I mentioned, in the easy, unguarded way you mention things at sixteen when you’re still occasionally forgetting to perform a more acceptable version of yourself, that I didn’t have a Russian doll named Grapefruit.

It was nothing. A passing observation. The kind of thing that floats out of you when your guard is down and you’re just — there, in the kitchen, being yourself without thinking about it.

My father looked at me and said: “Oh shut up. You’re sixteen and talking about dollies.”

And then, as though the first part hadn’t been enough, he told me about a seventeen year old he’d seen on the television. Going out to work. Being, presumably, what a seventeen year old was supposed to be. The implication was clear and didn’t need spelling out, though the spelling out happened anyway in the silence that followed.

That is what sixteen looks like. This — you, here, naming your dolls — is not.

I felt the humiliation arrive in my chest like something physical. Hot and sudden and complete. I just turned around and left the kitchen.

But I didn’t forget it.

It wasn’t the first time.

My mother had her own version of the same message, delivered in her own way. I was nine years old and I wanted to go on a bouncy castle. A perfectly ordinary bouncy castle at a perfectly ordinary event, the kind that exists specifically to be jumped on by children who are delighted by the prospect of jumping on things.

I had wanted to go on all afternoon. I was out in our local town with my mother and grandmother. We were going around the shops and doing some errands that were boring to me and I kept asking to go on.

My mother looked and she said it is for 8 years old. You cannot go on it.

I was nine.

So we went home and I was really disappointed.

One year. One year past the arbitrary line on the sign, and joy had already been reclassified as something I no longer had access to. Not because I didn’t want it. Not because I wasn’t still, in every cell of my nine year old body, a child who wanted to jump on a bouncy castle. But because the sign said eight and I was nine and the rules were the rules.

What I understand now is that both of these moments were teaching me the same lesson.

Joy has an expiry date. Fun is for people younger than you. The things that come naturally to you — the naming, the playing, the world-building, the bouncy castle — these are things to be grown out of, not grown into. Maturity means leaving them behind. The sooner the better.

I learned it well. By the time my father said what he said over his grapefruit I had already been learning it for years. Already quietly editing myself. Already filing away the parts of me that didn’t fit the expected developmental timeline.

The Russian dolls didn’t go away. But I stopped talking about them.

That’s what happens when you’re told often enough that who you are is too much, or too young, or too strange, or too old, or too something. You don’t stop being it. You just stop letting it show. You take the part of yourself that brings you joy — the naming, the playing, the rich interior world you’ve built around the things you love — and you move it somewhere private. Somewhere nobody can reach it with a sign or a verdict or a comparison to a seventeen year old on the television.

You protect it by hiding it.

Here’s what I wish someone had said to me instead.

The age on the bouncy castle sign is a liability guideline, not a decree about your right to fun. The dolls are not childish — they are evidence of an imagination so vivid and an empathy so deep that it extends to painted wooden faces. The naming and the playing and the world-building are not things to be ashamed of. They are the most essentially you things about you.

And there is no expiry date on joy.

Not at nine. Not at sixteen. Not now.

I still have the Russian dolls. They still have names. I still look at their painted faces and know exactly who each one is, what she’s feeling, what she would and wouldn’t do.

I don’t hide that anymore.

My father was eating a grapefruit the morning he told me to shut up about my dollies.

I think about that sometimes.

A few days later we went back into town and my father took me on the bouncy castle.

I was so upset when I couldn’t go on that bouncy castle. I didn’t even see the sign so I felt that my mother had made it up. My mother and grandmother had never wanted me to go on anyway because it was inconvenient for them so they had an excuse. I felt it the way children feel injustice — completely, in every cell, with a clarity that adults sometimes mistake for overreaction. They weren’t protecting me. They were being killjoys. I knew it then and I know it now.

But later my father found out what had happened.

And he challenged my grandmother about it.

My grandmother’s position was clear: I wasn’t allowed on it. I was spoiled for being upset. The sign said eight and I was nine and that was the end of it.

My father disagreed.

And we went back to that bouncy castle.

I don’t know if he framed it to himself as a repair. I don’t know if he understood, in that moment, that he was doing something that mattered beyond the afternoon. What I know is that it felt good. Genuinely, simply, completely good — the jumping, the permission, the particular joy of being given the thing you’d been denied by someone who thought you deserved it.

He saw what they’d missed. That I was a child who wanted to jump on a bouncy castle and had been told she was too old and too spoiled for wanting it. And he decided that was wrong.

The same man who would sit at a kitchen table years later and tell me to shut up about my dollies. The same man whose just get on with it I filed away alongside everything else.

He was also the man who took me on the bouncy castle.

People are not one thing. Parents especially. They are the killjoys and the defenders, the wounders and the repairers, sometimes within the same year, sometimes within the same sentence. My father got things wrong in ways that stayed with me for a long time.

He also, on an ordinary afternoon, took his daughter to jump on a bouncy castle because someone had told her she wasn’t allowed and he thought that was unfair.

I’m still figuring out what to do with all of it.

But the jumping was real. And it felt good.

And I think, somewhere underneath the grapefruit and the dollies and the just get on with it, he saw me more than I knew.

Hit reply — what were you told you were too old for? What did you quietly move somewhere private to protect it? I want to know what you hid.

I thought everyone did this.

I thought the alternative — opening a menu cold, in a loud restaurant, with people waiting, making a decision in real time under mild social pressure — felt as overwhelming to everyone as it did to me. Turns out most people find it perfectly fine. They open the menu, they pick something, they move on.

For me the advance research isn’t optional. It’s the thing that makes the going possible. Without it the meal starts with a decision I’m not equipped to make quickly in a noisy environment and everything that follows is coloured by the stress of that beginning.

With it I can just — be there. Enjoy the food. Be present in the actual dinner rather than the managing of it.

I need to know how to get there and how to get home.

