I already have other support. What is the distinct role of your mentoring, and how do you work alongside it?
I love this question. Firstly, because if you are already accessing support, it tells me you are proactive, resourceful, and deeply committed to your well-being. (And if you aren’t, or if those spaces haven’t worked out? Then I get that, too. I have also felt excluded and been told that I was “too complex”. We all take our own road, and I totally respect your specific process.)
If you are currently receiving support from mainstream or traditional medical routes, my mentorship acts as a vital adjunct. The grounded reality is that neurodivergent individuals have rarely been given the space to be fully seen, heard, or understood in mainstream services. We bridge that gap. I offer the deep, unhurried, relational, neuro-affirming space that traditional systems simply cannot provide, helping you in practising self-advocacy and untangling the invisible threads that restrict our ability to have more ownership of our treatment, for example. As someone who lives with a chronic and variable pain condition, I am navigating this reality on the regular.
My role is also highly practical. Alongside the deep dives, I provide tools and strategic frameworks designed entirely around your specific life, your pacing, and your unique nervous system needs. Think of me as the space where your deep internal truths meet grounded, day-to-day strategies, where we work in conjunction with your existing support to ensure your physical world feels more safe and sustainable. You can read about the specific rhythms and frameworks of my 6-month containers here.
How deeply neuro-affirming is the underlying philosophy?
These questions fill me with such nerdy delight; philosophical depth is in my soul and getting to talk about it is my idea of fun. (Please, ask me more!)
To answer this question fully, I need to go back in time to when I was about 7 years old and asking my grandmother if her brown eyes saw things in the same way as my green eyes?
I’ve always been intensely curious about human variation and different perspectives. Add to that my intense and innate sense of justice and equity in representation, and you have an answer to your question.
It’s the foundational principles from which we co-create and collaborate on what you want your life to look, feel and be like. [These are the foundational principles from which we co-create and collaborate on what you want your life to look, feel, and be like.
To read more about my personal journey with human variation, head over to my full About Me page
Your neurotype, whether diagnosed or self-identified, your energetic pacing, and your processing style are a natural variation of humanity. Instead of problems, we look at your executive function challenges, your utter immersion into what fascinates you, your intrinsically driven capacity as the valuable blueprint for “how” we design your strategies and tools.
Because I am inherently existentially philosophical, live with a chronic, variable pain condition and navigate my own multiply-neurodivergent reality, this philosophy dictates how I live and run my business. It is precisely why I operate via a low-capacity, whisper network model, cap my practice at just 8 clients, and include nervous system insurance into my calendar. We protect the physical body first. In this space, you are supported to be variable, to experiment with adjusting the mask a bit at a time, and to co-create a life that honours and joyfully greets your “complexity” as the multi-dimensional being you are.
Does she understand late diagnosis specifically, rather than neurodivergence in the abstract?
I’ll share some of my story and you can decide for yourself.
By the time I had my final assessment after 18 months on a waiting list, in November 2019, aged 47, I was in a state that could be described as desperate. This felt like my last shot at living. Not that I was actively considering unaliving myself at that time, more like I was at the end of living in the way I had been. If I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic, I had nothing left to fall back on. I was exhausted from decades of masking, cycles of burning out, recovering briefly and burning out again. I couldn’t understand what was going on? I was trying my best and hardest to do what I was meant to do, why wasn’t it working?
My nervous system was in tatters. It was taking all my effort to attend to my life admin, work and eat. I was so confused: is this how life is meant to be? And, more practically, how do I sustain this? I had no idea and that scared me. I was constantly living on the edge and just, just scraping by on a sliver of trust every day. Added to that I was driven to do more and more. I had a 6′ whiteboard in my bedroom that my friend had given me for my birthday – he knew me so well! – and such was torrent of information pouring through me, I filled that whiteboard up within a week. Wiped it clean and did the same thing over and over and over again for the next 4 years. My brain filled up very quickly, I made connections faster than I could process them at times, I had to write it all down to simply make space for all the other thoughts. I felt like I was hardly in my life, more like whizzing rapidly through every encounter, conversation, day with increasing speed whilst also feeling like I wasn’t doing enough, being enough, and having panic attacks if the bus was late.
