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In the mornings, I leave the house alone at 8am. I walk for about 10 minutes, into the village-y part of where we live, and go for a coffee. This began when my daughter wanted me to walk her part-way to her new school, to meet her friend.

Now, she walks alone and I continue to sneak out, leaving my husband with the boys. For months, he didn’t ask where I was going. That’s how I like it. I don’t like to be asked where I’m going, by anyone. But then one day, as I headed out, he asked me.

Where do you go in the mornings?

I was caught off-guard. Part of me wanted to keep going, shoot out the door, not answer. But that would be rude, and weird. I think. Would it? I go for a coffee and write, I said. He didn’t say oh, lovely, good for you - but he didn’t really say anything, either.

I took that as him thinking I’m outrageous. After all, as parents, we should either be parenting deeply, or working deeply. We should never have time off; never rest. Here, it looked like I’d found a little window in which to actually do something for me.

Though, I am always writing, during that time, and I’m a writer, so… it is work. I’m just lucky that my work is really fun and creative and that usually, I’m writing a poem while drinking a fancy coffee and observing other coffee-drinkers.

I pretended to be bold, but felt sheepish, and continued out the front door. “See you up there, boys” I shouted, as I do every morning on my way out, because after my coffee, around 8.45am, I meet my husband and the two boys to help with the drop-off.

(It’s a two-person job. Pick-up isn’t, though, and I do that on my own almost every day. I’m not sure why I thought it was outrageous that I was disappearing for 45 minutes in the morning. The rest of the day, I am on as a mother.)

On my way up to the coffee shop, I pass teenagers who are going to my daughter’s secondary school. I like looking at their clothes - boys in baggy skater trousers; girls in tracksuit bottoms and belly tops - and listening in on their conversations.

That morning, it occurred to me that I am mostly invisible to these teenagers. And that’s fine, I don’t care, but I wondered what they’d think if they did look at me. Boring mum? Sensible? Would they know that once upon a time, I was wild?

This is the poem I wrote that morning, while having a coffee…

When I write about my shy childhood and, more recently, neurodivergence, including my perhaps quite boring and certainly unadventurous need for sameness, I’m painting a picture of who I am and that’s one part of me, one side - but there’s another side, too.

She first appeared in the teenage years.

She’s going behind the paywall.

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My grandma, in her later years, had pork chops for dinner every night. Pork chops, boiled new potatoes and sweetcorn. My mum would take her and my grandad shopping once a week, at the big Tesco, and this is what they’d fill their trolley with.

I was thinking of this recently while sat around a friend’s table. We’d been invited for brunch and the conversation turned to food, as it sometimes does with this particular group of old friends who are all ‘foodies’ and interested in new recipes and restaurants.

For a while, I pretended I was too but it was very much an act.

I am not interested in new recipes, or new restaurants. In fact, I don’t particularly like going out to eat, unless it’s something quite predictable, like pizza in our local Italian or scampi and chips, by the sea.

During that brunch, I announced that I’d eat the same thing every day, if I could. One meal for brunch; one for dinner. I’d only eat two meals a day, as that’s all I need. Obviously, this food is delicious, I quickly added in.

One person laughed. The conversation moved on.

Newness is culturally valued.

We should be always learning, always experimenting, always trying something new. Go to a new country on holiday, learn a new language, eat new foods, pick up new skills, try the new restaurant, get a new job, leave your comfort zone.

Sameness is sneered at.

It feels unusual, now, for someone to stay in exactly the same job for their entire working life. To go to the same place on holiday every year. Someone who creates a daily, weekly, yearly routine without much variety might be judged as living a small life.

But what if eating the same food every day works for you, like it did for my grandma? What if new restaurants feel like a risk not worth taking? What if repetition feels soothingly rhythmic, rather than dull? What if some people have a need for sameness, rather than newness?

Let’s talk about neurodivergence.

