was surrounded by a glowing aura of visibility, my senses attuned painfully to the grey background noise and movement swirling around me. On this particular day was anxiety was high. I was longing to go home from the minute I arrived. At lunch I felt fearful of touching anything or having anyone in close proximity to me. I ordered chips because it felt like the safest option with regards to food poisoning. When my friend teased me for my order, given the wonderful and extensive menu, I lied then watched in horror, my heart hammering, as she tucked into her, admittedly delicious and infinitely preferable food, but one nonetheless covered in salmonella-inducing salad leaves. As we chatted, unbeknownst to her, I was rapidly talking myself off the ledge, trying to breathe through the anxiety, marvelling at how great it must be to just be able to order and eat anything, trying, and failing, to imagine a life in which health fears didn’t feature. I surreptitiously sanitised my hands under the table after using the vinegar bottle, frantically scrubbing away the germs that I could feel crawling all over my skin like fire ants.

My friend knew nothing of this. Couldn’t possibly have known that my mind and body were fizzing with anxiety and that the entire time we were talking I was simultaneously engaged in an internal battle which was distracting and required a shit ton of control and careful management to avoid spilling out. When I got home from lunch I lay on the sofa under a pile of my cosiest blankets, drinking tea and watching a comfort show. The feeling of relief and safety was so overwhelming and joyful it made me cry.

I could have told her. Of course I could. She would have been nothing but understanding and caring. But a number of things stopped me, always stop me.

Firstly, I hate drawing attention to myself. Yes, I’d rather suffer in silence than have a scenario where I need looking after or special attention. My MO is pretty much to ensure that everyone around me is okay, even at the expense of my own needs. I want to slide into social situations with minimal fuss, preferably virtually transparent with insignificance, and then slope out again having made zero impact. When I get home the dream scenario is obviously to have nothing to ruminate over – no cockeyed conversations, perceived slights, indecipherable expressions or comments that might keep me awake, literally, for months to come.

Secondly, I am intrinsically a very private person. Plus, it’s exhausting having to explain yourself or describe feelings that are indescribable. I always regret it, any time I try to talk about how I feel. The other person has questions or worse, offers solutions, by which point I am already floundering and willing the entire conversation to be erased for everyone’s memory.

Thirdly, masking is my normal. I’ve been doing it for 50 years, mostly successfully. That’s a hard habit to break. It feels terrifying to contemplate letting the mask slip, even to those closest to me. I hate the feeling of exposure and scrutiny, hating attention of any kind. Unmasking feels like the ultimate in vulnerability and nakedness. Keeping my true self hidden works for me. She’s all mine and I am fiercely protective of her.

So, to Uta Frith and her frankly ridiculous assertion that Chris Packham can’t possibly be autistic because he can communicate so well, I will say one thing – at what cost?

I too can communicate extremely well. I am articulate and wordy. In my professional work and in my social circles anyone you ask would agree. They’d be shocked if they knew just how much it takes out of me to put myself out there every day, talking and listening and responding and laughing all of which glides across the surface of the bubbling cauldren of anxiety and self-scrutiny, that I am holding it together with effort, physically uncomfortable, shrinking painfully from anyone’s gaze, meticulously engineering my day to avoid situations that spike my anxiety. It’s bloody exhausting.

I can only imagine how much Chris Packham needs to decompress and regulate after work. It honestly makes me so sad so think about it. To think about all the supposedly ‘high functioning’ autistic people for whom managing day to day and holding down a job feels like it’s slowly killing them. Who have developed such effective coping strategies that they are then informed that their experience isn’t real. That their struggles aren’t real. They they are essentially not real. Imagine.

So, those of us that can must keep writing and talking about this and sharing the reality of the highly masked autistic life. Obviously, I can only speak for myself and am in no way attempting to generalise. But if more people share, then a fuller picture will emerge. And then maybe ‘experts’ like Frith will learn something.

They’re back. First time around they arrived in the night, with stealth, seemingly a little embarrassed to arrive at such a trendy, much talked about party. But then they began to feel right at home and like an unwanted straggler, refusing to accept that the night is over and still hovering around in the morning making breakfast in someone else’s kitchen, they outstayed their welcome. Because that’s kind of how it feels – as though you have been taken over by an uninvited house guest. Before long, I was my own tide. But this was not water but lava, waves of heat rolling unstoppably through me, a relentless ebb and flow throughout every day. I wore vests to work in the middle of winter, panicking when I felt the first prickle of an incoming wave, the surge teeming with force and power like a contraction, reaching for my peppermint spray , frantically looking for the nearest window. Or escape chute. Because trying to continue the conversation you were currently in the midst of with, say, your boss, while you are completely distracted, suddenly and without warning, by the utterly consuming force of fire radiating through you like solar flares, is impossible.

Weirdly, after an interminable six months or so of this, of skimpy dressing and wide open windows and duvets flung away violently and repeatedly through the insufferably lengthy nights, they stopped. Suddenly and inexplicably the heat dissipated. Disappeared. I felt regulated again. I started wearing jumpers. I got cocky and stopped fearing a hostile takeover at an inopportune moment (aren’t they all bloody inopportune moments?) A blissful, temperature controlled six months followed. Like childbirth and head colds, once passed, the heat assaults blurred, eventually becoming a distant memory, receding into the mind files of things I no longer have to deal with.

So it was a surprise when I felt this unmistakable and very, very unwelcome feeling back again. No stealth this time. If the last bout infiltrated slowly, almost apologetically, this time it felt brazen, a diva making her dramatic entrance, bursting through the door half cut, clutching a bottle of Malbec around the neck, free arm flung wide. I’m back. Have you missed me?

This time it’s brutal. I keep trying to minimise the waves with humour. Maybe I can mock them into submission. I imagine them as a new, trendy sport. Like padel. Extreme Flush. Ultimate Heat. The Bed is Lava. These fuckers are burning me to the ground, less wave travelling through, more heat lamp; one switch and I’ve gone from cool to nuclear in seconds. It hurts, prickling me with red-hot needles and then goose bumps in quick succession. I am permanently coated in a sheen of sweat. My head throbs with pain all day. I feel desiccated, dried out by this internal heat like the garden in my friend’s Suffolk garden, with it’s lawn too dry and crispy to walk on with bare feet, its wilting, brown plants, everything drooping under the weight of so much relentless heat.

It’s not just southern England which has suffered extreme, prolonged heat. 2026 feels like the summer that the world was on fire. Every time I glance at the BBC news page there’s another one, a rolling ticker-tape of wild fires and devastation. It feels kind of fitting that I, too, am victim to a personal wildfire that is raging out of control, coming ever closer to wiping out my entire life. Maybe I have manifested this. Maybe all those years of trying to live seasonally, as connected to nature as much as is humanly possible given that I am living through capitalism and patriarchy, my life a bombardment of AI, adverts and fake fucking everything. What if the longing I have felt for a deeper connection to the rhythm of the year, to using nature as my guiding star, rather than the consumerist-laden, seasonal aisle at Home Bargains, has brought me finally into direct alignment, at one with nature, burning up alongside my beloved forests?

Or maybe it’s the eclipse. I mean, arguably it’s a coincidence, right, this sudden and powerful reemergence of heat in my body. At the exact same time as the Lion’s Gate Portal opened, with all it’s ushering in and releasing. Or so they say. And the solar eclipse? That must bring some weird arse energy with it. Could my hot flushes be an extreme burning away of all that no longer serves me? The ultimate releasing ritual. The razing of my old self. Jeez, maybe new growth is going to come in in its wake. A whole new me, gingerly germinating out of the still-warm ashes of my previous identity.

But then alongside the heat, like the worlds most unwelcome bedfellow, comes insomnia. Because obviously it is impossible to sleep when your own body is a raging inferno and you wake repeatedly, thrashing first through the half sleep of the rising temperature, a sensation not disimilar to how I imagine drowning, semi-conscious in sticky lava feels, before pinging suddenly awake to lie in a veneer of cold sweat, like you’ve been glazed, anxiety and frustration surging in the undertow of heat. No stranger to poor sleep, this is still next level. I feel so permanently tired I am woozy for much of the day. Even with my eyes closed I can feel the dizziness swimming like nausea. I am wall-eyed and demented from sleep deprivation. And, like as a mother with a new baby, I become enraged by hearing other, younger (or husband shaped) people bemoaning their tiredness. I fantasise about grabbing them round the throat Bart Simpson style and shaking them vigorously, reassuring them in the strongest possible terms that they have no fucking idea what tiredness feels like.

And while I’m in no way creating a hierarchy or an interescting tiredness/stress pie chart, at least when I had new babies I wasn’t also trying to work full time, care for ageing parents, navigate a mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and deal with still at home teenagers with newly acquired driving licences (FFS as if I needed anything else to keep me up at night). You know you’ve got it bad when you look back on the heady days of post-partum sleep deprivation with misty-eyed fondess, looking jealously at your younger self sobbing on the sofa after another broken night, wanting to step back through the veil of years to softly stroke her head and tell her to enjoy these blissful days of hibernation and mum-caving as it gets much, much worse later down the line.

Is this the worst if it? Is this new level I’ve unlocked going to use up my remaining hearts. Or power me up for the next round? I do kind of love the thought of emerging from this time, my face smeared with soot, hair wild, a broken cigarette dangling from my cut lips, and striding into my don’t fuck with me, badass future. But until then – ever increasing heat. Stronger and more powerful sensations. Less and less sleep. More and more anxiety. I’m not sure how much more I can handle to be honest. I’m just so tired of naively assuming things have reached an apex – the worst they will be - before everything becomes profoundly and shockingly worse. All areas of life feel surreal and unfathomable. Politics, climate change, the patriarchy, wars, prices, fuck wits, and now here, at home in my own body. Even my endless mantra of for fucks sake is losing its impact, as the situation, once again, surpasses my expectations. Tests my limits of sanity. Crosses the red line, the first of which is now just a pale, pink, faded tattoo, back there somewhere, barely visible.

Of course I will soldier on. What choice do we have but to keep at it? I will continue to attempt to be the glue of my family. Will carry on fretting until I hear my daughter’s key in the door. Will speak to someone from Age UK. Hire a solicitor and enter the steep learning curve of the legalities of acquiring lasting powers of attorney. I will go to work powered by tea and chocolate digestives and collapse into bed every night, earlier and earlier (yes, 9pm is now a completely reasonable bedtime) and live out of synch with the nocturnal teen contingency. Is it fun? Is it fuck. But it’s mine this life and I’m determined to continue to seek joy, even if it’s blurred by exhaustion. It’s my body and I’m determined not to lose myself to this wild transition. It is what it is. There’s no point fighting nature. And, who needs sleep anyway?

Reading the same book at different stages of life hits hard. Maybe the first time round you relate most to the twenty something daughter. During your second read, you’ve shifted into the mother mode and have a whole new perspective on the same events. Maybe over the years you’ve acquired more knowledge on the context or history of the book, allowing it to open up a deeper treasure chest of riches. Maybe the things that have shaped you over the intervening years have rendered it too painful to revisit, a sharp slice a little too close to the bone.

It’s not just books either. I loved My So-Called Life when it came out in the early 90s. Still very much with a teenage brain, I related heavily to Angela and, like her, found her mother Patty to be quite annoying; cloying, overprotective and uptight. Every Christmas Eve for many, many years, I have revisited the Christmas episode of My So-Called Life. It became something of a Christmas Eve ritual for me when I had finally wrestled my children into bed, to pour a glass of wine and put that particular episode on and attack the mountain of wrapping I still had to do, the very wrapping I had vowed would never get left until Christmas eve again. Over the years, I began to see the episode differently, as gradually the needle moved. Eventually, as a mother myself, I moved completely from relating to Angela to, horror of horrors, being utterly on the side of Patty. I started to find it deeply moving, her longing for family time, concerns over her daughter’s friends, wanting to know where Angela was at night. And now it makes me sob ugly great heaving sobs every time as Patty stands in the snow and aches over her relationship with her daughter. And boy, do I recognise the collapse of relief in her entire body as she is reunited with her in the hymn-filled church. Likewise, the deeply felt mothering instinct which causes her to hold Ricky as he cries. I didn’t register any of that when I was younger. I didn’t see the hurt and sense of abandonment which Patty was carrying. Couldn’t possibly understand the complexities and baggage which run through marriages and families, no matter how happy they are. All I saw was the connection between Angela and her friends, cheering her breaks for freedom and her sense of loyalty and need for belonging which overshadowed everything else in her life, including her receding relationship with her parents.

