Dear fellow neurodivergent woman,
I’m sitting in a vegetarian café run by two young sisters, on a quiet side street on the edge of Kampot town. A wooden stool, a tiled patio, potted palms. The sweat from my iced Americano glass is leaking onto the table. The only sounds are the occasional hiss of the coffee machine and a motorbike passing outside.
The sky is doing something. I can’t see the Praek Tuek Chhu river from here but I can feel the storm coming — the warm wind picking up, the Cambodian flags snapping on their poles, wind chimes clanging somewhere nearby. The air is hot to bursting. The air is charged. It’s that same feeling just before bonfire night as a child — anticipation, excitement, something enormous about to happen.
The sky above turns a weird shade of bruised purple. Bright daggers of lightning in the clouds. The deep rumbling of thunder as it moves through the mountains. And then comes the relief — the clouds finally burst and pellets of water hammer onto tin roofs, red dusty roads and thirsty palms.
The agitation, the apprehension, the built-up pressure — and then the dissipation. The relief. Smoother now. Still.
A storm that passes brings relief.
It's rainy season here in Cambodia, and sitting here watching it, reminds me of a nervous system regulating.
And then I think about my motorbike accident…
It was a Sunday. I’d already decided I wasn’t leaving the house. I was going to have a lovely day resting. Gloriously nothing. No agenda. No commitments. No emails to reply to. Eating when I fancied. The pleasure of not having decided yet what I wanted to do — if anything. The luxury of unknown leisure.
And then my phone rang.
A delivery guy. An important package from Phnom Penh. Could I come to the depot to collect it?
I could. I shouldn’t have. But I did.
Except I went to the wrong depot. Then another wrong depot. Then a third. By the fourth — the right one, finally — it was 1pm, 32 degrees, and I was covered in sweat, thirsty, exhausted and seriously furious. The kind of furiousness that builds slowly and then sits in your chest like a tombstone.
The depot was situated on a busy roundabout, weirdly chaotic for a Sunday. Across the road, the Lucky supermarket shimmered in the heat. Inside the depot: many counters, only one serving. Staff in neat uniforms moving slowly. Families sitting on benches waiting.
There was a strange system where the staff had to call my phone and I had to answer it in front of them to verify my identity — except my phone wasn’t ringing. I just stood there, sweat pouring down my face and saturating my clothes, watching the one serving counter do its unhurried work.
Eventually it rang. They gave me my package. I put the cardboard box inside my seat, got on my Honda, and set off.
One second I was riding away, looking forward to getting home and lying on the sofa. Next I was lying on the floor outside the depot.
The marble exterior of the depot was hot and slippery and my bike had gone from under me in an instant. My head cracked onto the pavement. The bike flipped on top of my body and I was stuck underneath it, unable to move. My cheek was against the floor. I could smell oil and dirt. At eye level: a strip of grey marble, the edge of the depot building, and above it, just sky. No humans. Everything very still and very silent. Time stopped. I didn’t even try to get up. I couldn’t.
Within seconds a crowd surrounded me — pulling the bike off me, setting it upright, turning the ignition off so as not to waste the battery. That detail has stayed with me. The bike off, ignition off. Kind and practical.
But I still couldn’t get up. I could feel stabbing in my legs. My right shoulder was numb. With the help of some unknown passerby I eventually managed to rise. I just sat there on the floor, trousers ripped, blood seeping down my legs.
And then I held my head in my hands and burst into tears. Primal sobbing. The crowd who had lifted the bike off me had dispersed, giving me space — watching from a distance, many of them, silent. We had no language between us. I couldn’t see who was there or how many. I just knew they were watching.
I felt entirely, completely, on the spot. A British woman crying on the pavement outside a depot on a busy roundabout, not knowing what to do or who to call or whether any of this was actually happening.
I slowly and tentatively got back on my bike and rode home at a snail’s pace.
I don’t remember the ride up along the Asean highway, right at the tailors onto dirt roads, left past the new housing and the building projects, right at the corner shop selling water and cigarettes, then left onto my street.
