A mothball called girl

2026

I made loads of friends when I was a kid.
I made friends on paper, or, in a pinch, out of mothballs or the lining of my horrible 90s cropped puffer jacket. I ripped the stuffing out through a hole in the pocket and rolled it into balls until it was deflated and flat on one side. I’d talk to the balls of stuffing when I was lonely.

I had a set of five cedar mothballs that I coloured with felt tips. I split them into emotions, like real life three-dimensional emojis. There was an orange happy ball - I drew a smiling face on him. There was a blue sad ball, a green jealous ball, a red angry ball. Curiously, the pink ball was ‘girl’, a neutral expression with a Ms. Pac-Man-like pink bow, as if feeling ‘like a girl’ was a fleeting emotional state, something I visited. Something that only happened sometimes.

I remember being 7 or 8 years old, stood alone on the school field, pulling the lining out of my coat. For reasons I can’t recall, I’d been desperate to start wearing berets. My mum bought me a black Kangol one from Debenhams and, wearing it at school, I really thought I was the shit. It’s kind of hysterical imagining what I must have looked like, considering that this was me.

Me and some of the sort of thing I liked to wear. Botched approximation of a smile: model’s own.

That day, Billy, a boy from my class, walked right up to me and asked me to my face why I was so weird. I hadn’t considered it. Dunno, am I?

When I was very young, younger than the above, I went through phases where I wouldn’t answer to my own name, preferring to dress up as characters instead. I’d wake up and decide to be Noddy or Tiger Lily or Basil the Great Mouse Detective. The latter involved me walking around in public in a furry trapper hat, holding a dessert spoon in place of the magnifying glass I didn’t have. Mum made me walk ten paces behind her, and rightly so.

I wasn’t interested in other children very much. I was inattentive and disruptive in class and my mum wasn’t part of the mum group, so I was never invited to parties. Teachers told my mum I behaved as if I was deaf, preferring to wander off and direct my own learning instead of bothering with the parts of the day that didn’t interest me. I got in trouble in my first few hours of being there, because I, having already learned how to read, had been used to getting as many books as I wanted from the local library. At school, there was a rule that you could only have one reading book at a time, and that rule didn’t make sense to me. I took too many books and inadvertently drew attention to myself, being disobedient. I fidgeted. I didn’t want to participate in imaginative play with other kids, I wanted to build displays out of toys and then look at them. I did things like repeatedly taking my big 90s granny glasses on and off, putting them back on upside down. This was seen as attention-seeking, disruptive behaviour, even if that wasn’t really my intention. I soon gained a reputation as a problem child. This meant that other children would often use me as a scapegoat, telling the grown-ups I’d done bad things I hadn’t done. Once I was accused of spitting in someone’s lunch (I didn’t even eat in the same room as her!) and her mum followed us home shouting abuse and threatening us, so I had to start getting picked up from the office because the playground was unsafe. I was 5 years old. All of this meant I wasn’t invited to anyone’s house to play, ever. I don’t think I ever cared. I had no interest in it. All I cared about was Biker Mice from Mars.

When I was a little bit older, I started to see how my playground pariah status affected things, when kids started saying cruel things and my mum was upset with the way other parents treated her, I realised I was supposed to try to fit in. I liked learning pop dance routines. I wanted to be seen as normal. I definitely wanted to avoid being bullied, so when I was 8, I tried to align myself with the popular girls. I noticed they only had 4 people when they were learning the routines to Spice Girls songs, so I said if they needed a Scary Spice, I’d fill in, despite, well, you know. I’d braid my hair at night to sleep in and then backcomb it in the morning to try and get it close to Mel B’s texture. Look, it was a different time! They let me do that for a while, but I didn’t gel with them. I didn’t understand the hierarchies and the rules of being in a group of little girls, or why they would invite me to play with them one day, then collectively decide to shut me out the next. What was it about me that left me standing on the periphery all the time? I gave up on it and retreated back into my internal world, where things made sense.

I loved - I still love - my internal world. I am, admittedly, an obsessive. Back then, it was pop music. I played my CD singles in my bedroom while recording myself talking over them onto cassettes with my Talkboy, pretending I was a radio DJ, listing off facts about each artist. I’d get my mum to buy me Smash Hits and read it cover to cover. At that time, each issue came with a perforated pull-out consisting of a 9x9 set of collectable lyrics cards, so you could learn all the words to the hits of the day. I memorised them. Try me now. I can’t sing, I sound like foxes fucking, but when dementia comes for me one day, the last thing I’ll still be able to recall, most likely, is every word of all of this absolute shit. We all know our Boyzone and Billie, but how many people know their E-male, Alda and Fab?

I was lucky enough to have cable TV in my bedroom too, so I whiled away the hours watching cartoons and music TV. Writing this, I realise how much my parents, who were young and not high-earning, must have sacrificed to keep their nerdy little only child hooked up with tech and media. My mum had three jobs at one point.

While the girls in my class had posters of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp on their walls, I developed my first crushes on Jarvis Cocker and, er, Eddy Temple-Morris from MTV’s Up for It.* There was absolutely zero supervision involved and I saw a lot of things I shouldn’t but it was the 90s. All the children were watching Eurotrash on mute.

*If we want to go back even further, my first crush was actually Big Ben - toddler Bex used to snog postcards of the clock tower and beg her parents to take her to London to feed him crisps by waving them at him in the air. I think it was the bongs I liked. Phwoar.

The first time I ever hyperventilated from crying was when my dad caught me and my older male cousins watching an adult game show where a topless woman had to jump and catch balls in a basketball hoop she was wearing around her waist. This was almost certainly L!VE TV. It’s funny to think that my dad was working for the Inland Revenue to fund his eight-year-old daughter watching Kelvin MacKenzie’s tax-skirting tabloid trash upstairs. I still got to keep the TV.

For my 9th birthday, all my dreams came true and I got the sickest upgrade to the big old TV in my bedroom - a bright yellow Bush 1433. I remember it came in multiple colours. I can’t find much online. I am now scouring eBay and archive.org for the 1997 Tandy catalogue.

Ah, got it. I can’t tell you how much I adored that set.

