Hello Wall - Hormonal Heart Poetry

Then you realize - (The packing got terribly done) Decision paralysis , or analysis paralysis, is the inability to make a decision due to overthinking or being overwhelmed by too many options, often resulting in no choice being made at all. Triggered by the fear of making the wrong choice or perfectionism, it leads to anxiety, procrastination, and mental exhaustion.  Key Causes and Factors • Too Many Options: An abundance of choices makes it harder to choose, often leading to lower satisfaction. • Fear of Failure/Regret: Worrying about making a wrong decision or missing out on a better option. • High Stakes: Increased pressure in professional or personal situations makes deciding harder. • Executive Dysfunction: Common in ADHD, anxiety, or depression, making it harder to process information and prioritize. You empty the case by half and hope for the best, also known as magical thinking.

Memoir Shard — The tether slips  (a metaphorical one)  (The packing will not get done) Sometimes you need a tether or an anchor, and I don’t mean a literal one. I mean something that holds you in place long enough to finish the thing you’re trying to do. Today I feel like every tether has been cut. The children have left home. My husband and I live independently inside the same house, not codependent, not intertwined in the way that used to keep me focused. I need something metaphorical to tie me down, but nothing is sticking. Packing should be simple, even lucky — packing for a holiday — but for me it’s one of the worst tasks. I can’t gather outfits or essentials and put them in a case in any practical order. It’s like dyslexia but with objects: I think I’ve packed something, but I’ve skipped it entirely. Pants, socks, my wash bag — the important things slip through the cracks. I used to try the Ziploc method, the organised system, but it felt too structured. Too rigid. I sta...

MEMOIR SHARD — TABS OPEN, STEAM ON (The packing will not get done) Part One This morning starts like a browser with a thousand tabs open, none of them loading, all of them screaming for attention. I’m packing, or at least I think I’m packing, because somehow I’ve packed the flowers behind the suitcase. I’m colour-matching my clothes to the flowers, to the beading on the ornament in the window, and in the corner of my mind the Cheshire Cat is folding her paws, nodding like, yes darling, the aesthetic is strong today. But is it aesthetic or is it my ND brain doing its usual pattern-matching Olympics. The steamer is plugged in downstairs — forgotten, humming, dangerous. The bleach is sitting in the sink — also forgotten, also dangerous. The dishwasher is fixed because apparently only I can see when it needs fixing. The knife and fork I left as a clue were moved, not washed. So I did that too. One task completed. Gold star. Meanwhile the bed is unmade, my teeth aren’t brushed, and I’ve sud...

yet I rise, choosing my breath. Birdsong leads me out. House crumbles around— yet I rise, choosing my breath. Birdsong leads me out.

The house had become a museum of expectations.  Every object held a story she didn’t want to tell.  Every wall held a version of her she no longer recognized.  Every room asked something of her she could no longer give.

  —  When the House Falls, I Don’t Walls fall; I remain. I choose breath, joy, life — not ruin. I walk out intact.

  — The House of Disrepair House circling slows. Weeds rise where plaster gives way. Birdsong still finds me.

The House of Disrepair lived house   I circled   circled garden   circled rooms   circled walls   windows roof   circled circled   picking plucking   doing cleaning   seeing fixing   loving embracing   highlighting adding   house broken   falling-apart edges   gift-wrapped present   ready-made nest   nest love   slowly carried   round round   did less   less less   couldn’t things   I stopped   house dilapidation   stood still   see little   too late   back broken   house disrepair   tried mindset   fixing one   circling tornado   repairing path   one-at-a-time   doesn’t anywhere   disruption destruction   falling apart   o...

When the House Falls, I Don’t circle house   fixing patching   broken things   walls fault   something shifted   cracked open   don’t care   house falls   peel crumble   weeds garden   mortar out   I understand   not house   not plaster   endless circling   care myself   my breath   my joy   my life   house collapses   still standing   walls give   walk whole   done breaking   broken things   house fall   I won’t

  Purgatory Rooms Walls whisper old selves. I leave the rooms built to hide. My words breathe again. Purgatory Rooms Rooms press like concrete. I break the walls with my breath. Silence splits open. Purgatory Rooms She didn’t yet know The walls were already closing.  Her body told her.

