Making your vision board a reality - How to build an online community and find your tribe.

Because we were never meant to do this human thing alone.

As a Neurodivergent woman, being in any relationship feels difficult and confusing at times.

Struggles include picking up on social cues and learning how to fit in and be accepted. I am fascinated by people whilst also wanting to hide away. As a child, I struggled to make friends for the first few years of school. I have vivid memories of walking around the playground holding the teacher’s hand because I hadn’t connected with any of the other kids. I don’t know if I tried too hard to make any, but the playground felt like an unsafe space. It felt big, noisy, and overwhelming.

As I got older I learned that having friends meant being liked, and it made the whole school experience a little easier. The kid who sits on her own at lunch is the kid who gets bullied, ostracised, and pointed at. All that attention seemed scarier to me than putting myself out there and speaking to people. Eventually, I got the hang of the whole friendship thing. I learned how to mirror people, bending and shaping myself to fit the mould. The saying goes people like people who are like them. So that was my strategy, to be like them.

By high school, I was a chameleon of sorts. I had one main friendship group, but could also speak with ease to different sorts of groups. The Emo’s, the Musical kids, the Geeks, the Sporty ones. Thankfully, this ability got me through school relatively unscathed, made me pretty popular, and guaranteed that nobody would draw too much attention to me and my differences (which I had learned to mask).

It wasn’t until my twenties that I began to pay the price for my shape-shifting abilities. By twenty I had no clue who I was, what I wanted, what I liked, or what I was supposed to do with my life. I had completely lost myself in boyfriends and friendships that I felt completely invisible.

I decided to start discovering who I was outside of other people and their expectations of me.