Dear fellow neurodivergent woman,
Last Wednesday I rode home from my writers’ group on my Honda, the heat pressing down on my neck. It was just after noon. The strange, unsettled heat of Cambodia, when the rains have arrived but left again before they were supposed to. Everybody’s waiting. Wishing for rain again.
The writers’ group meets fortnightly at a vegetarian café on a quiet road. We sit outside. I love it. The conversations, the pleasure of being with people who care as much about words as I do. There had been a few more of us than usual, which meant more conversation, more ideas flying, more energies entwined. I rode home smiling.
Then I had to lay down in the dark and my brain felt like concrete.
I could still feel the conversations moving around inside my body. A residual vibration. The voices, the coffee orders, the creative ideas, the chuckles, all still swirling somewhere between my chest and my skull. I wasn’t upset or anxious. I was simply paying the bill.
I rest after lunch every day anyway. I call it Medicinal Cellular Repair, horizontal time in the dark that I treat as non-negotiable. But this was different. This time I had absolutely no choice in the matter. My body decided I must.
This is the experience nobody names properly for neurodivergent women: the crash that arrives after something good. Not after a hard day or a confrontational meeting or a sensory nightmare. After something you loved, chose, and would choose again tomorrow.
The same week I had a thirty-minute swimming lesson at a hotel pool across town. Outdoors, in the shade, the water is just slightly cooler than body temperature. Lovely. And I LOVE swimming. The pool itself I’m less sure about. No plants. Concrete surroundings that feel a little lonely, a little gloomy. And my swim coach, going strong on the chat as always.
I came home and went into my dark room again.
There was a flicker of resentment on the way home. Not at the lesson, but at the situation. How do I get this man to stop talking so much and so close to my face?
Here’s what’s actually happening: our mitochondria — the tiny engines inside every cell that produce our energy — don’t distinguish between good stimulation and bad. They just see load. For a neurodivergent nervous system, any social interaction, however joyful, however chosen, requires enormous processing.
The eye contact, the vocal tones, another person’s energy, the sensory landscape of a concrete pool with no plants and continual talking. Every input is being processed at a higher intensity than a neurotypical brain would require. Our mitochondria are running hot the whole time. And when we get home, the debt needs to be paid.
What makes this so hard to explain, to ourselves as much as anyone, is the dissonance. We expect to feel bad after hard things. We do not expect to feel wrecked after a writers’ group we’ve been looking forward to all week. And because we can’t explain it, we might reach for shame. I’m too sensitive. I’m weak. Why can’t I just be normal?
But there’s no version of this that is weakness. It is cellular. It is biological.
Understanding this changes the question.
Not: what is wrong with me?
But: what do I actually need?
What we need is to take the crash seriously rather than pushing through it or marinating in guilt about it. The dark room and horizontal time isn’t indulgence, it’s repair. Medicinal Cellular Repair
We also need to plan for it. Not to avoid the things we love but to hold the recovery time afterwards as part of the same decision. The writers’ group is a yes. The dark room after is also a yes. The swimming lesson is a yes. The relieved, necessary collapse afterwards is also a yes.
We’re running a more complex operating system than most people around us, on hardware that requires more careful maintenance.
The bill will always need paying. But once we know that, we can stop being surprised by it and start budgeting properly instead.
Love Hannah xoxo