If I wasn’t racking up a hideous phone bill making requests for Aqua on The Box, I was busy completing Crash Bandicoot, Croc and, my favourite, the point-and-click adventure game Discworld. I’m still not sure I had the capacity to fully understand half the jokes in that game, but I LOVED it. I loved it so much I would make my mum get on the bus to Lakeside in Thurrock on Saturdays so I could ask the man who worked in Gamestation what to do next when I was stuck. I still, to this day, remember a tonne of strings of information from this time. Fire up Crash Bandicoot on a PS1 now and I’ll unlock every level and gem for you, without needing to look it up.

My enjoyment of primary school very much depended on how kind my teacher was to me that year. Some years were good, if a teacher appreciated my sense of humour and blurting of facts during the day. Others were gut-wrenching and terrible. My year 5 teacher was so vile to me, it was the first time I remember feeling something deeper and more lingering than sadness, something deep, in my stomach, that made me wonder if I should be dead instead of alive and causing all these problems. I was ten years old, you know? I wasn’t even trying to cause harm. I can’t even remember 99% of the specific things I did that seemed to enrage everyone around me. I’d do it all by accident. I remember kicking a mirror in the school bathroom to see how much force it would take to break, and then being terrified when it did break, because I was so focused on my little physics experiment that I hadn’t factored in what I would do if there were consequences. Things like that.

The one place I felt comfortable and safe, if I haven’t illustrated that by now, was in media - music, TV, games. Then, by 1999, I was online, and that opened up a whole new world of research for my little brain to bathe in. I liked Pokémon a lot. I had a Game Boy Color and all the guides and even a GameShark so I could cheat. I caught a Mew that way, which wasn’t possible in the game otherwise. I also attended a promotional event at Bluewater where you could obtain a legit Mew onto your game pak by putting it into a Mew Machine (here I go down another rabbit hole, brb). This meant I had two different Mews in one save, and I think they even had two different sprites? I thought this might make me cool at school. It did not.

It made me cool online though, in Mighty Misty’s Pokémon Chat (I wish I could find this, I think it was an Angelfire site). I impressed someone I knew only as ‘Necromancer’, my first exciting experience of talking to a ‘boy’ (who knows) online.

By the time I was 11, I had fully given up on having friends at school. I had also read every work of fiction held in my primary school library, like an unbearable little Matilda, so I’d sit alone in the classroom at breaktimes, teaching myself Japanese from a textbook, drawing the Sailor Senshi, and learning all the words to Moonlight Densetsu. In the evenings, I’d log on to the Fox Kids forum on dial-up and write essays about how the Sailor Moon English dub was censored and terrible and we should really be watching the Japanese original so as not to miss out on all the fun stuff like nudity and lesbians and magical gender swapping. I don’t think my account lasted long.

All of this nostalgia-laden preamble is to say: I was a fucking odd kid.

I had advanced abilities in some areas and baffling gaps in others. While all of this was going on, I did not master things other children seemed to have mastered. I couldn’t tie my shoelaces, hold a pencil right, tell the time on an analogue clock or use cutlery properly. I couldn’t play sports or ride a bike or climb a tree. Going to the supermarket made me misbehave in odd ways.

I’d been referred to CAMHS at some point, I think when I was 6 or 7, and I attended multiple sessions about my behaviour, in a room with my parents that had a camera and a two-way mirror. I would always sit in the far corner of the room. When my mum asked me why, I told her it was because it was the only part of the room the camera couldn’t see me. By the end of these sessions, they told my parents they had no suggestions - they would simply have to accept the fact that I was ‘a naughty little girl’.

So you might know where all this is going, but nobody did back then.

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I was scared to go to secondary school. I didn’t want to grow up. In the summer before I went to Dartford Grammar School for Girls - my lofty, turreted new home - I attended a course for, I was told, Gifted and Talented girls! We did odd things, like having to go and wallpaper an alleyway in Islington with aluminium foil, an art project. I really enjoyed it. Years later, on my wedding day, my old school mate Holly - who has written beautifully in the past about the Kentish grammar school experience as a working class kid - told me that this was in fact a course for girls they thought were poorly socialised and would need extra help making the adjustment and fitting in. I never knew.

Me and Elle were sat next to each other on our first day at DGGS because our last names were next to each other in the alphabet, and I, being great at making friends normally, introduced myself by telling her “Hi, I’m Rebecca. I can do an impression of a pig.” I lifted my nose up with my finger and snorted. Apparently this worked on her because she’s been one of my best friends since that very first day. We cemented our friendship by setting a lab bench on fire by accidentally turning the gas on the wrong Bunsen burner tap, which kind of set the tone for the rest of our school days and the many ‘behavioural concerns’ letters sent home.

My parents listened to a lot of good stuff. When it came to finding my own, I speedran my juvenile tastes over the course of a year or so, upward from The Offspring through pop-punk to Weezer and Jimmy Eat World and out into the deep. By the age of 13 I had become a completely insufferable snob for post-hardcore and what was then known as emo, digging through the internet to find more impressive and obscure names to tippex onto my messenger bag (Milemarker, The Jazz June, Small Brown Bike, anyone?). I thought perhaps this would mean that somebody really cool would strike up a conversation with me on the bus and save me from my life. Instead, I was kicked and spat at on the bus by a kid from round the corner whose actual, real name was James Bond.

I just started to lean into it. I became a self-identified Freak.

As every adolescent does, I had started to feel some big feelings. I’d found spaces online perfect for a girl my age to express them. This was the age of platforms like Livejournal and Diaryland, so I started to keep a diary online where I’d talk about my friends and my anxieties and the concerns I had as a teenager. I still have access to this. It is useful to me now in the sense that it has helped me prove to myself that there is a consistent through-line in my life for certain traits. But it’s a hard read, and not just because it’s earnest and cringey.

I wrote about being afraid to be in public, struggling to make eye contact, rehearsing conversations I could have with Elle ahead of time, putting them into play if I thought someone was looking at us and we needed to ‘act natural’. I wrote about never wearing my glasses in public, walking around not being able to see, because that way, it was harder to tell if people were looking at me and laughing at me, and it helped me to feel safer. I wrote about how I always felt like an actress, like I was being fake the whole time I existed. I wrote about being angry about being placed in a textiles set for art at school when all I wanted to do was draw and paint. I got in trouble for drawing in class instead of sewing because I knew my fine motor skills were shoddy. At one point, I even typed up lines from my Year 8 school report to berate myself with. I noted how my form tutor had written that I struggled to form friendships within her class. She framed this as a kind of personal choice and moral failing. My mum said I had to try and be more social, or I wouldn't get pocket money. Must try harder!

