I wanted to die because living was too hard.

Not because I didn’t love my children. Not because there was nothing beautiful in the world. Not because I had never experienced happiness.

Living itself was hard.

Everything felt scary. Ordinary things exhausted me. Things other people appeared to do without thinking could require an extraordinary amount of thought from me, and nobody seemed to understand why.

Neither did I.

I had words given to me instead.

Lazy.
Bone idle.
Messy.
Unmotivated.
Had it too easy.
Didn’t know what a hard life was.

Eventually, when enough people describe you in the same way, you start wondering whether they can all be wrong.

Maybe I was lazy.

Maybe there was nothing stopping me from doing the things everybody else did except me.

Maybe I was simply bad at being a person.

I remember my bedroom as a teenager. Clothes on the floor. Things everywhere. My mum asking why I would WANT to live like this.

That word mattered.

Want.

As though I had looked at the chaos around me and chosen it.

As though the state of my environment told you something about the state of my character.

Years later, I became almost obsessive about particular kinds of cleaning.

My toilet had to sparkle. No yellowing. The sink had to be clean. The oven. The hob. Metal and glass were satisfying because cleaning them made sense to me.

There is dirt.

Remove dirt.

Finished.

But clutter was different.

Clutter required decisions.

Where does this go?
Do I still need it?
What if I need it later?
What belongs with what?
Where do I put the things that don’t have a place?
What do I need to move before I can clean underneath it?
What was I doing before I picked this up?

So the toilet sparkled while everything else could descend into chaos.

Somewhere along the way that sparkling toilet became evidence for the defence.

See?

I do clean.

I’m not dirty.

I’m just messy.

I spent a very long time defending my character with a toilet.

Nobody asked why a woman who loved organisation, order and things being arranged correctly could simultaneously struggle so much with the physical environment around her.

Nobody asked what happened between wanting to do something and actually doing it.

I didn’t know how to ask either.

I just knew that sometimes I couldn’t.

Literally couldn’t.

Try explaining that.

Imagine it is time to make spaghetti bolognese.

It is only spaghetti bolognese. Mince. Jar of sauce. Pasta.

Simple.

Except inside my head, Clipboard Fros has arrived.

Tea needs cooking.

Yes. I know.

Get up then.

But I’ve been writing all day.

You still need tea.

Fine. Cook the mince.

Except the pan needs scrubbing first.

Then fry the mince.

Then add the sauce.

Wash the jar.

Don’t forget the hob.

Don’t burn anything.

Get another pan.

Boil the kettle.

Spaghetti in.

Break it because I can’t be bothered waiting for the ends to soften.

Wait ten minutes.

Drain it.

Now the colander needs washing.

And the pan.

And the tongs.

Dish everything up.

Put the bolognese pan to soak.

Cheese.

Serve.

By the time my brain has rehearsed the entire event, I’m exhausted by something I haven’t even started.

Another voice joins in.

I don’t want to.

Clipboard Frost answers.

You have to.

And somewhere between all those instructions, my body simply doesn’t move.

So I sit there.

And procrastinate.

From the outside, perhaps that looks like laziness.

From the inside, I have already cooked the fucking spaghetti bolognese seventeen times.

That was my life far more often than anybody knew.

I look back at the woman I was five years ago and I see somebody moving through treacle.

She was exhausted.

Her body said stop.

Her mind said stop.

She could spend entire days paralysed by the thoughts surrounding all the things required to be a functioning human being.

And she thought it was her fault.

That makes me sad now.

Not because I pity her.

Because nobody thought to ask whether there might be a reason she was finding life so difficult.

She was told what her behaviour meant instead.

And she believed them.

Depression followed me for years. Anxiety too. I did therapy. I took medication. I tried.

I really fucking tried.

But eventually I began to understand that depression and anxiety didn’t explain everything.

There was something underneath them.

Something lifelong.

My daughter helped crack the door open.

After her third suicide attempt, social services asked whether we had considered that she might be autistic and have ADHD.

I cried.

Because suddenly somebody had seen something I recognised.

She was my miniature me.