I have recently been re-reading The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I first read it on its publication in 1997 and was immediately struck by the captivating story and beautiful, poetic prose. It was a book that stayed with me and one which I have read a number of times over the years simply to reacquaint myself with writing of such depth and quality. However, one of the central themes of the lasting impact of trauma, didn’t quite make it through to me in earlier readings. I definitely felt a lot reading the book, particularly the trepidation and fear which carries you through the pages with a dark, creeping sense of foreboding. I empathised with the character of Estha and felt heartbroken for what happened to him. And obviously I could see the direct link between the events of his childhood and the struggles he was experiencing as his solitary, muted adult self, unreachable even by his beloved sister. But I had no real understanding of trauma. Over the years, in my professional life in education and in my other life as a yoga teacher and facilitator, I have learnt a lot about trauma and ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences). I have attended trainings and workshops around creating trauma informed classrooms and yoga classes. I have worked directly with countless young people who are living with ongoing trauma or with the legacy of historic trauma. I have also begun to explore how traumatic incidents within my own childhood have impacted me in ways I hadn’t ever realised before. It is inevitable, therefore, that with increased awareness, knowledge and experience, I would read Estha’s story differently. Obviously, I am not suggesting I am anything special in this regard. Given the inevitability of growth, life experiences and change as we age we would all approach the subject matter of our reading history differently throughout our lives should we re-visit it. We cannot go back and re-read everything we once enjoyed as a child or young adult and filter it again through a new lens. And nor should we. Some things deserve to be preserved exactly where and when we encountered them, sensitive to the impact they had on our tender, innocence like a powerful colouring within our developing souls. However, given that I am, through choice, revisiting this wonderful book, it is certainly interesting to register which parts of the story speak to me now, at this point, in this chapter of my life. It’s a fantastic exercise in acknowledging how far I have come in terms of my own growth and healing. In this respect, the book holds a mirror up to my sense of self. It weaves a timeline from there to here. From who I was then to who I am now. Maybe even to who I am still becoming. Literature holds so much power in this way. Friends and family, ageing and growing alongside you (some to greater degrees than others, it has to be said), sharing life with you, can only offer smeared reflections. But a novel? A novel, essentially frozen in time, both simultaneously holds our hand and takes us back to the place and person we were when we first encountered it, and meets us again here, fresh, vital and illuminating. The re-read novel pushes open new windows, and the fresh breeze alters the way we connect with it. I can visualise The God of Small Things placed at strategic points along the relentlessly, forward-moving river of my life and at each place can hear the different wisdom it whispered into me. It looked at my capacity, life experience and emotional maturity and offered what it knew I could cope with in that moment, feeding me slivers of fruit, their juices running down its outstretched hand. As I have aged and my brain has altered, shifted, expanded and been forever scarred, the novel has responded in kind, offering an ever-changing buffet of wisdom and delights dependent on my place within the space-time continuum of my own personal timeline. And that’s powerful stuff.

No generation knows terror like generation X. Fear was our bread and butter. The messaging was clear – be afraid. Be very afraid.

Turns out, we were definitely sold a lie back in the day. Was it a conscious parenting strategy I wonder, filling us with fear, making us so scared of everything that we basically monitored and parented ourselves. If that’s true, then society at large was definitely in on it. Nobody held back from terrorising children over the peril we would encounter every day, often before leaving the house. Forget stranger danger. That at least had some merit. These fears were bonkers - overhyped, overblown and completely without checks and balance. There was never any discussion around the likelihood of these things actually happening, zero amount of reasonable, common-sense probability. Which left us kind of free floating around in a swirling mass of unchecked fear.

Who can still remember vividly the endless infomercials that aired throughout the seventies, those cautionary tales promising a grisly end in their seemingly innocent scenarios? I will never forget the children who strayed too close to the train line. Or the ones who thought a barn of farm machinery was a cool place to play. And I don’t think I have ever looked at an electricity pylon and not had a flashback to the small boy, jerking and sparking after climbing one to retrieve a tangled kite. The world around us was apparently riddled with danger and jeopardy at every turn, full of large-scale threat and peril.

But there was more, a whole host of subtler, less dramatic ads that haunted my childhood. These were the accidents that could befall anyone in their own home; the pan of boiling water upended onto a child after a careless mother left the handle sticking out (yes, I still think of it every time I dutifully swivel the pan handle towards the middle of the hob). Likewise, the iron. It was mother again, silly woman, thoughtlessly leaving the iron cable hanging, ripe for a grab from a chubby toddler hand. The advert cut away as the iron began to freefall but I didn’t need to see the impact of the burning metal onto the child’s face – that image lived unwanted in my head for years, perfectly supplied by my own vivid imagination. Most terrifying of all was the advert showing a table containing two identical piles of sweets. Except, obviously, in this dark and duplicitous world that we lived in, one was not sweets at all but evil medication, fooling and tempting unsuspecting children. I lived in a state of abject fear that the sweets I was nervously consuming were shortly going to render me a foaming, frothing mess, clutching at my chest as I gasped my last raspy breath.

As if the BBC wasn’t doing a good enough job on its own of rendering the younger generation incapacitated with fear and anxiety, there were plenty of other scenarios floating around that we were led to believe were going to impact us directly. To say that these were overblown would be an understatement. I still wonder what the point was. Was there so little going on back then, so little entertainment or distraction that people genuinely gorged on this stuff with glee? Surely the adults around us knew that the likelihood of encountering any of these deadly fears was remote. Maybe. But not only did they do nothing to alleviate our fears, they actively fed them.

My parents had a book on spontaneous combustion. I can still recall the photographs and images in its dark and disturbing. I was morbidly fascinated with it, even when it made my skin crawl with the icy fingers of terror. I know from talking to friends my age that we weren’t the only family with a similar interest/obsession with this topic. It was clearly rife. What on earth were our parents thinking? The fear of spontaneous combustion, like so many other implausible but recurrent terrors, was like a background anxiety throughout my childhood. I thought about it all the time with a dizzying mix of fascination and horror. As I can recall, nobody talked about this with any degree of measure. Maybe a bit like fortune tellers and mediums from the last century, these creepy elements of the supernatural served some kind of purpose, a real-life horror movie with all the fizzing glee of a good conspiracy theory. Speaking of which, I haven’t heard the Bermuda Triangle mentioned for decades. But you best believe that it was on everyone’s lips in the eighties. I remember vowing that I would never be so foolish as to fly over that area of the world for fear of being sucked into oblivion.

Then there was the fear of quicksand which also seemed to occupy a disproportionately large number of conversations throughout my childhood. Images of people being sucked slowly into the earth, only their two flailing hands left visible above the surface, literally kept me awake at night. I could only too easily imagine the sense of panic, could hear the gulping, wet sucking sounds of the possessed sand wrapping its evil arms around my thin, light body, suffocating me as it closed in over my mouth. Given that we never went anywhere where we were likely to encounter quicksand was no reson to avoid to having to learn the techniques required for survival. I do remember my father losing both his shoes to a particularly eager stretch of wet sand somewhere in the north of England, having them sucked right off his feet as he ventured out to rescue something of mine. Abject terror coursed through me, my active mind racing ahead to his funeral and my lifelong guilt at being the cause of his sucky, fear-filled demise. On that day he was able to retrieve both his shoes, pulling them noisily out of the sand and then washing them in the town’s pretty duck pond much to my mother’s embarrassment. In my mind we had encountered one of our biggest fears and survived to tell the tale. But what if the sand had grabbed more than his shoes? What if it had pulled him slowly under, right in front of our eyes? Could I be relied upon to remember the strategies for rescue. Or would I have stood there helplessly, watching my father disappear into the bowels of the earth?

Rabies was another installed fear that I now realise was also completely overblown. Holidays in France were ruined for me as a child. I desperately tried to relax and enjoy the pastries and ice creams and different, French-style playgrounds. But I can tell you, it’s pretty difficult when you are hyper vigilant, fearful that a foaming, demented canine is lurking around every corner. When the channel tunnel was first talked about, many people were fiercely opposed, stating that rabies-carrying rats would be able to enter Britain en masse. I imagined swarms of infected, mutant rodents hurtling through the tunnel and rendering England as dangerous and fearful as our poor, rabies-riddled neighbours.

By the time I was a teenager, the fears were ramped up a bit in both scale and consequence. I’m still waiting for all the drug pushers to start foisting hard drugs on me at every turn. Because, if you’d listened to my parents, you’d have thought that the streets were full of drug takers hell bent on grabbing us all in order to forcibly turn us, kicking and screaming, into dead-eyed addicts. I guess the deeper message was - be suspicious. Everyone and their twisted agendas are out to get you. Ironically, the only pushers I ever encountered were the ones I lived with, who foisted fear on me every single day

The last big fear I remember falling for via the medium of society at large was of catching Aids. Aids was a serious concern throughout the eighties, legitimately so. It devastated communities and took countless young lives. The government created a huge ad campaign featuring enormous, black tombstones that appeared on everything from billboards to letterbox flyers to television adverts as the Aids crisis took hold. As usual real information was in short supply. I don’t remember anyone giving any context. There was no discussion round the dinner table. Just hard, cold fear. Because apparently you could catch Aids off the handles on the tube. Or from public toilets. And don’t even think about snogging someone. That way certain death lies.

I wonder what fears today’s generation live with. Children will always pick up on the energy of those around them. Today they’ll be hearing about the manosphere and Iran and the migrant crisis. Maybe kids are lying awake at night scared of invasion and nuclear attack. But I don’t see young people being fed baseless, overly dramatic lies anymore. I don’t hear it being suggested that marijuana is a gateway drug, that you might enjoy a spliff one day but shortly afterwards you’ll be slumped in a stairwell with a needle in your veins. I don’t hear parents implying that girls will fall pregnant at the mere glance at a penis, which is not far from what I was told. It would seem that we’ve collectively moved on from this particular brand of nonsense. Maybe we’ve learnt something about fear-based behaviour management. Because it might have stopped us kids from playing on old tractors. But it sure as hell also created a generation of neurotics who were fearful of the very society in which they lived. The fact that so many of the images associated with the fears peddled through the eighties still live in me in vivid technicolour has at least informed the way I raised my own children. Yes, obviously I want to make them aware of the very real threats to their safety – spiked drinks, unsafe driving, walking home alone, the stuff that keeps parents up at night. But I definitely don’t need to add to that with other, baseless fears. Our kids would never fall for it anyway. Looking back, I can’t believe that we all did. Honesty, probability and common sense underpin all my conversations with them about life out in the big, scary world. And we focus way more on the good stuff. Because I kind of want them to enjoy their wonderful, precious life, not spend it in fear of every sweet and dog and beach they encounter.

Yesterday I was flicking through a copy of Outdoor Swimmer magazine which my husband had left on the kitchen table, and I glanced, and I mean glanced, at a short article about an artist who collects beach plastic and uses it to create art works. Oh, my brain said instantly, that sounds great. I think I’ll start doing that, and I immediately began to run through local beaches and potential best spots for a good collection. By the time I had crossed the kitchen to put the kettle on, the flare of that idea was already fading. It did come back to me at intervals throughout the day, but even if it had been the best idea I’d ever had and the this was unfortunately immaterial as it had already been swiftly followed by hundreds of other bright, compelling ideas flashing like sparks through the mundane and the domestic moments of that particular day. These ideas and sudden plans come so thick and fast that I have lists all over the house, on the notes app on my phone, scribbled inside novels, filling notebooks in every room. At the moment of their arrival, each one is so urgent and compelling and accompanied by such a surge of excitement and adrenalin that they briefly stop me in my tracks; a new creative project, a business idea, a career change, a plan to rearrange the house, a new hobby on and on and on, a never ending stream. Many are small and inconsequential. Mostly the fizz has flattened before it even gets started. And I learnt long ago not to mention any of them out loud to my family. But sometimes they have such a sense of immediacy and urgency that I devote vast amounts of time to them in a sudden and frantic flurry of energy.

Recently a novel arrived in my brain, with fully formed characters, the entire thing plotted from beginning to end. I was driving at the time, alone in the car with loud music on, singing my heart out as I zipped along in the sunshine. And the story simply sailed in the open window and settled into my mind unbidden. My heart briefly sank. Nope. No. NO. I think I may have even said that out loud. Oh no you don’t. Not now. I’ve got too much on as it is. Piss off and go and annoy someone else. But it was too late. I was lit up like a fairground ride inside. I began to buzz uncomfortably as the thrill of it began to course under my skin. My stomach fluttered with excitement. This was it. My best idea ever. This had best seller written all over it. What if I don’t get it down quick enough and someone else writes it instead. I mean, come on. This idea is so wonderful it must be out there in the ether, landing in countless other minds at this very minute. I powered home, the excitement and adrenalin tinged with the fear of some part of this idea leaking out into the world to be stollen by another writer. I remember the utterly overwhelming sensation of excitement of carrying this story home, holding it tenderly and protectively inside my mind, my best new secret. For the rest of the drive, I felt high. But this was better than any drug. When I got in the house I went straight to my laptop, opened a new word document and out it poured. For a week I woke at dawn and wrote this story. I felt slightly manic. It felt too easy, the words just forming on the page as if I had nothing to do with it. I fell in love. Head over heels. These characters were as alive in my mind as my real flesh and blood friends. I was excited to meet them every morning, thrilled to see a little more of their story unfold beneath my fingers. During this time, I felt fully alive. The world was technicolour and I was cresting a wave, surfing it expertly, effortlessly, woo hoo-ing on this exhilarating ride, longing to stay wave borne for as long as humanly possible. Because, obviously, I knew it would end. Eventually even the most majestic, dramatic wave breaks, all that power and energy reduced to a trickle receding on the sand. As fast as the creative surge arrives, it disappears. A snuffed candle. A switched off light. In its wake, I deflate. I frantically try to recreate the sensation of creativity, but the shine has dulled. The work I began so feverishly and joyfully sits neglected on my laptop, waiting for the next surge of energy. But, of course, the next flow will bring with it new sparking ideas and different projects will start with gusto, the old ones victims of their own diminished attraction.