At school, I had become practised at appearing functional when I had to. I would perform the right things to say and do so that people liked me. So much so, that I started to worry at night that I was evil, because I was fake, and I'd ruminate over and over on what the difference was between appearing to be something convincingly and actually being it. I didn't think it mattered what I felt like on the inside at all, as long as the outside was tightly controlled and received as pleasant enough. I'd stew for hours, wondering if there might be nothing real beneath my constructions, that a performance sustained for long enough might replace the self, or worse - prove the self was never there. The line between those things was so blurry. I worried that, because I couldn't seem to 'be myself' or connect with anyone properly, it meant there was something bad they could smell on me that I couldn't wash off. I worried that all this introspection meant I must be a manipulative and self-involved narcissist. Maybe that's what people could smell. I really yearned for connection, though, more than anything else in the world.

For the first year of secondary school, it was just me and Elle. Sometimes we’d mooch around Bluewater together, wearing matching bright green corduroy trousers from Punkyfish in Camden or matching black maxi skirts from Topshop (until my dad joked we looked like the Plymouth Brethren).

In the summer of 2002, the two of us got the train to Brixton Academy to see Jimmy Eat World. I was thirteen. I had agonised over what to wear and accessorised with wrist-sweatbands I'd made by cutting the tops off a pair of cheap sports socks, because I'd read online that this was the correct thing to have if you were going to be emo (??) The Promise Ring were supporting and me and Elle were furious that nobody around us knew who they were. We jumped up and down to Happiness is all the Rage and we bought t-shirts from the merch stall. Elle's was brown with a vector drawing of a girl with wavy brown hair just like mine, wearing an orange version of the shirt I'd bought for myself, so it was like she had a shirt of me. We were kind of enmeshed.

I felt alive at gigs in a way I didn't anywhere else. The same girl who rehearsed conversations in advance would go into a loud dark room full of strangers and feel completely at home. I still mouthed along to every word (so everyone around would know they were dealing with a serious pro), still made sure I was doing the right things, but underneath that, a switch was flipped on. I liked to feel the bass in my chest. I liked the anticipation of waiting for the lights to drop. It meant everything to me and I made it my whole personality.

Eventually Elle made a friend, Charley, in another class, and that friend knew other people, and then we had a little gang of six or so similarly afflicted misfits. My teenage years, like so many others, were an exercise in wearing my differences like armour to tell the world that it can’t punish me for losing a race I’ve already opted out of running in.

I grew up in the kind of place you’d be yelled at and sometimes physically threatened in the street for looking different. It happened, but often I would just laugh and agree. I was trying to communicate that calling me names didn’t work on me. I was so used to it. Tell me something I don’t know. Occasionally this kind of unfazed reaction would be interpreted as a challenge, and make things worse. One time, a girl kicked me so hard between the legs outside a betting shop, for no reason other than being a mosher, I was bruised purple and I was worried it might have made me infertile. I still just took it all stoically, like it was just noise. I didn’t speak back, I didn’t fight back, I’d just tell myself I was misunderstood because I was better than them, hope to escape one day, and cry at night to sad songs.

Life at home became very complicated in so many ways I shouldn't go into here. What I will say is that by December 2003, just after my fifteenth birthday, I found myself standing in a Las Vegas wedding chapel as one of two witnesses at my mum’s wedding to someone she had met on the internet, who was only six years older than me, and she had only known in person for one week. I remember thinking it would make a good ‘bit’ for when I got back to school, a funny story I had to practice telling over and over in my head, of course. I feel bad flattening my mum into a chaotic anecdote - she had her own life, her own reasons - and that marriage lasts to this day. She’s fucking wonderful, she’s my best friend, but, it was the kind of destabilising thing that was happening around me while I was trying to become a person and it was hard for me.

When I got back home, Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand had just come out. I went to Charley's house, played it on repeat, and drank vodka from the bottle until I was sick.

I really wanted to fall in love. I wanted to know what all those songs were about. For whatever reason, the only real criteria I had when it came to trying to get a boyfriend was that I wanted to be with someone who had the same music taste as me, because I really wanted someone to talk to about music, and to have a kind of dreadful indie teen fantasy romance around it with. I lived in my head all the time and I had this constant soundtrack so I dreamed of someone who'd come live inside it with me. It could be thought of as the kind of short-sighted and immature goal of a teenager more concerned with the idea of romance than the reality of another person. I wanted social validation, proof of normality, obviously, but more than that I wanted something to make my inner life feel less stranded.

I didn't have much luck with that in my real-life catchment area of the local park and my friends’ bedrooms, so I looked online. I used to talk to a man on MSN when I was 14. He knew I was 14, and I knew he was in his 30s. He stopped talking to me because I would answer his questions without remembering to ask any back or add detail. Just yes, no, okay. Talking to me was so boring he couldn’t hack it and one day he wrote “you know what they say, never meet your heroes” before blocking me. Imagine being too boring to groom.

I then had a kind of online relationship with a boy my own age who lived in Virginia. It lasted for a few years. I met him on Myspace. He told me he had Asperger’s, as it was called at the time. I spent lunchtimes at school sat in the IT room checking to see if he'd messaged me. Of course, Myspace was banned at school, so, I went as far as working out one of the teacher's passwords (this was not exactly MI5 work - it was three characters long and basically his own name) and using his account to access it, until that backfired when he was investigated because I'd distributed that information to multiple other girls, and made it look like he was looking at teenagers online on his breaks. I had to own up and he told me that if I wasn't a schoolgirl, he'd have punched me. I will never forget being sat there in a room with him, me and three friends. He told us “I want you to look at me with your own two eyes” - then, when he panned round to Kat’s side-swept emo fringe - “well, one eye - very fashionable”. lol. We got suspended for a week and my mum said she'd always known it would be 'white-collar crime' with me. I’m being glib but it was awful. As a stupid kid, the only thing I was thinking about was getting through the firewall. It genuinely didn’t occur to me what it might look like for that teacher until he was being questioned about it.