Both. Not just the outward journey. The return route matters as much as the arrival — sometimes more. Knowing how I’m getting home before I’ve left the house means I’m never stranded in the situation without an exit. It means the evening has a shape I can hold in my head. It means the unknown is smaller.

I map the whole thing in advance. Door to door, both directions. I know which train, which platform, which exit at the station. I know how long it takes and what happens if I miss the connection.

I thought this level of preparation was standard. That everyone travelled this way — with the full route understood before the journey began.

They don’t. Most people work it out as they go. The spontaneity doesn’t appear to cost them anything.

It costs me a lot. Which is why I stopped leaving it to chance.

I calculate how long I have to stay.

Before I arrive anywhere — a party, a dinner, a work event, a gathering of any kind — I have already done the maths. What’s the minimum reasonable amount of time? What’s the point at which leaving stops being rude? What’s my limit, and how do I get from arrival to that limit without running out of resources before I get there?

This runs alongside the exit strategy question, which is a separate but related calculation. Is there a clean way out? Can I drive myself so I’m not dependent on someone else’s timeline? Is there a reason I can give if I need to leave early that won’t require explanation?

I used to think this was anxiety. Just general, garden variety anxiety that I needed to manage better, push through, overcome.

I understand now that it’s a nervous system doing careful, advance risk assessment on a situation it knows from experience is going to cost something. The calculations aren’t irrational. They’re protective. They’re me building the scaffolding I need to get through the thing and get home in one piece.

When plans change, something in me comes down.

This one is harder to explain to people who don’t feel it.

Last week I had my heart set on going to a particular café. Not just any café — that one. I’d thought about it, looked forward to it, built a small mental picture of the afternoon around it. The coffee, the corner table, the particular quality of the light in that place at that time of day.

It was closed.

And I know — I know — that’s not a tragedy. I know there are other cafés. I know the rational response is to find somewhere else and enjoy that instead. I know that in the scale of things that matter, a closed café is nothing.

But something in me came down anyway.

Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone else would necessarily notice. Just — the afternoon lost its shape. The thing I’d been holding in my head, the small structure of the plan, collapsed. And rebuilding it on the spot, in the moment, without warning — that takes something. It requires a reorganisation of expectation that doesn’t happen quickly or easily for a brain like mine.

This is what people mean when they say plans changing throws them. It’s not about the specific plan. It’s about the mental architecture that gets built around it. The café wasn’t just a café. It was a structure I’d already lived inside. When it came down I was standing in the rubble of an afternoon trying to rebuild from scratch with no materials and no warning.

I’ve spent years being embarrassed by this. Feeling like my reaction to changed plans was disproportionate. Like I should be more flexible, more spontaneous, more able to go with the flow like everyone else seemed to do without effort.

What I understand now is that the inflexibility isn’t stubbornness or rigidity or a failure of personality. It’s a nervous system that relies on predictability to function well — that uses advance planning and mental preparation not as a preference but as a genuine coping strategy. When the plan changes the coping strategy collapses with it. That’s not an overreaction. That’s a scaffolding coming down.

All of these things — the menu research, the mapped return journey, the exit calculations, the grief of a changed plan — I carried them for years as evidence of something wrong with me. Signs of anxiety that needed fixing, rigidity that needed loosening, inflexibility that needed work.

They weren’t. They aren’t.

They’re a brain doing its best to make an unpredictable world predictable enough to live in comfortably. They’re strategies that developed because they work — because the alternative, arriving unprepared into uncertain situations with no exit and no map, costs more than I have to spend.

I don’t think everyone does this.

But I think more people do than I ever knew.

Hit reply — what’s your version of the closed café? The changed plan that came down harder than it should have? I want to know.

This one was serious and a little sad. This one was warm but easily flustered. This one, the smallest, was the wisest of all of them — you could tell by the expression. Quiet. Knowing. The kind of face that had seen things.

They had relationships with each other. Dynamics. History. I gave them voices and storylines and entire interior lives that I curated and developed over years of careful, devoted attention.

I thought everyone did this.

I genuinely, completely, with no awareness that it might not be universal, assumed that every child looked at a toy and saw a person. That every child felt the particular pull of an object’s expression and responded to it. That every child built a world around the things they owned and lived in that world as fully and as seriously as they lived in the real one.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to discover that they didn’t.

This is the issue where I tell you about the things I do — and did — that I assumed were just human. Turns out some of them are specifically, characteristically, neurodivergently me. And I am only now, in the middle of all this researching and recognising, beginning to understand that the gap between my experience and everyone else’s was wider than I knew.

I check where I’m going before I go.

Not just the address. All of it. I Google the location and then I Street View the entrance and then I work out where to park and how long it takes to walk from the station and what the building looks like from the outside so that when I arrive it doesn’t feel like arriving somewhere new — it feels like returning somewhere I’ve already been.

I thought everyone did this.

I thought the idea of arriving somewhere completely cold, with no mental map, no preview, no sense of what you were walking into — I thought that felt as uncomfortable to everyone as it did to me. Turns out most people just… go. They find it when they get there. The not knowing doesn’t appear to register as a problem that needs solving in advance.

For me it does. For me the preparation is the thing that makes the going possible. Without it the anxiety of the unknown is loud enough to make the whole thing feel impossible before it’s even started.

I have interests. Proper ones.

Not passing curiosities. Not a vague fondness for something that fades after a few weeks. I mean the kind of interest that takes up residence — that moves in, rearranges the furniture, and stays for months or years. The kind where I read everything, watch everything, collect everything, think about it constantly, bring it into conversations whether it’s relevant or not, and feel it running underneath ordinary days like a frequency only I can hear.

I collect things connected to whatever I’m currently fascinated by. Physical things. I build small archives of the interest — objects and books and pieces that let me live inside it more fully, that make it real in a way that just thinking about it doesn’t quite achieve.

I thought everyone had this. This specific, total, consuming relationship with the things they loved.

They don’t. Most people have hobbies. I have obsessions. There’s a difference, and I spent years being slightly embarrassed by mine before I understood that the depth of the interest wasn’t excessive — it was just how my brain is built to love things.