It’s not just novels and books. My Canva account has pages of social media images I’ve spent hours creating, for online courses I’ve never run, businesses I’ve never started and community groups I didn’t get round to organising. I have plans to start an autism consultancy, a podcast and a local support group for teenagers. I regularly see an inspiring YouTube channel and think how lovely it would be to make content like that, immediately planning a side quest, never mind the fact that the videos that inspired me were obviously professionally produced, not cobbled together with a cheap mic from Amazon and a phone camera. Semantics. These small issues are never enough to put me off. And I’ve lost count of the times I’ve decided to start a new Substack newsletter. Maybe one for each of my multitude of interests. Why not? Again, let’s not think about the fact that I barely have time for the one, little-read Substack that I already do have (this one right here).

Obviously, there is a lot of joy in having an idea factory for a mind. Creative flow cannot be beaten in my opinion. The highs and wild, wild energy of it are intoxicating. And addictive. But this kind of brain is also debilitating and exhausting. There is a shame that comes with being unable to complete anything. I cringe when I stumble upon an old notebook and see the manic scrawlings of previous brilliant ideas. They’re tinged with sadness. I marvel at my friend who conceived an idea for a book, knuckled down and wrote it, got it published, started marketing it. Every time I see them at another book fair or literary event I feel a swell of envy. Imagine if I’d stuck with just one effing idea. Who knows where we’d be now. I guess it will never be like that for me. I am currently trying really, really hard to focus on editing one of my novels to the point of it being ready to submit. I have started taking the editing process seriously, using Post-its and timelines and charting the story arc. I hired an editor and paid attention to their feedback and notes. But there’s no denying that this isn’t anywhere near as satisfying, or fun, as the initial creating. Especially the wild type that takes me over and sees me writing for hours fuelled on tea and digestives and happiness. I had better just hope that no new, shiny, compelling idea calls to me before I’ve finally finished my book. I’m in a race against the creative clock for sure.

January 1996

She’s like a Rainbow – Rolling Stones

We walked through a muffled, snowy street. The snow fall had been so fast and heavy that it lay thick and unblemished, softening all hard edges, sucking out all sound. We trod a soft path along the middle of the road, the parked cars to either side white mounds, giant boulders dropped beside our miniature selves. Beyond them the houses, enormous on this street, barely visible behind trees their walls and gates, all enlarged now, rounded by snow. We were alone, our breath puffing out before us. Streetlights threw their redundant light in yellow puddles on the ground, the thick of night lightened and cleansed. Sharp, stinging air sliced our lungs. So very, very quiet. And then a sliding. A thump as a tree branch deposited its load onto the soft pavement. I was having trouble keeping up with Saira. Despite wearing thin, unsuitable boots that were already saturated, flapping open at the sides and letting in snow with every step, Saira was walking at some lick. I felt buoyed up, floating on the adrenalin of the excitement of snow, this middle of the night adventure, the playfulness, the heightened reality in this soft altering of the world. When we saw the park ahead, we approached the railings swiftly, uncertain on the ground. As usual I was momentarily surprised that they still hadn’t patched up the missing iron post but, as we squeezed through with practiced ease, and scrambled through the shrubs, the thought evaporated in a wave of stomach-tingling excitement as there, before us, lay a virgin, muted wonderland, a heaped and softened landscape. Saira was already off at a run, her shouts echoing round the space. I was worried that we were still too close to the road to start making noise, but of course, Saira had no such concerns, and I watched her jump and dance her way across the snow. She really wasn’t wearing very much. I belted my coat around myself more firmly and readjusted the woollen scarf at my neck before setting of after her, lungs scorching in the cold. We both knew, obviously, where we were going and, as we approached the hill, were comfortingly reassured that so did the rest of town. Under the tree that stood alone on top of the hill, I found Justin, smoking a joint, sitting on a wooden sledge. I introduced him to Saira and watched him look up at her. He opened his mouth to say something, but she had already gone, racing to someone and leaping onto the back of their sledge as they launched off down the hill. I very suddenly felt unsettled and tense having brought Saira here. It felt wrong somehow, to muddle the circles, too dangerous to bring her out of one sphere and place her in another. I felt responsible for her, a feeling in direct disproportion to the amount of influence I could ever exert over her. I shuffled Justin up on the sledge and sat closely beside him. ‘This yours?’ I asked, patting the wood.

‘Nah, it’s Pauls, but he’s busy with a tarp,’ Justin replied, nodding his head toward the brow of the hill where I could just make out a body cocooned in plastic being prepared for flight.

‘This thing goes like a mother, though. You want a go?’

‘Yeah, maybe. Later.’ I watched the movement on the hill. It was dizzying. ‘You been here long?’

‘Straight from the pub. What about you?’

‘Zoe’s party. It was okay. Bit too much drama for my liking. D’you know her? Zoe. She’s quite needy.’

‘Yeah, I know Zoe. And her idiot boyfriend. Was he there?’

‘Tim? Yeah, he was there. He also took I shine to my friend.’ I nudged him gently in the ribs. He smiled. ‘Who is she anyway? You kept her quiet.’

Suddenly I regretted this. She didn’t belong here, in the real world. This wasn’t working.

‘Um, I,’ I swallowed hard. ‘I’ve known her for a few years. We don’t see each other that often. She lives out in Fleetfield. She’s cool, but you know...she’s, um, oh nothing. She’s just cool. Anyway, she’s a good laugh. I asked her if she fancied coming into town tonight. Really didn’t fancy Zoe’s party on my own. And now we’re here.’ I took a deep breath, glancing through the sledgers, trying to locate her. My errant ward, this ethereal soul, wandering out there somewhere, unchecked.

1. Leaving public toilets

The fact that when you leave any public toilet the door is always a pull handle. This is utterly illogical to me. Yes, I may be slightly more germ reluctant than your average person, but seriously have you ever watched people leaving public toilets. Turns out a surprising number of people still haven’t got the hand-washing memo. Why on earth don’t we have the pull door on the way in so when you’re leaving you can just push it open with your foot and save yourself the ball ache of having to yank your sleeve down over your hand in order to exit the room minus norovirus.

2. HSBC cash machines

The thousand decibel beeping is relentless. Like some kind of torture. Thank God for online banking.

3. Perfume

Yes, you may love the smell of yourself, but drifting a cloud of toxic, headache inducing guff around with you everywhere is just plain selfish.

4. Parking

Any time. Anywhere. Especially anywhere new, but given I’d rather get the train somewhere than navigate unknown parking, thankfully I mostly manage to avoid this particular flavour of hell.

5. Car parking machines

Following swiftly on from parking itself is the double horror of payment machines. They’re all different. Some require you to know your number plate which I consider a completely unreasonable ask on top of the distress of navigating the car park itself. Some require an app. Some take cash. Some don’t. Just NO

6. Tyring to buy a cup of tea

I have quite specific requirements granted, by come on. Why is it impossible for me to get a decent cup of tea anywhere outside of my own house? I thought England was the spiritual home of builders tea. And yet…

7. Someone knocking on the door

I’ve been wracking my brains trying to come up with a single acceptable reason for someone to come and bang on my front door and nope, I can’t think of one. Please don’t do it. No, I don’t want to see you unannounced. Even if I love you very much. I’m not interested that you were ‘in the neighbourhood’ or ‘just passing.’ Next time, please just keep on going. And, if you’re delivering something, what do you think the strategically placed recycling box is for? I won’t answer anyway. Not under any circumstance. So you’ll have had a wasted journey and I’ll still be in recovery hours later, heart racing and nerves on edge so thanks for ruining the day (Literally. Not joking).

And people wonder why I find it infinitely preferable to stay in the comfort of my own home. Really?

I have always loved the solstices, the points in the wheel of the year with either the most, or least, amount of daylight. In my minds eye I see the summer solstice as a pinnacle, something we ascend towards through spring and summer, a climax of the life force and abundance that the earth has to offer, a swelling of energy, the full moon of the year. I then visualise a descending, a closing down, as we lose light and energy steadily until the dark new moon of the longest night, a time of retreat and dormant energy.

The summer solstice offers a wonderful opportunity to review the year so far. To do some checks and balances on yourself and to make sure you’re heading the right way before you travel too far down the road. The long daylight hours, like the full moon, are the perfect symbol for clarity. Also, for being outside and marvelling at the abundance, lushness, beauty and miracles of nature, to feel the energy thrumming in the earth, the life force animating everything. The rhythm of the earth is unmistakable at these key points in the year. Tuning into this energetic dance and living in harmony with these cycles can feel very grounding. Connecting yourself to the earth in this way can feel very freeing and expansive and remind you that you too have rhythm, that your life also has cycles, not permanence. There will be times of high, creative energy and times when your art feels dry and fallow. Time of productivity and times of rest. Times of joy and times of sadness. Just like the earth we keep on cycling through, driven by the invisible energy of life. It is unstoppable, ever in motion. And like nature, we too are fluid beings. There is no such thing are permanence. Just change, birth, growth, death – in our feelings, relationships, businesses, creativity and energy.

The summer solstice is also a good time to plan ahead. What is on the calendar in the next six months? Where do you want to be by the winter solstice? What do you want to have achieved, or changed, left or grown? Practices like this should never feel like another pressure but can help us to feel a sense of agency. Obviously, in some ways we have no control at all. Who knows what’s going to swerve in to derail us tomorrow, let alone half a year away. But setting ourselves on the right path, fully present, fully aware and fully awake will go a long way to ensuring we stay balanced. When we step tenderly through our life with intention, we are far more likely to recognise when something is not right or feels off or is no longer worth our energy, than when we flail our way mindlessly through life, buffeted about by the waves.

This is one of the most important things that yoga has taught me – that when we mindfully enter and leave poses it enables us to access them safely and gives us time to listen to our body’s feedback. It also allows a much deeper experience in our practice and teaches us the importance of the entire journey rather than racing to fling ourselves into a peak pose. As on our mats, so in our lives.

Here are a few other wonderful lessons from yoga that also apply to life and are perfect reflections as we enjoy the midpoint of the year.

🌸Focus and know where you’re going - In yoga our focal point in any pose is known as our drishti. Concentrated focus helps us balance. A specific point of attention also helps to lessen the amount of visual stimulation in order to be more aware of our internal landscape. Focus helps us be more present - in the pose and in our own experience in the moment.

🌸Ground before you rise – yoga teaches the importance of building a solid foundation and always being aware of the places in which you are grounded. It is this connection to the earth beneath us and the cultivation of our own stability which allows us to rise and expand. Strong roots make tall trees. Developing practices which help keep you grounded and balanced will give you the space to explore, knowing you are rooted in trust, confidence and authenticity.

🌸Rest when you need – there are no prizes for pushing yourself through a yoga class in discomfort. Learning to spend some time in a resting pose is really important. Not only is is safer to practice with mindful self care but it teaches us the importance of listening to our bodies and honouring our capacity and energy levels in any moment. The exact same is true in life. Balance times of productivity, creativity and outward energy with slower times of restoration, nourishment and rest.

🌸Create a strong container – It is within the strength and stability that we create in a yoga pose that we can be soft and fluid and move and breathe with ease. I love the image of the strong container and I use it a lot in my teaching. In any pose we are ideally seeking both the Sthira (the steadiness or strength) and the Sukha (the ease, comfort and joy). Where in the pose, and in life, do you need to cultivate strength and engagement and where can you soften and release? These two states, when in balance, can create perfect harmony in our practice and our lives.

🌸Be ready to adapt and modify – Not all poses will be accessible or desired in every practice. Understanding this and being willing to adapt or modify a pose (or leave it all together) will enable you to develop a safe and sustainable practice. This may mean building the confidence to trust your own inner voice. It may mean learning to stop comparing yourself to others. Being humble enough to recognise when you need to change something is a fundamental attitude for yoga and a great one for life too.

Living in tune with the rhythm of the year and spending consistent time on my yoga mat have both taught me so much about how to live a more balanced, rich, authentic and connected life. Life on purpose is an absolutely joyful experience.