Myspace-boy and I used to fall asleep on the phone to each other and send each other burned CDs through the post, swapping names like Elliott Smith and The Delgados. We fell out quite spectacularly when I started going out more and speaking to him less. I've always kept this email he sent me when we "broke up". It's really horrible, a merciless attack on my character, but deep down, I knew there were bits of truth in it, so I kept it accessible in my old hotmail account. Not so much because I thought he was right about me in full, but because he’d hit a fear I already had so squarely. An excerpt -

you're just another cardboard cut-out sycophantic piece of shit who doesn't care about betterment on a personal level but is so consumed with everyone elses' ideas of you, what they're desirous of and what you can do to fit the mold of normalcy. that's all you're concerned about and all you'll ever be concerned about. fuck you forever you dumb bitch.

When I think about the sad and scared young person I was, I mainly feel protective. I wish I could go back and help her. There’s a lot to complain about when it comes to the absence of care and understanding in the 00s education system. I had one meeting about my mental health at secondary school, because I got caught cutting myself in the toilets when I was feeling overwhelmed. I’d stolen a Stanley knife from the DT room to do it with. I read the words ‘strange girl’ circled in biro, upside down on the notes the deputy head had in front of him. I asked why it said that. He popped the paper in his drawer and, flustered, stammered ‘oh, that’s not about you’. He said he’d follow up another time. Nobody followed up. As long as I was getting A’s and showing up to most of my classes, they gave no shits. I got through school by myself, with poor but effective coping methods, believing that I was indeed just a freakish and offputting person, and that this could not be helped. It was my being, my lot in life, my fate, so, I embraced that. I listened to the Smiths on tape, on a 1980s Aiwa walkman instead of an iPod, like a total fucking bellend. I sought oblivion on the streets, in the park, in a jumbo bottle of White Ace and a 10 deck of Mayfair, every weekend. Before the age of 17, I had passed out and thrown up on the streets of Dartford more times than I can count.

I still did alright though. It wasn’t all bad. I got to paint, eventually, and the art room became my second favourite place (after the internet). I had a small group of friends, but those friends made other friends, and so over time I became part of a loose local network of young people. This was back when subcultures still existed, but in a commuter town, you all get lumped together, so the punks, goths, skaters, the emo and indie kids all hung out in a specific corner of the Bluewater shopping centre quarry, drinking blue WKD. I still felt like an alien. I’d still run off to get the bus home sometimes without saying goodbye to anyone, but, I could make myself useful too. I customised a lot of Myspace profiles and pirated Photoshop and made things for people, which is probably the main reason I work in the areas I do now. I found huge solace in art and books and music. I started listening to so many different things (jk it’s all millennial indie bullshit) and going to gigs all the time. I matured, slowly, and remembered how much I genuinely enjoy study and learning, and I got good GCSE results despite being so sad all the time.

Sixth form was even better still, because I could focus on my passions and also go clubbing, and I made another lovely, very close friend - Emmie - in Year 12 after most of my old friends left for the local college. I left grammar school with AAB A-levels, a belief in my academic skills and my love for art. I only wonder now what would have happened if I’d also had support and understanding from the adults I saw every day for all that time.

I even got a real-life boyfriend for a while, who I went out with purely on the basis that he had heard of Neutral Milk Hotel and listened to Dinosaur Jr. He was a bit older than me, he’d been through uni already. I’d meet him after school. Being confronted with the task of having to maintain a romantic relationship with a human being without the mediation of screens made me incredibly anxious. I would do literally anything he said, even if it made me uncomfortable, trying to contort myself into a vision of a fun, desirable girlfriend. He dumped me and went back out with me repeatedly, and I let that happen, failing to realise he was much more into the, mmm, services I could provide than my hopes, dreams or personality. I’d write emergency topics of conversation in my notebook to return to if I found myself running out of things to say to him on the phone. It didn’t last, obviously, but that’s normal. I felt relieved to have hit a milestone of normalcy, to have been in some way publicly chosen, even if he called me Waynetta* and I was never allowed to go to his house or meet his parents.

*I take this as a compliment now because Kathy Burke is the coolest.

Things were complicated in 2006-2007 because my mum had moved across the country with her husband and she was desperate for me to follow her in the middle of my A-Levels. I stood my ground and waited until I finished my last year, but I moved up immediately after and went to Warwickshire College for my art foundation year. I thought I would easily find my kind of people on an art foundation course, but I was very much an outsider, and softly bullied.

My sense of humour didn’t really land with the new people I met. I'd moved from a damp-ridden rotten mid-terrace in Dartford to the middle-class regency rendering of Royal Leamington Spa, and this was so jarring, I didn’t know how to navigate it or who I was meant to be to fit in, so I joked to them that I lived on the one shit street in their lovely town. That didn't go down like I thought it would. They just kind of wrinkled their noses at me.

It was all so odd because, growing up in Dartford, I used to get called posh all the time, and I put that down to the things I said, my vocabulary, and speaking strangely because I was raised by the television. It was always strange to me because I grew up in the same situation as the kids who called me it. I played in the same mysteriously blood-spattered stairwells. It wasn’t my circumstances that made me seem posh to them, it was something else, these other markers that made me seem different, made me seem perhaps condescending or aloof. I saw myself as one of Pulp’s Mis-shapes. A class of our own, my love.

When I went to Leamington, I met proper middle-class people on that college course and experienced the opposite treatment. I was a chav in their eyes. So - where the hell was I going to fit? Always somewhere in the middle, neither one thing nor another. A square peg. I remember talking about needing to get a job and one of them asking me why on earth I’d ‘want’ to do that. One of them liked to hide my cigarettes and mock my accent, telling me things like ‘I’d explain my work to you, but I don’t think you’d understand it’. There was a night out, and by this point in time I'd become very used to the millennial ritual of taking a digicam to the club in order to put all the photos on Facebook to prove you were a cool person with friends. I had double the reason to try and prove that in a new place on my own. I very much overdid it, and the group of young artists I'd tried to befriend held a meeting and informed me I was being evicted from their social group for being cringey and overfamiliar. I was trying much too hard and reading none of the cues, which is obvious to me now and was invisible to me then. It was a shit year.

I tried to find online spaces that felt safer, like the world of Blythe doll collecting and posting on Flickr. That became an obsession for a time and I met some wonderful women doing that. I had absolutely no qualms about meeting up in public to do photoshoots with dollies at the big age of 21.

Young me and my Goldie, Allie Vimto. You would not believe how much this doll is worth. Sickening!