  Happy Girls, Happy Hormones (about watching your TEENAGE daughter get thrown around by life) All I ever saw was my teenage daughter being battered around like a ball in the wrong game. Not even a tennis ball — that would’ve been gentle. More like squash: fast, hard, unpredictable, slammed from every direction. She got pinged from friendship group to friendship group. Pinged from boyfriend to boyfriend. Pinged through workplaces she chose with a hopeful heart and a tired brain. Pinged by parents who were trying to make sense of a teenager who didn’t make sense to herself. And now I realise: that was PMDD. (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) That was her brain trying to make a good decision only to have it crushed by the bad one that followed. That was her hormones hitting her like rackets from every angle — friends, boys, work, even us — and she was just the ball, trying to survive the match. Context I wrote this at a red light, sitting in my car, watching a group of fifteen, maybe ...

  When the House Falls, I Don’t (The House of Disrepair - The collapse and awakening two ways to view the words)  I used to circle the house, fixing, patching, lifting, carrying every broken thing as if the walls were my responsibility and the roof was my fault. But something shifted. Something cracked open. I don’t care anymore if the house falls down around me. Let it peel, let it crumble, let the weeds take the garden and the mortar fall out. Because I finally understand: I am not the house. I am not the plaster, the windows, the roof, the endless circling. I care about myself. My back. My breath. My joy. My life. If the house collapses, I will still be standing. If the walls give way, I will walk out whole. I am done breaking myself to keep broken things upright. Let the house fall. I won’t. Context Using AI to take my words and turn them around - to change the metaphor.  The collapse and the awaking. 

The House of Disrepair The House of Disrepair I once lived in a house that I circled. I circled the garden, I circled the rooms, I circled the walls, the windows, the roof. I circled and circled — picking, plucking, doing, cleaning, seeing, fixing, loving, embracing, highlighting, adding, turning the house of broken declarations and falling-apart edges into a gift-wrapped present, a ready-made love nest, a nest of love. But slowly, as I carried everything on my back, as I went round and round, I did less and less and less. I couldn’t do all the things. And before I knew it, I’d stopped. The house of dilapidation stood still. All I could see was too little, too late, a back broken, a house in disrepair. I’ve tried to change my mindset — fixing one thing at a time instead of circling like a tornado, repairing everything in my path. But one-at-a-time doesn’t seem to get anywhere. And the disruption, the destruction, the falling apart outweighs the fixed, the repaired, the okay. ...

CLARITY (Micro poem) CLEAR BEGUN WOKEN WOMEN

  How Something So Happy Becomes Something So Sad (a memoir shard a wardrobe story) Some things start out so happy — a dress, a moment, a feeling — and then life shifts, and suddenly that same thing carries a sadness you never planned for. My happy dress was exactly that. A £13 Primark floral cotton ditty, paired with those unbelievable £13 leather boots — the Robin Hood ones with the tiny wooden heel. The dress that cost £26 back in 2008–2010, when £26 felt like a fortune and I felt like a million Swedish crowns in it. I wore it through Sweden. I loved it. I washed it, wore it, lived in it. It was my “I feel good in my skin” dress. And then came an unexpected funeral — a bright celebration, not a black‑clothes day — and of course I reached for my happy dress. Because that’s what I do: I reach for the thing that once held joy, hoping it will hold me up again. But grief stains fabric in a way no washing machine can fix. The dress absorbed the sadness of that day. It became the dress...