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There wasn’t really a plan. Maybe, subconsciously, I was sabotaging my relationship with alcohol over the Christmas holidays when I let loose and drank a lot more than would be advisable. A final blowout. Still, I hadn’t planned to go sober.

The psychotherapist Susie Orbach, in her book On Eating, suggests that rather than limiting something that we think is ‘bad’ for us, it can benefit us to actually be surrounded by it. When it’s not ‘forbidden’, it loses its power.

This has advice has stayed with me since reading it nearly 25 years ago. I don’t ban any foods, I don’t create a mental list of the food I’m eating, I eat what I want, when I want (the suggestion from another therapist, from a time when I was limiting food).

Now, I wonder if I was doing the same with alcohol. Rather than saying I would only have one drink, three drinks, stay for an hour etc, I spent the Christmas period indulging my alcohol-drinking until I felt utterly disgusted by it, and bored.

I have had periods without alcohol - 100 days in the pandemic; the odd month off - so I know the joy of sobriety. I know about those clear crisp mornings where your brain feels calm and fresh. I know how it feels to wake without guilt and anxiety.

I know that I am happier and calmer when I don’t drink. That I’m a better mother, wife, friend (hmmm, actually: we’ll come back to that). I become more productive but not in a robotic way; rather, my work seems to flow out of me almost effortlessly.

I know all this and yet, every time I’ve tried to stop drinking, I’ve failed.

Maybe a wedding has been announced and I know that it’s impossible to do a wedding sober; or a 40th; 50th; Christmas party. There is always something to pull me back into drinking. Though, only the social events with lots of people.

When we went to Paris last May, I didn’t drink. I loved it. I wrote about it here. And when we were in Cornwall, over the last half term holiday, I didn’t drink. Holidays, it seems, are ok. Just me and my family of five: no social pressure.

But for many years, I’d be at a party or gathering and even if I’d gone with the intention of not drinking, I always would, because it would ease me into it. One close person, when I asked if they thought I had a problem with booze, said:

Not at all! I think you’re great when you drink, really fun.

This has always been the issue. I have felt too quiet and boring without alcohol, but fun and relaxed with it. This is a difficult story to change about yourself, especially if you’re neurodivergent and acutely aware of how you’re being perceived, always.

Since I was a teenager, I have drunk too much and more than others. It was easier to blend into the general mess of it when I was younger - everyone was drinking, I probably didn’t massively stand out - but I felt it.

I felt it when we went to the pub, in the day-time, in our late teens, and friends would order a coffee or a coke but I’d have a pint of beer. I felt it when we went for group meals and I’d be filling up my glass of wine quicker than others.

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Every morning, I’m up before my family. Sometimes scrolling on my phone, sometimes writing, sometimes drawing. Always drinking several cups of coffee. I wake naturally around 6am, and I like the peace of this hour.

As I sat writing a proposal, this morning, I thought: why would anyone stay in bed, in the morning, having a lie-in, when they could be up ge…

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When we moved back to London from Somerset, my youngest child had only done one term of reception. He was four, an August baby - so the youngest in the year - and although he loved his new teacher and made friends, school was hard.

I wrote a bit about it in this piece. The way he’d put his hood up and try to hide. At home he was chatty, funny, loud; at school he was silent (mute) around adults, shy and tried to blend into the background. He seemed younger than his peers.

Towards the end of the summer term, we decided that my husband would go on a school trip to the zoo, to assess what our son was like around his classmates. The parents were getting the bus, while the children were on a coach with the teachers.

Only, my son couldn’t separate.

When there are two versions of your child, it can be hard to reconcile the version you know with the version others see. We knew our adventure-loving child, always up for a spontaneous or planned trip out; this version was a terrified boy, unable to let go.

My husband ended up going on the coach.

This would be the first of many scenarios where we were the only parents.

After that trip, my husband suggested asking if our son could repeat reception. I could see the benefits - another year of play-based learning; a cohort that might seem more aligned with him, socially and academically - but it would be another transition.

