01/06/2026
I’ve been making a lot of these funny little “I did not suddenly…” posts lately.
Partly because they make me laugh.
Partly because neurodivergent people are very good at laughing at the exact things that are quietly ruining us.
But underneath the humour, there is a pattern I keep coming back to.
A lot of us do not actually “suddenly” get overwhelmed.
We do not suddenly lose capacity.
We do not suddenly become irritable.
We do not suddenly stop coping.
We do not suddenly need to disappear into a quiet room and become furniture.
Usually, there were clues.
Tiny ones.
The light was too bright.
The noise had been building.
The email took more effort than it should have.
The small talk had used up more than expected.
The decision-making had started to feel sticky.
Words were getting harder to reach.
Everything was starting to feel a bit too close.
But because we are used to pushing through, we often don’t treat those clues as useful information.
We treat them as things to ignore.
We call it being dramatic.
We call it being lazy.
We call it being bad at life.
We call it needing to try harder.
Then we hit the wall and wonder why it came from nowhere.
That is the bit I’m interested in.
Not just the wall.
The part before the wall.
The pattern before the crash.
The early signs that capacity is dropping before the outside world can see anything is wrong.
The memes are funny because they’re true.
But they’re also tiny pieces of a bigger reframe:
Maybe we are not as random as we thought.
Maybe our nervous systems have been giving us data for years.
Maybe the problem was not that we had no warning signs.
Maybe the problem was that nobody taught us how to read them.
That is the part Normal Zebra Method keeps circling back to.
Look earlier.
Not because everything can be prevented. Not because we can become perfectly regulated people with colour-coded routines and suspiciously clean kitchens.
But because the earlier we notice the load, the more chance we have of lowering it before we end up on the floor wondering how socks, emails, fluorescent lights, and being perceived managed to defeat us again.
So yes, I’ll keep making the funny ones.
Because sometimes humour is the least threatening way to tell the truth.