I hope you find moments where you can reflect and celebrate yourself this summer solstice.

A couple of days ago I listened to an episode of Naomi Fisher’s podcast, Let’s Talk Neurosense, Her guest was the autism researcher Dan Lovesey, and the episode was entitled, Why Lived Experience Expertise Needs Checks and Balances. I had so many thoughts and mixed reactions listening to it. This piece is an attempt to organise my responses.

I was particularly interested in this discussion as I am currently writing a book about the lived experience of autism and my initial response, (a very autistic one I may add, as I am prone to extreme rejection sensitivity which is ironic given the content of this podcast. More on this later) was to immediately scrap my entire manuscript. My first thoughts were that Dan and Naomi were rubbishing the validity and importance of the autistic voice and lived experience stories as they were not based on, or able to reference, robust clinical research and quantifiable evidence. They seemed to be going so far as to say that these voices may even be potentially harmful in terms of spreading baseless information and homogenising the autistic experience. Their argument seemed to be that someone could read an account by an actually autistic person and then make generalisations about the autistic community as a whole, which may in turn change the way the reader treated or ‘understood’ the next autistic person they met. I found this quite patronising. I like to think I am capable of listening to someone’s lived experience without projecting it to an entire population, just in the same way I do if I hear any minority, or indeed any person, tell their story. However, after reflecting further on this discussion, I realised that listening to this episode was actually good for me in a number of ways.

It made me remember that as an autistic adult who is raising autistic children and has worked with autistic teenagers in mainstream education for almost two decades, I have years of experience in recognising and honouring the multitude of presentations and diversity of strengths and struggles within the young people I have had the pleasure of working with. I tried to imagine having little to no knowledge of this topic and then reading something written by an autistic person and could easily see how that one story could be assumed to be universally applied.

Secondly, it made me look at my manuscript and reflect on what I am trying to say and to whom. I was reassured that at no point am I speaking for any other neurodiverse person. I fact, I regularly attest to this, making it clear that this is my story and mine alone. However, there is a caveat to that that is worth mentioning. Yes, as the saying goes, if you’ve met one autistic person you’ve met one autistic person. Yes, there are many different autistic people as there are neuro typical ones. Yes, autistic traits vary enormously, not only within the autistic population, but at any given time within any one autistic person. Yet when working or living with autistic young people, as much as they are unique in their presentation, support needs, strengths and struggles, there are unmistakable commonalities which set them apart and group them together. Without this, diagnosis would be impossible and the label of autism would be meaningless. This sounds too obvious to mention maybe. But it feeds into the arguments made on this podcast, that it is impossible to make generalisations about the autistic experience. We can and we do.

On paper my two neurodiverse children present very different pictures of autism. Their personalities, capacities and level of mental health challenges differ. But don’t surprise either of them with anything. Or change their routine. Or touch their things. They will both wear the same clothes and eat the same foods every day. They will both balk at perfumes and constantly turn the lights off. The list of autistic traits that they share are the commonalities that make them both autistic. The things I’ve mentioned here are fairly well-known examples of autistic traits. I would argue that even someone with a limited knowledge of autism may know about sensory differences and the reliance on routines experienced by many autistic people. However, there are countless other traits that differ in a subtle way but still group neurodiverse people together. And it is these less known traits that I am writing about in my book. So, after my initial and very predictable wobble immediately after listening to the podcast about the point of my book, I stand firm in the belief that understanding these subtle experiences will help someone understand autism a bit better. I will persevere.

Next on the see-saw of seemingly contradictory issues this podcast threw up, having thought about the importance of the online world in supporting and validating someone’s lived experiences, I had an minor epiphany and circled back to agreeing with Dan’s argument that social media is potentially damaging in offering baseless information. I follow a number of autism accounts on Instagram, and the very next time I opened the app the first post I saw declared, ‘you’re not just tired, you’re in burnout’ (or something along those lines). Once I had noticed this one post, I started seeing similar ones all over the place. In just this one example, everyone and their dogs are being told that the potentially normal amount of fatigue and stress plated up by the modern world and driving us into the ground, is not actually that, but instead something pathologized, with a diagnosis and a name. As someone who does suffer from debilitating exhaustion and regular bouts of extreme fatigue, am I, and other autistic people, about to get lost in the pathology soup of mass diagnosis? Is it actually helpful for the general population to think they are suffering from something out of the ordinary? I don’t have the answer to this, and I feel that ranking or even talking about anyone else’s experience puts us on very shaky ground. But I’ve been reflecting on it a lot. These types of neuro-affirming accounts presumably have a captive audience of people who are either autistic by diagnosis or are self-diagnosed or questioning. The messages, in that case, may be supportive and life changing. If you suspect you are autistic and have been struggling to get off the sofa for weeks on end, it could be useful to learn about autistic burnout, and find information which could save you from trying to continue to push through when your entire being is screaming at you to stop and regulate. Is this information sharing invalid? I can tell you with absolute certainty that I still find these spaces enormously supportive and comforting. Having felt extremely lonely for my entire 52 years on this planet, crippled with anxiety and never knowing why I was struggling so much, to have found a lot of people who can reflect back to me similar experiences, quirks, difficulties and traits is affirming and wonderful. And for people who are fortunate enough to have never needed that, I say, pipe down and take a seat. While they may not be based on clinical research, are we really going to gaslight the very people living and breathing the autistic experience every single day and tell them that their views are not valid because they were not gathered and tested by a researcher? I am actually living this experience. I feel autistic. It colours every single aspect of my life. Am I supposed to wait for science to catch up with me? And while the fields of psychology and psychiatry keep offering new research, altering the wording of ‘conditions’ and changing their mind about autism (see Utta Hagan’s latest TES article about masking and my response to that here) out here in the real world there are thousands of actually autistic people who don’t care about any of that. Utta Hagans flip-flopping ideas about masking have absolutely no bearing on my lived experience of masking. She can change her mind as much as she likes. It will never alter the reality of my life. Simply stating that you don’t believe something exists doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But likewise, the opposite is also true. Simply saying you do believe in something doesn’t make it real either. Confused yet? Yes, me too.

Which brings me onto the next topic discussed on the podcast, which was the validity and prevalence of non-diagnosable conditions such as Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) and Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA). The discussion argued that it was problematic for regular people with no scientific or clinical background to be going round talking about these things as if they are real. As someone who experiences extreme sensitivity to criticism, exposure or rejection (see first paragraph), I wholeheartedly resonate with the concept of RSD. Is it a condition? Or a disorder? A dysphoria? Who knows. Who cares. Understanding that many neurodiverse people experience higher than typical vigilance around personal criticism could be extremely helpful to a newly diagnosed adult, say who is trying to understand themselves. Yes, everyone experiences this to a certain degree, obviously. But with regards to myself (as I can’t speak for anyone else) you’re looking at someone whose heart pounds every single time they receive an email, especially the ones that have, ‘we’re writing to inform you,’ as their opening gambit. The thought that I said, or did, the wrong thing and inadvertently upset someone can haunt me for weeks. Often longer. You get the idea. Is it useful to pathologize this? Maybe not. Is it useful to acknowledge it as a facet within the autistic profile, definitely yes. I can’t imagine there are many people that have never experienced this level of prolonged, extreme and debilitating anxiety over simple every day interactions, who on reading about it would diagnose themselves with RSD. But for those whose life is crippled by it? Well, then it could be a lifeline.

The same is true of PDA. Sure, there may be a small minority of people who adopt this and self-diagnose simply to continue being lazy and unmotivated. Or use it to avoid doing the deeper work with their child. But I find that very hard to swallow. There are way, way more people, especially parents, who will feel reassured by discovering the possibility that they are not in fact shit parents or are getting it all wrong, who will sob, as I have done countless times, reading other families experience of this. I was particularly interested to near the host, Naomi Fisher talking about PDA as I have attended a couple of her online webinars on this very subject. I am hoping that rather than suggesting that it doesn’t actually exist, that she is simply refuting the pathological element. This was not made clear. Yes, there could be a number of additional things going on in the background to cause a young person to resist doing something – fear, anxiety, trauma, rather than having a stand-alone ‘condition’ driving the avoidance. I can see how once a label of PDA has been attached to the child as an explanation for their extreme behaviours, then the real causes may become sidelined, missed altogether and never explored or supported. But the end result is the same and awareness of the strength of resistance in some young people is important. In the discussion, they cited the story of a teacher or TA who, having done some training on PDA, began to attach the label willy-nilly to any student who showed disinclination towards something. This is a rather silly reason to throw out PDA of the discussion. That speaks much more to the poor quality of the training delivered that left participants unclear, or to a TA insufficiently supported in their role. Throughout my career, I have only ever met a handful of students who have displayed avoidance extreme enough to warrant a label of PDA and this avoidance has been unmistakable in its presentation. One of them is my own daughter. I remember distinctly the point at which we realised that this was something more extreme than was typical and that was when our daughter struggled to go to something that she really wanted to do. This was not a child trying to get out of walking the dog or doing homework. This was an extreme, prolonged and distressing response to doing pretty much anything, wanted, enjoyed, looked forward to or otherwise. There is a huge difference between saying no to something to preserve your autonomy and being completely unable to do something you want to do due to overwhelming resistance. As someone who experiences demand avoidance myself, I can tell you that it feels like another entity that dwells inside me that controls what I can and cannot do. This is not just a mild reluctance. It is an internal drive, a barrier which it feels utterly impossible to remove, or climb over. I write more about this in my book, but suffice to say, I don’t really care whether it has a label or a name. It is real for us, my daughter and me. Crucially, no amount of empirical research will ever be able to disclose the feeling of demand avoidance. I admit, demand avoidance may present in a child who is seeking control due to trauma or extreme anxiety and in this respect isn’t a condition in its own right. But families who are dealing with a life dominated by their child’s often violent resistance just want their struggles acknowledged and to know that are not alone. And let’s face it, when people are looking for support and understanding they will find other real people, other parents, other neurodiverse people, other late-diagnosed women etc, far more relatable and trustworthy that clinicians, especially neurotypical ones. The online support shared within the SEND or late-diagnosed or EBSA (emotionally based school avoidance) communities offer real lifelines to people, something that, sadly, the diagnostic and clinical community fail utterly to do. Maybe the assessment and diagnostic world needs to look at itself first.

The DSM – The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - is seen as a robust and comprehensive directory of all known mental health conditions, although it is worth remembering that it is a fluid document which in many ways reflects the wider changing cultural shifts within which psychiatry sits. The most recent version was published in 2013 with the entry on Autism Spectrum Disorder making some significant changes and additions. I have always had an issue with the presentation of autism within this manual. Do I even have a mental health disorder? Can my experience even be measured, catalogued and categorised? Maybe it is partially the fact that the DSM contains such a cold and reductive description of something as complex and nuanced as autism that leads people to share the deeper, warmer realities of being autistic with each other. As an autistic person, I find it at best insulting, at worst damaging, to have my identity reduced to a list of impairments. And what does that teach anyone who is learning about autism? Autism training and CPD in schools usually mirrors this basic and reductive approach. If teachers and support staff truly want to better understand the pupil in their class, then they desperately need to hear the lived experience voices in order to widen the story and flesh out the clinical terminology and lists of impairments to something approximating what is actual present in the classroom. Surely if we’re talking about embedding false information and altering views within society, then arguably nobody has done it as effectively as the compilers of the DSM. Maybe with access to social media, real people are finally getting the chance to set the record straight and tell a much broader truth.

I do agree with their point that once an idea has entered the public domain and taken on a life of its own it is difficult to put it back in the box, leading people to be wary of questioning, for example, a presentation of PDA for fear of backlash. But this is not unique to PDA. Ironically in a time of supposed freedom of speech, we seem to be becoming ever more polarised about who can, and definitely cannot, exercise that right, with many people fearful to air their views or challenge the prevailing norms. Cancel culture and derogatory labels are very real repercussions of holding an unpopular (but not necessarily incorrect view).

So, I circle back to my own book and why I am doing it. Writing this piece has reaffirmed for me why I think it is more important than ever to listen to autistic voices. I want a newly diagnosed or late diagnosed woman to experience a relatable, informative, warm hug in a book. It’s what I wanted and, indeed, what I went online in search of. After years of being fobbed off, then of waiting lists, a bizarre online assessment experience that left me feeling exposed, battered and unsettled and then the post-diagnosis tumbleweed, it’s what I really needed. And when I wanted to feel seen, did I turn to my assessor? Or the NHS website page on autism. Of course I didn’t. I went straight to seek out real people, living like I was, being thrown about every single day by the turbulence of being autistic. I’m not trying to homogenise autism in my book or iron out the quirky kinks that make us all unique. But I do want to offer what the diagnostic process singularly fails to do, which is post-diagnosis support. The current scenario, once you are told of your diagnosis, is akin to being shoved off a cliff edge, the whistling of the wind the only sound as you hurtle into the abyss. Nobody wants to learn about their neurodiversity from someone clinical, regardless of their credentials or years of research. People are yearning for connection and a shared experience. And if the medical model can’t provide that, maybe it’s time to move on.