Autism and ADHD already existed around our family. There were patterns everywhere once I knew enough to recognise them.

And eventually I started looking properly at myself.

I pursued an assessment.

I was told it was mental health.

Mental health told me there wasn’t a mental illness explaining it beyond the depression and anxiety I already knew about.

So I went back.

I remember asking my GP whether I was allowed to get emotional because I was new to advocating for myself and I needed to say what was in my head.

I told her I felt failed.

My whole thirty-nine years.

I wasn’t depressed for no reason.

I had worked bloody hard in therapy because I wanted a life, but I was still scared of everything and I still didn’t understand why.

This diagnosis mattered to me.

She listened.

She told me about Right to Choose and suggested I research another provider.

Most importantly, she believed me.

So did I.

Eventually.

I was diagnosed as autistic, with substantial care needs.

A month later I was diagnosed with ADHD.

Clipboard Frost must have been standing somewhere inside the house in my head with her clipboard tucked underneath her arm looking exceptionally pleased with herself.

We did it.

Now we can heal.

Now we can start processing.

I didn’t immediately tear through forty years of my life looking for evidence.

I let it settle.

There was a lot to unpack.

Then, in 2026, I dusted off my pen.

Writing has always been how I make sense of things.

So I bought far too many notebooks and pens, because apparently healing requires stationery, and started going backwards.

I met myself at three.

At six.

At eleven.

At fourteen.

I revisited memories that had once been filed under Weird Things Frost Did and looked at them again with information I hadn’t possessed the first time.

The little girl arranging colouring pencils into families wasn’t ridiculous.

She had an enormous internal world.

Those pencils had lives.

Faces.

Relationships.

I can still step into imagined rooms so vividly that I can see them, hear them and sometimes almost smell them.

Eventually I learnt the word hyperphantasia.

What had once been another strange thing about me became one of the tools I treasure most as a writer.

I looked at eleven-year-old me approaching the girl who would become my lifelong friend and opening the conversation by asking whether she’d started her periods yet.

I can laugh at that one now.

Apparently I had conducted my assessment, decided she looked friendly, identified an available conversational topic and commenced friendship negotiations.

Efficient.

The teenage years were harder to revisit.

I had spent so long watching other people and trying to work out how to be like them.

Trying to behave properly.

Trying not to be the freak.

Trying to make myself acceptable.

By adulthood, I was extraordinarily vulnerable to other people’s definitions of me.

I made choices from a place of needing safety and belonging without understanding how substantial my own support needs actually were.

Diagnosis did not make the things that happened to me acceptable.

It did not make anybody else’s behaviour my autism’s fault.

What it did was allow me to understand the person standing in the middle of those experiences.

She wasn’t stupid.

She wasn’t weak.

She wasn’t deliberately making bad choices.

She was trying to find safety with a brain and nervous system she didn’t understand, while the people around her didn’t understand them either.

Sometimes she found safety in places that weren’t safe at all.

Eventually I found my partner.

He didn’t fix me either.

For fifteen years he has given me something I had very little experience of before him: room.

If I can’t start something, he doesn’t call me lazy.

He says, “It’s okay. In your own time.”

Or:

“I’ll come and stand with you.”

There is an enormous difference between being supported and being shamed.

But even my partner couldn’t do the work inside me for me.

I did therapy.

I pulled apart trauma.

I questioned the things I’d been taught about myself.

I learnt what my nervous system needed.

I learnt to accommodate myself rather than punish myself.

I met my inner child.

She is eight.

She has never grown beyond eight in my internal world and, actually, I quite love that for me.

She brings joy like you’ve never experienced.

Child wonder.

In April I booked a trip to Flamborough and Bempton Cliffs.

When I was little, I wanted to see puffins.

I never did.

So I took her.

Standing on those cliffs listening to puffins, something changed.

There was adult me.

There was that little girl.

And for perhaps the first time, we weren’t fighting merely to survive together.

We had arrived somewhere.

I had spent years choosing to stay alive because I had children who needed me.

Now I wanted to choose life for me.

That summer I started going places.