I played with my dolls differently.

The roleplay wasn’t random. It wasn’t just moving figures around and making sound effects. It was character work. It was sustained narrative. It was reading the expression on a painted wooden face and knowing — really knowing — what that face was feeling, what her history was, what she would and wouldn’t do in a given situation.

The smallest doll, the one at the centre, the wise one — I never gave her a storyline that didn’t suit her expression. It would have felt wrong. It would have felt like a betrayal of who she was.

I understand now that this wasn’t just imaginative play. It was a highly developed internal world finding the only outlet available to a child who felt most at home inside her own head. It was empathy running so deep it extended to painted faces on wooden dolls. It was a brain that was always, always looking for the person underneath the surface.

I’m still doing all of these things.

I still check where I’m going before I go. I still fall completely into interests and live inside them. I still look at objects and find personalities in them. I still build worlds in my head that are as real and as populated as the external one.

I just know now that these aren’t universal human experiences I happen to share.

They’re mine. Specifically, characteristically, wonderfully mine.

And they’re not flaws to be managed or quirks to be apologised for.

They’re just how I’m built.

Hit reply — tell me the thing you did that you thought everyone did. I want to know what you discovered was specifically yours.

I was the second kind.

My close friends weren’t going. That was the thing. The people who made rooms feel safe, who made groups feel navigable, who made the whole business of being among people feel less like a performance and more like just — being. They weren’t going to be there. And I was going to have to share a room with someone I didn’t know and I didn’t know who and I didn’t know how that was going to go and the not knowing was loud and constant and taking up a lot of space.

So I told my mother.

Not in a spiral. Not dramatically. Just — I’m worried about who I’m going to share a room with. A specific, concrete, entirely reasonable thing to say about an unfamiliar situation you’re about to walk into without your people.

She said: “You worry too much.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

I’ve thought about those four words more than they probably deserve. You worry too much. Said lightly, easily, the way you say something that feels obvious. Not unkindly — I want to be fair to her. She wasn’t trying to shut me down. She was trying, in the way she knew how, to reassure me. To tell me it would be fine.

But what I heard wasn’t it will be fine.

What I heard was: your worry is excessive. Your worry is disproportionate. Your worry is a character flaw that other people don’t share and you should probably work on. The thing you’re feeling right now — real, specific, taking up actual space in your chest — is too much. It is, like so many things about you, simply too much.

So I filed it. Added it to the collection. And went on the trip.

The room situation turned out fine, as it happens. My mother was right about that part. But here’s the thing about being told your worry was unnecessary because everything turned out okay — it doesn’t actually help with the next worry. Because the next worry doesn’t know yet that everything is going to be fine. The next worry is just sitting there, in the chest, being real and loud and present in the way that worry is, and it turned out fine last time does nothing to quiet it.

Telling an anxious person not to worry is a bit like telling someone with a broken leg to just walk it off. Technically the instruction makes sense. Practically it misses the entire point.

Here’s what I understand now about the worry.

For many neurodivergent women, anxiety isn’t a personality flaw or a thinking error or a bad habit to be corrected. It’s what happens when a brain that’s wired to notice everything — every variable, every possible outcome, every social nuance, every way a new situation could go — is placed in an uncertain situation without enough information. The worry isn’t irrational. It’s the nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do, which is scan for risk and prepare for it.

The problem isn’t that it scans too much.

The problem is that nobody ever told you that’s what it was doing — or gave you anything useful to do with the information once it arrived.

You worry too much teaches you that the worry is the problem. That you are the problem. That the correct response to an anxious thought is to have fewer anxious thoughts, as though that’s a thing you can simply decide.

What would have helped — what I wish someone had said — is this.

Your worry makes sense. You’re about to go somewhere unfamiliar without your people and you don’t know who you’re going to be sharing a room with and that uncertainty is real and it’s okay that it’s loud. Let’s think through it together. Let’s make it smaller by looking at it directly instead of telling it to go away.

That’s all I needed. Not to be told the worry was wrong. Just to have someone sit with it alongside me for a moment before sending me on my way.

You don’t worry too much.

You worry in proportion to how much you’re taking in — which is more than most people, processed more intensely than most people, in a nervous system that was never explained to you and therefore never properly supported.

That’s not too much.

That’s a lot to carry without the right help.

Hit reply — what’s the worry people always told you was unnecessary? I want to know what you were carrying that nobody thought to help with.

That the teasing was just a joke. That I was overreacting, taking it too seriously, making something out of nothing.

I had gone to her because I was upset. Because some kids had been teasing me and it had gotten under my skin in the way things always got under my skin — deeply, completely, in a way I couldn’t shake and couldn’t explain and couldn’t make stop. I’d done what you’re supposed to do. I’d gone to the adult in the room. The one who was meant to help.

She looked at me and told me I was stupid.

I went quiet.

That’s what I did by seventeen. I’d had enough practice. Feel the thing fully, completely, in every cell — and then go quiet. Don’t let it show. Don’t give anyone else the opportunity to confirm what you’re already starting to suspect, which is that your reaction is the problem, not the situation that caused it.

I went quiet and I went back to my seat and I filed it away with everything else.

And somewhere in the filing, without quite deciding to, I believed her.

Not the stupid part — not consciously, not completely. But the version underneath it. The implication. That I had gotten it wrong again. That I had felt something real and loud and legitimate and somehow, in the feeling of it, made myself the problem. That if I’d just been a little less sensitive, a little more resilient, a little more able to take a joke — none of this would have happened.

That’s what she taught me that day. Not the course, Not whatever she was supposed to be teaching seventeen year old me. She taught me that my feelings were an inconvenience. That bringing them to someone in authority would get them turned around and handed back to me as evidence of my own failing.

I learned to stop bringing them.

Here’s what I wish she had said instead.

You are not stupid.