A new teacher. A new class of children. He’d made friends, even if they did seem quite a bit older than him: was it right to return to not knowing anyone? Would the advantage of now being one of the eldest outweigh the challenge of starting again?

The school agreed that it was worth trying, and said there was a space for him.

As I suspected, he found it hard, being separated from friends he’d made. And having to find his place within a new class of children. But, he was grateful to be staying put, in reception, rather than starting year one. And he had another lovely teacher.

All of that year, we’d walk him into the classroom, while his peers were being dropped at the door. Hood up, head down. I’d walk him to his tray, to put his reading folder in it, and wait until he’d found his space on the carpet.

He never waved goodbye. He didn’t watch me go.

I worried, often, that we’d made the wrong decision.

But then one day, he came out smiling. There was this teaching assistant (TA) he’d taken a shine to. He said that every day, she put a carton of milk into his tray. He loves milk. She’d discovered this, somehow. Not all the children were getting milk.

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My most ecstatic moments are when I’m alone. Is that a strange thing to say, as a mother? As a wife, daughter, sister, friend? That no one shares in that pure ecstasy with me, and that I don’t feel it in the same way when I’m with others?

I will hungrily catch up with a friend I haven’t seen in a while, I have deep interest in my close people and their lives. Friends and family I get to see more often feel like a warm breeze, as we walk and talk. Soft and enveloping. They matter to me; the connection matters.

And I feel as if my body is love itself, when I’m with my children. We have giddy moments, regularly. Sat around the kitchen table making art with them, the emotional connection can feel like it’s physical rather than abstract. It’s powerful.

But it’s when I’m alone - often, walk-running up the stairs - that my entire being slips into ecstasy. It’s like something has just been switched on. It might be preceded by exciting news but more often: it’s like it’s the aloneness itself that triggers it.

Or, the aloneness lets me succumb to it.

We are told that community is integral to human survival. That loneliness can cause an early death. Extroversion and togetherness is celebrated through, I believe, all cultures - and yet, what of those, like me, who feel most at ease when alone?

I acknowledge that I rarely am alone, these days, so I have the benefit of contrast. Often being in company - loud, engaged company - and then, when everyone is out, the sheer simplicity and lightness of being alone. The euphoria of solitude.

But then, I have always liked being alone.

I wonder if my need for solitude stems from being a writer and needing complete silence and aloneness in order to think, and then write? I can’t have any interactions or interruptions. Or, did I become a writer as I so enjoy solitude? (I suspect it’s the latter.)

As a child, it felt normal to stay close to home - and at home, I could be alone. Our family unit was tight, we had friends around but it wasn’t a busy, open-door home. It felt peaceful. Social occasions were generally planned. People didn’t really ‘pop in’.

But as a teenager, normal was being with friends. I liked being with friends; we learnt from one another. I liked passing notes around the class and, in my later teen years, being part of a sprawling social group. I still needed alone-time, though.

I wonder if my panic attacks - my first was in year seven at secondary school and they picked up again when I was doing my A-levels - were my body’s response to an environment where I was constantly surrounded by people, expectations and rules?

I liked it. I thought I liked it. I still think that I did. But I also needed to escape it, clearly. That’s when panic set in. However, the message was always clear: having a social group is fun and also safe (power in numbers): you must stay together.

And then I started having boyfriends and the first one that lasted more than a few months wanted to always be with me. Like, way too much. There was safety in having a boyfriend - someone to shield me - but I lost myself in the constant togetherness.

When I turned 16, he asked me to marry him.

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I don’t know when I stopped noticing. When my senses shut down. When I stopped doing nice things for people, like making a cup of tea. Started cancelling plans too often. Turned inward, went quiet, disappeared.

I suppose it was a gradual implosion, over a few years.

It began just as the pandemic came to a close, in 2021.

Later that year, in the December, …

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When one of my children first started school, they struggled. A few weeks in, a meeting was called and the teacher looked at me, concern in her eyes, and said: the anxiety levels are unusually high. This was the first external hint at neurodivergence.