The only time I really had a break was when I was working with disabled university students; we got each other without having to even talk about it, and praise all the deities for that gift. When I opened the report and read the words: Autistic Spectrum Disorder I didn’t really feel anything. I now know that that happens when I have been feeling overwhelmed for a long time. There was a part of me that simply said, OK.
Thankfully, I had found an autistic mentor. She helped me to understand myself as an autistic person and what my needs were as well as with practical things, such as not having opened my post in 2 years. I also came to understand that I am a very deep processor a.k.a “slow learner” and it takes time for me to come to terms with big changes. The grief I felt is ongoing ~ and the rage at being gaslit by society, at being let down as a child, at being shamed for being different, is held by my therapist and channelled into my work.
Through this ongoing navigation, and being 7 years out from that time, I know how vulnerable, tender and disconcerting it feels to have an entire life be reconfigured to include this new reality, which was there all the time. As a practising magickal person at the time, my practice was a container for me to acknowledge it as a type of portal. I still see it that way. Like a wormhole in space that takes us from one timeline to another. Life is still hard, in different ways and also, I am now in it, rather than whizzing through it on a wave of adrenaline and cortisol. This means I can attend to my needs from a more resourced place. And, I am in such deep joy with my work that that in itself is hugely restorative. I live in such a way that I forget that I am neurodivergent. There’s flexibility, structure, flow and more peace than not.
I am unable to put into words how relieved I am to have the privilege of being able to access a diagnosis. My particular brain needed the piece of paper, plus the experience of the process. Since then I have self-identified as ADHD (in case you hadn’t noticed!) and a sprinkle of dyscalculia.
In essence, late-identification is a major structural transition on every level of your being. We honour it as such.
Does your style leave room for my own meaning-making, rather than imposing a particular model?
Yes, yes and thrice, yes! There absolutely is room for your meaning-making, and you discovering it is also the entire fuel source of our work. I have an absolute allergy to top-down, standardised templates that force multi-dimensional people into flat, two-dimensional boxes.
While I bring many practical tools, strategic frameworks, tarot, astrology, and somatic understandings to the table, they are always presented as options or experiments. They are lenses. We try them on, see how they look from your perspective, and observe how they feel in your body. If a concept or a framework doesn’t resonate with your lived experience, we discard it or reshape it together. You are the ultimate archivist and expert of your own life; my role is simply to hold the light steady while you explore the lore of you.
How collaborative and autonomy-supporting is the relationship?
I want to say 100%, but that isn’t strictly true; and I am always mindful of my own tendency towards black-and-white thinking! Let’s put it this way: we both have distinct responsibilities and commitments in this space that can and cannot be shared.
My part of the commitment is to provide the technological environment, the professional standards, the relationship, and the steady holding of the energetic space. I do this so you can safely let go of “managing” everything on your own, giving you the room to explore your realms and share your discoveries and insights with me, including what is and is not working.
Every person is different and arrives at a different place in their journey. My role is to meet you exactly where you are, identifying where you are heading and what capacity you currently have for collaboration and autonomy. Crucially, this isn’t just about my interpretation of your capacity; it is about your interpretation of it, too. How do we ascertain that? That is a collaborative piece we work on together.
True autonomy requires support, and it requires practice. If you are in the early stages of coming into contact with your own autonomy, it is my job to sense into that and provide support that is deeply meaningful without becoming overwhelming. I take entirely different approaches with different clients; some thrive on highly structured sessions with check-ins at the beginning, middle, and end while they safely build up their comfort with autonomy in a protected environment, while others prefer a light check-in from time to time to build confidence in their choices. And, also there may be variation within that process itself…we’re not machines and building capacity for collaboration and autonomy, especially when it is not something we’re used to, is going to be fluctuating.
To give you a very practical example of how this philosophy filters through everything I do: when people sign up for my Mewsletter the unsubscribe button reads: “You are free to leave at any time and welcome to return at any time. I respect your choices and uphold your autonomy!”
That is my bottom line.