Last week a neurodivergent writer I follow and admire so much (Sarah Teresa Cook, author of For The Birds) commented on a piece of my writing. It was something I’d written earlier this year before I realised that I was experiencing an almighty burnout. It was called “I’d Like To Explain Everything Less.”

I remember being frustrated with what I’d written at the time. Every time my sentences turned a corner, I found a dead end or a cliff. All I could manage were fragments.

Reading it now, I recognise that my words almost have a prescient quality. In the weeks after publishing it, in the early stages of burnout, I experienced shutdowns that lasted for days. I couldn’t speak. This was frightening. I combed my mind and body for words, almost finding something, almost language, but I couldn’t hold the letters together, words were leaking through my fingers.

It’s painfully clear I was exhausted. I see that now.

In a year that has been a return to basics and surrounding myself with support in all corners of my life to try to recover from burnout, my relationship to writing has changed. Writing has become essential. I use it to process my experience of being a neurodivergent person in a world that isn’t designed for difference. To process the giant emotions I feel. Without writing, emotions can feel violent in my body: feelings that should be shaken out, sobbed, poured, danced or screamed are instead turned inwards and become sharp. These shards embed themselves in my fascia, in my bones, in my lungs and I am heavy with pain. Writing gently removes the shards, makes paper birds of them and guides them out of my body.

Seeing this comment from Sarah on my work this week felt like a nudge towards sharing my writing again. Thank you Sarah, for your kind words and your generosity in sharing my words with your writing community. I found your Substack in the spring this year and your words have made me feel safe; the way you express yourself has made me feel less strange. I feel somehow connected to you now and I’m grateful to you. I like that we’re both called Sarah too :)

You can read I’d Like To Explain Everything Less here.

You can explore Sarah’s work here.

Image by Zhong Lin

Other People’s Days

I have made a podcast!

It’s called Other People’s Days and it is a podcast where we talk about our daily lives with honesty, nuance and reverence in the hope that we can find something of ourselves in Other People’s Days. With a focus on the neurodivergent community, Other People’s Days explores what days really feel like: where there is difficultly, where there is comfort and where there is beauty.

At the beginning of my experience of burnout, I was really seeking accounts of how other neurodivergent people were getting through their days, in lots of detail, minute by minute, really what did it feel like to wake up as them and did they find mornings really difficult and did they find transitions throughout the day excruciating too? Did they constantly feel like they were absorbing way way more input than they had the ability to process? What do they like about how their brains work, what parts of their day are really easeful and ordinary, and what would their dream days be like? I really, really needed to know that. And I read a lot of books written by neurodivergent writers and listened to a lot of podcasts but I couldn’t find stories with that much detail and nuance.

It was the medicine I needed in a way - people to reflect my experience, remind me that I am ok as I am, to model ways of taking care as a neurodivergent person living in a world that is not always built for our needs. I decided that I wanted to create a wide, wide space for neurodivergent people to talk about their daily lives. I decided I would have a conversation with each guest but that it would eventually take the form of a monologue - just their voice throughout the episode, with space for detail, tangents, pauses, and meanderings - the things daily conversations don’t always allow for.

The first episode features a wonderful friend of mine, Erin Enfys, a disabled and neurodivergent (AuDHD) performer and theatre-maker living in Brighton. Someone I love and admire so much. They really take care of themself in a way that I am constantly learning from and they really acknowledge and celebrate their neurodivergence in all corners of life, they are always being completely Erin. And I’m so drawn to that.

Episode Two features Alice Reeves who has OCD/ADHD and is a brilliant coach, consultant and the co-founder of Joyfully Different, an organisation who supports neurodivergent business owners. Alice is building something really remarkable and valuable with Joyfully Different, I’ve felt so understood by this community. I admire her so much!

And then Episode Three (coming soon) is with another dear friend of mine, Candi Louise Underwood who has ADHD and is a singer, vocal coach and the founder of City of Stars Choir, an intermediate musical theatre choir in Brighton and Hove. I have learned so much from Candi about the importance of community and about braveness and bigness. I adore her. I’m excited for you to hear this episode over the next few weeks.