I got a job at Next on the shop floor but I was pretty swiftly ‘promoted’ to being the stockroom and office manager there. I say ‘promoted’ because I’m not actually sure I got a payrise, I think they were just desperate to get me and my flat affect as far away from the general public as possible. I ran that shit, as they say, like the fucking navy. I loved it. I was upstairs, alone, playing my own CDs in the stockroom, meticulously organising clothing by type and SKU. Not a thing was out of place. Replenishment was done at lightning speed. I did all the admin and cashing up, and then the store manager also got me to do her auditing forms, so I was the only person performing security checks... on myself. I genuinely could have gotten away with stealing hundreds of pounds in cash, definitely enough for a Kenner Blythe or two... but I wouldn’t have slept at night if I had.

Eventually I needed more money to fund my expensive doll-collecting habits so I applied for an office job doing credit control, despite having no idea what credit control was. I was so nervous in the interview that I still didn’t ask what credit control was, and I picked the skin on my thumb under the desk, and when I came to shake hands at the end, mine was covered in blood. Somehow, I got the job anyway. I imagine because nobody else wanted to do it.

On my first day in the big open-plan office, I made a new friend. Again, I’m really good at this, I’m pretty sure one of the first subjects I brought up in conversation was how weirdly beautiful slug sex is. What I had learned by this point was that my way of being was offputting to the vast majority of people, but was an effective and fast-acting litmus test for finding similar oddballs, so I’d throw out insane shit like that to test the water, lighting a little neurodivergent beacon. Billie saw the beacon, thank god she did, because that job was fucking terrible.

I discovered that my role was, essentially, calling up people who had been placed in social housing in off-grid areas requiring expensive alternative fuel, and asking them to pay their overdue gas bills. These people were mostly in estates in remote parts of Wales and Scotland, living on JSA, and here’s me, an English twat doing a telephone voice, asking them if they can cover £2000 of backdated bills or I’ll have to cut them off. I tried to be as lenient as I could possibly get away with. I had one really creative woman on my ledger who seemed to experience a different traumatic emergency every single week, and told me she was in a women’s shelter for domestic violence the same day she was posting “barbecue with hubby xx” photos on Facebook, but I played along.

I became very concerned about an elderly woman I called often who was showing serious signs of dementia, and would think I was her estranged daughter in the middle of our conversations, She had no understanding of her own debt, so I contacted her local social services to explain the situation and ask for a welfare check. This was in breach of company policy because I told a third party she was in debt. That part was all they cared about, I got threatened with disciplinary and decided to pack the job in instead. The lack of empathy in that place was absolutely unreal.

---

I decided I should go to university. I wanted to make art again and time was ticking on. I picked Manchester School of Art, and I’m going to skip most of that because I’ve written about it already. What I will say is that it is interesting to look back at the work I made then through the lens I now have. At the time, I thought I was making art about a universal human experience in a mediated world - fragmentation, flattened identity, the artifice of constructing personas both online and off.

Now, I look at the bright colours, the goop, the materials I chose because I found them comforting on a sensory level, the childhood toys, the literal masks embedded in sculptures. I look at the photos I took of myself, always staring off-screen at something unknowable in the distance, with black unreadable eyes and blank faces. I realise now that everything I have ever made has been about one thing only, and I had no idea what it was when I was making it.

I learned I was somehow pretty comfortable with presenting my work in lecture halls, monologuing to students. It’s something other people might get nervous about, but I was fine. I found it easier than things that should be easy, like having to make small talk with a hairdresser.

I might say this - sometimes, people ask me about my art. They ask me in a kind of sad way, as if to imply that I must have failed or squandered an opportunity because I no longer have gallery shows or celebrity endorsements on Instagram. Don’t get me wrong, I loved that time, I loved making things and I loved being recognised for making them. It was a nice feeling to express myself, to see my ideas made real, to have my name on posters and printouts and to be praised for something, praised for my way of seeing, instead of treated like an aberration. But it was totally unsustainable, and stopping was a choice I made because I finally learned what my own needs are and how to take care of myself in my own way.

At the height of it, I would treat making art like some kind of extreme boot camp. This was hyperfixation. When I was making that work, it became all I could do and all I could think about. I would neglect my basic needs, finding things like eating and sleeping to be irritating disruptions to my flow. It would mean nothing else got done and I got sick. People still ask me why I don’t supplement my income by making blob sculptures anymore, why I don’t still try to monetise my creative work. I never liked doing that because it was never about money-making. I hated having to change my work to make it more likely to sell. Even if I did, making art to sell is a full time job, I have no idea how anybody side-hustles that. I already have a full-time job and that depletes enough of my energy that the only art I can make around that is deadlineless, niche special-interest work and research done at a snail’s pace.

Besides, making things was supposed to be a grounding exercise, a safe harbour, a refuge. The moment it feels like I have to make things because my quality of life depends on it, it becomes an empty, hard slog for me and I lose interest. It’s the reason I seem to drop an idea as soon as I think it’s what people want from me, it feels like external pressure. I just need it to be mine, entirely self-directed, with no strings attached. That’s why. I also was never able to cope with the demands of things like private views, air-kissing the cheeks of gallerists, networking, forming inauthentic professional relationships in the hope that it might get me opportunities, being my own accountant and solicitor and PR executive all at once. I hated that stuff. I felt fake, plastering on smiles in white rooms, knocking back free prosecco to calm my nerves and then talking anxiety-fuelled bollocks I’d regret the next day. I’ve hidden in the bathroom at my own private views, or pretended to fix artwork that wasn’t broken, just to avoid having to make small talk with curators and visitors (A tactic I reprised on my own wedding day). I couldn’t stand feeling exposed, being perceived, having to explain things that were deeply personal in academic, distant ways. I never want to go back.

Looking back now, I definitely think I went through burnout. The period of recuperation that was ushered in by Covid, despite how awful it was for many people, felt like a blessing to me. The relief of everything being cancelled and being told to stay indoors and not socialise is something I look back on quite fondly.

___

At university, in my twenties, I met a fellow mature student. He seemed to know so much about art, and he stayed late all the time, dedicating hours to his work. Because we were both older than the people around us, we didn’t live in halls or go out and get drunk with the other students. We were dedicated, we were there to work. I’d stomp through the corridors and keep to myself and others thought I was serious instead of, you know, scared. I’d stay late too, spending hours injecting dots of thinned paint onto canvas with a syringe until my hands ached, not knowing how to actually talk to him. Instead I’d just make a weird show of myself, stretching to pin the inspirational images I’d printed off Tumblr to the highest bit of the wall, hoping he’d turn around and notice how long my legs are. That lasted a while, until he did finally talk to me. He asked me if I had any sellotape.

