Finding My Brain Again

Part 1: Spiralling in Silence

"See I spent my teens enraged
Spiralin' in silence
And I armed myself with a grin
'Cause I was always the fuckin' joker" - Seventeen Going Under, Sam Fender

That line has stuck with me for a reason. It feels like a line written from inside my own skin.

I spent my early teens getting sent out of class, arguing with teachers, being put on report card after report card. I didn’t understand why I kept clashing with authority — only that I had to. That my body rebelled before my brain could catch up. I was always the joker. Funny, expressive, chaotic. Somewhere between charming and disruptive.

In Year 9, two teachers — English and Science — told my mum that my facial expressions were “amusing” when I was being told off, and maybe I needed an outlet. They suggested drama. It changed everything.

I joined a junior operatic group and discovered that I could sing. And act. And captivate. For five years I landed every leading role, threw myself into rehearsals, and finally felt seen. I got an A in Music GCSE, a Distinction* in acting, and performed with a youth theatre. I even auditioned for drama school and got callbacks the first time. But then life, as it does, fell in hard.

Someone close to me died. Another family member fell apart. I left college, ended up on Jobseeker’s, and suddenly I was in auditions surrounded by people whose families had built them studios, who had £10k for summer school fees, and I realised — this world wasn’t built for people like me.

So I stopped trying to belong there. I got a job in a pub, started drinking heavily, smoking weed, and regularly found myself crying in the street to a friend.

I still needed something, so I applied last-minute to a mediocre university — purely because it was in London. A friend and I had this dream of writing comedy. I worried I wasn’t good enough, but I could pull off a 2:1 essay or short story in a few hours before the deadline. I skipped lectures. I scraped a 2:2. My final screenplay, written in a single night, got a First. I didn’t care. I felt like a fraud.

The pattern was familiar by now — throw myself at something, burn bright, crash hard.

After uni, I worked toward management in the same pub I’d once cried outside. I crumbled. Again.

Then came teacher training. It went well. Then my first job. It didn’t.

I scraped a pass. I needed union support. I nearly took my headteacher to tribunal. I got a payout, an agreed reference, and moved back home — on the very first day of lockdown.

It felt symbolic, somehow — closing one chaotic chapter just as the world itself paused. I don’t think I knew it at the time, but the quiet that followed was going to unearth everything I’d spent years pushing down. Without the noise, there was nowhere left to hide from myself.

There was a pregnancy. Then a loss. The kind of grief that hums under everything.

We tried again. And when a child came along, something deep inside me shifted.

Suddenly, I had to show up. Not just survive. And I realised I couldn’t.

I wasn’t present the way I wanted to be. I was angry. Wired. Flat. I did everything the GP suggested — antidepressants, CBT, every treatment lined up for people who are “probably just depressed.” But none of it worked. I was still drowning.

Someone in my family had been diagnosed with autism and gently suggested I might be neurodivergent too. I’d been spiralling again — digging into trauma, questioning whether I had OCD. I was back in a toxic workplace, slowly crumbling under someone who chipped away at me until I barely recognised myself.

Then I found ADHD.

And I don’t mean “found it” like a curious bystander. I mean I saw it and everything clicked. It was like holding a mirror up to my entire life — every meltdown, every failure to follow through, every lost job, every spiralling thought. The mask cracked just a little in that moment.

When I finally sat in front of a psychiatrist and heard her confirm the diagnosis, I cried. Not a dramatic sob — more like a quiet, exhausted release. I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t just lazy or disorganised or emotionally volatile.

I was neurodivergent. I had always been neurodivergent.

And with that validation came a tidal wave: grief for the kid I was, rage at the years I’d spent trying to fix a problem I couldn’t name, fear about what came next. Relationships shifted. The old dynamics no longer made sense — and neither did I, sometimes.

I started on medication. The titration phase was brutal. By the second week I felt worse than I had in years — disconnected, panicked, dangerously impulsive. There was a moment I nearly threw everything away, acted out, did something I couldn’t take back. I scared myself. But I held on.

And then the meds started working.

Not in some movie-style transformation. Just small shifts. A little more space between thought and action. A little more clarity. One night, I sat down to watch TV — and realised I was actually watching it. Fully there. My mind wasn’t darting to a hundred unfinished tasks or replaying a mistake from two years ago. I was just… still.

And I cried again. Not from sadness, but from recognition. This was what other people had, what I had chased for so long without knowing what I was missing.

For the first time, I could sit with my own mind.

I was finding my brain again.

A Name, Not a Fix

---

Getting the diagnosis didn’t fix everything. It didn’t tidy up the years of wreckage behind me, or magically rebuild the confidence I’d lost somewhere between the stage and the staffroom.

But it gave me a name. A framework. A way of holding the pieces that had always felt like fragments of different people — the performer, the teacher, the dropout, the friend who never texted back, the person crying in the street at 2am. Suddenly, they all belonged to the same person.

It also helped me realise something I hadn’t been ready to face before: that I was carrying trauma. A lot of it. Not from one single event, but from years of trying to survive in a world that was never built for the way I think, feel, or exist. I’ve collected these traumas slowly, quietly, often without language. Moments of shame, rejection, punishment, misunderstanding — all stored somewhere in my nervous system, waiting for a name.

I’m only now beginning to unpack them. Mostly alone.

I’ve been referred for a treatment review through the NHS, but it’ll take time — and patience isn’t something I’ve ever had much of. When I asked my GP about an autism referral, she was mostly understanding. But she also asked if I really needed to pursue another diagnosis — as if one label should be enough. As if being “already ND” was a full explanation.

But I knew it mattered. Not just for me, although clarity helps me live more honestly — but for my children. For the possibility that they too might one day need to understand their brains, their needs, their difference. How can I advocate for them if I don’t do the same for myself?

The anger took a while to settle. The grief still hasn’t. But I had something I didn’t before — a sense that maybe I wasn’t the problem. That I hadn’t failed. That I had simply been trying to live with a brain no one understood. Not even me.

And for the first time, I started trying to understand it. Not to fix it. Not to fight it. But to listen to it.

I was beginning — quietly, uncertainly — to find my brain again.

Something I Haven’t Said Yet: The Dark Hole Days

---

There were days my partner and I came to call “dark hole days.”

They weren’t dramatic, just... swallowed. I'd disappear into myself. Sometimes I took long baths. Often I stayed in bed — not resting, just retreating. Sleep, music, silence. Anything to slow the swirl. Anything to feel something warm in the cold static of my brain.

That’s when the music came in.

Bon Iver’s Re: Stacks felt like it was being whispered through a crack in the door. It didn’t try to lift me up — it just kept me company in the quiet. And Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight — just strings, slow and steady — gave shape to my sadness when I had no words for it. I wasn’t trying to be better. I was trying to be. Those songs helped me hold on, just enough.

But the days got too frequent. The darkness too routine. I became absent when I should’ve been present. The first year of parenting was hard for reasons I won’t go into here, but the truth is this: what started to pull me out of those holes was her.

She began to look for me.

Not metaphorically — physically. She would wander into the bedroom and search for me with a quiet certainty that confirmed something I hadn’t wanted to admit: she knew I was likely to be there, in the dark, instead of out in the light with her and her mum.

That tore at something in me.

I could have fallen further. And sometimes, I still did. But something shifted. I began to realise that there was more to fight for than just myself — someone I’d grown to loathe. There was a small, warm person who didn’t need me to be perfect. Just there.

And that changed everything.