You are not stupid for feeling hurt when people teased you. You are not stupid for being unable to laugh it off, shake it loose, file it under just a joke and move on. You are not stupid for going to a teacher and expecting to be taken seriously. You are not stupid for having a nervous system that registers unkindness at a frequency others don’t seem to feel.

You were seventeen and you were hurting and you did exactly the right thing — and the adult in the room failed you. That’s what happened. Not you being too sensitive. Not you overreacting. Not you being stupid.

An adult failing a teenager who came to her for help.

The too sensitive explanation had been waiting for a moment like that. It was already there, already broken in, already the answer I reached for when anything hurt more than it was supposed to. Of course I was too sensitive. Of course I’d made something out of nothing. Of course the problem was the way I’d received it rather than the way it had been delivered.

That’s what years of being told you’re too sensitive does. It doesn’t just make you doubt your reactions. It makes you doubt your reality. It makes you the unreliable narrator of your own experience — always second guessing, always checking, always wondering if what you felt was real or just another example of the flaw.

I’m done being the unreliable narrator.

What happened in that classroom was real. The teasing was unkind. My hurt was legitimate. The teacher was wrong. All three of those things are true and none of them cancel each other out.

And I was not stupid.

I was a sensitive seventeen year old girl in a world that had not yet given her the language for why she felt everything so loudly and so long. I was doing my best in a nervous system nobody had explained to me yet. I was trying to get help in the only way I knew how.

That’s not stupid.

That’s brave, actually.

Going quiet was the only safe thing left to do after she said what she said. But I want to say something now, to seventeen year old me sitting back down at her desk with everything filed away and nothing showing on her face —

You were right to feel it. You were right to go to her. You were not too sensitive and you were not stupid and none of it was a joke if it hurt you.

It hurt you. That’s enough. That’s always been enough.

Hit reply — who was the person who was supposed to help and didn’t? I want to know your version of going quiet.

One afternoon I sat down next to her.

I didn’t see her hand. I genuinely didn’t see it. I sat down, she said — lightly, pointedly — “do you want me to move, Charlie? You sat on my hand” — and I apologised immediately. Genuinely. The way I always apologise, which is completely and probably too much, because I have never once in my life been able to do a casual sorry.

She didn’t acknowledge it.

Not a don’t worry about it. Not a smile. Not the small, brief absolution that costs nothing and means everything. Just — nothing. A silence that had a shape to it. A coldness that told me, very clearly, without a single additional word, that I had already been tried and found wanting before I’d even sat down.

I observed her and she was always warm to everyone else but me. If I said anything light hearted she would take offence to it. I didn’t know what was wrong.

I didn’t try to win her over. I want to say that. Some part of me knew, instinctively, that there was no version of trying that would work — that whatever verdict she’d reached about me had been reached before the hand, before the apology, before I’d had any real chance to be known by her at all.

But I did go looking for my fault.

That’s what I did instead. Quietly, internally, on the long replay that started that evening and ran for longer than it should have. What had I done? What was it about me that she’d clocked so quickly and so completely? Was it the way I’d sat down — too abruptly, too unaware? Was it something before that, something I hadn’t noticed? Was it just — me? Just the particular way I exist in a room, that thing I’ve never been able to identify or fix, that some people seem to sense and respond to with an instinctive closing off?

I searched for the answer for a long time.

I never found it. Because I don’t think it was there.

Here’s what I understand now that I couldn’t then.

Some people won’t like you. Not because of anything you did or said or failed to notice. Not because of the hand or the apology or the way you sat down. Not because of anything fixable or learnable or within your control. Just — because. Because chemistry is real and not everyone’s is compatible. Because some people make their minds up quickly and don’t unmake them. Because occasionally you will walk into someone’s orbit and something about you — your energy, your presence, the particular frequency you operate on — will simply not land with them.

And that has nothing to do with your worth.

This was a hard one for me to learn. Still is, honestly. There’s something about being neurodivergent — about having spent years searching for what you did wrong, years collecting evidence of your own wrongness, years filing away every coldness and every silence as further proof of the fundamental flaw — that makes it very difficult to receive someone’s dislike as information about them rather than a verdict about you.

But that’s what it is.

Her silence after my apology wasn’t a mirror. It wasn’t showing me something true about myself. It was showing me something about her — about how she moved through the world, about what she was willing to offer, about the size of the space she made for people she’d already decided weren’t worth the effort.

That’s not your reflection. That’s just who she was.

You sat on her hand. You apologised. You did everything right in a situation that had already been decided before you arrived.

If someone doesn’t like you — really doesn’t like you, coldly, without cause, without giving you the chance to be known — that is their problem.

Not yours.

It was never yours.

Hit reply — tell me about the person whose dislike you carried longest. How long did you spend searching for what you did wrong?

And then a girl came up to me.

I didn’t know her. That’s the part I keep coming back to. She wasn’t a friend with a nickname, or someone who’d earned the right to tease me. She was just a girl from the class. Someone who had seen me, at most, for an hour a week. Someone who knew nothing about me — not my name, not my life, not what was happening inside my head on any given day.

She looked at me and said: “You’re mad.”

I must have looked confused. Because she said it again.

“You are.”

And then she walked away.

I stood there in the changing room holding my dance shoes and I didn’t say anything. I don’t remember if I laughed it off or went quiet or just turned back to getting changed like it hadn’t happened. What I remember is the feeling. That particular cocktail of confusion and shame and something else — something that took me a long time to name.

The something else was this: I believed her.

Not immediately. Not consciously. But somewhere underneath the confusion, in the place where all the verdicts about me got quietly filed away, I took it in. Added it to the collection. Another piece of evidence in the case against myself.

Too sensitive. Too much. Can’t fit in. Can’t find the right words. And now — mad.

What I want to ask, and couldn’t ask then, is: how?

How was I mad? What did you see in the thirty seconds between me walking through that door and you delivering your verdict? What was it about me — flustered, late, getting changed in a dance class changing room like every other person in that room — that made you reach for that word?