I am so excited to make more episodes, I want to keep collecting stories and paint these sort of audio portraits of people in the neurodivergent community. I wonder if we can point our kind attention in someone else’s direction for just half an hour, that’s all, is it possible to come closer to imagining what days feel like from their perspective? And what can we learn from that? What can we carry with us?

Listen to Other People’s Days here. If you can, please comment, subscribe and share with your community - I’d love for the people who really need this to find us!

Sound design by brilliant Megan Tuck who I met at just the right time this year. Thank you Megan for being a wonderful partner and collaborator.

Original Music by Leo Aram Downs

Writing in progress

Inspired by Sarah Teresa Cook’s words and the way she is very comfortable sharing fragments of things, I am sharing something imperfect that I’ve written recently about not feeling sticky enough and trying to hold too tightly onto things that can’t be held. I know that this feeling is related to my neurodivergence in some way but I haven’t quite joined all the dots yet. And that’s ok.

Longing/Light

by Sarah Brand

Nothing sticks to me the way it is supposed to

I think I am supposed to be sticky but I am not

When you hold my hand, my hand is supposed to feel held for a long time after, for a long time after feel like it is holding

When you put your whole body on my whole body and the heaviness is peace and your lungs and my lungs seesaw breath between us

How do I hold that?

I long for the things I can’t let in

Is my filtration system broken?

You pour and pour but your water never reaches my thirsty glass

What breaks the cycle of longing?

Do you know?

Can you tell me so that I can know too?

Is it light?

I feel like it’s something to do with light

Everyone around me is made of honey I think and things just melt right in

Me, I am gathering mist

I am rolling a snowball with milk

How do you carry someone with you when they’re not in front of you anymore?

How do you recall the poem of their hands?

Do you fold them into the pleats of your skirt? Into the plaits in your hair?

How do you keep a person with you?

How do you keep and keep?

How do you, please?

Do you mix the sweet dust of their presence with milk and drink it hot and brimming just after they leave? Does it fill you up?

Does it have to do with a transference of light?

Do you have to become a door?

Or a sponge?

Do you have to actually become light?

Is that it?

If you are light and they are light too, then there’s no holding?

I feel silly for thinking it was about holding

So does their light compound with yours?

Does their gleaming kindness make your omelette in the morning?

Does their bright attention button your coat?

Is that their glowing arms around your lungs, making your tangled breath simple and easy now?

Is there always more coming? (light)

When you have become it? (light)

Footnote Feelings

Florence and The Machine’s new album is out today. And it is GIANT. It’s going to be taking up a GIANT space in my mind over the coming months. Adoring Florence and feeling mirrored by her music is an experience I share with my sweet friend Liv Purvis who wrote a gorgeous article this morning about being held by music and how some albums sweep in and find you exactly when you need them.

Thank you so much for reading my first newsletter in a long time. Please share with anyone you think might like to read it too.

Take care.

Sarah x

Erin Enfys is a non‑binary, disabled AuDHD freelance creative from Brighton & Hove. Erin shares the rhythm of their days: easeful mornings where they give their body what it needs, their “gathering yarn” ritual for organising thoughts and tasks, and their ongoing quest for balance between ambition and wellbeing. This episode weaves together reflections on sleep, chronic pain, self‑sufficiency, and how to feel safe with big, intense emotions, and celebrates the sweetness of building forts and playing Stardew Valley.

Follow Erin on Instagram @erinenfys
Work with Erin: https://erinenfys.carrd.co
Erin’s next event at the Brighton Dome, Disabled & Disobedient - Vitamin D+D is on 7th December, 2025. Tickets and info: https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LmE-disabled-disobedient-vitamin-dd/

If you enjoyed this episode please share with your community, subscribe and leave a review to help other people discover us.

Other People's Days is created by Sarah Brand, an art director, writer and content specialist.
Sound design is by Megan Tuck.
Theme music is by Leo Aram-Downs.

If you’d like to sponsor Other People’s Days send us an email: sarah@otherpeoplesdays.com - we’d love to hear from you!

otherpeoplesdays.com

✺

I had to remind myself this week that sharing fragments is a reasonable thing to do.

✺

I asked myself not to connect the dots.