Short breaks. Days out. Things I had spent twenty years believing weren’t for somebody like me.

It was tiring.

I still had to accommodate myself.

Travel days needed to be separate sometimes. Recovery mattered. Autism didn’t disappear because I had decided I wanted adventures.

But I saw more in a matter of weeks than I had seen in years.

And it felt good.

I felt alive.

My writing changed too.

In February I began Inside I Am Crying.

Then came Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.

Nervous System Diaries.

Fascinating Facts Friday.

Special Interest Sunday.

Borrowed Beauty.

Essays.

Poems.

Random thoughts.

I wanted to write particularly for people like me.

Autistic people, with or without ADHD, whose support needs don’t disappear simply because they can write eloquently.

I cannot use my voice easily in the way social media often demands.

I can’t sit in front of a camera and effortlessly explain myself.

Verbal communication can be enormously difficult for me.

But give me words and time and I can invite you inside.

I have a beautiful hyperphantasic mind and a whimsical personality, and I no longer intend to apologise for either of them.

Quiet people are overlooked.

So I write.

A five-year plan appeared.

Year one: find beauty every day. Say yes more. Write. Advocate. Travel around England.

Year two: grow the page and keep writing.

Year three: explore publishing.

Year four: write my story.

Year five: publish it.

I don’t know whether the plan will happen exactly like that.

Life isn’t linear.

Setbacks happen.

Plans change.

But I had made one.

For the first time in my life, the future contained something more than getting through it.

Then, on 13 September 2026, I took my first dose of ADHD medication.

I had deliberately avoided reading endless reviews beforehand.

I know myself.

If I filled my head with everybody else’s experiences, I’d spend the entire titration wondering whether I was experiencing what I was supposed to experience.

So I went in relatively blind.

My expectations were modest.

I wanted to be me on a really good day more often.

And, if possible, I’d quite like to stop losing my train of thought halfway through a sentence.

That was about it.

I held the tablet between my thumb and finger, put it in my mouth, swallowed it with water and thought:

Here goes.

I didn’t become a superhero.

There was no cinematic burst of light.

Nobody played inspirational music.

I did some work.

Then the washing machine finished.

I put my phone down.

I got up.

I dealt with the washing.

I came back.

I picked up my phone.

Right. Where was I?

And carried on.

Then something occurred to me.

Did I just…

Was that a complete sequence?

Did we just do a thing and come back with no gaps?

Hmm.

Nobody inside my head answered.

Which was frankly rude considering the significance of the occasion.

So I carried on designing as though this might apparently be normal now.

Over the next few days, more tiny things happened.

Getting dressed was one of them.

Usually even dressing could require conscious instruction.

Bra.

Knickers.

Sock.

Other sock.

Next thing.

On one of those early medication days, the process suddenly felt wrong.

Disorganised.

I remember wondering whether I was doing it correctly.

Only later did I understand what had been missing.

Clipboard Frost hadn’t been giving instructions.

The clothes were just going onto my body.

At thirty-six milligrams, that became even clearer.

I got out of the bath one day, wrapped in a towel, walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed.

My body immediately seemed to say:

Nope.

And stood back up.

I dried myself.

Got dressed.

Took the towel back to the bathroom.

Done.

I laughed.

Because the week before I had sat on that same bed in my bra and knickers with one sock on and the other sock in my hand, staring into the distance as though the solution to the second sock might be somewhere over there with the list of the day.

Now it was:

Boom.

Bam.

Wham.

Dressed.

There are things you don’t realise are difficult until, suddenly, they aren’t.

That has perhaps been the strangest part of this experiment.

I keep being surprised by ordinary things.

Not extraordinary productivity.

Ordinary life.

At five o’clock one evening, after tea, I stood up.

I washed the dishes.

Cleaned the kitchen.

Dried everything.

Put it away.

A ladle fell after I had already walked away.

And I went back and put the ladle away.

This sounds ridiculous.

I know.

I ran into the room afterwards to announce what had happened and received the congratulations I quite rightly deserved.

The Sacred Ladle Incident.

