Coming Alive at the Edges.

At university I became instantly aware of my social background, a working-class Liverpudlian, the first person in my family to attend university. I was very conscious of my lack of social sophistication in comparison with my peers. This feeling was exacerbated when I began to study psychology. As with most teenagers, I was desperate to succeed and to belong. I made the decision to soften my edges.

I tried to be more polished, less impulsive or erratic but it took tremendous energy. Behind the scenes, when the curtains were closed, I would often fall apart at the seams, doubting myself, having severe attacks of social anxiety. Alcohol soothed my tension more than anything else, but beneath the numbing, my body was remembering. Years later I would read Anaïs Nin, who captured the tension of living this way: "when one is pretending, the entire body revolts." My body registered the gap between how I felt and my performative life. I didn't understand, at the time, the cost to a body living in continual survival mode.

There were tell-tale signs, but I mistook invincibility for what was really just recklessness. This silly sod thought it was cool to spend a fortune on expensive physio for chronic pain and joint dislocation, and prized my endurance through several emergency and numerous elective surgeries for endometriosis. It was fashionable to be cognitively tough, and that's how I got through my twenties and thirties.

At 43, things changed. I felt the full impact of my life's decisions on my body. It was impossible to isolate the effects as they slowly impacted the rest of my life until it became unmanageable. The shiny facade became impossible to sustain. Arthritis, unprocessed trauma and neurodivergence all flared at once. My life began to get smaller. Soon enough my relationship collapsed, I had to move from my dream home, and I became a single mother. I struggled to sustain my high-paying career, began to worry about money and our future. The worst part of it all was the dismissiveness I met from the medical profession, and having to go through it alone. My friends appeared to be holding it together, living their best lives. The few who did know my truth had their own struggles and weren't in a position to offer support. My doctor offered SSRIs and recommended counselling. For over a year I saw a therapist. She was well qualified and cost a fortune, but her lack of life experience, and her reliance on coping mechanisms and counselling platitudes, left me feeling more hollow after each session. A year later, I was in an even worse position, having spent that time ignoring the part of my life I most needed to work on.

With hindsight, I understand that 43 sits right in the prime window for perimenopause. It makes sense now that it became a major inflection point, hormonal shifts and life burnout colliding. I wish someone had told me about the perimenopause marathon. Midlife became a profound biological, psychological, socio-economic and spiritual shift, an epic journey of twists and turns that lasted over ten years. Each time I reached rock bottom, I discovered there was a whole new level below. At the end, there was no shaft of beaming light. Just another day.

Back in my teenage years, as a psychology student, I remember completing a personality profile for the first time. Like a lightning bolt, mine zig-zagged across the page, from one extreme to another. Comparing myself to my peers, I felt a surge of embarrassment. Their profiles sat neatly within the middle section. It was revelatory, and it partly explained that my lack of social sophistication wasn't only about my working-class background it was equally a mark of my extreme personality. Like cement shoes, this sank into my psyche, killing off any semblance of my "excessiveness." I morphed into the "average" person, there and then. I believed that was what it took to belong.

As a late-discovered neurodivergent, autistic and ADHD woman, I understand the true cost of my masking now. If I could offer advice to my younger self, (knowing she'd be too headstrong to actually listen) it would be this: pretending only means you are ignoring, masking, or suppressing part of yourself. Those parts have energy, and that energy remains in the body, with nowhere to go.

Remaining in the middle also demanded so much of me biologically that I rarely did my best work, or felt fully alive. Today we know neurodivergence has a genetic underpinning, expressed as a behavioural phenotype, a common constellation of traits, a surface-level expression of deeper regulatory system differences. Symptom severity varies depending on how we manage key drivers, including our biology, social context, psychology and economic circumstances, and it appears, especially in women, that severity can shift across the day, the month, the lifecycle. What's very apparent is that these key drivers impact our stress-response and arousal-regulation system, and affect symptoms directly. Known stressors include overwhelm, physical activity, blood sugar stability, sensitivity to sex hormone flux, micronutrient balance, including omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium, glycine, B6, B9, B12 and iron — co-regulation, and a lot more besides. We are sensitive, social creatures. The very act of pretending or masking is itself a key stressor, and over a significant period of time can result in chronic dysregulation of the nervous system.

When we're energised, we're passionate, unconventional, intense, highly stimulated, competitive, emotional, and sometimes volatile. We can be needy, childlike, deeply empathetic, self-sacrificing, cooperative and nurturing. We also seek solitude, can be rigid, perfectionist, prefer routine, and become hyper-focused on our ideas, no matter how abstract or impractical they might be. We can be the early bird, scanning the environment to soften the impact on our nervous system — and we may also arrive at the last moment, or too late. We forget time. We forget to eat, drink, or go to the bathroom.

We love to be casual, spontaneous and flexible. We also love to be serious, to plan and organise. Our minds never stop, and we get easily overwhelmed. We love attention, but prefer meaningful interactions free from small talk, which easily drains our social battery. We struggle with authority, not because we're belligerent, we do care, maybe too much, but if it doesn't make sense, or doesn't fit within our own time frame, we struggle to see the point. We can be calm, but we're easily rattled.

Learning to embrace who we truly are is how we find flow, joy, meaning and life satisfaction. It won't look the same as the next person's, we each carry a unique experience of the world, and a different threshold for what regulates us and what depletes us.

I think of my dislocating knees, the surgeries, the years I called invincibility that were really just my body quietly revolting. Some of us are not built to live in the middle. Unlike the average person, our sensitivity determines our capacity to function, and there is no shame in that. We can flex our boundaries when it matters, but we now know what it costs, and we get to choose when that cost is worth paying.

I try not to toughen it through these days. I listen. And I embrace my edges, the ones I spent forty or more years trying to flatten down. These are the places I come alive.