The next few years would become the most interesting, intense and emotional research project of my life.

For context, I’m a journalist, with a joint honours BA degree in English language and literature (read: two dissertations) and a masters degree in journalism (a third, even longer and more in-depth dissertation).

The intensity of those degrees was nothing compared to the exploration and study I’ve undergone in the past four years.

I have dived deep into research on (and personal stories about) neurodivergence, school challenges, school trauma, school avoidance and, eventually, learning how to help my child to feel safe at school through nervous system regulation.

(Final reminder: tomorrow, I’m running an online workshop all about this, for other parents in a similar situation. There will be a replay for those who can’t attend live. Read about it here.)

Like many parents on this journey, I’ve learnt about my own neurodivergence along the way.

This has been an enlightening journey and the further I’ve gone into it, the more interesting I’ve found it. Only, my own research is often at odds with both what the media and certain medical professionals are saying.

I’ve been sat in rooms with - and read the headlines of articles by - people whose ignorance and disparaging comments about neurodivergence and the supposed ‘overdiagnosis’ of it has silenced me.

I’m better in writing than conversation, so here are my thoughts, behind a paywall, because some of it is quite personal.

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I was sat in a coffee shop with my husband, our kids and my parents on a weekday, during the Christmas holidays, and my husband turned to me: remember when we used to go for a coffee before work, every morning? He was smiling at the thought.

This was back in 2019 and the first few months of 2020, before lockdown shut all the coffee shops. My fi…

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If I had a wife at home, I’d be a millionaire.

I could spend long hours at my desk working on all my creative ideas.

After-work drinks with friends and collaborators.

Take a three-hour stroll for idea-generation, walking through woodland and maybe taking a dip in a lake, knowing that feeding my soul would feed into my business.

If I had a wife at home who w…

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If you like this essay, please give the heart a little tap so that it reaches more people and spreads a little happiness their way. Thank you.

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And I swam in the most beautiful swimming pool, out in the countryside…

I felt like a vessel, when I arrived, em…

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You can listen…

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We had friends round for lunch on Sunday. Their children are younger than ours (three and a half, and a four-month-old baby) and we were talking about putting the kids to bed and claiming a little bit of time for yourself in the evenings.

I remember really needing it when I had babies and toddlers but now that my kids are older (11, eight, six) and go of…

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I’m sat at the kitchen table and it’s silent. My husband is at the end of the garden, crafting some beautiful wooden cabinets for the garden studio he’s been building over the past few months. Soon, he’ll take one side of it and I’ll take the other.

And my children are at school.

That shouldn’t be unusual, with three kids aged 11, eight and six, but for us, it is. As you may know, if you’ve been here a while, my middle boy has spent his first four years of school in and out. Most recently, in - but on a very part-time basis.

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I don’t believe in having regrets. What’s the point in lamenting a past decision that now cannot be changed? However, I do believe in mistakes. Getting it wrong and later, on reflection, acknowledging that. Not to lament but to learn from it.

The question I’ve been asking myself, gently, of late, is: Was it a mistake leaving London?

It was 2021 when we finally packed several vans and our car and left London - my hometown; the birthplace of my three children - for Somerset. We’d found a derelict house on the edge of both town and countryside. A doer-upper, if you like.

I’d left before. I’d travelled around Asia and Eastern Europe, lived in Brighton for four years and, actually, tried life in Somerset when I first met my husband - a year in a village; a year in a town - before settling back in London.

But I hadn’t left London with children.

And relocating with children is very different.

Though, the children were one of the reasons I wanted to leave London in the first place. Two of my three children had been gravely ill in hospital with respiratory issues and I couldn’t help but wonder if pollution played a part.

In fact, I asked a consultant at The Royal London, where my three-month-old baby had been transferred by ambulance, in an induced coma, if living in a polluted part of London had contributed to the severity of his illness and he said it might have.

