I’m not doing excellently, but I won’t write at length about it because I’m in a neurodivergent burnout and limiting my screen time. Even as I type this, my eyes are doing strange things, and I keep wanting to look away from my laptop. Last night, I booked a train ticket so I could get to a place where I could take a woodland walk, but at around 11 pm, I switched off my 7.30 am alarm. I knew I wouldn’t have enough energy to do everything it would take to get out of the house and to the train station. I also felt dampened by the memory of the last time I was in that area, when I almost stepped in dog shit several times, and there were plastic bags of it dumped all about and strung in trees. I spent most of my time trying to get away from people and their noise. I thought, ‘What’s the point of going if I’m going to be as distressed by the experience as I was last time?’
I had a slow morning. I put seed out for the birds and re-filled the suet ball feeder before making my breakfast, which at the moment is a protein shake because anything other than that is beyond me. I watched the birds in the yard while I drank my shake; a blue tit came, two song thrushes, a blackbird, and, of course, the host of pigeons which know when I get up and wait for me, on the neighbouring chimney pots and my windowsills.
Watching the birds feed, clean themselves, and have respite in the tiny tree in the yard is one of the few times I’ll smile during the day. It’s a little ritual providing a treasured connection to the natural world, the disconnection from which makes me progressively more and more unwell.
Mid-afternoon, I shuffled out, bundled in my big coat, more so for its cave of a hood and the padded hug it gives me than for its warmth, and I went and bought notebooks and an Eccles cake and some Lion’s Mane gummies because someone mentioned that Lion’s Mane is good for people with ADHD. My coat, especially the hood because I typically keep it up inside shops, usually draws the wrong kind of attention, and as I was looking for a suitable notebook, no less than three staff members made me very much aware that I was being monitored.
Back home, I went to get the bin in. I’d forgotten to get it in; it had been out in the lane over the weekend. But it wasn’t there. Other bins were, but not mine. I stood in the lane for a few minutes, staring at the ground and feeling very done. It’s the second time I’ve had a bin stolen. I went to go back inside and then noticed, perched on my neighbour’s side of the wall, a plastic bird of prey. I’ve never interacted with my neighbour other than giving over a package that filled up my hallway for the best part of a week when he and whoever he lives with were moving in.
Putting that bird of prey up was the most passive-aggressive thing I’ve ever seen anyone do, and I went around to tell him so. But, despite being in, nobody came to the door. I’m not able to fully articulate the distress I’m feeling at the moment, in this house, in this street, in this town, in this county, in this country. When the opportunity comes to leave England and all its horror and settle elsewhere, I never want to come back.
A Wyrd Of Her Own 