We became friends. He was sad, too. He understood how it felt. He loved art and films and music I hadn’t even heard of (wtf). He was older than me - shit, I realised - he was older than my mum’s husband. Hmm. What a weird world. I texted him outside of uni more than I spoke to him inside, but that’s how I got to know him. Then I just kind of followed him around for three years.

It is difficult to write about what happened, but, by the end of a night out during the last few months of university, we were a couple. I moved in with him to a 9-bed HMO in Liverpool, a tiny room full of stuff and clutter that made me feel sick. Things changed between us. He was a heavy solo drinker and a total slob - a totally different person to the one I had known as a friend at uni, I thought. Maybe there were signs I ignored. In third year, just before we got together, he was so upset about breaking up with a first-year he’d been shagging (he was 35) that I wrote his dissertation for him in one night after finishing my own. That’s just what friends do for each other, right? I got him a 2:1. He sulked when I told him I’d got a 1st, so I had to apologise.

Once again, I found myself in a relationship with someone older than me who refused to let me meet their friends or family. I was really anxious and scared to upset him. I seemed to upset him accidentally all the time, and I had nowhere to go and cool off when I did. Life was very unstable, we had absolutely no money. He wouldn’t get a job, so we both lived off my minimum wage earnings from my job at a jeweller’s (up in the cash office of course, not the shop floor). That Christmas, I came home from work and thought we’d been burgled, but it was just him leaving it in a state because he’d decided to go to his brother’s house down south for New Year’s Eve without telling me. He’d left vomit in the carpet for me to clean, socks encrusted with semen on the floor. I remember going to bed early, not knowing that the ships on the Mersey would blast their horns at midnight. I rolled under the bed thinking it was an air raid. I stayed there. I felt safer squashed in the little gap under the bed than I did in it.

I remember he commented that in the first three years I’d known him, I’d never looked him in the eye. He told me I was deeply, severely, mentally unwell. I believed him. Obviously I was, I had always been. There had always been something wrong with me, I knew that. I hadn’t really ever considered the idea that sometimes people tell lies to manipulate, to steer others towards a certain outcome. I thought he was doing me a kindness by telling me the truth I’d always suspected - that I was an evil psychopath. I thought, yes, all the evidence does point that way - so, perhaps this person can finally teach me how to be normal, okay, happy, nice. That’s what I thought. He would refer to my ‘condition’ as being the sole cause of my problems, never telling me what ‘condition’ that supposedly was. I told my female university friends and they begged me to leave him. He found out, and I apologised to him, petrified, sorry I had badmouthed him to them and made him look bad.

I had noticed that I was now living with a constant underlying sense of shame and terror, and I began to blame myself - my ‘illness’ - for feeling it. I thought the feeling was me being mentally ill, a personal failing, rather than simply the effect his words and my new environment were having on me. He would start arguments with me that weren’t really arguments, because I’d never know what they were actually about or what I had done wrong. These arguments were circular, maddening. They could last for up to 8 or 9 hours, so I lost entire nights of sleep, being made to feel that I was completely insane, that I had lost my mind. I truly believed I had. I went to the doctor and explained that I thought I was evil and I felt terrified all the time. He took me through a questionnaire about how many times I’d thought about dying in the last two weeks. He told me that ‘some people have extreme personalities’ and put me on sertraline, which made my thoughts feel slow and foggy, and did nothing to help.

It became so hard to hold on to my sense of self and sanity, my understaning of how life works, all the things I’d figured to be true up until that point. I’d flit between asking myself why this was happening and whether I was being abused, and then telling myself that’s what an abuser would say - that I was flipping the script to absolve myself, and I was the bad one. If I could just listen and learn and be normal, all of this would stop. I lost trust in my own thoughts completely, deferring to him to make all my decisions for me. I think this was the intention. I would panic and apologise for being myself, for being weird, for not understanding how to behave, and ask myself how I could reconstruct myself to keep him happy.

This lasted for about a year, and the only thing that made me come to my senses was when he began phase 2: trying to convince me that my friends and family were all evil terrible people who didn’t have my best interests at heart. One morning, he referred to one of my best friends - Emmie, from sixth form - as ‘that cunt’. Not in the British term-of-endearment way either. I knew this was a lie. She’s the very opposite. She’s an angel, hilarious and kind, clever and loyal. I finally, finally realised that he was trying to break my spirit and then isolate me from my lifelines and that it had been embarrassingly textbook. How could I have taken so long to work it out? I thought I was meant to be smart. I packed up what I could fit in a suitcase, fled to Kent while he was passed out drunk, and never saw him again.

The damage had been done though, and it took me a long time to recover. Even when I was back in Kent, safe and living with my dad, his voice would remain in my head, telling me not to trust my own judgements and making me question everything about myself. I still believed I was evil and I still questioned the truth of the narrative I’ve written above. It is true, but, part of the damage was that I could no longer feel secure in the truth of it without immediately imagining his rebuttal and doubting myself. There are two sides to every story, and I would ask myself what version of the story he would tell, if asked. The effect was so frightening and confusing. I couldn’t get out of bed. I cried all the time.

That August, my granddad passed away from pancreatic cancer. I know grief can do strange things to your mind. I remember being in my dad’s flat. Emmie came over and we tried to order a takeaway, but the doorbell broke and my phone wasn’t working, so it didn’t get delivered. Emmie left. I tried to stream some music but the internet went off. There was a storm. The streetlight outside my window wouldn’t stop flickering. My dad’s alarm clock radio came on in the middle of the night. I called the Samaritans and told them something like ‘Hi, I’m not suicidal but I think my granddad might be haunting me through technology because I’m a bad person’. I knew it sounded crazy. They were really nice to me.

