Learning to Enjoy Life Again?

We’ve been out of the habit of writing for a while, and it’s been hard to get started again. But, life is much easier than it has been for several years. We’ve been in therapy with CTAD for a year and a half, we rarely get triggered anymore (and when it does happen occasionally we manage much better than we used to), and we’re more settled being us, being Astra. 

Strangely, this year we’ve not been on any social media much. After years of obsessively oversharing and documenting everything we do, feel and think, this year we seem to be living for living’s sake – and we guess that’s kind of good, maybe? 

Cinema, Ballet, and Gigs – Alone.

When the year started, we hoped to get out and do more things this year. Our ‘doing more things’ started with us going to see Better Man by ourselves at the cinema on the 2nd of January. It was good, it was really good, we loved the film, and this prompted us to wonder what else we could be doing alone, because, oddly, this is easier than trying to find someone to do the things we want to do with. 

We went to see Swan Lake at the Lyceum in Sheffield, and then we saw there were more dates added to Robbie Williams’ tour, and bought ourself a ticket to see him in Manchester in June. 

Next we discovered Kele Okereke, the lead singer for Bloc Party, was touring. We’ve adored Bloc Party, and Kele’s solo music, for twenty years – we were keen. There were tickets to see him in a small venue in Leeds, just 45 minutes away from us - the following week. We booked it, and went alone. It was scary, but we went and loved seeing some live music again – live music has been something we’ve enjoyed since we were a teenager (mostly Robbie concerts back then, lol) and this was the first gig we’ve been to since the pandemic began. It was also super intimate and we were very close to him, which felt very surreal!

Our littles got our husband to come to the circus with us too, which was way too loud and overwhelming but an experience… But we definitely wanted more live music too.

In February we discovered Twenty One Pilots were touring. We again decided to book to go alone. We did start to worry about the drive, and our husband kindly offered to drive us through to Manchester, spend the evening with a Mancunian friend and pick us up after. 

It was amazing, incredibly scary but we are so glad we did it. Our love for TOP started not long before our system was revealed in 2018. We heard My Blood on the radio, and knew we would like this band. We listened to their 2011 album, Vessel, for months. It spoke to us in ways we didn’t understand, and it was after our system was revealed in 2020 we realised why. 

Tyler Joseph understands so much about the DID experience, we are fairly sure he has a dissociative disorder and/or is plural. Throughout his lyrics there are countless relatable themes - such as not being in control of one’s life/body, the experience of plurality, the impact depression, anxiety, and trauma can have on our lives. (We’d love to write more about the way his lyrics speak to us, maybe next time…)

Anyway, we loved it. Ben dropped us off, we found our seat and we sang and danced and loved every second of it,  knowing that we were surrounded by strangers we would never see again liberated us, as it has in the past, when we were ‘Amber’, and we/she went to gigs alone. Both because we apparently like doing that and it’s easier than finding someone to go with. 

Twenty One Pilots playing 'Trees' at Manchester AO Arena. It was amazing in spite of the terrible seat! And yes, it was the night the drum got stolen (and recovered!)

Meeting Other ND Writers

The other thing we’ve done this year is a course at The Writers Workshop in Sheffield. The ‘ND Writers Toolkit’ was a 6 session, in person course run by Amanda Marples, which explored various experiences that can impact a neurodivergent writer. The first session was about RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria), which is commonly associated with ADHD and can severely impact a person’s life - even perceived rejection can be painful. We’ve known about RSD for a while and are definitely affected by it. This is probably one of the main reasons we rarely post and don’t have any real-life friends anymore. 

There were also sessions on: Avoidance and Procrastination (yes and yes); Time Management (what is time?); Paralysis, Motivation, and Focus (yes, problematic…); Imagination and Overwhelm (we definitely struggle with overwhelm); and, Demand Avoidance (heck yeah, we know that one…)

The whole course was amazing. We felt as comfortable as we can in a group of strangers, that everyone was some flavour of neurodivergent made it much easier. We had one minor incident when we had had trouble parking because of the Sheffield Half Marathon and were struggling mentally due to the monthly PMDD (which has been improving since we started on HRT a while ago, but can still be debilitating some months). We got upset about something, couldn’t articulate ourselves, started to cry, and had to leave early. Everyone was very understanding though and Amanda said we could attend that session again in the future for free. 

So we managed all this, but didn’t start writing unfortunately, but that’s ok and hopefully we will again sometime - maybe now? At the moment we are waiting to move house again, and that‘s been taking up most of our headspace and ability to be at all productive. 

Finding Our Forever Home

We are incredibly lucky that our husband inherited some money and is now in a position to buy a house. We've been waiting for this since the middle of last year, and the waiting alone has been debilitating, we feel like we’re in limbo. We hate our house and where we live at the moment and are so excited to move into our forever home in a few months, where we can get rid of all magnolia walls and finally get our gallery of charity shop Bad Animal Paintings back on a wall! 

It’s been over six months of looking at houses online every day, with a different house that we can see working for us every week. The last couple of months have been very chaotic and overwhelming with us viewing houses, thirteen in total. Ben has all the work to do, all we can really do to help is make phone calls, which we can manage to (probably unsuccessfully) mask for, we feel bad, but we try to help as much as we can.

We very quickly found one we liked and made an offer, but fortunately that offer wasn’t immediately accepted and we withdrew it after viewing another house that we really fell in love with. 

The house Ben is (hopefully) buying is a bit further out of town than we hoped, but is a lovely little house, with a river at the bottom of the garden… If all goes to plan it will be a dream come true, we’ve spent a huge amount of time walking around Rivelin and other rivers, and find them incredibly peaceful and healing. Many of us are very excited about the wildlife too - ducks! Kingfishers! Herons! Even otters live locally!

Connection, Community, and What’s Next

We have been managing some productive stuff too - we’ve been volunteering with The DDA (The Dissociative Disorders Alliance, a new UK charity) for a while and are in their Content Creation and Peer Support teams, which we love. Getting together online with the teams a couple of times a month has been really good for us, we’re helping to make something which will help so many people, spending time with people we like, and it feels good. 

Today we had a meeting online with someone from Flourish, a local mental health charity. We’ve been pondering the idea of doing some kind of educational talk about DID for a while – we feel us explaining DID, talking about our experiences, dispelling some of the misinformation and answering questions could be something we’d really enjoy doing, and could hopefully help people understand a bit more about dissociative disorders. It was a great meeting and we are meeting with her again in person in a couple of weeks. She has training in planning and facilitating workshops so we’re super excited to be able to get this support and hopefully do a little more for our community.

We’re used to the quiet now. Used to doing things alone, or just with our husband. And while we’ve lost people along the way, we’re finding a life we’re happy living. Life is easier, the future feels brighter, and we're looking forward to what’s next – our new home by the river, the Robbie gig next month, whatever happens with The DDA and Flourish… and maybe even writing again…?