But I remember pulling up outside. My neighbour’s grey Toyota parked in its usual spot. Their washing on the line. Something in me unclenched at the sight of it — the ordinary familiarity of someone else’s day continuing as normal.
Inside, my home was flooded with light, surrounded by plants, the sounds of nature coming in from everywhere. I sat on the sofa. Drank iced water. Took deep breaths. Felt the faint outline of safety.
I phoned my daughter who lives in Glasgow. She is the one person I can tell anything to and I needed to hear her voice.
And then I told her I was ‘absolutely fine’.
Here’s the thing about the neurodivergent brain and body: it often genuinely doesn’t know how it feels. We’ve spent so long overriding our own signals — masking, performing, pushing through — that in the immediate aftermath of something shocking, the system doesn’t always know what it’s registering. Was I fine? I honestly didn’t know.
And then there’s the thing we do regardless of whether we know how we feel. I minimised. Then swore her to secrecy from telling people back home. Not wanting to worry anyone. Not wanting a fuss.
We call the people we love most and then protect them from us.
The following day was hot and sunny, as it always is. Laundry needed washing, plants needed watering, the ordinary rhythms of my home waiting for me to step back in.
I couldn’t move.
I lay on the sofa and cried. Not constantly — in waves. Between waves I’d get up and pace the room, back and forth, not knowing what I was looking for. Then back to the sofa. Then crying again. I wasn’t hungry at first. Later I ordered comfort carbohydrates. I didn’t water the plants. I didn’t tidy up. I didn’t leave the house.
And I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t a choice. There was a barrier between me and any kind of action — between knowing I could call someone and actually being able to do it. Between understanding that help existed and being able to reach for it. The freeze response doesn’t feel dramatic from the inside. It just feels like an invisible wall between you and the rest of the world. You can see through it. You just can’t get to the other side.
I felt isolated and abandoned — even though I wasn’t either. Even though help was available if I would just ask for it. Even though my family would have been on the phone within seconds. I held all of it in, held all of their potential worry in, and then wondered why I was drowning in it alone.
I started contacting family and friends back in the UK telling them I was coming home for the summer. I looked at flights from Phnom Penh to Manchester on Skyscanner. My nervous system was doing exactly what it’s designed to do when it decides the environment is no longer survivable — flee, find the tribe, get safe.
I didn’t actually book anything. But I nearly did.
This is what happens when it doesn’t rain.
I didn’t just fall off a motorbike. My nervous system fell off a motorbike — a nervous system that was already running on empty before I even left the house. The rest day that didn’t happen. The rage building across four wrong depots in 32 degree heat. The accumulated debt of sensory overload, and the particular exhaustion of being neurodivergent in a world that never stops demanding an alien performance.
The accident was just the marble floor. The drought was already well underway.
The neurodivergent nervous system — already working harder than it should have to, already burning through energy just to mask and function — is a system under chronic, low-grade drought.
Every day, our sensory boundaries are breached. Every day, we absorb more than we’re supposed to, feel more than we show, hold more than is ours to hold. We are empaths by nature and by necessity, and other people’s pain moves through us like weather patterns.
But sometimes the weight we carry is entirely our own — and no less heavy for that.
The grief of building a new life from scratch, far from everyone you love. The missing of family and friends and the small daily routines that held you without you ever realising. The weight of your own expectations — that you’ll succeed, that you’ll be okay, that the chronic illness will stay behind you. The judgement of others, spoken and unspoken — that you’re doing it wrong, that a 48-year-old woman should be somewhere more sensible, living something more conventional. The quiet daily effort of existing so far outside the life that was expected of you, and refusing to apologise for it, and the cost of that refusal.
All of it stored. All of it unfelt. All of it sitting in the body on a Sunday morning, waiting.
We manage it, contain it, file it away — and we’re so good at this that we convince ourselves we have processed it. We haven’t. It’s in our shoulders. It’s in our jaw. It’s in the strange numbness that descends when someone asks how we are and we say fine with absolute conviction.