So, when I was back in hospital six months later - my son on oxygen - and then again, for four days, when he was nearly two, I decided it was time to try the countryside. I didn’t want my children to be admitted to hospital every year, needing help breathing.

That summer, we drove around Dorset and Somerset, looking at different villages and towns. We found an incredible house that felt like a palace, with a huge garden and out-houses, but my husband could hear a nearby A-road and vetoed it.

On our way back to London, he said that maybe we should think about returning to Frome, where we’d spent a year in our early 20s. We knew there was a big creative community there, and other young families like us, leaving London for a different life.

I wasn’t sure. We’d been there already. I fancied somewhere different. But then, we knew the town so well, it didn’t feel like such a big move. There was a train station for trips back to London. I still knew a few people who lived there.

We booked a weekend trip to Frome and although the airbnb was sweet, filled with retro toys, which the kids loved, the town felt grey that weekend. It was cloudy and drizzly and I walked around with a lump in my stomach. I knew it didn’t feel right.

But I pretended it did. Maybe it was just the rain?

We put our house on the market, quickly got a buyer and soon, we’d found a nice-sized family home that had been derelict some years and before that, was home to a hoarder with 20-40 indoor cats, and rats. The bath was filled with human faeces.

WE DECIDED TO BUY IT!

My husband is a builder, it would be a project. It backed onto a park, and beyond the park, there were rolling fields. We could walk down and watch the sun set; go for a stroll along the river to Mells; eat lunch next to a log fire in a countryside pub.

I tried to sell this life to myself and I did a good job. Until I didn’t. I realised this might not be a very good decision that we were making. We were leaving my family behind in London, all our friends, our support network, work opportunities.

Also, our original talks around moving house had been based on moving nearer to a liberal, creative state secondary school that our three kids could all go to, in time. Back then, we had a state girls’ school nearby but nothing for the boys.

But that had been forgotten. The school talk. Waylaid, as we focused more keenly on needing fresher air. Well, until we were on the brink of making this move and I said: hold on, is this really ticking all the boxes? Is this the right move for us? I wasn’t sure it was.

I panicked.

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I think the context of our conversation is me going to the gym; maybe I’m explaining my new weight-lifting regime. Intense, in this context, means committed.

When I decide I’m going to do something, I give it absolutely everything…

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I’m sat at a raised desk in my gym. It’s pristine, this desk - white and spotless - and I’m on a backless stool, pretending to be elegant. Occasionally I let my back slump, in the way it wants to, before stretching it back out. On the whole, I suspect the stool is good for my back.

(Though, I’m very uncomfortable with the word ‘stool’. I can never remember how to spell it, so I always have to google it to check if it’s ‘stall’ or ‘stool.’ Turns out they are spelt the same: stool sample; stool you sit on. Got it. Until next time.)

It’s raining outside. Proper rain but not pouring. There’s a green lawn dotted with yellowed autumn leaves, and so many trees. This workspace is an upgrade from the last one, which was window-less with kids running around screaming.

And I get to sit here, slouching and straightening, thinking of stories about my work/life that I can share with you. Because that’s what I do on Substack. I tell stories. Real-life stories. I do it in my poetry, too. And non-fiction books. In my online courses.

Sometimes, people say: how can you feel comfortable sharing so much of your personal life, I could never do that. And I think: how can you not process your life and experiences through the written word and put them out into the world? But I get it, really. We’re not all writers.

Though, I’m noticing that I’m increasingly cosy in my career as a writer. I’m nestled into it like a hedgehog in a hibernaculum. Having spent many years fattening up on experience, I can now write what I want, when I want. And get paid.

And friends: the personal essay is having a moment.

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I know that I’m not meant to drink coffee on an empty stomach or look at my phone first thing in the morning but I do both those things every morning, because I also know that I don’t like being told what to do.

Not just that.

I love my morning coffees. My Azera instant. I drink four or five, with oat milk, before eating anythin…

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