But underneath the joke was something enormous.

I had already lived a day.

I had already done things.

I had cooked.

I had eaten.

It was five o’clock.

And there was still some of me left.

I went to run my bath absolutely bloody proud of myself.

Maybe my day was bigger than I thought it was.

Before this, one substantial thing could feel like the whole day.

I could write something and then need the day to begin closing around me.

Even when I technically had hours left, they didn’t necessarily feel available.

Now I was discovering something almost alien.

Apparently people can do one thing and still be themselves afterwards.

They can do another thing.

Perhaps even another.

Then go to bed because it is bedtime rather than because they desperately need the day to stop.

Who knew?

The medication hasn’t made me want to clean constantly.

As I write this, I don’t want to clean at all.

That matters.

There will still be days when I don’t want to.

But perhaps there is now more room to choose that rather than having the choice made for me.

The difference is not productivity.

It is access.

The distance between wanting and doing has sometimes become shorter.

The internal resistance is quieter.

My thoughts are quieter.

My impulses are easier to pause.

I can stop something and return to it.

I can change plans without the entire internal structure collapsing.

My working memory is still capable of wandering off with nouns.

My autism is still very much here.

I still have substantial care needs.

I still need another person with me outside the house.

Sensory overload still exists.

After several demanding days my nervous system can still apply the brakes and require recovery.

Medication has not turned me into somebody who can necessarily go to the gym before an eight-hour shift, come home, cook tea and finish the evening with yoga.

For years I thought people who did that were superhuman.

After experiencing several full days containing multiple tasks, I understand them slightly better.

But I am autistic too.

Executive access is not the same thing as unlimited energy.

Removing some resistance does not remove my limits.

And I don’t want it to.

I want a sustainable life.

It is also important to say this clearly:

Medication did not save me.

I saved myself.

Before Xaggitin ever existed to me, I had fought to stay alive.

I had done therapy.

I had processed trauma.

I had fought for diagnosis.

I had learnt to care for my inner child.

I had started writing.

I had gone to the cliffs.

I had seen the puffins.

I had begun building a life around who I actually am.

I had made the five-year plan.

I had already chosen life.

Medication has not given me a life.

So far, it appears to be giving me greater access to the life I had already chosen.

And that distinction became painfully beautiful while I was cleaning my house.

I was on my second day of labouring through jobs, listening to RØRY’s new album while wiping down the banisters.

And I realised something.

I was removing dirt.

And enjoying it.

That was unusual.

Could I do this tomorrow too?

What if I couldn’t?

But I was doing it now.

I was actively cleaning, by choice, with almost no resistance, and enjoying myself.

Then the thought arrived.

Look how far I have come.

I met myself.

I chose to live.

And today it feels like the final piece needed to live the meaningful life I deserve has just slotted in.

Then RØRY sang in my ear:

“I’m alive.”

Yes.

I am alive.

I am actually living and participating in my life.

And suddenly a feeling I hadn’t quite managed to name had words.

I too can have a rebirth in my forties.

I can chase a dream.

I can make plans.

Because that is living.

I know myself now.

I found safety for myself.

I found love and belonging in myself and in the small circle of people I trust.

I learnt that other people’s thoughts and opinions about me do not get to define my life simply because they have them.

They are not me.

Only I can make the choices that are right for me.

My self-respect and kindness towards myself led me towards freedom.

Freedom allowed me to meet my inner child.

And together we fought until we arrived.

We arrived on the cliffs.

Perhaps what I am describing is the closest I have ever come to self-actualisation.

Not perfection.

Not independence.

Not being cured.

Not permanent happiness.

Just the unfamiliar experience of survival no longer being the principal project of my life.

There is room now for something else.

Meaning.

Writing.

Curiosity.

Plans.

Dreams.

Contribution.

Possibility.

Hope.

And grief.

Because of course there is grief.

How could there not be?

I can look backwards now and see the woman who spent decades believing she was failing at things that genuinely required enormous effort from her.

I didn’t know how hard I was working to do ordinary things until some of those things stopped being so hard.

That hurts.