I feel exposed in the world, skinless and raw. This is at the root of many of my issues. The world is a very unpredictable place. I cannot control my environment. I certainly cannot control other people’s behaviours. The world is full of smells, sounds and sensations that arrive unwanted to scratch at my raw skin and jangle my over-exposed nerves. As a side-effect of this feeling of being vulnerably exposed, I hate being observed doing anything. It feels physical, painful, a full body reaction to having eyes on me when I long to be private. Being asked to make a phone call in my boss’s office while she is at her desk makes me freeze in panic. Filling up the car at the petrol station, doing housework when anyone is home. And please God, don’t come in the room when I’m on my yoga mat. Or writing. Obviously, this has got a lot better as I have got older. For years of my younger life, I hated even walking down the street. I felt like a giant in neon, attracting the gawping, horrified attention of everyone’s probing eyes and invisible thoughts. I care much less now what people think of me as a person, what I wear, my body, my hair etc but the feeling of exposure itself hasn’t really diminished. I’ve just got better at dealing with it. Or ignoring it. Being seen feels creepy, a crawling, cold sensation over my skin. I am prey to the neurotypical viewer. Maybe my aversion is borne out of an innate need to hide my weirdness and quirks and odd behaviours in order to avoid ridicule or questions. In that sense, the fear of being watched could be seen as an intelligent system of protection and self-preservation. I have always worked hard to remain undetected, and things are usually going fine until somebody takes it upon themselves to situate themselves near me, where their proximity and observations feel threatening. It is a very physical feeling, their gaze like a heat boring into my skin, into my soul even, like a heat-seeking missile. It makes me want to flee or hide or sink into the cool soft earth.

As a child, I complained to my mother continuously that people were staring at me. It must have been wearing for her, having to deflect my stream of paranoia everywhere we went. I felt awkward and gawky and, like a lot of nerdy kids and teenagers, I was very self-conscious. But this felt like more than that. This felt deeply unpleasant – a world of swivelling, penetrating eyes, of rubbery hands kneading my being. Everywhere we went, eyes followed me. Obviously as an avid people watcher and obsessive collector of other people’s mannerisms, foibles, gaits and intonations, I was accustomed to always being the one doing the staring. I was certain I was doing this subtly, observation by stealth, but almost certainly I was as subtle as a horse in a sheep pen and probably unsettled people and got other kid’s backs up continuously. Regardless, despite my own unfiltered need to study other people, the sensation of being at the receiving end of this was horrible. And relentless. ‘That girl’s staring at me,’ would become my mantra, whispered anxiously at my mother as we navigated the weekly shop or sat in a pub garden or on the bus. Without exception I was told I was imagining things. Maybe I was. Maybe something about my special brand of weird attracted unwanted attention like wasps to a jam jar.

I still people watch obsessively but as I have got older I am much more likely to strike up a conversation with someone I find interesting. I will tell strangers I like their tattoo, or their trousers. I am much more confident and genuinely like people now on the whole. They are a lot less frightening and intimidating than they used to be. Having said that, as much as I now love people, I would much rather being doing any tasks in private. I still wait for my family to go out before cleaning. Obviously, I can do it while they’re home and, frankly, domestic chores are so endless, and my busy family are coming and going at all times, I would never get anything done if I waited for an empty house. But it’s uncomfortable and given the choice I would always do it alone. I like the music loud when I’m hoovering or cleaning the bathroom and where possible want to remove completely the possibility of encountering someone like a jump scare. As soon as I know I’m entirely alone, I relax fully into the spaciousness. When I know there is someone else there, I remain on edge, full of nervous anticipation. I hate being interrupted when I’m doing something. Or being forced to turn the music down to answer a question or stop to find something for a child. Left to my own devices I can power through a day’s worth of tasks in an hour, calibrating my bee hive mind, to-do list and the fizzing energy of joy I experience from cleaning and tidying and creating order and cosiness into a superpower of focused activity. Watched and I become hesitant and awkward. There is no flow and no ease. And the flow and ease feel so good!

I still cringe if my husband or one of my kids comes into the room while I’m doing yoga. Even after practicing every day for the twenty-plus years of our marriage, I still hate him seeing me do it. Even if he’s just popping his head round the door to let me know he’s going out, I will freeze like a small, startled creature. A hot flush of embarrassment will sweep through me leaving irritation and anger in its backwash after he leaves. Now the yoga feels ruined, tainted. I feel annoyed at him for disturbing the energy in the air around me and I have to talk myself down in order to be able to continue. I am intensely private. It makes being a writer very difficult. It is a very vulnerable conflict this need to express myself and share my struggles to help others with the need to feel hidden away and anonymous.

I get mad with my husband if he leaves the bedroom light on in the winter, giving anyone walking down the hill a clear view into my most sacred, safe space. My home is my retreat from the relentless assaults of the world. My home is a place carefully and deliberately curated to foster calmness, regulation and joy. It is not for public consumption. When I go into my bedroom and discover the light on, I immediately flood with physical sensations – shame, embarrassment, exposure, nakedness, anger. The thought of a stranger looking in feels like they’ve smeared shit all over my house. I turn the light off and get under a blanket on the bed, curled tightly around my shame, holding it tenderly and loving it until it has released its grip on me.

One of the biggest triggers at this current point in my life for this paralysing and overwhelming reaction to being seen is owning a dog. I know that for many autistic people animals and pets are wonderful supports. I can see why. They offer non-judgemental affection, companionship and they don’t talk or ask endless questions which is a massive plus. But not for me. The dog is probably the single biggest stressor in my life. Don’t get me wrong – the dog is lovely, with his comedy behaviour, adorably cute affection, daft markings and crazy level of intelligence. Despite everything, I really love the bloody thing. But, he causes me issues. In the house I wage an ongoing war with dog hair. He walks wet, muddy paws across my kitchen floor because it appears that no amount of after-walk towelling works. He smells like dog and, depending on my capacity on any given day, he can send me spiralling into a sensory overload. Basically, he makes demands on my time, energy and sensitivities. But, it’s out of the house when it’s really awful. As someone who is always hypervigilant when outside and prone to anxiously scanning the horizon for threat, being responsive to the behaviour of a dog as well feels overwhelming. How will he react to this approaching dog/child? Is he going to cause me embarrassment by getting too excited and not returning when I call? And, most horrific of all, is he going to poo in full view of other walkers causing me to do the public walk of shame as I approach his deposit with my little bag? Those other walkers will see as I bend, a beacon on my head, to wrestle an actual shit into a bag which I then have to carry around like the world’s worst handbag until I locate a usually non-existent bin.

It’s ironic as I rely on being in nature to regulate myself, to quieten my overwhelmingly noisy brain and loosen the ropes of demands placed on me but with a dog I find my walks regularly produce more stress than they release. I can’t just blame the poor dog though. It’s a rare day walking in the Lake District when you don’t come across other people. Continuously scanning, I will stage whisper, ‘people, people,’ at my husband when I spy some innocent couple on the path ahead, willing them to evaporate, or at the very least, politely veer off the path to disappear into the undergrowth. As soon as I see anyone, my flee instinct kicks in. Only when there is not a soul in sight do I settle. When it’s just us and the trees, the sheep, the fresh, cleansing air unbothered by the rippling energy of others – then I am happy.

Essentially, I long for an empty world to wander around in. I long for an empty house. I long for an empty workplace where I am not forced to sit, uncomfortable, in staff meetings, itching with the feeling of scrutiny, feeling trapped and on edge, panic catching my breath. Unfortunately, I am not the solo inhabitant of earth. I’ve learnt to do it, to walk among you. But don’t for one minute mistake my presence in your meeting or party or fell walk as me being at ease. I am not at ease. It is exhausting and means I regularly need hours of recovery time. That’s the bit nobody sees. That’s the bit that makes disabilities such as autism, hidden.

I’m going to invite you to step into a large, rural secondary school’s chemistry lesson. I have been working with one particular autistic girl for a couple of years now. A complex young woman whose anxiety-driven behaviour seemed challenging to most staff members. To me she made absolute clear and perfect sense. What they referred to as her, ‘picking and choosing,’ which lessons she went to was actually extreme anxiety making it impossible for her to get herself through the door. This could be because of the smell of the room, the temperature (she couldn’t regulate her body temperature in the way typical people can), the member of staff and what she sensed about them (always bang on) or maybe the configuration of the desks and chairs. The one thing it definitely wasn’t was choice. Staff also struggled with the fact that if she did make it into their lesson, she would often walk out without warning. ‘She really needs to communicate with me before she goes,’ they would say to me, stopping me in the corridor to air their frustrations. I would sigh inwardly, take a deep breath and try to explain it to them again - that extreme anxiety causes fight or flight to kick in, at which point the rational, thinking brain has switched off in order for the primal, survival brain to do its clever job of protection. At the point at which she walked, she was so far from thinking about the teacher’s wishes and how to placate them. Every fibre of her being was screaming at her to get out of there. Imagine sitting in a house on fire trying to communicate your concerns before fleeing. Obviously, that would be stupid, risky, life-threatening behaviour.

Nothing about her behaviour made me question her motives. I understood entirely why she left lessons. Or refused to enter rooms. Or do collaborative group work. I understood why she refused to wear the school tie and why she panicked, pacing like a trapped deer within the gated school complex, eventually scaling the fences in order to go home. I understood why she thought of the place as a prison and why she found the majority of the work pointless. Subsequently I became the sole staff member who had any relationship with her. Far from finding her difficult to manage, I found hanging out with her brightened my working week. I often wished that other staff members could get a glimpse of the bright, chatty, funny, wildly clever young woman who I knew. Staff marvelled at how I managed to get her to talk to me or do things no one else could. I didn’t tell them that my own autism made connecting with her a natural and easy thing. I got her in a way that nobody else at school did.

One bone of contention within the science department was that in order to pass her GCSE science there were some compulsory, assessed experiments that had to be conducted in the class and observed by the teacher. This girl and I sporadically made it to chemistry. She loved science, so this was one lesson that she really tried to go to despite the multitude of sensory issues that assaulted her as soon as she walked through the door. Eventually, after much to-ing and fro-ing, and lengthy discussions, I got her to agree to come and do one of their, ‘stupid experiments’. I arranged that she and I would do it together, somewhere at the back of the room, not in a group like all the other students. There were many points at which I knew I could lose her – I knew I needed to get us there before everyone else so we could get set up at the back before the room filled up. This however was dependent on her being in the right place at the right time in order to meet me and walk over to the lab, and well-intentioned plans with her were always subject to sudden change. Once in the room, I then needed to keep her there and, despite our amazing relationship, I was no match for her anxiety and knew she could bolt at any moment.

Miraculously, she did it. We got in the lab, stayed in the lab and conducted the experiment. I was trying to hide the fact that I was bursting with pride as we tidied away. What an absolute breakthrough. Afterwards we had a quick de-brief sitting in the afternoon sun on some steps. I asked her how she felt about it, reiterating how proud I was of her. And her response floored me and changed the way I viewed autism for ever. When I asked her if she felt a sense of achievement for having stayed to the end of the lesson and completed the whole experiment, she said

No, I feel like I failed. I’ve let myself down

Wait, what?

We talked a bit more about this. Having felt the usual desire to leave at some point through the lesson, she had forced herself to override the urge to run and, instead, stayed put. To the outside this had looked like success. But at what expense to her wellbeing? Obviously, if the overwhelm had been too strong, she simply wouldn’t have been able to talk herself into staying. But even so, remaining while the buzzing of anxiety was humming under her skin and her mind had begun to come untethered from the focus of test tubes and Bunsen burners had cost her dearly.

Autonomy and self-preservation are a strong driver in autistic people. In a world that feels unsafe, often threatening, a place where you are repeatedly asked to be in situations, and do things, that make you feel desperately uncomfortable at best, overwhelmed and panicky at worst, taking care of yourself feels like a matter of life and death. This involves being hypervigilant all the time and suffering the near constant nausea of adrenalin that you keep accessible, at a low level, just in case you need to run. Living in this state of tension and poise, like a tightly coiled spring, makes relaxing into enjoyment or being able to access the parts of your brain needed to take in information really difficult.

For my student, staying in the lesson and ignoring her own needs felt like failure not success. She had abandoned herself, the one person who always had her back.

I was so interested by her articulate response to this chemistry lesson (needless to say we never made it through another one, though she did pass her GCSE regardless) and have thought about it frequently over the years.

Maybe, an important aspect of autism is that there is a reversal of many neurotypical behaviours, behaviours that only seem logical to a neurotypical mind. These ‘weird,’ reversed behaviours that are often the only outward ‘symptom’ of a person’s autism, make perfect sense to the autistic mind. From where we’re standing, believe me, much neurotypical behaviour leaves us baffled.

