06/10/2026
🤦🏼♀️Wednesday- Whatever we’re calling it 😂
Follow up from yesterday:
I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was going to hit “post” yesterday.
But since I did, I’ve had messages and comments from women sharing their own experiences with me. Women saying “me too.” Women saying they hadn’t realised other people felt the same way. Women who simply said “thank you, I don’t feel so alone.”
And honestly, that is exactly why these conversations matter.
Because when so many women recognise themselves in the same story, perhaps we need to stop treating each experience as though it happened in isolation.
There’s another layer to this that I think we need to talk about, particularly for neurodivergent women and for people who grew up around domestic and family violence.
Some of us were more vulnerable to experiencing abuse long before we understood why.
Neurodivergent people experience disproportionately high rates of sexual violence and abuse within intimate relationships. People who grow up exposed to DFV are also at increased risk of experiencing violence in their own relationships later in life.
Not because neurodivergence causes abuse.
Not because growing up around DFV means you’re destined to repeat it.
And absolutely not because a victim did something to cause what happened to them.
Abuse remains the responsibility of the person choosing to abuse.
But think about what some of us learned growing up.
Walking on eggshells can feel normal. Keeping someone else happy can feel like safety. Love and fear can become tangled together. You learn to monitor moods, minimise your own needs and question whether you’re overreacting.
Then add neurodivergence.
Taking people at their word. Missing hidden intentions. Masking. People pleasing. Difficulty recognising manipulation. A lifetime of being told you’re too sensitive, you’ve misunderstood, you’re overreacting or you’ve read the situation wrong.
That’s a pretty useful combination of vulnerabilities for someone who wants to exploit them.
And then there’s something else I’ve been thinking about.
Justice.
Many neurodivergent people describe an incredibly strong response to unfairness and injustice. I certainly do.
I don’t have to know the person. I don’t need it to be happening in my town. I don’t need to have experienced exactly what they have experienced.
My brain just goes: THIS IS WRONG. WHY IS NOBODY FIXING THIS?
And lately, that’s where I’m struggling.
The world doesn’t feel like it’s being taken care of.
We carry violence, misogyny, war, abuse and injustice around in a little rectangle in our hands. We can watch someone’s worst day unfold on the other side of the world while we’re drinking our morning coffee.
And when you have your own history sitting underneath that, plus a brain with a particularly enthusiastic justice department 🫣🤭, sometimes it becomes a lot.
I’m learning that caring doesn’t mean I have to consume all of it.
I can care deeply without reading every comment.
I can advocate where I have influence without carrying responsibility for everything I cannot change.
I can turn the phone off.
I can sit in the dirt.
I can borrow the nervous system of an animal for a while.
And maybe most importantly, we can talk about these things.
Because judging by the number of people who reached out yesterday, there are an awful lot of us who have spent portions of our lives thinking we were the only one.
We’re not. ❤️