I genuinely want to know. Because I’ve turned it over so many times and I still can’t find the thing she saw. I wasn’t doing anything unusual. I wasn’t talking to myself or behaving strangely or making a scene. I was just — there. Present in whatever way I’m present. Being whatever I am in the unremarkable act of getting ready for a dance class.

And somehow that was enough.

That’s the thing about being neurodivergent in a world that wasn’t built for you. Sometimes you don’t have to do anything wrong. You don’t have to say the wrong thing or react the wrong way or be visibly too much. Sometimes you just have to exist — just walk into a room and start getting changed — and something about the particular way you exist is enough for someone to clock it. To name it. To hand you a label you didn’t ask for and walk away.

Mad. Weird. Strange. Odd. Different.

I’ve collected them all over the years. Filed them away with the too sensitives and the just get on with its and the stop being so self consciouses. Built a whole case out of them. Became so fluent in the language of what was wrong with me that I stopped noticing I’d never once been offered an alternative explanation.

Here’s the alternative explanation.

You weren’t mad. You were neurodivergent in a world with a very narrow definition of normal, moving through spaces that weren’t designed for you, being perceived by people who didn’t have the language for what they were seeing and reached for the easiest word instead.

Mad is what people say when they don’t have a better explanation. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s not an insight. It’s a word a girl in a changing room threw at you when you were already running late, and you were never obligated to carry it.

Put it down.

You’ve carried it long enough.

Hit reply — what did they call you? Mad, weird, strange, odd, too much, not enough? Tell me the word. I want to know.

I got very good at that laugh.

I got good at a lot of things that weren’t really me. Nodding at the right moments. Asking follow up questions I’d rehearsed rather than ones I actually wanted to ask. Tracking the rhythm of a group conversation like music I was trying to learn by ear — waiting for the pause, the breath, the moment where a contribution might land without interrupting, without being too much, without drawing the kind of attention that felt dangerous rather than warm.

Everyone else seemed to just — know. That’s what got me. They knew when to speak and what to say and how to say it and how loud and how much. They knew the rules of the room without apparently ever having been taught them. They moved through conversations the way you move through a house you grew up in — without thinking, without checking, without that constant low hum of am I doing this right, is this right, is this normal.

I didn’t know. I was always guessing.

And the guessing was exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t do it. It’s not that the conversations were bad or the people were unkind. It’s that existing in them required a level of active, conscious effort that seemed to cost me something it didn’t cost anyone else. I’d leave and feel wrung out and wonder what was wrong with me that something so ordinary could take so much.

I concluded, eventually, that I just wasn’t normal.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way I said out loud or let anyone see. Just in that quiet, settled, this-is-just-a-fact-about-me way. Other people were normal. I was something adjacent to normal — close enough to pass, most of the time, if I kept the social laugh ready and didn’t let the searching show.

I carried that for years.

Here’s what I wish someone had said to me.

You are normal.

Not normal like everyone else is normal — because that’s not what normal actually means, despite what we’re all quietly taught to believe. Normal like: your experience is real and valid and shared by more people than you know. Normal like: the searching and the guessing and the laughing along and the exhaustion afterwards — that’s not a personal failing. That’s a neurodivergent woman doing what neurodivergent women do in a world that was built for a different kind of brain.

The people who seemed to know the right things to say — they weren’t better than you. They weren’t more evolved or more socially gifted or more worthy of belonging. They were working with an operating system that happened to match the room. You were working with a different one. That’s it. That’s the whole difference.

You were never abnormal. You were always just — differently wired. Running different software in a world that only ever came with instructions for one kind.

I think about all the rooms I stood at the edges of, laughing along, searching for the lines, convincing myself that everyone else had something I fundamentally lacked. I think about how certain I was that the gap between me and them was a gap in my worth rather than simply a gap in how we were built.

I think about how much energy went into performing normal when I was, in every way that actually matters, already it.

You are normal, Lottie.

I’m still learning to believe that. But I’m saying it out loud now — here, in this newsletter, to you — because I think you might need to hear it as much as I did.

You are normal.

Whatever room you’re in, whatever laugh you’ve been keeping ready, whatever script you’ve been searching for while everyone else seemed to already know their lines —

You are normal.

And you always were.

Hit reply and tell me — what did you do to get through the rooms? I want to know your version of the social laugh.

Not you reading this now — although you’re welcome to take what you need from it. I mean me. The younger version of me who spent years quietly, persistently, exhaustingly convinced that the problem was her.

I don’t know when it started. It wasn’t one moment. It was more like a slow accumulation — a hundred small pieces of evidence, collected over years, that added up to the same conclusion.

You feel like you don’t fit in anywhere.

You keep trying to fit in. Wondering what is wrong with you. What do you have to do to be accepted. That there is something about you that turns others away, Something you were born with that marked you out and couldn’t be changed, only managed, only hidden, only apologised for.

I believed that for so long.

I watched other people belong to things — groups, friendships, rooms, conversations — with what looked like no effort at all. And I tried. I want you to know that. I tried so hard for so long in so many different ways. I read the room. I adjusted. I performed the right version of myself for every different situation until I couldn’t remember which version was actually me. I smiled when I didn’t feel like smiling. I stayed when every part of me wanted to leave. I said the right things in the right order and went home afterwards and felt like something essential had been wrung out of me.

And it still didn’t work. Not really. Not in the way it seemed to work for everyone else. It just seemed like I didn’t know the right way.

So I concluded it was my fault.

Not in a dramatic, conscious way. Just in that quiet, settled, this-is-just-how-things-are way that’s almost worse because you stop questioning it. Of course I couldn’t fit in. Of course connection was harder for me. Of course I was too sensitive, too intense, too much, not enough. Of course I went home from evenings that should have been fine and sat in the dark for a while before I could take my coat off. This was just who I was. Flawed in this particular way. Getting on with it, like I’d been taught.

Here’s what I wish someone had said to me.

It isn’t your fault.