The autistic student isn’t defective or wrong. Left to themselves, their approach to life is a logical and intelligent response to the world as they experience it. The problems arrive when those autistic students are asked to squeeze themselves into the weirdly functioning, baffling neurotypical world. It would probably have the same result if neurotypical students were asked to live in an autistic way as soon as they stepped through the school gates. But that of course never happens. It is only ever the autistic person who is viewed as deviating from the norm and expected to step out of their skin and navigate a situation with their nerves exposed and their strategies for living taken away from them at the door.

If only we could all reach an understanding, accepting that in many ways the neurotypical and autistic experience are two sides of the same coins. Neither is right and neither is defective. Sadly, at the moment it is the autistic community who are wandering around in the Upside Down, with their ways deemed dark, problematic versions of normality, a divergence, a negative, lacking and impaired. What if instead, we learnt to see their different approach to life as incredibly logical, a reasonable response to this world and its strange unquestioned rules, hierarchy’s, expectations and demands. Imagine if the neurotypical world could stop asserting their authority for long enough to learn something from the autistic person in their life

Finding balance in my life has become something of an obsession over the years. I have learnt the hard way what happens if I neglect to decompress and reset. The result can be catastrophic. As a late-diagnosed autistic woman, I spent years ricocheting between extreme emotional states with absolutely no understanding of why I felt so out of control and battered the majority of the time. I was completely at the mercy of these wildly oscillating moods. Peace and stability felt like states that other, calmer, better people could reach. But not me.

Over the years, out of necessity, I have worked hard on embracing modalities to help me manage my life. I can certainly say that I have put in the 10000 hours required to reach mastery. I am now a bone fide expert on self-care. And in the process, I have built a magical life that brings me so much joy. It is my greatest creative endeavour and the one of which I am most proud.

Some of this work has been extremely conscious, seeking out and practicing ways of caring for myself. Other things I approached for different reasons, their full power not revealing themselves to me until years later.

Decades before I understood about my undiagnosed autism I fell in love with the practice of yoga. Long before I recognised the profound support it was offering me, I just liked the way it felt in my body. What I hadn’t realised was that behind the scenes, behind the poses and movement and savasana, my body and nervous system were being offered the chance to regulate. Yoga allowed me to step away from the busy world and enjoy some quiet. Yoga helped me learn to breathe properly, slowing my racing heart and racing mind. Yoga legitimised rest. Unbeknownst to me I was regulating, soothing, decompressing and healing.

Along with a dedicated and committed yoga practice, I have always retreated into nature as often as possible. In fact, one of the triggers of my meltdowns is being unable to be in nature when I need to be. When my 9 to 5 dictates which days I do, and don’t, get to spend outside, I can become incredibly upset. Obviously, I have learnt to hide this. From the outside I may look content to be working my job. Nobody sees the rage and angst barrelling through me, nobody knows the toxic mixture of demand avoidance, sense of injustice, existentialism and distress which being forced inside against my will creates in me, even as I sit there, dutifully, quietly, doing my job. As a city-bound young child, I sought out solitary time in nature whenever I could. I was lucky in that our house was on the last street of the housing estate. Behind it was a large swathe of rough, open land, with woods and a brook and long grass which in the summer concealed me perfectly. Regardless of the fact that the woods were tainted by the urban myths gleefully spread by local kids of the lone, Boo Radly figure who lived there, the sheer, unadulterated joy of roaming for hours through the fields far outweighed any fear. Thankfully before I became a teenager, we relocated to a village beside a lake ten miles out of town. Here I could range even further. My life became intimately intwined with the seasons and the call of Canada geese which I could hear from my bedroom became its soundtrack. I could come face to face with deer as I ventured out with my camera on my favourite dawn walks. I talked to the horses two fields behind the gate that said no entry. I climbed trees and lay in the sun by a secluded pond to half-heartedly revise for my GCSEs while dreaming up stories in my head, inspired by the magical lush-edged water, teeming with iridescent dragonflies. Like with my yoga practice, this innate desire to be out in nature, was serving a purpose long before I realsied how much I needed it. Nature, as we well know, lowers cortisol and blood pressure and slows breathing. Nature had my back and was quietly stopping the wheels from flying off my otherwise out of control life. Today, my time in nature is a much more conscious love affair. Since moving to the Lake District in my late twenties, time spent in trees, mountains and swimming in lakes is how I choose to spend my weekends. I still get giddy, uncontrollably stimming with joy at the sight of the first fresh green leaves and jumping lambs every spring. I adore soaking up autumnal colours, gliding through cool water under the watchful eye of a lone heron, hearing the first cuckoo of the year, wrapping up, lake-side, on winter’s days clutching a hot cup of tea after a freezing dip. As someone with varying energy levels, I have learnt to make my nature time work for me. As much as I would love to scale mountains each weekend or enjoy hiking for miles through the fells, I have come to accept that very often this just isn’t possible for me. I have collected hundreds of small walks with access to water, places where I can decompress, recalibrate myself, loosen the tight ropes of overthinking and anxiety and immerse myself in nature quickly. Give me a couple of hours by a lake with a book, a flask and a piece of cake and I am as good as restored.

What has become more conscious as I have leant more and more heavily into self-care, is the joy of treating everyday moments with reverence, turning the mundane into ritual. In this respect almost anything can become a mindful doorway to regulation. A cup of tea, a few pages of a book, stepping outside to look at the moon. There is an internet trend at the moment, which encourages you to romanticise your life, to seek the beauty and joy in what you already have. And boy, am I here for that. I’ve been doing that under a different name for years. How much more satisfying to discover that you already have a life worth celebrating and revering than constantly itching for something different. Building a life full of pockets of peace, moments of presence and saturated in joy and beauty is great for everyone. For a dysregulated, anxious autistic person prone to overwhelm it is vital and utterly life changing. Life saving even. Cups of carefully prepared cacao, candles, slow yoga, lie-ins, prioritising reading over scrolling, writing in all forms, reading poetry, touching trees, growing things, watering house plants, dancing – all these things can easily be woven into even the busiest of lives. And rest. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to second guess my future autistic self. It’s a lot of work. It involves vigilance and awareness. More often than not, prioritising rest and relaxation now means future me will be energised and capable. Guilt around rest and restoration needs to be firmly erased. Who ever decided that we should be productive and full of energy all day every day. It’s completely ludicrous and non-sustainable. Even mother nature isn’t blooming and bursting fifty-two weeks of the year. And she’s not even autistic.

Many years ago, I started something new which felt counterproductive, especially as at the time I had small children – I started setting alarm earlier than I needed it. I discovered that gifting myself some conscious time in order to curate the start of my day set me up much better than being woken by children and thrust straight into the craziness of the pre-school routine. Taking some quiet time on my own first thing in the morning has turned out to be a total game changer. Time to do whatever I need. It always involves tea. Maybe reading the book I have on the go, or a few pages of something inspirational or spiritual. Ten minutes of meditation. A spot of writing. A candle in the winter. Listening to the birds in the spring. Feeling the wind through the open window. Or the early morning sun. Or listening to rain.

I also seek time through the day. I forgo eating with my colleagues round the table in the staffroom and instead go for a walk along the river in my lunch hour or read my book under a tree in the park. Turns out, nobody minds. After work, before I reengage with family, I try to take some time to sit with my headphones on. I have a cup of tea and allow myself time to transition from the energy of the workday to the energy I wish to feel in the safe comfort of home. My children are young adults now. This transition has become much easier. I say no to most social events, preferring evenings of soft presence and rest. It works. It allows me to get through the week intact.

I have recently scaled right back on my yoga teaching too. When a number of wider life events collided, I recognised that I was at high risk of overwhelm. My plate suddenly felt too full. Things were in danger of sliding off. In knew there would be a big mess to clean up somewhere down the line. Although it was difficult, I sent out the email that told my students that yoga was going to look a bit different for the foreseeable future. I hated doing it. I hate being flaky. I like commitment and dependability but for too long that had come at the expense of my own mental wellbeing. It’s taken me sooo many years, but I have finally realised the damage caused by ignoring my needs. Falling out of balance ends badly. And the balance is precarious. It is a continuous work in progress. A daily commitment to assessing, re-assessing, adjusting, finding a middle ground between demands and retreat.

And the greatest beauty of all this balance-seeking? Not only does it mean I can float on the waters of life more easily, avoiding the more stomach churning super waves of unregulated living, but it also means I have much more to give to my family and friends. I can be fully present with them. I can give generously of myself and enjoy company when I am not teetering on the brink of shutdown and desperately trying to escape for some alone time. Because it is already factored into my life now, I scrabble about much less trying to snatch moments here and there in unsuitable places. It leaves me freer than ever before. Lighter, happier and more in control. And, if the tools and practices you’re using to seek balance, also bring you untold joy and make you feel amazing in the process, well, that sounds like a pretty perfect balance to me.

It’s wild to have spent the majority of your life hating yourself, loathing your vile, defective and unpleasant personality, only to discover, well into midlife, a cause of your most hated trait. It turns out, all that anger I had tried, and mostly failed, to contain, the anger that had blighted my development, had seeped like a stain into my personality and disappointed my parents, had not been regular anger at all. What I had actually been communicating was the extreme discomfort, sensory overload and overwhelm which I could no longer hold inside. As a quiet, meek and fairly biddable child, one desperate to fit in and feel normal, these volcanic rages were distressing on many levels. It’s fairly hard to blend into the background when you’re volatile and spikey. The rage and overwhelm didn’t always make itself known – mostly it was an internal agony, a cataclysmic power surging through me. It was, quite frankly, terrifying. I didn’t understand it and it felt horrible. Obviously, there were times when it spilled out. Mostly this was in being snappy, agitated or extremely irritable. I know that my parents despaired of their dull, unsmiling daughter. I imagine they felt cheated out of a ‘nice’ child. One who was smiley and full of childhood joy. I definitely didn’t feel like a nice child. I hated myself with every fibre of my being. Sometimes I would sit and contemplate the depth of this hatred. I could get in so far as my cells and realise I even hated them with a feverish passion. I longed to have never existed. I knew that my personality flaws were irredeemable. No matter how hard I tried, and believe me I tried, I simply couldn’t erase the irritation and anger I felt. I couldn’t replace it with the bubbly, cheerful, happy person I longed to be. To this end I would spend most nights, as I waited for sleep to claim me, manifesting a totally new persona. Obviously, I didn’t use the term manifesting. Nobody did in the eighties. What I did was a mixture of praying and longing and, if that failed, I hoped that through brute force I could will a new me into existence. There was an enormous oak tree outside my bedroom window. I would pick a leaf and imagine that if I stared at it long and hard enough, I would wake up a different person. A better person. Gone would be the prickly, unapproachable, snappy me. In would be ushered a bright, sparkly version. This was what defined the most popular girls at school. The girls everyone loved. The girls who got all the praise, the party invites and, later, the boys. These girls had perma-tans and bouncy, sleek ponytails. Their smiles were effortless and broad. They were good at running. And hockey. I was like a negative of these people. Frizzy, awkward, pale and full of fear. Bouncy I was not.

It wasn’t until I became a parent that my meltdowns became so obviously damaging. Until then I had kind of resigned myself to the fact that I was a pretty unpleasant person, one fuelled by irrationality and anger. This had seemed like a logical conclusion, given my behaviour and mood swings. For the entirety of my teen and early adult life, and for the majority of my parenting life, I didn’t know anything about meltdowns, or autism for that matter. I didn’t understand that meltdowns were the consequence of overwhelm and couldn’t possibly have made the connection between situations and experiences and this horrendous feeling of losing control which swept through me like a tidal wave.

I now understand that one of the major triggers for this overwhelm in me is being forced to perform too many tasks in a day without sufficient down-time in between. In my current life I break up my day with significant amounts of alone time, silence, music, tea breaks, time on my yoga mat, nature. Obviously, even now this is easier than on some days than others, but I can recognise the signs now a mile off. It’s still the same as it was back then when I lived in the fog. It’s an internal crawling under my skin. It’s the sensation of each of my senses becoming heightened. My breath quickening. Tears rushing to the surface. I lose the ability to make a decision. Or talk. Too much activity in any day spells disaster. Any parent will tell you that the days are never fuller than when you have young children. They will also report, universally, that alone time is in very, VERY short supply. For any parent this is difficult. For an autistic one, it’s pretty much catastrophic. And when I reached the point in life where I had three primary school aged children, active, wild, interested children, here’s what a normal weekday could look like.

I would leave my job in a secondary school and drive the fifteen minutes back to town. I was always squeezed for time due to the proximity of the end of my working day with the time my children needed picking up. Eyes on the clock, stressed by every red light, tractor or learner driver, this was already a recipe for disaster. Far from having the break after work I so desperately needed (working in a huge secondary school is not for the faint hearted. Nor the autistic), I was straight into the fray.