✺

Sometimes, when I use lots of glue to stick thoughts together in an attempt to be fully understood, they end up not quite making sense to me anymore.

✺

You know the feeling of walking away from a conversation with too many words soaked in too much glue on the wall behind you? Words sticking to your shoes, to your fingers, to your chin, as you hurriedly close the door.

✺

I would like to explain everything less.

✺

My favourite things to read are made up of shards of ideas—quietly forming and then deciding against formation: half absolutely nothing, half definitely something.

✺

In the world of fractals, tiny shards of things are vital components of the greater whole.

✺

A fractal is something that is made up of self-similar patterns that repeat at different scales.

✺

The interior architecture of a nautilus shell is a fractal—a beautiful, pearly bone staircase, an ever-increasing or decreasing spiral, created through a feedback loop where the formula of one chamber informs the pattern of the next.

✺

In Marcel the Shell, Marcel (a tiny shell, created by the mighty Jenny Slate) lives in a big house with his grandmother, Nana Connie. Their community has disappeared, leaving them alone and without support. Marcel takes on small, essential tasks for their survival, bringing his sweetness, creativity and appreciation for life to everything he does. You can see the whole of him in every tiny action he takes.

✺

Extreme pattern recognition can be a feature of autism; it is for me. This looks different for every autistic person, but it can involve things like spotting visual patterns or noticing minute details or changes in sound, energy, or language that others might miss.

✺

I can spot patterns in the subtle details of how people speak, move, and the words they choose, leading me to predict what might happen in the next few minutes, hours, and (often) beyond.

✺

In a room with five, twenty, or a hundred people, my brain is absorbing and processing all the swirling energetic information, trying to figure out what patterns might emerge. This can allow me to anticipate and understand other people’s actions or reactions. But sometimes, it’s just too much input. I don’t know what to do with all the information, it’s like plugging a hard drive into a strawberry. I don’t have a system for filtering what’s important from what isn’t.

✺

Pattern recognition is one of the most exhausting and bewildering parts of being autistic (for me.)

✺

When I notice old, limiting patterns reemerging in my thoughts and behaviours, I feel trapped in the suddenly eerie, bony staircase inside the shell. I’m scared of getting stuck in a pattern without realising it, adding pieces to it, making it more solid and intricate as I go. Meaning it’s less likely that I’ll find a way out.

✺

When you notice you’re in an old pattern do you:

a. panic

b. feel very angry with yourself

c. frantically try to do everything you possibly can to change the course of the pattern

d. all of the above

e. something else?

✺

What about all the good fractals that already exist? (This feels important. I often forget these). The patterns in my life I have built over time that are easeful, supportive, valuable, connecting… just right.

✺

What can I learn from the thriving patterns to gently shift the broken ones?

✺

“In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.” Adrienne Maree Brown

A moodboard

A second hand shopping trail

Seeking:

1. some kind of snail-like shell

2. self-protection, I guess?

3. details that remind me of the inside of the nautilus shell

4. shiny things

Here are all the things I didn’t buy that caught my eye.

1980s Polka Dot Hat

Nautilus Shell Necklace

Two Piece Parisian Suit

Vintage Rodo Black Shell Bag

Mondial Atelier Silk Bolero

Vintage Chain Belt

Sheer Cream Shirt

Vintage Shell Brooch

Polka Dot Peplum Blouse

1980s Shell Earrings

Books made up of fragments

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

If Not Winter, Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson

Thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and pass onto anyone who might like to read it too.

Take care,

Sarah x

Footnote Feelings

“Fragments are the only forms I trust.” - Donald Barthelme

Shell earphones: design and photograph by Fleur Goedendorp

Consistency is the sharp, spiky ruler I use to measure my worth.

A feature of my ADHD is that notions of what I need (or want) to do melt away from my mind almost as soon as they arrive there. I spend a lot of time scooping them up, moulding them back into a recognisable shape, and attempting to hold them somewhere in my syrupy mind. This isn’t really conducive to getting the same things done every day without fail.

I’m also autistic and have chronic pain, both of which require me to notice and negotiate my energy levels and capacity – measuring the physical and mental cost of doing something against the investment in my life, the people I love and my community. This can make it challenging to keep up with all the things that make my life feel full: habits, communication, self-care, hobbies, and socialising.