But I am proud of her.

Proud.

For me.

I am no longer a dead girl walking.

The hope is alive now and visible.

That does not mean I am naive.

Right now is lovely.

And right now is where I am.

The present.

The future may go wobbly.

Something may knock me down.

I don’t know what that will feel like because I have never been this far into a happy life before.

Maybe the coping skills I have developed will help.

Maybe I will fall hard.

Maybe my five-year plan will become a seven-year plan.

Maybe the book will never happen.

Maybe it will.

Nothing is promised.

If this were a film, naturally I’d be run over by a bus next week.

Which would be extremely irritating after all this character development.

But I no longer need a promise that nothing bad will happen.

I need to know that when something happens, I will meet myself there.

I trust myself now.

I will deal with what comes, learn what I can from it, and continue moving forwards when I am able.

One day, perhaps, I will hold my book.

My first response will probably be:

“Fuck me, is this War and Peace?”

Then I will look at Adam and ask:

“Did I do that?”

And somewhere inside there will probably still be a small voice asking whether anybody is actually going to buy it.

Big hits don’t happen to us.

I know that voice.

It appears now when I look at my social-media numbers.

I have around one hundred followers on TikTok after nearly eight months.

Sometimes that stings.

But I also understand what I make.

I write.

People don’t consume words in the same way anymore.

They often want things read to them. Short. Fast. Low effort.

I make people stop and read.

That audience may grow slowly.

The numbers are secondary.

I write because I love writing.

If one person feels seen because of something I wrote, then that day my words did what I wanted them to do.

Inside, perhaps we are crying together.

There is just a little less noise around it now.

I am a writer.

I used to struggle to say that because I am disabled and cannot work in the conventional way.

But I write.

The words are mine and I put them onto paper.

That makes me a writer.

Stephen King was still a writer before he earned his first dollar from writing.

My notebooks are full of me.

One day my children will have those words.

That is a legacy whether a publisher ever puts a barcode on the back of them or not.

My story belongs to me.

I have every right to write it.

I don’t want to talk at the person reading it.

I want to sit beside them.

Maybe that is why I have written all of this.

Because somewhere there is somebody sitting in their own chaos wondering what is wrong with them.

Perhaps ordinary life has become impossibly heavy.

Perhaps things everybody else calls simple require so much thought that you cannot begin.

Perhaps somebody has called you lazy.

Perhaps you have called yourself worse.

I see you beneath all of the chaos that is part of mundane daily life.

The struggle is real.

It becomes too much.

You are not lazy.

You are not worthless.

You do your best every day.

That is enough.

Be kind to yourself.

I wish somebody could have taken eight-year-old me to one side and told her that.

My little love, there is a bumpy road ahead.

It is fucking wild, if I’m honest.

More like one of those loop-the-loop rollercoasters you desperately want to go on.

You never do, by the way.

You aren’t sad about that.

You have good intellect in you.

Those dark days will hurt.

But you have strength and courage, and you keep fighting.

Never giving up becomes a choice you make over and over because somewhere deep inside you know:

This is not your whole life.

It pays off.

You finally get seen.

You finally get heard.

You discover that you are autistic and have substantial care needs.

No wonder life has been so hard.

Then you discover you have ADHD too.

And gradually, you understand.

Believe in yourself.

That is what is going to help you.

You are a writer.

You will resist calling yourself one for a while because you are disabled and cannot work.

Ignore that.

You write.

That’s the qualification.

Your words will matter because they are yours.

You will learn that you don’t have to stand above another person and tell them how to live.

You can sit beside them instead.

Invite them into your world as an equal.

Be proud of that.

Most of all:

Be kind to yourself.

It will serve you well.

You have spent enough of your life crying inside.

There will probably always be days when you still do.

You are still you, after all.

But one day, in your forties, you will be standing in your own home doing something as ridiculously mundane as cleaning a banister when a woman sings into your headphones that she is alive.

And something inside you will answer her.

Me too.

I’m alive.

I am no longer waiting for my life to begin.

I am here.

And I am living it.

— Frost ❄️