I would speed park the car and run/walk down the drive to the school playground, a place teeming with movement, noise and people wanting to talk to me. The stress has just notched up a touch. Out would spill my three darlings to race around uncaged, swinging on monkey bars and playing with their friends. By now my nerves would be beginning to scream. I was becoming desperate to go home and lie in the dark. Instead, I would eventually manage to round them up and get them home. We were later to discover that two of my three children were also autistic so there were often signs of their own dysregulation as well as the usual hunger, tiredness and general end of the day fractiousness. At home we would have a quick snack before I would need to bundle them in the car again or get them in their waterproofs to set off walking somewhere - swimming lessons, tennis, athletics, fencing, Brownies, synchronised bloody swimming – they did it all. Each of these activities required kit which I had to remember, snacks for afterwards and activities and books for whichever bored siblings were on the side-lines. At this point I would still be in my work clothes, not the comfortable, soft clothes I change into within minutes of coming in the front door and which help me regulate and compartmentalise my day. There wasn’t time for any of that back then. I think you probably get the picture. There were so many points in the post-work routine when I needed to stop. To slow down, breathe, do the quiet, still things that enable me to regulate. Instead, through necessity, I sailed past each of them, each missed call to my soul, and instead climbed another rung on the ladder to overwhelm. This went on for years.

What was the result of this, day after day? Often by the time we were walking back from whichever activity had stolen my peace, I would be completely disengaged from the present. I would talk to myself with ever increasing intensity, ranting and raving out loud, or if managing to hold on to a modicum of self-control, running a screaming, deranged monologue in my head, making me deaf to everything and everyone around me. By the time we got home I was usually over the edge. I would herd them in front of the TV and go and sob hot, wracking tears in the kitchen as I boiled water for pasta and tried desperately to refrain from throwing things at the walls. By the time my husband arrived home from work at about seven o’clock, I was more often than not in a complete state of distress, dysregulation and fury. It was absolutely exhausting and, with barely a moment to catch my breath, I would be doing it all again the next day.

I like to think that for the most part I managed to internalise the worst of it and hide it from my family. But I know that I didn’t manage that all the time which causes me deep shame and regret. I wonder if we focus enough on the challenges of parenting as an autistic person. It wasn’t only the day to day overwhelm that I found hard. There were endless additional challenges I faced which caused me embarrassment. None of the other mothers I knew seemed to feel like this. One of the biggest issues was my children having friends round. I struggle to have people in my house, something which causes me intense anxiety. Having children necessitates the arrival of friends - with their alien smelling washing powder, their different food requirements and more often then not their overnight bag. I found this extremely difficult. Obviously, I said yes to this and over and over throughout their childhood I would subsequently suffer nights of sleeplessness and extreme anxiety as an additional child slumbered in our house and I spun off into stress and dysregulation.

What has your experience been of parenting as an autistic person? Obviously, I wonder often what could have been different had I known about my autism while my children were small. If I’d understood the overwhelm and the consequences of lack of down time. If I’d understood why ever fibre of my being clenched and panicked when one of my children asked for a friend to come round after school and why children’s parties made me crawl out of my skin. But I didn’t. So, as with so many aspects of my past spent in the dark, I thrash about wildly between shame, anger and deep compassion for the me whose life was so out of focus.

I spend a lot of time reading, talking and thinking about autism. I particularly enjoy sitting back and watching neurotypical folk talk about it (I think this is known as sarcasm) which I approach with a strange mixture of fascination and annoyance. Last week it was Uta Frith’s TES article in which she decided she had ‘changed her mind’ about a number of things she had previously believed about autism. I was thrilled to see that someone with no lived experience of autism felt so confident and assured in her views. She may well be an expert in her field with years of research under her belt but that cannot ever make up for the fact that without a lived experience of autism she is arguably missing the most important ingredient, rendering her views and opinions a bit meaningless and pointless. I would be very interested to hear from other autistic people as to their thoughts on this. The article, and her faintly smug commentary about autism, made me angry. How gracious of her to inform me, a fully paid-up member of the autistic community, that she has changed her mind about my experience.

She also did a U-turn on the concept of masking. By this point my anger had tipped into something more akin to rage. Again, why is someone non-autistic even commenting? Because I am here to tell you that masking is most definitely real. I should know. I’ve done it for almost fifty years. In fact, so prevalent was it in my life and, I have come to see, so damaging, that I am writing an entire book devoted to it and how it manifested and has shaped my childhood, adolescence and adult life. Masking from a young age makes it very difficult to develop a clear and accurate sense of self. I have been learning about Michele Borba’s Five Building Blocks of Self Esteem in some training I have recently undertaken in my professional capacity. Borba proposes that in order to develop a secure, realistic and positive sense of self, a child must feel secure and safe, have self-knowledge, a sense of belonging, and purpose and recognise their own competence. You can see at a glance, how problematic this is for the masking individual. It is impossible to feel safe when the world around you is unpredictable, confusing and overwhelming. It is impossible to develop accurate self-knowledge when you are morphed into the personality of whoever you are with at that moment. It is impossible to feel a sense of belonging when you are an outsider, a loner, a misfit struggling to find her people. It is impossible to develop a sense of purpose or recognise your strengths when you hate everything about your defective, incapable being and every ounce of energy is taken up trying to keep a tsunami of emotions locked inside. At numerous points throughout this training, I felt myself welling up as I recognised the pain and lasting effects of this on my formative years, not to mention the disabling aspect of being unable to know yourself.

The longer masking, mimicking and copying continues, the more blurred and woolly one’s own sense of self becomes. It is akin to walking around the world in an invisibility cloak. Or like a drifting mist, insubstantial and untethered. I can still remember my dad regularly telling me, before a party or some social event that was causing me anxiety, to just be yourself. I had literally no idea what he was talking about. I had no concept of myself which I could refer to or fall back on. What did ‘be yourself’ even mean? I certainly had no clue. I was clearly defective and broken. A far better approach in my opinion was always to just be someone else. Someone who was obviously getting it right. Who understood the rules. Who attracted positive attention. The masking became my MO. I studied harder to pass the test of blending in than I ever did for anything academic which probably goes some way to explaining why my exam results were never commensurate with my ability. Because I can tell you, masking is exhausting. Being hypervigilant, studying every move, expression and intonation of another person, squirrelling away phrases and mannerisms for later use, performing an elaborate act every minute of every day uses a lot of energy. Add onto that the very real fear of being found out, of being unmasked Scooby-Doo style, of being ridiculed and laughed at and I was living life very much on a knife edge.

This week I am reading the recently published Lost Girls of Autism by . While this at least contains the voices of actual autistic women and similarly is making me weep every other page as I see myself reflected back through the shattered mirror that is the undiagnosed life, I keep coming back to this thought which I have never seen in any discussion on autism. I just feel autistic. Now, I understand that this isn’t a very helpful tool in the diagnostic belt. It is unquantifiable, unobservable and relies entirely on user testimony. But there you have it – it has always been my most reliable, consistent and powerful indicator of my neurodivergence. I felt it at five when I first approached my mother with my concerns at my difference. I felt it all the way through school as I watched my peers frolicking through life on the other side of a pane of glass. I felt it when I went off the rails as a teenager, thrashing about in the soup of self-destruction. I felt it when I tried to go to jobs, when I had my first child, when I got married. Feeling autistic has been the biggest constant in my life. Long before I had the language, long before I had even heard of autism, I knew. Decades before my diagnosis I felt it keenly – the un-nameable feeling of difference. I write much more on this in my book. Hopefully one day you will be able to read that too. For now, I just wish I could gather some of the wonderful autism researchers, writers of books and advocates as well as the self-appointed ‘experts’ and medical professionals who despite all their studies seems to know next to nothing of the actual experience, and I would try to explain to them that what they’re missing is the feeling.

If you are a late-diagnosed autistic I would absolutely love to hear whether you too have always sensed your autism, felt it in your bones before you had the words to articulate your experience. I’m certain that I cannot be alone in this and I am interested in how this felt experience can feed into future research

So, I wanted to write a piece about cold water swimming. I love it so much and feel quite evangelical about it. But I hesitated. What could I possibly say that other wild swimmers and ice dippers haven’t already espoused. Plus, there’s always the feeling that you are only ever preaching to the choir with this topic; swimmers already get it and everyone else just seems to find the Dryrobe-wearing brigade intensely irritating. And I get that. I do. It must look like so much posturing and bragging – hey look at me. In a swimsuit. In the snow. It is kind of cringe. Until you do it. Until you fall hard for it.

It’s been a number of years now. But not so long that I don’t remember clearly my intense hatred of cold, of any discomfort in fact. I remember sitting smug and happy, dry and warm as my dear friend Rachel donned what appeared to be comedy booties and gloves and submerged herself into a tarn. I felt no desire to join her. Not a flicker. Then it was my husband, forcing us to pull over on the way back home from a day out in the Lakes in order to ‘have a quick dip.’ Watching him emerge, red-skinned a few minutes later did nothing to make it any more appealing. I just couldn’t see the point. So much faff. Dragging that stupid inflatable behind you. So much shivering. So much foot stamping. It was definitely not for me. Until it was.

My husband is fit, in the original (and new) sense. So much so that the paltry distance of a marathon began to lose all meaning to me when he and his fell running friends ran further than that over mountainous terrain every weekend. He cycled and skied and generally seemed to have the stamina of an Olympian. I do yoga and like a good walk. There wasn’t much common ground where exercise was concerned. One year, after our annual six week trip round France, sleeping in tents and spending every moment outside, we returned to the start of the new school year like every year, a bit depressed by the routine and drudgery of it all. If only there was something we could do, together, that would keep the spirit of travel and adventure alive in us as school and work began to creep in and take over again, something to keep us outside as the seasons turned and winter began to steal the daylight away. Crucially, for me, it had to be something that my husband wasn’t already good at. Something where I wasn’t going to get left for dust. We had enjoyed some beautiful swims that summer in the Alps. Crystal clear lakes, stunning scenery and a hot sun to dry you within minutes of getting out. Clearly, we didn’t have aquamarine waters and warmth. But we did have an abundance of lakes at our disposal. Maybe we could cling onto some of that travelling vibe by carrying on swimming. Like I said, my husband had started infrequently, fair-weather swimming. Could we make it a thing. Together?

We started in late August on our return to the UK. It felt easy but the waters had had all summer to warm up so we probably had the easiest introduction possible. We loved continuing the feeling of freedom and spaciousness that defined our family summers. It was all new and exciting and made us feel like we were still on holiday. Quite rapidly the water started to cool. By then we were already going regularly, two or three times a week, rain or shine. By then we were already talking about it all the time, planning our days around our next dips. Let’s see how long we can keep going, we challenged ourselves, continuing to wade in as the sun lost its September warmth and the leaves stated to turn. Let’s see how long we can go into autumn before we swap to wetsuits, we said, fully intending to make the switch at some point. On one dark, Friday afternoon as I gleefully left work, excited to get into the wind-whipped water, I realised, it had happened. I was hooked. Funnily enough, we never did switch to wetsuits. By the time they were needed, I had already learnt too many things about this wonderful new world of water -

The feeling of cold against my actual skin is a big part of the experience. I discovered I didn’t want any barrier between me and the water

Likewise the connection to nature. It felt primal and wild to touch nature in this way

thanks to great outdoor clothing and kit, we hardly ever feel the elements against our skin. Standing semi-naked in heavy rain and blasting winds makes you feel alive like nothing else

✨

As the months went by, we discovered more cool things. The post-swim shivering began to lessen. At the beginning I would slosh tea out of my flask because I was shaking so much and the walk back to the car was always a hobble on stump-frozen feet. Suddenly we realised that was no longer the case. Our bodies were adjusting and changing. It felt exciting and fascinating to witness this transformation. We were evolving into our new environment. What had happened to us? How was it possible that I was now willingly leaving the comfort of my fire to battle the elements on a dark, cold February day to wade into a storm-thrashed lake. It was exhilarating. As was the first snow swim.

Along the way other friends, beside the already water-obsessed Rachel, began to curiously join us. I started going out with my girlfriends as well as my husband. My friendship group became a group of swimmers, sharing countless flasks, biscuits, tears and laughs in various states of undress besides bodies of water. We have celebrated birthdays and grieved over losses, cried tears of frustration and joy and supported and loved each other by lakes fiercely over the years. And do you know what has never happened? Never have we pushed each other further than we have wanted to go. Or persuaded each other to stay in longer. And in my experience, this is true of all swimming communities, big and small. I have never encountered groups of women who celebrate their bodies with such gay abandon as swimmers. Who eat the bloody cake and boldly wander the shores in their swimsuits regardless of their shape or size or scars. Who accept unconditionally each other’s stories, reasons for swimming and limits. Who support and encourage and celebrate each other. In this way, what started out as a micro-adventure for my husband and me, something we could quietly go and do together, that offered a tantalising sense of escape and some headspace from family life, has spread through my whole life, connecting me to my friends on a whole new level, deepening, solidifying and enriching our friendships in ways I could never have envisaged.