With my eyes fixed on consistency—the thing I’ve learned is the measure of a good and capable adult—I ignore my body’s cues and push myself forward, snapping cords holding precious things together. When you live life obsessed with measuring cups and spiky rulers, at some point, everything boils over. You have to stop. You can’t be consistent; you can’t be anything. You need rest, to take care of yourself, wait patiently for your energy to reform, and begin again. Early last year, I found myself in an exhausting cycle of this, and I knew it wasn’t a sustainable way to approach my days.

I tried to give myself space from consistency, to shake it out of my language, untangle it from my mind. I removed its resoluteness from around my shoulders, folded it up, and put it away high up in a tall cupboard that I always forget to look in—keeping it close, just in case I needed it back again. In the space that opened up, I froze. I had no idea how to map out my time or hold myself accountable without the stifling pressure of absolutely having to do the same things every week, and the story that if I couldn’t, I wasn’t a real person somehow. (Describing this now, I’m struck by how fierce my self-blame and internalised ableism were.)

Persistence was the word that rose to meet me. I liked it straight away.

My friend said she wonders if, perhaps for all of us, consistency is a myth and we’re all pretending to each other that we do things consistently. I took a deep breath when she told me this.

Consistency is a staircase on a staircase on a staircase.

Responding to a dog licking you the same way you respond to lightning striking you.

Gathering flowers to make a harness.

Persistent is twenty sweet times in a blue moon.

Being a student of beginnings.

Listening to contraction clearing its throat and expansion humming a scale.

There is something humble about persistence; it knows that things will probably fall apart, we’ll get ill, we’ll lose things, we’ll be distracted, we’ll be exhausted. Still, we can still choose to return again to the things we’re drawn to. Because they’re worth returning to and they’ll be glad to see us, even if it’s been a while, even if we’re unsteady.

Getting dressed, persistently

After a chronic pain flare-up, on a day when my pain is quieter, persistence is deciding to get dressed again. I think, what’s the point? I’ve been wearing old jumpers and pyjamas two sizes too big for weeks. I’ll just wear this to go out; it’ll do. Days haven’t felt like mine to be in, putting on clothes won’t make anything better. The pain will still be there.

I tried to figure out if there was a way to get dressed to bring my pain with me, without trying to hide its presence from myself or from other people.

I started wrapping a scarf, my favourite jumper, or something delicate around the parts of my body where the pain is intense. Then I tried layering up the most intricate clothes I own, patch-working them together in a way that feels like I’m weaving a magic, protective lace quilt of my own invention. I really love this way of wrapping my body up, I feel like myself and I feel held together by something else too. It’s a visual reminder to myself that my body needs care, but also that I don’t need to mask the pain from other people.

When I get dressed again—persistently, in a deliberate way—that doesn’t ignore what’s going on in my body, something that starts off as visually pleasing can have a soothing effect on my whole system.

I like that persistence only asks us to try again, as we are: we can take a step forward, carrying the pain, the hopelessness, the exhaustion, or the grief with us—around our shoulders, our waist, in our bag, tied to our hair, or in our shoes.

The odd thing is that I now do more things consistently than I ever have. I think it’s because I’m not forcing it; it’s just happening. Without the spikiness and grasping, I watch the things I do flow towards me and away from me. The important things almost always come back.

Books To Pair With Persistence

Pure Colour by Sheila Heiti

The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride

Like A Bird by Fariha Roisin

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and pass onto anyone who might like to read it too.

Take care,

Sarah x

Footnote Feelings

A poem by non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson about beginning again

CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

Please try to go
to hell frequently
because you will
find the light there

yes yes — please
try to kiss the ideas
that you find there
yes yes — please

try to get that
it is the center
of the universe
yes yes — please

try to help yourself
by kissing the hot hot
hot life that is born
there yes yes — please

try to yell in hell
yes yes — please
try to free yourself
by pouring yourself

into the gutter all
guttural guttural yell
yes yes yes — please
try to get that you

become the being
that you came there
to be yes yes — please
try to go to the great

great great fire that you
created because you
become the light
that the fire makes

inside of you
yes yes — please
try to kiss yourself
for going there

“To express your sense of place in the world is, it would seem, an endless act of translation. A self-portrait is not always a depiction of a body.”

Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror & The Palette

Getting dressed isn’t the answer to anything. But it’s a question I’m interested in getting lost in sometimes. How do I want to get dressed to be in my days? Often, this exploration can be a fleeting distraction or a simple invitation back to beauty and creativity. Lately, it’s a curious new language I’ve been learning to speak.

I am autistic and have ADHD, a discovery that came late in my life and late in 2023. The past fourteen months have been a swirl of learning, processing, explaining, grieving and trying my best to cultivate a delicate kind of kindness towards myself. Kindness to myself wasn’t here before. I’m learning about it slowly, holding it in my hands for the first time, a porcelain vase I’m afraid I’ll drop, that I want to hold onto so much. I have taken my first bold and shaky steps towards unmasking (in spaces and with people that can provide enough safety for me to do this). It is possible that this will be a never-ending process, forever checking, and checking again, to see what is acceptable and what is not. The fact that masking is sometimes an option for me is a privilege. Devastatingly, for many people, this isn't possible, and the safe places do not appear to hold them when they should.

I feel a lot of tenderness towards my past self for learning so precisely how to mask to keep myself safe. It’s also true that masking in all corners of life eats up your energy, presence and sense of self.

There is a lot more to say here, another time will be better for that, but I want to say that I think if we can create more spaces where people can safely unmask and be witnessed in their purest form, it can be alchemical, for everyone involved. Masking means there’s a lot that isn’t being shown or expressed that deserves to have wings and a sky to fly against.

An unexpected exclamation mark in this process has been a kind of sartorial unmasking. Is that what I would call it? A better phrase isn't coming to mind, so that'll do for now. I mean that the way I get dressed now is unrecognisable. It's the same clothes really, but the way I wear them feels completely different. I feel like I'm taking on a new form. There's a channel between the internal and external that was closed off before. It could be that I'm not filtering my outfits through someone else's lens anymore. In her moving and generous book Easy Beauty, Chloé Cooper Jones writes "Beauty is what we're told is beautiful and what we're told becomes the truth." I felt an affinity with Chloé's notion of beauty, specifically her fascination with and preference for 'difficult' beauty. I feel increasingly dissatisfied and uninterested in the things I've been told are beautiful or acceptable. I try to actively resist them; they're not mine. Now, the odd and complex pieces of clothing I love, I love more fiercely, and I feel more sure of the weird tincture of ingredients that make up my personal style. Those are mine.

The more of myself I understand and uncover, the stranger my outfits get.

In the past, I would constantly seek validation and reassurance from the people around me when I was deciding what clothes to wear. There was a deep worry about looking strange or odd, learning early in life that the cost of being viewed and othered in this way was too high. Before I knew I was neurodivergent, I was twisting myself into painful shapes to make other people comfortable, destroying essential fibres of myself in ways that I'm still trying to process and make sense of. Putting an outfit together to go out into the world was the last layer of masking, hoping to belong.

But I know now that belonging when you're not being yourself isn't real belonging; it's watching people belong to each other, in a room you're locked out of.

If the purpose of getting dressed before was to create a veil of normalcy and acceptability, now it's a cape of strangeness and light. The storm of emotions and piercing otherness I feel internally, I can't always communicate to the outside world, but I might be able to wear a fragment of it.

With clothes, nothing is untranslatable.

Now I dress because I feel.

This is something I'm drawn to in other people too. It's not just that the way they've adorned themselves is fascinating and exquisite (but it is that too), it's that I can feel their desire to work out and express something of their interior world. It's not polished or exact; we're just getting to witness one of the many brief snapshots of their transformation, a lifelong iteration. A visual poem, deliberately unfinished. A swift reminder to us all that none of us really know what it’s like to be someone else. When I see these other others, I make a point to smile at them. I wonder if they know what I mean.

Visual Notes

Thank you so much for reading my first newsletter. Please share with anyone you think might like to read it too.

Take care.

Sarah x

Footnote Feelings

“The main thing is, when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”

Grace Paley, 1989