My dad had to move to Bedford for his own complicated family reasons, and so in 2017 I bounced around the country trying to find somewhere safe to live. I had 4 different addresses in as many months, sleeping on a friend’s floor, looking for work, finding a room in a house in Cheetham Hill that only locked from the outside with a landlord that made me feel unsafe. He’d tricked me - when I looked around the house, there seemed to be lots of other people living there, but the next week when I moved in, it was just me and him and everyone else was gone without much of an explanation. He asked me if I wanted to watch Game of Thrones - I did - but it was awkward watching tits and dragons with a stranger, and I couldn’t relax at all. My head felt like it was on fire, like all I could hear in my brain was screaming. He told me about his wife who left him and how much they liked going to the cinema together. He asked me if I wanted to go to the cinema with him. I told him no, I hate films. Yeah, all films. He asked me if I knew how to use Photoshop. Yes, I said. I edited photos of fluorescent jackets and workboots for his website. He wrote me poems to say thanks. It made me feel sick. I hid in my room and stopped eating completely. I couldn’t tell if my fears were legitimate or paranoid. He offered me a glass of water and my brain started spiralling. The familiar tingling feeling of a panic attack started in my hands and my throat closed up so I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t tell in that moment if it was a panic attack, or if he’d given me drugged water so he could hurt me. I called my mum and asked if I could come home. It was just normal water.

I sought medical help again, still in the middle of what I’d now call a period of acute trauma, and after a year on a waiting list I was told, after speaking with a psychiatrist for - no lie - 5 whole minutes, that I had BPD.

I knew BPD could involve paranoia or losing touch with reality under stress, and I thought that was what I had experienced with the landlord. I thought that everything that had happened was because I was an empty person who didn’t know who I was and couldn’t seem to regulate my emotions, so that is how I presented it when I sought help.

I feel nervous writing about the BPD diagnosis, even now. It’s not because I think people with BPD are bad - I don’t. It’s because the stigma around it is so intense, and because I did feel shame. For hours on end, I would get stuck in thought spirals that could not resolve themselves. The label attached itself perfectly to the story I had been told, and to the thing I already feared most about myself: that I was unstable, manipulative, too much, impossible to love, somehow rotten at the centre. It felt less like a diagnosis than a confirmation of the prosecution’s case. It was the stamp of authenticity on the front of the dossier against myself I had been compiling for decades.

After two years on a waiting list, I went to group therapy. It was a mix of various approaches - DBT, ACT, CFT. In the meantime, I had tried every antidepressant under the sun, none of which seemed to change anything for the better. I just got a tour of various grim side effects, from sewing-machine leg to binge eating biscuits to constipation. I disliked group therapy because I didn’t understand it. I wanted to know exactly why we were doing certain exercises, what it was supposed to achieve, what I was meant to learn from it. Asking those kinds of clarifying questions was almost seen as selfish and disrespectful in group, so I kept quiet and tolerated the exercises. I did try, but they all seemed so stupid to me, so childish. We had to walk around the room and laugh at things that weren’t really there. It felt ridiculous. I was shown a wheel of emotions that sent me into a terrified internal philosophical debate - how the hell I was supposed to understand the difference between all these micro-emotions when mine only ever felt like either “okay” or “petrified” and nothing in between? I really struggled with the difference between guilt and shame - a difference that seemed, as I probably misunderstood it, to be defined by whether or not something is your fault. How can I tell if I’m at fault and feeling appropriate guilt, or if I’m feeling misplaced shame, when every single person has a different interpretation of the world and I can’t trust my own judgement to make sense of my life? You can’t disrupt group to ask that. It has no answer.

Fuck off. Too many.

All of the exercises seemed to be based around the idea that I had a choice in how I behaved, that I just need to pause, count to 5, and then make kinder, more considerate decisions for the sake of people around me. My experience was more like being completely powerless, like someone else taking the wheel and driving my car off a cliff while my rational voice whispered weakly at them to stop from the backseat. I thought that this probably meant I was incurably evil, because I couldn’t even acknowledge to myself that I had control over my own worst tendencies, in the way that was described to me, so I would never be able to make the effort to change.

There really was no amount of naming 5 things I could see or creating a wise and compassionate imaginary friend that I could do. I craved logical answers, rational explanations, that were not offered.

What I did know, was that the diagnostic criteria for BPD didn’t seem to really fit. I met my now-husband around the time I went to group therapy. On our first date, I had to stop him and ask him if we were on a date, because I couldn’t tell. He had to ask me if I was enjoying myself (I was) because I wouldn’t look at him. We went back to his place - and I know what you’re thinking but no, we stayed up in his kitchen talking and listening to songs and I finally got to demonstrate to someone that I know all the words to Sleep by Marion and be told I was cool because of it. Later, I met his mum. I was so nervous I had to take time out to curl into a ball in the corner of another room in the dark for a second. She asked me if I’d considered that I might be autistic. No, no, I said. I don’t think so. I just need a break sometimes.

Over time, I came to find that this relationship was nothing like the previous one, it was the opposite. Surely if I was the problem, if I had a personality disorder, this relationship would be fraught and scary and unstable too, wouldn’t it? They all would have. So would my friendships, but I’d never fallen out with my friends. The friendships I have are great - devoted and long-lasting. I didn’t fear abandonment from my family or friends or partner. If anything, I longed for it sometimes, because my alone time, deep diving weird things online, is my happy place. I have to be alone, often. BPD can also be coloured by what is called an unstable sense of self, but, though my sense of self had been destabilised, and I often masked in an attempt to fit in and be liked, beneath that I’ve always had the same tastes, convictions and interests. These subtle differences create diagnostic challenges, especially when you’re looking at how behaviour presents without looking at its roots, at intentions. The further I got away from the trauma, the more I could see that my worst symptoms only arose situationally. They basically disappeared when I had no pressure on me, my own routine, a stable income and a roof over my head. It was nothing to do with attachment issues.

I’m still ashamed of that label, which is unfair, because shame is not how anyone should feel about any diagnosis. But I am. I’m ashamed because it was given to me at the exact moment I had the least trust in my own reality, and it seemed to confirm every cruel thing I had ever thought about myself.

It’s hard to find proper statistics for how many late-diagnosed autistic women are first misdiagnosed with BPD, but studies suggest it’s rather a lot.

---

I went on a little holiday to Galway in Ireland with my mum and half-sister in February of 2023 and I was looking for an audiobook to listen to during my travels. I’m a fan of Fern Brady and her book Strong Female Character had just come out, so I downloaded that. What happened next, was that a book I had planned to absorb in short bursts on trains or coaches, kept me up all night. I finished it in one go, skipping sleep. Then, I listened to it again a second time, immediately. I had never related to anything more in my life.