Not the not-fitting-in. Not the exhaustion. Not the too-sensitive and the too-much and the connections that fizzled before they started. Not the relationships you couldn’t quite get right no matter how carefully you tried. Not the boy you never told. Not the rooms you stood at the edge of, watching everyone else be easy with each other, wondering what was wrong with you.

None of it was your fault.

You weren’t failing at something everyone else found simple. You were doing something genuinely harder, in a nervous system that processes the world differently, without a single person who understood what you were actually navigating. You were playing a game nobody told you had different rules for you. You were trying to fit into a shape that was never designed for the way you’re built.

That’s not failure. That’s an impossible situation handled with more grace than it deserved.

I wish someone had seen the effort underneath the quiet. The work behind the stillness. The trying that never stopped even when it looked from the outside like not trying at all.

I wish someone had said: you’re not broken, you’re not difficult, you’re not too much. You’re just different in a way that nobody has given you the language for yet. And the world hasn’t done nearly enough to make room for you. That’s the world’s failure, not yours.

I wish someone had handed me a manual.

Nobody did. So I’m writing one.

Not from the other side where everything is resolved and makes sense. From right here, in the middle of it, where it’s still messy and unfinished and real. Because I think that’s more honest. And I think you’ve had enough of people performing certainty at you when what you actually needed was someone willing to sit in the uncertainty alongside you.

So that’s what this is.

Every week, one honest issue. One real moment. One thing nobody said out loud until now.

For every woman who spent years believing she couldn’t fit in and never once considered that the world might have been the problem.

It wasn’t your fault.

It was never your fault.

— Lottie

Hit reply. Tell me the thing you blamed yourself for the longest. I’ll write back.

There was a boy once.

He was good looking and seemed really kind.

I won’t tell you his name. But I’ll tell you that I liked him in that particular way that takes up a lot of quiet space — the kind of liking that doesn’t announce itself loudly but sits in the background of everything, colouring the edges of ordinary days.

I remember looking forward to going to the club because he was there. I was hoping that we would become more than just friends

And I never told him.

Not because I didn’t want to. Not because the feeling wasn’t real or wasn’t worth saying. But because every time I got close to saying something — anything, even something small and ordinary and unrelated to how I felt — there was a voice running underneath the conversation that was louder than everything else.

Don’t say the wrong thing. Don’t say the wrong thing. Don’t say the wrong thing.

So I said very little. I smiled when I should have spoken. I laughed when I should have stayed with the moment. I edited everything before it came out and most of it never came out at all. I was so focused on not getting it wrong that I couldn’t get anything right.

I didn’t know it was fizzling. That’s the part that still sits with me. I wasn’t watching it slip away and feeling unable to stop it. I was just — there, in it, doing my best, genuinely believing I was managing the situation. And then one day I looked up and it was gone. The moment had passed. The connection had quietly closed, like a door nobody slammed, and I was standing on the wrong side of it wondering when that had happened.

Only afterwards did I understand. Only in the absence of it did I see what had been there.

I spent a long time thinking that was shyness. That’s what everyone called it — she’s just shy — and I accepted that explanation because it was the only one available. Shy meant fixable. Shy meant something I could work on, push through, overcome if I just tried hard enough and cared a little less about what people thought.

But it wasn’t shyness. Not exactly.

It was the exhausting, relentless, completely invisible work of trying to get everything right in real time. Of monitoring every word before it left my mouth. Of being so acutely aware of how I might be perceived that I couldn’t be present in the actual moment I was living in. Of caring so much about not saying the wrong thing that I ended up saying almost nothing at all.

This is what nobody tells you about being a neurodivergent woman in relationships.

It’s not that we don’t feel things. We feel everything. Often more than is comfortable, more than we know what to do with, more than we have the words for. The problem isn’t the feeling. The problem is the translation. Getting what’s inside — real, vivid, genuine — out into the world in a form that lands the way we mean it to. That gap between what we feel and what we manage to say is where so many connections quietly die.

I’ve thought about that boy more times than makes sense for something that technically never even happened. A almost-connection. A door that closed before I knew it was open.

But I understand it now in a way I couldn’t then. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t disinterested. I wasn’t playing games or being mysterious or any of the things people sometimes assume when someone goes quiet where warmth was expected.

I was trying so hard not to get it wrong that I couldn’t let myself get it right.

That’s the relationship pattern that makes more sense after. Not just with him — with most people, in most situations, across most of my life. The overcalculation. The editing. The gap between what I felt and what I managed to show. The connections that fizzled not from lack of feeling but from too much thinking wrapped around too much feeling with no clear way out.

I don’t have a fix for this. I’m still figuring out how to close the gap. But knowing it exists — knowing it has a shape and a name and a reason — means I can see it happening now in a way I couldn’t before.

And that’s not nothing.

That boy never knew what I felt. But I know now that it wasn’t shyness that stopped me.

It was a brain doing its complicated, exhausting, well-meaning best in a moment that needed something simpler.

Hit reply — tell me about the connection you only understood after it was gone. The friendship, the relationship, the almost. What makes more sense about it now?

I don’t remember exactly what had been said to me — something at school, something that had burrowed under my skin and stayed there, the way things did with me. The way things still do. I went to my mother and told her I was worried about what someone had said. I needed her to tell me it was going to be okay. That the thing I’d felt so sharply was worth feeling.

She looked at me and said: “They didn’t mean anything by it, Stop being so self conscious.”

And that was that.

My father had his own version. Shorter. More efficient. Whenever something got to me — and things got to me constantly, quietly, in ways I couldn’t always explain or justify — he would say: “Just get on with it.”

I remember looking at some of the things on my school report that my mother had noted. It said “Too sensitive, grow a carapace.”

So I did. I just got on with it. I tried to grow a carapace.