Why Do Our Wardrobes Change Without Asking Us? (a thinking aloud blog post ) We don’t choose clothes the way we think we do. We tell ourselves we’re choosing colour's, shapes, styles — but really we’re choosing states of being . We dress for the body we’re in, the brain we’re carrying, the season we’re surviving. And sometimes the shift is so slow we don’t notice it until one day the dresses are gone the tights are gone and the trousers have multiplied like mushrooms after rain. It isn’t that we stopped loving dresses. It’s that our life changed, and our wardrobe quietly followed. Menopause changes the body. Neurodivergence changes the sensory rules. Motherhood changes the logistics , Grandchildren , one step away from your own. Confidence changes the silhouette. Grief changes the palette. Healing changes everything. Sometimes we dress to hide. Sometimes we dress to be seen. Sometimes we dress to get through the day without screaming at a waistband. Sometimes we dress l...

When the Bones Are Being Scraped - ND Dentist Feeling When it feels like my bones are being scraped, when my skull is being rocked, when my teeth are being jolted — the dentist is not “just the dentist.” It’s an end‑sensory event. I’ve never liked it. Not since childhood. Not since the mask, the gas that didn’t work, the sickness, the headache, the fear that stayed. I didn’t go back for years. Then a kind dentist appeared — a man who understood fear, who treated me gently, who coated my teeth, who made me feel safe. As an adult I found another one — my dentist for life. I love them. I hate the chair. I hate the reaction. I hate the fight‑or‑flight that takes over. But I go. Prevention is better than cure. My ND brain knows that. And then menopause arrives. Nobody warns you that your pain threshold changes, your reactions change, your whole mouth changes. Low oestrogen affects teeth, gums, healing, sensitivity, everything. So now the dentist is different again. Not because of fear, but ...

  What Will Be Left of Me What Will Be Left of Me Grief isn’t just about death — we should be taught the grief of hormones, the grief of becoming someone new without choosing it. Perimenopause arrives and I lose versions of myself I thought would return. Menopause arrives and the me I knew is gone. I grieve my brain — the firing, the misfiring — and the woman I was before it shifted. What Will Be Left of Me Grief isn’t just about death — we should be taught the grief of hormones, the grief of becoming someone new without choosing it. Perimenopause arrives and I lose versions of myself I thought would return. Menopause arrives and the me I knew is gone. I grieve my brain — the firing, the misfiring — and the woman I was before it shifted. What Will Be Left of Me Grief isn’t just about death — we should be taught the grief of hormones, the grief of becoming someone new without choosing it. Perimenopause arrives and I lose versions of myself I thought would return. Menopause ar...

  To wash or Not to Wash I have a counter jar — of course it’s a Kilner — my porridge jar in the kitchen. Every time I empty it, I fill it with more porridge. And then I waste five minutes, maybe two, just staring at it, thinking: Should you wash the jar in between changes?” I’ve had this jar for years. This refill is probably number 222. I’ve never washed it. Never wiped it. I’m a grown adult. It’s clean on the outside. It just has porridge oats on the inside.. But is this an OCD thought? Why would I even think about cleaning the jar? And then — once it’s back in the cupboard — the thought is gone. Goodbye Kilner jar, goodbye porridge. My interpretation — the domestic comedy truth  I’ve had this jar for years. I’ve refilled it hundreds of times. I’ve never washed it. I’m still alive. The jar is still alive. The porridge is still alive You’ve had this jar for years. You’ve refilled it hundreds of times. You’ve never washed it. You...

The Marriage Benefit in One Scene At the crossing today I watched an old couple — she must have been seventy five, maybe more. The lights said go, the traffic had stopped, but she still paused at every single car, checking, double checking, triple checking, her body angled on the protective side. And him? He just drifted along beside her, eyes forward, hands empty, the human equivalent of “she’s got it.” Decades of practice, I suppose. It hit me like a punchline: the marriage benefit imbalance in one neat little scene. She’s still the lookout tower at seventy five, still the risk assessor, still the one scanning for danger so he doesn’t have to twitch a single neuron. And of course I recognised it — because whenever it’s my children or grandchildren, I walk on the outside of the pavement too, What blows my mind is this: even at seventy five, she’s still doing the emotional labour, still carrying the co dependen...

  The Game With Missing Pieces It’s like she’s been forced to play a game where the rules keep changing, and every time she learns how to survive one level, someone reaches in and removes another piece she needs to keep going. And still — she’s expected to continue the game.