There’s a lot about Fern’s life that is very different to my own experience, but her honesty and her objective detachment from herself sounded like my inner monologue. There were also little details - really uncannily specific things in there - I related to in a way that scared and excited me. At one point, Fern writes about having tried to learn social skills from, hysterically, Debrett's Etiquette and Modern Manners and I thought back to when I’d done the exact same thing, in a Waterstones in Kent. All I’d managed to retain from that is that one should restart a dying dinner party conversation by asking ‘what does everybody think of X?’ - where X would be some kind of non-controversial topic or current affair. I could never think of anything to fill in for X, so remembering this has really only come in handy since Elon Musk bought Twitter.

But reading Fern’s wonderful book changed everything. Instead of someone else telling me what was wrong with me and me blindly trusting them because I was gullible and didn’t trust myself, it felt instead like overhearing the language I had needed all along. Other people had been giving me incorrect interpretations of myself as definite statements for my entire life. When you are conscientious and frightened and desperate to understand, you end up buying into and trying to incorporate those explanations. You see, I was bad and stupid, everyone else was an expert, an infallible authority.

Now, for the first time, something had tipped my life onto the floor and rearranged it. Everything was still mine, but re-ordered and re-contextualised. Nothing changed. Everything changed. Jigsaw falling into place.

It’s why I’m writing this now, not because I love navel-gazing (I fucking do!!) but because if just one person has a shock of recognition from the spaghetti mess of my mind and it helps them to understand themselves, I would be delighted.

---

In my usual way, I began a research project. I discovered autism TikTok. I listened to women’s stories. I read reddit threads. I compiled observations about myself in my notes app. I went to see a support worker from the Mind charity at my local GP in August of 2023 and she told me I should speak to my GP and ask for a referral, but, I wasn’t ready. I had to be sure, I had to be scientific. What if I was just trying to dodge my BPD diagnosis and lie my way into a nicer one, like the evil bitch I (maybe) was?

I kept monitoring. I kept reading and researching. I kept lists of things that seemed to be relevant, everything from my lifelong colour-grapheme synaesthesia to how I had routines about walking around cars when I’m outside so I don’t disturb drivers by walking in front of them. How I’d had to teach myself how to hold my arms normally when I walk, and not like a T-rex or a Ukrainian Hopak dancer. How I hate sudden noises, whistling, the big light, the JML TV talking at me in The Range when I’m trying to shop. How I sometimes listen to the same song on repeat all day at full volume in my headphones. I added and added to the list over the course of two years.

I took self-screening tests, the AQ50 and the RAADS-R, then waited six months to do them again. I did this three times, to ensure that the results were consistent and not just me on a bad day. They were always sky-high. I made graphs. I collated a 10-page report with a one-page summary sheet and then hid it in my bedside drawer for a year. I finally did something about it in April of 2026. I was referred via Right to Choose, assessed and diagnosed within a month.

---

Nothing felt like it had changed when I was told that I’m autistic. I didn’t really know what to do with myself. Immediately after my appointment, I went and got my nails done. They had to remind me approximately 25 times to relax my fingers. I spent the afternoon visiting a model village in the Cotswolds. I am 37 years old. Nothing really surprises me anymore. I knew it was coming. It was still strange to have it confirmed.

I’m the same person. Nothing changed in the sense that I still have the same job, the same personality, the same aversion to the big light, the same need to know exactly what is happening and why, the same tendency to disappear into a research hole and come out three days later needing a shower, the same strong opinions about music.

Everything changed in the sense that I suppose I can finally look backwards without seeing a crime scene. I can look at the little girl wearing her glasses upside-down and not see attention-seeking. I can look at the teenager rehearsing conversations and not see fakeness. I can look at the woman hiding in the bathroom at her own private view and not see failure. I can look at all of it and think - hey, cool, a pattern! My brain loves that.

The day after I received my diagnosis, I had to put it on trial by going to the bin fire that is Twitter and reading hundreds of comments written by people suggesting that women like me are being diagnosed because having autism is trendy now. I don’t know why I’m such a glutton for punishment. Well, I do know why. It’s because it fuels the part of my brain I have to picture as an irritating blue spider with a squeaky voice - the one that says they’re right, you horrible bitch, you faked it. These things upset me because they’re untrue and unjust, but also because they make me feel vulnerable and doubtful, they stoke the fires of those old fears.

I know that my diagnosis is real, NHS-commissioned and legitimate. I know I didn’t just get influenced by TikTok to believe normal quirks are a medical condition I can use as an excuse to be a dickhead, or to claim benefits. I know I never wanted to stand out or be special, that actually I would give anything to be neurotypical, to have a choice in how I react when I’m overwhelmed. I want to feel like I’m allowed to take up space, and not feel so self-conscious all the time. I’m still coming to terms with who I am. My assessor said that, while it was not in her remit to remove previous diagnoses from my record, she thought that “the question was the right one to ask” and encouraged me to enquire with my GP about that another time. When I read people saying ASD is overdiagnosed now, its like they’re telling me all the things I’m scared of - that I’m a liar, even to myself, and just a shitty person who needs to try harder and stop making excuses.

I’ve tried all my life.

If this was social contagion, it somehow managed to infect me in the early 90s when I was kissing pictures of clocks and standing alone on a school field pulling the lining out of my coat to make little friends. I prefer the analogy I have read that it is like saying it’s suspicious that we can see more stars since inventing telescopes. I simply finally gained access to information I didn’t know before, and, more is known now about how ASD looks and feels for certain people who have been historically overlooked.

While I understand the discourse that widening the definition of ASD has made it too broad, that differences in support needs are vast, I still say there’s no ‘overdiagnosis’. If anything, its the PDs that are overdiagnosed. I have my doubts about the entire practice of psychiatry, to be honest. While it’s a logical and scientific apprach to check boxes in lists of diagnostic criteria, that can never quite do justice to each individual, complex experience.

There is a part of me that wonders if BPD exists at all, or if its an outdated misreading of female neurodivergence combined with trauma and invalidation.

You don’t seek an autism diagnosis like this without a reason. It’s just not true. It was there in the school field. It was there in the CAMHS room. It was there in the weird little performances and the rehearsed conversations and the private rules and the lists and the songs on repeat and the feeling that I was acting. It was there when I was called naughty, strange, fake, intense, aloof, cringey, cold, too much, not enough.

I keep thinking about the pink mothball. Not happy, not sad, not jealous, not angry. A neutral little face with a bow.

I know what to call her now.