So there you go. From sceptic to convert. No bells and whistles. No fancy gear. Just me, a swim suit and a flask of tea. Just me and the weather. Just me and nature. Just me, connected, wild and free. Just me fully alive.

It would seem that January is a marmite month, seen as either a time of deflation, come-down and disillusionment, a depressing bleak month devoid of sparkle and joy or a spring board into new-year-new-me fervour, an enthusiastic leap into change.

Over the years I guess I have oscillated between these two ideas, maybe neither in any extreme way, but propelled none the less by some kind of need to mark the new year with a drive to do better. To be better. To be fitter, stronger, more productive. It’s a dangerous arena I feel. Mostly a place that only brings disappointment and shame. I steer clear now.

For years I have resisted this hard re-set idea. I have no desire to reinvent myself. I’ve barely got it together enough as it is and a whole new me, with new habits and hobbies sounds like a lot of work frankly. Controversially, I actually like my life. I’ve certainly put in the work to get this far. So much of the concept of the new year is a contrived trap, yet another way in which we are manipulated into thinking that we’re not good enough as we already are. That we would feel better, and even be better if we changed ourselves in some way.

It’s a confusing time though. As a self confessed Christmas lover I have always struggled to reconcile the abrupt, grim return to normality. The packing away of the tree and lights has always made me extremely sad. (You can read more about how I work hard to fight off the January blues in my piece ‘5 Things to do if You’re Missing Christmas, which I have linked below)

Recently I read a piece here on Substack by my favourite writer. In this particular essay she touches on the extended sadness that can feel hard baked into the short, grey days of the post-Christmas month. But what really struck me, and has stayed with me, was something she included, a nugget of advice if you will, that she had received from someone else a number of years ago and which had stuck with her. Apart from the pleasing thought of wisdom being passed like this, from person to person, heart to heart, as we support each other through the storms and wild fires of life, the words themselves stuck a deep chord in me. ‘January,’ she was reminded, ‘is a good month. A calm month.’

This small sentiment settled in me like a soft snow fall. A calm month. What a delicious thought. What need lies dormant under that idea? What quiet, whispered plea is resolutely being ignored if we barrel headlong into a new year?

This year I will be approaching January with the same quiet reverence that I tried, and mostly failed, to embrace December, where despite all my best efforts life kept on barging in in her muddy boots to run screaming through all my soft, quiet plans. I guess the best way to view this month is as a second go at that. It makes much more sense anyway. We at least have a fighting chance at a month of rest and relaxation without the frantic, scrambling, demanding joys of Christmas to contend with. Let’s face it, if you opt out of the fitness challenges which sprout everywhere as soon as the 26th rolls round and ditch the lure of the discounted gym membership, there is nothing happening this month. Absolutely nothing. Not only is January lacking the sparkle and baubles of December, for many people it amounts to four grey weeks of indulgence-hangover and the longest ever wait for payday. The days are still cold and short and dark. There may be an exciting day or two of snow and Traitors returns, but let’s be honest, this is the emptiest, most dreary month of the year. Which makes it the perfect time to hunker down and hibernate. To look after yourself and tend to your frazzled nerves and battered heart. We are still in the darkest depths of midwinter and crying out for even more withdrawal, longing for a slower, quieter pace. January has a quiet power hidden in its dreariness, offering us all of that and more. We just need to refocus our lens and accept her gifts.

For me a humungous book pile lies waiting. More Substack engagement. Long evenings playing games and eating slow meals. Candles. Lots and lots of candles. Ditto fires. It might be December’s dull relative but, like the misunderstood family member who we all thought of as so boring and tedious, January actually holds all the wisdom and support we needed all along.

Last night I taught a candlelit, advent yoga class. I run these every year and the aim is to invite my students to pause and take a breath before stepping into the urgency and busyness of December, arguably the most demanding, frenetic time of the year. A time when so many of us feel stretched and stressed. A time when expectation is high, up, out and on. This time of deep winter is actually calling us to do the exact opposite. This season – natural not festive - needs slow, off, inward energy. It needs us to withdraw and embrace the dark. To tend to our hearts, build up our stores, rest deeply. These long, dark days of winter are begging us to slow down. To shut the door, light the fire and retreat. This is a time for candlelit mornings, long, slow meals, books, early nights, walks in nature. But instead, we traipse round shopping centres not quiet woods. We work under harsh electric lights long after the mid-afternoon sun has sunk below the horizon plunging us into daytime darkness. We can feel pressured to do so much, buy so much, be so much. It’s all just too much. Hence the yoga class, an opportunity to move mindfully into December with presence, to set intentions around how we want our December to feel, where we need to place soft boundaries, where we can soften our hearts and minds and turn everyday moments into pause points, places of reverence and ritual. Where we can become the calm amidst the chaos.

The yoga was beautiful. It was a joy to guide people so ready and willing to go deeply into quiet. Into rest. The space felt held, the energy settled. But I have to admit, this year, I felt a little fraudulent. The next day, December 1^st, a day I hold with no small amount of reverence and importance, was far from being the day of my intentions. Far from feeling calm and quiet I instead felt completely overwhelmed with anxiety, the kind that crawls under my skin, presses fast forward on my thoughts, squeezes my chest until I feel I can no longer breathe freely.

Often times I cannot pinpoint the source of this all-consuming worry. It is ever present, has been a constant throughout my life. But currently, there are a number of obvious things that are feeding my anxiety and causing me to feel overwhelmed.

After waiting months, years even, trying to get support for my daughter, like the proverbial busses, after an interminable amount of tumbleweed, everything has come at once. I’m definitely not complaining. Far from it. It’s such a relief to feel someone, anyone, step in and offer a hand across the abyss to our family. But it turns out, it is a full-time job keeping up with it all. Multiple appointments a week (with ever changing days and time, often cancelled at the last minute) and the many related emails (relentless) and texts, the form filling, referrals and meetings that we need to attend, seem to fill every day. There is no longer a day when I am not fielding correspondence while at work, managing multiple text and email threads, keeping my phone volume up for all important calls, finding a quiet space to discuss medication or medical issues in private. We are very fortunate. My husband went freelance at the beginning of this school year and we constantly marvel at the serendipitous timing of this. Because without him being at home, flexible and available, I honestly don’t know how we would do it. I guess one of us would have been forced to give up work. Because it is near impossible to hold down a full-time job while also needing to be at random appointments four days out of five. And, if you are in any way enmeshed in this system you will know the strange law of mental health services – appointments beget appointments. Either you’re fobbed off within minutes of reaching the top of the long, long waiting list or you’re given the golden ticket. And then the meetings and appointments just seem to lead one into the other, endlessly it feels. I’m so curious as to how other families navigate all this. It seems to me that it is just another example of systems serving the privileged. How on earth do regular working families manage when their school aged child has four plus daytime meetings or appointments a week. Again, I’m really not complaining. We waited so very long for help. But without being in the lucky position that we are in I simply cannot see how it would work. It’s a lot.

There is also the emotional exhaustion for my daughter, and us, as we navigate this new season of support. My feelings and emotions oscillate wildly. I find it hard not to feel judged as I sense our family coming under scrutiny. I feel my stress levels plateauing at mega-high as we walk the tightrope of getting our daughter to all these things, the hostage negotiation level of skill required not to blow it at the last minute and generate a refusal or the last minute cancellation that throws her into meltdown. It gets harder and harder to quieten my mind and relax my body. Despite a lifelong acquisition of practices and tools to buffer against stress and overwhelm, I’m struggling to regulate. But I keep coming back to my advent intention, regardless. For the time being, I will continue to hold my December mindset closely. Moment to moment. Each day I will continue to carve out tiny pockets of time to sit still while the chaos swirls like a snowstorm. My morning will start early and be slow and candlelit, at my desk writing or reading in bed with a pot of tea. I will try to create time after work to light the fire and move my body. I will light my advent candle, keep the kettle hot and cook slow meals with the radio playing softly. With enough awareness and intention, it will be possible. It may feel like it is getting harder, not easier, to live the slow advent I so desperately crave. But awareness and intention are the best first steps. A soft and forgiving heart. A tender care towards my daughter and myself. I will try to provide a home of quiet and peaceful moments. A home of love and joy. A place for us all to retreat at the end of another day of probing meetings and challenging appointments. Maybe the intensity of this chapter will eventually lead to an even greater opportunity and appreciation of those small moments of peace and presence which we can create. A space to hold each other with tenderness and soft, cosy care by the light of the advent candle.

If you’re a parent dealing with this high intensity support, if you’re immersed in the system buckling under its own weight of need, I see you. And I am wishing you as much peace as you can muster this December.

And, if you’re so inclined, please come on over to my YouTube channel and step (virtually) into my cosy, home studio. You are all invited. It is my Christmas gift to you - the gift of quiet time. Find me at The Lake District Yogi x

This morning, as every morning, I attempted my morning meditation (I say attempted because much of the time I seem to just sit feeling frustrated and annoyed at my inability to ‘do it’, which is kind of the opposite of the point of it. You can read more about my thoughts on meditation in my post, ‘Meditation – It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3 Breaths, Right?….)

I use a rotation of meditations on YouTube and other platforms. Sometimes I go solo but more often than not I find that a calm voice and soothing music help enormously in staking my restless mind to the ground for a while. This morning, I was blindsided. Yes, I had seen that the latest meditation from one of my favourite subscribes was called something about your inner child. But it was early. Not yet light. I was thinking about everything I had to do in the day ahead, wondering when I’d make it to my desk to work on my novel and before you know it, I’d slipped my headphones on, cradled my tea and pressed play. I have been through a profound transformation of awakening, healing and acceptance over the past few years. Things are going really well. But sometimes I think that even with all the healing in the world, all the new understanding, the self-care, the learning and transforming – all of it can be undone in a moment when I visit my inner child.

In this morning’s meditation, the gorgeous soothing voice of the guide invited me to watch my inner chid playing. The soft music gave way to the sounds of children’s voices, outside. I was asked to see myself on a day where ‘there are no cares and no worries’. Wait, what?? I immediately felt my brain spiralling into disbelief as he continued, as though that was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask someone to do. I took a deep breath, tried to re-enter the meditation. But I was stuck on the outside now. Because I could sit there until the end of time and never be able to conjure up, even in the darkest recesses of my memory, a day where there were no cares and no worries. Zip. Zero. Not. A. Single. One.

Frankly, child me is a pretty sad affair. When I look back, I can only ever see myself as the weird little loner in the playground. The one vibrating uncomfortably inside their own bubble, completely removed from those around them, scared by their own alienation. The one awkward and unsure and lost. The one who’s enormous imagination, clever mind and inner world was so rich and so bright but so utterly ignored.

In my stronger more robust moments, the ones where I’m feeling really brave and fully prepared, I do go back to see her. Then we sit together, her head on my shoulder, my hand gently holding hers. I look at the sadness in her eyes. I look at her dorky seventies clothes, her unruly hair, her chewed nails. I stroke her thumb until I feel her racing heart begin to slow. When she’s ready to talk I listen. Man, do I listen. We laugh together. And then I do the best thing ever. I walk her away from school, away from her childhood home. Together we crack open life and fill it with joy. We adventure and hug hard. We laugh until we cry. Sometimes I go all in – we take a fast car to the beach and lick chip grease our fingers and run screaming and laughing into the surf. On a school day. I watch as she begins to relax, as the brightness and light returns to her eyes. I tell her over and over, I love you, I love you, I love you.

Is it common among late-diagnosed women, this need to re-parent yourself, to try to undo years of damage done, unknowingly in all likelihood? To heal years of trauma. To re-write the story, with your child-self front and centre, to drown yourself in acceptance, inclusion, understanding? I certainly feel that need. You could say it’s my life mission now. And we’re doing okay, me and her. It’s still raw. It’s still upsetting if I’m catapulted back there without warning. But mostly it’s becoming, if not okay to go there, necessary. Yes, there are always tears. A truly surprising amount. Hot, angry, lonely tears. But also the knowledge that I am gently, gradually, slowly circling round to some kind of wholeness.

People often ask me if I think diagnosis is detrimental to young people, whether it offers them a get out of jail free card, an excuse for not doing the things they need or want to do. And my unequivocal response is always and forever a resounding NO.

Obviously, I will never know what would have been different If I had had knowledge and understanding earlier in my life. But I do know that I wouldn’t wish the loneliness, fear, isolation and anxiety of not knowing on anyone.

For now I will keep loving the small, lost, scared girl who walked alone. She sure as shit isn’t alone anymore. She has me. And I am the person she was always searching for.