I got on with it when someone’s offhand comment replayed in my head for three days. I got on with it when a certain tone of voice made my chest tighten. I got on with it when criticism that rolled off everyone else landed on me like something physical, like a hand pressed flat against my sternum. I got on with it when noisy environments left me wrung out and overstimulated in ways I had no language for. I got on with it when I cried at things I wasn’t supposed to cry at, and felt enormous things in situations that apparently didn’t warrant enormous things.

I just got on with it. While filing away, very quietly, the understanding that what was happening inside me was excessive. Embarrassing. Too much.

Too sensitive became the explanation for everything. Didn’t like confrontation — too sensitive. Needed time to recover after difficult conversations — too sensitive. Found certain environments overwhelming — too sensitive. Felt things deeply and for longer than seemed reasonable — too sensitive.

It became a character verdict. Not a description of how I experienced the world but a judgement on who I was as a person. Weak. Fragile.

Difficult. The kind of woman who needs to toughen up.

I spent years trying to toughen up.

I practised not reacting. I learned to keep my face very still when something landed wrong. I developed an internal delay — feel the thing, wait, assess whether the feeling is proportionate, decide if it’s safe to show it, usually decide it isn’t, file it somewhere and get on with it. I got very good at this. So good that people started telling me I was calm, measured, contained.

I was none of those things. I was just exhausted from the filing.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then.

Sensory and emotional sensitivity isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a nervous system difference. Many autistic and ADHD women experience the world at a higher intensity than the people around them — not because they’re weak or fragile or haven’t tried hard enough to toughen up, but because their nervous systems are genuinely processing more. The sounds land louder. The feelings arrive bigger. The offhand comment that someone else forgets by lunchtime is still running on a loop at 11pm because a brain like mine doesn’t have an easy off switch.

That’s not weakness.

That’s a lot of information arriving at once with nowhere to put it because nobody ever told you that’s what was happening.

My mother wasn’t cruel. My father wasn’t cold. They were doing what their generation did — teaching me to function, to push through, to not let it show. They didn’t know there was another explanation. They didn’t know that telling a sensitive child to stop being sensitive is a bit like telling someone with poor eyesight to just look harder.

But I wish someone had said to fifteen year old me: “You feel things deeply. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

I wish someone had said: “Your nervous system is working overtime. That’s not a character flaw. That’s just how you’re built.”

I wish someone had said anything other than just get on with it — because I got on with it for thirty years and it cost me more than I can properly calculate.

The sensitivity was never the problem.

The problem was never having a name for it. Never having permission to say: this is real, this is a lot, and I need a minute.

You’re allowed the minute.

Hit reply — what did they call it when you were growing up? Too sensitive, too emotional, too dramatic, too much? I want to know your version.

That was the thought. Sitting in the pub, one of those nights that was supposed to wind down hours ago, and someone — kindly, generously — got another round in. Drinks I hadn’t asked for, didn’t really want, but couldn’t say no to without it being A Thing. Without me being The One Who Left Early Again.

So I stayed. I smiled. I picked the drink back up.

And somewhere behind my ribs, very quietly, I groaned.

Not again.

Not again, meaning: not another hour of this. Not another round of small talk I have to manufacture from nothing. Not another stretch of time where I have to keep performing “having a nice time” long after the having-a-nice-time has run out.

I want to be clear — I was having a nice time. I like these people. That’s not the contradiction it sounds like. I can be enjoying myself and also be completely, bone-deep done. Both things were true. I just didn’t have a way to say the second one out loud without it sounding like I meant the first one too.

So I stayed in my seat, doing the maths. If I leave now, is that weird? If I wait twenty minutes, is that better? Is there a version of leaving that doesn’t require an explanation? I went through about six different exit strategies in my head while someone was telling me a story I was nodding along to and not really hearing.

This is the part that’s hard to explain to people who don’t feel it. It’s not that the night was bad. It’s not that the conversation was boring or the company was wrong. It’s that being there — present, responsive, appropriately animated, laughing in the right places, asking the right follow-up questions — costs something. It’s not free. It’s not automatic. For some people, apparently, it is. For me, every hour of it is a withdrawal from an account that doesn’t have unlimited funds.

And nobody can see the balance dropping. From the outside I just look like someone enjoying a few drinks with friends. From the inside, I am just so tired, I don’t know what else to say. I hope I am getting this right, is this the right amount of talking, am I making this weird, should I ask her something, is my face doing the thing it’s supposed to be doing, how long has it been since I said anything, say something, anything, now.

By the time I got home that night, I didn’t feel like someone who’d had a nice evening. I felt like someone who’d run a shift. I got in, just couldn’t wait to get into bed so I could get as much sleep as possible in order to face the next day. Not sad. Not upset. Just — done. Completely, utterly done, in a way that didn’t match how the night had actually gone.

I used to think that meant I didn’t really like socialising. That I was somehow faulty for finding something that everyone else seemed to do so casually — go for a few drinks, chat, go home — so disproportionately costly.

What I’m starting to understand is that I wasn’t just at the pub that night. I was working the entire time. Reading the room. Managing my face. Calculating exits. Translating in real time. Everyone else got to just be there. I had to do there.

That’s the exhaustion nobody sees. It doesn’t show up in photos. Nobody else clocks it. You don’t even have the language for it yourself half the time — you just know that “fun night out” somehow costs you the entirety of the next day, and you’ve quietly stopped questioning why.

I don’t have a neat ending for this one. I don’t have the trick that fixes it. Some days I leave early and accept the awkwardness. Some days I stay and pay for it later. I haven’t worked out which is right yet — maybe there isn’t a right.

But I know now that the groan wasn’t rudeness, or ingratitude, or me being difficult.

It was just my body, quietly telling me the truth before I was ready to hear it.

Hit reply — what’s your version of “not again”? Where were you, and what did the next day look like?

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

A few months ago I was at a networking event. One of those sit-down ones where the room is full of women who are all, apparently, very good at being in rooms full of women. There were name badges and wine glasses and that particular kind of noise that happens when everyone is performing their most confident self simultaneously.