Unfelt, unprocessed emotion doesn’t disappear. It’s stored as physical tension in the body. And stored tension is a biological signal — to our mitochondria, to our cells, to every system in our body — that the threat is ongoing. That the bear is still there. That it is not yet safe to produce energy, to heal, to rest, to recover.
The drought continues. The rivers run lower. The crops begin to fail.
And then something happens and the flood arrives. Not gently. All at once.
Too much rain, after too long without any.
What lies underneath every unregulated neurodivergent nervous system is rage.
Whether we know it or not. Whether we’d describe ourselves as angry people or not — and most of us wouldn’t, because we’ve been so effectively conditioned to contain it.
At its deepest, oldest layer, underneath all the sophisticated language about sensory boundaries and dopamine and mitochondrial function, the rage is saying something very simple.
My needs are not being met.
That’s it. That’s all it has ever been trying to say. The most fundamental, primal statement a nervous system can make — and the one that neurodivergent women are most effectively trained, from the earliest age, never to say out loud.
The rage of a world that wasn’t designed for us, that asks us to perform neurotypicality while we quietly fall apart inside and gather chronic health conditions. The rage of always being the one who holds everyone else’s feelings carefully while our own go unfelt and unprocessed. The rage of building a life outside expectations and being judged for it while simultaneously judging yourself.
That rage needs somewhere to go. All emotions do. All weather does.
If it doesn’t rain, the rivers dry up and there is a famine. The body begins to starve itself of the very energy it needs to function — because unprocessed emotion, stored as tension, keeps our mitochondria locked in the Cell Danger Response.
What actually helped process the emotional aftermath from the accident was a combination of things. Rest. Talking. Journalling. The intellectual understanding of everything I’ve just explained to you. But at the heart of all of it — the thing that made everything else finally land — was TRE — Trauma/Tension Release Exercises.
I worked with a certified TRE therapist here in Cambodia who I trust completely, and I now work with her as part of my own programme for ND clients because I believe in it that profoundly. TRE works by allowing the body to discharge stored tension through gentle, involuntary tremoring — the same mechanism animals use naturally after a threat has passed, the shaking you see in a deer after it escapes a predator. We’ve been conditioned to suppress this response. TRE gives it back to you.
My first session took place in a rented room above a shop. Wooden floorboards. Light spilling in from a balcony. White lilies in glass vases.
At first it felt overwhelming — all that fight or flight energy rising up to be released. For those of us who are neurodivergent, feeling emotion that strongly, that physically, can itself feel like a threat. It could have been a flood. But my practitioner knew this — she taught me how to ground quickly without being taken under by it.
My body temperature rose. I flushed. I could feel the energy releasing through my hands and feet — moving through me and then, slowly, out.
Then I started using TRE daily, just a couple of minutes each time. Once the accident had cleared I began to release the older things underneath. Patterns of tension that had been there so long they felt like me.
I found I no longer wanted to go back to the UK. The flights I’d been looking at lost their urgency. My nervous system had stopped fleeing because it no longer felt like it needed to. Not because anything external had changed — but because something internal finally had.
Once I was out of fight or flight I was able to allow myself to be held, authentically. Not solving, not explaining, not carefully managing what the people I love were allowed to know about how I was really doing. Just reaching out. Just saying — in whatever small way I could manage — I need you.
I allowed myself to let their warmth in without immediately redirecting it back to them. This is something I want to learn to reach for much, much sooner.
The question I want to leave you with isn’t a comfortable one.
Where in your body are you holding heavy clouds that haven’t rained yet?
Not metaphorically. Physically. Is it your shoulders? Your throat? That chronic tension across your chest that you’ve stopped noticing because it’s always there? The jaw you clench in your sleep?
And the second question, the harder one: who could you call — not to update them, not to reassure them, not to carefully manage what they’re allowed to know about how you’re really doing — but simply to be held?
You don’t have to tell them everything. But can you just let yourself be supported and loved without earning it first?
If this one landed, you might also like Could L-Theanine Save the World? and Why your mental health struggle might actually be a metabolic crisis.
I hope you have a gentle week,
Love Hannah xoxo