The Game With Missing Pieces My daughter runs a marathon every morning   before she even leaves the house— not a physical marathon, not a metaphorical one, but an illness marathon built from PMDD, menopause, and now Hashimoto’s. Dropped into chemical menopause — then menopause — by twenty nine, we were left to gather the pieces: fighting for HRT, fighting the NHS rules, fighting the silence between departments, fighting contamination, dismissal, delay. Passed back and forth between NHS and private, no closer to help, no one taking responsibility. And when the truth finally surfaced— an autoimmune disorder she “must have carried,” a story rewritten after the fact— she was already exhausted from surviving. Now every day is another marathon while the thyroid waits to wake. How is it fair to lose so much life twice— first to PMDD, then to the fallout of the fix? It feels like a game she never chose: each time she learns the level, ...

 What will be left of me? Grief isn’t just about death. No one taught us that. No one taught girls how to grieve the things we lose long before anyone dies. We should be taught grief in school — grief for the period we didn’t know was coming, grief for the hormones that rise and fall and change who we are without warning, grief for the decisions we made, and the ones we never got to make. Then perimenopause arrives and we grieve again — grieve the hormones that leave us, grieve the function that doesn’t return, grieve the version of ourselves we thought would come back. I’m “just menopausal,” they say, but who am I now? One day I’m ten people, the next day I’m none. Full, then empty. Clear, then cloud. All there, then barely functioning. And I grieve my brain — the one that fired on all cylinders before the hormones shifted the ground beneath it. I used to imagine my brain being studied one day, cut in half to show everything I was, everything un-diagnosed, everything that made...

What I’m showing is inheritance (trying to show)  — not of harm, but of fight. My family’s tree produces survivors, even when the storms are different. His battle came from illness. Mine came from adults who should have protected me. Different origins. Different shapes. But the same stubborn strength running through the trunk. Texture  I wrote these chapters in one sweep, not to tell a story but to see it. Each piece is a doorway: the field I waited in, the rooms that trapped me, the family I grew from, the silence I filled to survive, and the label that unlocked the truth I’d been living without. Together, they reveal that I was never broken — only misnamed. A life lived without the right map, and the moment everything finally clicked into place. These aren’t separate stories. They’re one spine, one lineage, one voice — mine (slightly added drama but why not) I've so many notes (book ideas) and I am trying to get them all written up whist I have the time. All the Branches Fro...

  Memoir Blast — Carrying the Baby I still think I’ve got all our ages mixed up. I could’ve been eleven, I could’ve been thirteen — in my childhood it genuinely could’ve been either. Another Belinda memory, another moment where I was doing something far too adult for the age I actually was. We were in town to collect a baby — Rebecca — and take her to my mum’s house because Mum was going to look after her. I remember seeing Belinda in Broad Street, pushing the baby in a pram, and then suddenly it was my job. No discussion, no instruction manual, just: here you go. And then my ND brain did what it always did — ran the entire risk assessment of the universe in three seconds flat. I had no idea how to fold a pushchair. I didn’t even know how to tilt it properly to get it up a curb. But there I was, a child holding a nine‑month‑old who couldn’t walk, trying to work out who holds the baby while I fold the pram, and who folds the pram while I hold the baby. My hyper vigilant ND scale l...

  Five Minutes in the Hairdresser’s Chair I was about twelve or thirteen, heading to the hairdressers in the precinct — probably for a perm in the back of my hair because I always hated my curls. Or maybe to get something chopped off. I never asked permission. I just went. I had my paper round money and that was enough. I was downstairs in the salon, the woman combing through my hair, and then suddenly she asked me to go upstairs. Upstairs felt serious. And then she told me: my head was full of headlice. I was mortified. The words went full Charlie Brown — wah wah wah — adults speaking a language I didn’t understand. I could never go there again. Crushed. Confused. No idea what it meant or why it was happening to me. As I walked down the coiled, dangerous metal stairs, I heard one woman shout to the other: “Get everything in Solution!” (blue stuff in pot always curious never asked) Like I was a germ. ? A contamination. A problem. I didn’t understand why. Not...