I was sat at a long table. To my left, a woman already deep in conversation with her neighbour. To my right, another woman, same story. Both of them animated, leaning in, laughing at something. Swapping numbers before the starter had even arrived.

And I was in the middle.

Just — in the middle. Stuck between two conversations I wasn’t part of, with a wine glass I was holding slightly too tightly, nodding at nothing, doing that thing where you check your phone so you look busy rather than abandoned. I tried to catch the eye of the woman on my left. She didn’t notice. I rehearsed an opening line for the woman on my right. By the time I’d rehearsed it enough to feel safe, she’d turned away.

I sat there for what felt like a very long time, watching other people do something I couldn’t do, and I felt the familiar feeling settle over me.

The glass.

That’s the only way I can describe it. Like there is a pane of glass between me and every room I walk into. Everyone else is on the inside — warm, loud, easy with each other, swapping stories and numbers and the particular frequency that makes humans feel connected. And I am on the outside. Watching. Hands pressed against it. Trying to work out the trick.

The worst part isn’t the loneliness, though the loneliness is bad. The worst part is that it looks so effortless from the outside. Like everyone else was just born knowing how to do this and I missed the class. Like connection is a language everyone speaks fluently except me, and I’ve spent my whole life lip-reading and hoping nobody notices.

For most of my life I assumed this meant something was fundamentally wrong with me as a person. That I was cold. Distant. That people could sense something off and were responding accordingly. I have spent years — years — trying to fix it. Reading books about how to make conversation. Practising questions to ask people. Smiling more. Talking less. Talking more. Making eye contact. Not making too much eye contact because apparently that’s also a problem.

None of it worked. Or rather — it worked just enough to get me through the room, and then I’d get home and lie on the sofa for three hours and feel like I’d run a half marathon in shoes that didn’t fit.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to consider a different explanation.

What if the glass is real?

What if I’m not failing at something everyone finds easy — but attempting something genuinely harder, with no tools, no map, and no one who ever acknowledged that I was working twice as hard just to appear half as comfortable?

I’m not diagnosed. I want to say that upfront and I want to say it without apology. I’m somewhere in the middle of figuring out whether I’m autistic, or ADHD, or both, or something else entirely — navigating the same waitlists and self-doubt and Googling at midnight that I suspect many of you know intimately. What I do know is that I have spent months now reading about how autism and ADHD present in women, and I have felt, over and over again, not the shock of discovery but the strange relief of recognition.

Like someone finally put words to the glass.

This newsletter is me figuring it out in public. Not from the other side of a diagnosis with everything neatly resolved. From right here, in the middle of it, where it’s still messy and unfinished and real.

Because I sat at that networking event feeling like the only woman in the room who couldn’t do the thing everyone else found natural — and I know, I absolutely know, that I wasn’t.

You’ve felt the glass too. Haven’t you.

Hit reply and tell me your version of it. Where were you? What were you doing with your hands?

Leave a comment

Too sensitive. Too intense. Too exhausting to be around. Not quite able to do the things that everyone else seemed to manage without thinking — walk into a room and belong in it, make a friend in the time it takes to pour a drink, move through the world without it costing quite so much.

I tried to fix it. God, I tried. I read the books. I practised the conversations. I smiled more. I made eye contact. I said the right things in the right order and went home afterwards and lay on the sofa for three hours feeling like I’d run a marathon in shoes that didn’t fit.

Nothing worked. Because I wasn’t broken. I just never had the manual.

A while ago I started reading about how autism and ADHD present in women. And something happened that I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t feel shocked. I felt recognised. Like someone had finally put language to something I’d been living without words for my entire life.

I’m not diagnosed yet. I want to say that honestly and without apology. I’m somewhere in the middle of the journey — the waitlists, the self-doubt, the 2am Googling — and I’m writing this from right here, not from the other side where everything is resolved and tidy.

That’s the point, actually.

Why This, Why Now

Because I spent too long thinking I was the only one standing outside the glass watching everyone else connect, belong, and navigate a world that seemed to come with instructions I never received.

I know I wasn’t. And I know you know that feeling too.

There is so much content out there about autism and ADHD in women — but most of it is clinical, or retrospective, or written by someone who’s already figured it out. I wanted something different. Something that sits right here in the mess of it. Raw, honest, and written by someone who is figuring it out in public because doing it alone stopped working a long time ago.

That’s what this is.

What Kind of Space This Will Be

This is not an advice column. I am not a clinician, a coach, or an expert.

This is a space where one woman writes honestly about her neurodivergent experience so that other women feel less alone in theirs. It will be warm but it won’t be soft. It will be personal but it will reach for the universal. It will say the things that don’t usually get said out loud.

You are welcome here whether you have a formal diagnosis, suspect you might, are waiting for answers, or simply recognise yourself in everything you’ve been reading about late-identified women. The door is open.

The one rule: we don’t perform wellness here. We just tell the truth.

What To Expect

Every week I’ll land in your inbox with a new issue of The Manual I Never Got.

Each issue follows the same shape:

• A real, specific moment from my life — the kind that makes you say “that’s happened to me”

• The turn — where my story reaches for yours

• The thing nobody told me — one reframe, one insight, one thing that shifted something

• The exhale — a question, a closing thought, permission to feel however you’re feeling

Free subscribers get every issue, every week, directly to their inbox. No paywalls to start. Just the writing.

Paid subscribers — coming soon — will get deeper issues, voice notes, and a private space to connect with other women in this community.

For now, just subscribe. That’s enough.

One Last Thing

If you’ve ever sat in a room full of people and felt completely alone in it — this is for you.

If you’ve ever been told you’re too much and also somehow not enough — this is for you.

If you’ve ever watched someone make a friend in the time it took you to decide whether to say hello — this is for you.

You weren’t broken. You weren’t difficult. You weren’t too sensitive.

You just never got the manual.

Neither did I. So let’s write it together.

— Lottie

Subscribe below. It’s free to start, and you can leave whenever you want. But I hope you’ll stay.