Your Own Nutritious Solo Soup
Realising Your Needs When They've Been Invalidated All Your Life
I’ve come out to the cafe (for the second time today!) to start writing this newsletter. I thought I was more likely to get it done with a gentle background hubbub and a ham and cheese croissant I haven’t had to assemble. And because I’ve got a day of work-y Zooms in my office, I wanted to make some sort of demarcation between modes. I am currently feeling ambivalent about living on my own I notice. This ebbs and flows. But I would credit it with helping facilitate the amount of unmasking I’ve been able to do, particularly in the last couple of years while I’ve also been single.
Even my morning cafe visits - which I realise are partly about getting a dopamine hit to wake me into the day (that’s the walk and the company, albeit at a cafe-distance, and the coffee) feel like an expression of a neurodivergent need (do I have to call everything a neurodivergent need though, isn’t it just a need, or a strong preference?). I used to quite like a morning dream-exchange but it’s possible that me at my most unmasked doesn’t talk for an hour or so after waking. I seem to not schedule Zooms or calls until then. I also feel so much better on the days when I get to wake up without an alarm, or on someone else’s sleep schedule. (Even if I do live with someone else in the future, it’s hard to imagine wanting to share a bedroom again).
I love eating out because then I don’t have to make or plan it (I almost see this as an AuDHD-tax) but seem to have managed to find a repertoire of vaguely nutritious meals I can make which don’t require too much thought or planning or effort (quite a lot of frying happens still, but it might be fish frying at least). This has been a hard-won learning. I didn’t used to think I’d move on past ten years of marriage with a husband who was happy to take on all meal planning, shopping and making while I went out to hunt wildebeest/do poems. I now only shop at the Co-op which is five minutes walk away. It’s possible that if I wasn’t recognising my actual needs, I might still be forcing myself to do a Big Shop in a supermarket, as it’s cheaper and there’s more choice. Forcing myself to walk round fluorescent-light, visual-overwhelm hell (though with many, many more biscuit options). I can also wax lyrical for longer than most people would require about my Tefal Easy Soup. Essentially a boiling cylinder into which you can chuck stock, various vegetables and spices until, half an hour later, soup miraculously appears. It would only be more perfect if it also cleared itself so that you didn’t sometimes find green mouldy squash soup in it after several weeks in which you have forgotten that your soup maker or indeed the concept of soup exists.
My flat is a quiet haven where I can recharge - mostly by reading, scrolling or watching the hour (or at most two) of telly I seem to be able to manage per day. But given that hyper-focusing on a conversational topic or processing things by chatting, or being distracted by someone else or physical touch are all also things that can be nourishing, then living alone doesn’t allow such casual access to those things. (How would it work in future I wonder, now that I know that “Only when I want those things/have the spoons for them” is when I would want them. I suppose it does speak to the need for the open, clear, communicative relationship I would eventually want to co-construct).
**
After a pause for Zooms, I am now in my flat finishing this, having put my swirly Galactic light projector on, which probably only has a calmer effect when it’s darker really, but it’s nice to imagine a portal to another universe on your wall at any time. One of the calls was with Nic King, co-host of our podcast Neurotypicals Don't Juggle Chainsaws and we were talking about ways to get people to recognise the concept of neurodiversity as a natural and positive element of nature - which her education programme for young people Neurobears does- by using bears and which I’m experimenting with doing soon using creative writing workshops about trees. Nic casually said “It’s good to allow people to think about their needs with a bit of distance. Because imagine, as a neurodivergent woman taking your needs seriously. Their needs have been invalidated all their lives”. Flippin heck, that felt like a stark and true statement for a Wednesday afternoon Zoom. I had been thinking about how I was lucky compared to many people- to only have my needs and the needs of a half-dead plant to focus on in my living space. No partner or children or other dependents. And yet, taking that stark statement on board, its true that my needs were often invalidated by my family growing up or in workspaces or by partners- but I also didn’t know what they were. And now I’m finding out I do have a chance of fulfilling them without being pulled and torn by the needs of multiple other people who might have been used to me being a particular, other way.
I don’t quite want to think of it as “getting ready” to be in a relationship where I can be better at the dance of not losing myself in someone else’s needs, nor invalidating theirs. Ideally I’d be as content on my own as not. Or at least, as able to live a life where I’m thriving and flourishing like nutritious, simmering soup, not the mouldy detritus at the bottom of the cylinder. I’m definitely a lot closer to that than I used to be. Outside of my living space, I have coffees with friends, go to meditation classes, have some intense bursts of work as a poet and performer which can involve meeting dozens of people at once, and only occasionally have lockdown flashbacks where the gaping sense of existential loneliness I felt was probably a revealed glimpse of the bedrock of being for many of us neurodivergent people who have never “quite” fitted where they are and would not necessarily be salved by co-habiting with other humans.
What seems to assuage that bedrock of loneliness is feeling more connected to my self in a way that allows me to be more connected to others too. When we’ve got a stronger sense of our own needs then we’re less likely to be steamrollered, squashed or Easy-Souped into shapes that don’t fit and into the consequent alienation from a life we could be living. It’s not that I’m not still going to wonder whether there’s some perfect “other evening” I could be having tonight (unless I go to Buddhist class which is all about shutting down such bollocks) but at least I’m actively involved in some processes that lead to something a lot nearer to “healthy”need-knowing than in the past.
It is hard not to feel somewhat envious of your life alone. I know this is horrid of me in several ways, but I try to tell the truth (ND trait, or just me?). My family are almost certainly ND as well, but not in the same ways as me so it can be a hive of sensory/emotional meltdowns on a regular basis. I quite often wish I lived just with the cat. He is my favourite family member. Yes, Ibelieve I am a terrible mother - yes that's another thing, being an ND person parenting an ND child (and husband) is awful, but I think all parenting is probably awful really. Sorry about my negative comment. I am depressed and in the middle of a migraine, and, quite frankly, sick of feeling like an alien monster.
I identified with all of this. Living alone has been life changing for me the past couple of years in terms of allowing me to decompress from the world, but it's taken me until my mid 30s to allow myself to take my own needs seriously. And I still have a lot of work to do figuring out how I can be close to people without losing myself in their needs and ignoring my own.