  Blurb In this piece, I dive into the hive—literally and metaphorically. Inspired by Paull Laline's dystopian novel The Bees , I found myself thinking of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale —another of my favourites—and the strange parallels between a beehive and our own society. While bees live in a world of hormones, pheromones, and roles neatly assigned, we humans—and especially ND women—move through a society that expects a hive-like uniformity but never truly fits that mold. Our hormones are as unique as our wiring—no one pattern is the same, and no two ND minds follow the same path. So, I've cross-referenced these worlds: the dystopian hive of The Bees , the chilling uniformity of Atwood’s Gilead, and the very real, very human experience of being a menopausal ND woman in a world that expects a hive mind. In this post, you’ll find a poem and a reflection that asks a simple question: what happens when we refuse to be bees and choose to be beautifully, chaotically...

  Blog Post: The Meaning Behind the Hive This poem isn’t about bees. It’s about the systems that expect sameness — the hive‑logic we’re all raised inside without ever being asked if we fit. Schools. Workplaces. Families. Society. Every one of them built on the idea that a “good” person is predictable, obedient, consistent, and quiet. A single role. A single purpose. A single acceptable way to exist. But ND wiring was never built for that. ND minds don’t flatten into one task. They don’t thrive in repetition without meaning. They don’t survive in silence. They don’t fit the hive. The hive is dystopian because it demands uniformity — and punishes difference. It rewards those who can mimic sameness and labels the rest “difficult,” “too much,” “not enough,” “unreliable,” “disruptive,” “wrong.” It’s the same logic that sits under The Handmaid’s Tale: women reduced to function, ND people reduced to inconvenience, everyone expected to serve the system before serving themselves. The hive w...

This poem isn’t about bees at all. It’s about the systems that expect sameness — the hive‑logic of schools, workplaces, families, society — and how ND wiring refuses to shrink into one assigned role. ND people aren’t built for silent obedience, for repetition without meaning, for being reduced to function. The hive is the dystopia. The Handmaid echo is deliberate: women reduced to usefulness, ND people labelled “difficult,” everyone expected to serve the system. I’m not writing about bees. I’m writing about what happens when a world built on uniformity meets a mind built for difference. HIVE LOGIC (ND, Dystopia, and the Horror of Sameness) Poem Hive A hive. Living in a hive. One role. Accepting. Accepted. Accountable. One role. It’s so dystopian. ND could never. Be the same. Do the same. Be trusted with the role. How could anything be created, accepted — or could it? Watch. See. Do. One task. Busy bee. Wave. Feeling. Shared hormones. Pheromones. Vibrations. Hum. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. For...

  Hive A hive. Living in a hive. One role. Accepting. Accepted. Accountable. One role. It’s so dystopian. ND could never. Be the same. Do the same. Be trusted with the role. How could anything be created, accepted — or could it? Watch. See. Do. One task. Busy bee. Wave. Feeling. Shared hormones. Pheromones. Vibrations. Hum. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. Foragers. Unity. Be good. Do good. Task. Purpose. Hive. Handmaiden.

 Who knew I would have So much to say........... 

  Reflection and Wobble (she who cannot be named) When you see someone you think you know — a glance, a flicker — but you’re not sure. You bend down to press the button at the crossing and a memory rises, a face that fits. Was it her? I look back up and she’s gone. But she caught my eye like she recognized me, and I was just in my own moment, not thinking of relevance, not expecting anything. Then the doubt starts. Because she had a bob, a basket, a headband, black eyeliner. She from the charity shop. She the treasurer. She the rule bender. She who stood on her own two feet while the people around her didn’t have much. She who was paid. She I once admired and once resented in the same breath. When I looked up to reciprocate, to reconnect, to step back into the eye — she was gone. And I’m left not with a cup of tea, but with memories running through my head. Would she wear make up? Is that her? She looked so old — how ...