Where we were living before…it looked fine, nice even, as long as you didn’t pay attention to the much increased volume and urgency of the traffic on the road, assuming you knew how it was before. Or to the way people no longer talked so much as they beeped horns or shouted abuse, waved arms, snapped or shrugged, as a means of communicating. Or to the conveyor-belt urgency of life where, once not so long ago, I had believed myself to have found (oh irony) a slower pace of life away from the rat race. The London effect, which seems to now cover half the south of England these days, plus massive new housing pressures upon a tiny village infrastructure, had gobbled my dreams of such a place so subtly yet devastatingly there had been no getting out before we were suddenly in the full-throttle nightmare of it, for the best part of the last decade….with a brief respite for covid, when almost all the traffic stopped, then straight back into the fray with more vengeance than ever as everyone around us grabbed back their “normal” lives.

Telling myself “it’s alright really”, “it’s not so bad” or “it’s normal” were self-pacifications that conspired to turn me into a lobster thrown into a cold pan of water before the heat was turned up so slowly, almost imperceptible, that I hardly noticed I was being boiled alive yet the place we were living in until last year bore no real relationship with the one I had moved to twenty years before. I also think that, when we also happen to be neurodivergent, feeling “out of place” can be become such an innocuous-seeming sensation across the course of a lifetime because we become so acclimatised to feeling like a misfit in a lot of situations; our version of “normal”…thus all too easy to ignore the signs we are in the wrong place until the effects become much more stark and unavoidable.

Yet (and I really do know this now) place is so very key to wellbeing, for anybody, but perhaps much more so for those of us that already feel neurologically out of place. When you already feel wired differently, when you experience things through a different lens to the majority, perhaps more intensely, acutely and even painfully compared to the next person, that feeling of difference requires of you that you carve a space in which to feel like you fit; somewhere you can relax and not feel affronted by all the sensory and circumstantial reminders of just how different you are to those who apparently think whatever is going on is bearable, comfortable or acceptable…or at least more so than you do, to whom wrong place can be deeply, inexplicably, relentlessly traumatic.

When your sensory “volumes” are all amped up and everything affects you so much more than other people, when you can’t filter out all the most abhorrent details or when senses echo their effects on constant overlapping loops stuck on repeat, the wrong place can be like a torture chamber and yet even those of us wired this way may somehow learn to normalise it, to distract and block most of it from our conscious attention…but at what cost to our longterm health? When do the edges start to fray, when does your nervous system become so leaky and unfit for purpose that your health starts to play-up like a chaotic tune hammered out on a broken piano, with half of the notes out of tune or in the wrong order? That has certainly been my health these recent years!

The reality was that the traffic outside my house wasn’t just a bit more annoying, it was making the house shake. It was depositing dust that was thick, black and sticky on all my window ledges at the front of the house and, in general, making the house more grimy in a way that made housework into the relentless task that was never even remotely “done”.

It was drowning out the bird song and changing bird behaviours and numbers in a way that I really did notice and which deeply bothered me.

It was altering, almost imperceptibly but most certainly there, the behaviours of people in the village until the mode du jour was impatient, aggressive and entitled, not helped by a vast change in demographic from those who had long chosen to make a life there to people searching for affordable, convenient housing near the motorway junction.

As the village itself almost imperceptibly morphed from a tight unit surrounded by fields into a corridor along a main road attached to an urban sprawl, it’s identity and very reason for existing changed from a place of choice to a place of necessity…a dormitory for people that hardly spent any time of choice there, except to crash into bed between bouts of commuting and generally racing around consuming and socialising…that latter not done in the village but in other places half an hour or more away, resulting in a traffic flow that was almost as “rush-houry” relentless as the real thing between 10pm and 3 o clock in the morning.

People’s hearts were no longer in the place and you could tell, but the hardest part of all was the slow but steady evacuation of nature.

Dawn choruses as perfunctory as they were brief had replaced the old orchestral manoeuvres, long and languorous, that used to accompany my dozy awakenings when the window was open before too much traffic forced me to keep them mostly shut. Even when I made the effort to listen out for the dawn, the low attendance bird chorus now sounded like it was almost too much effort for most of them to bother with and would peter out after just a few minutes…perhaps newest generations of birds simply hadn’t learned the ropes, no memo sent down by their increasingly weary and survival fixated forebears. Perhaps they had ceased trying to compete with the disharmonious clatter of lorries treating the speed signs as gauntlets thrown down, using the village as a rat-run between two motorways at that delivery time of the morning. Perhaps they had simply started to give up or retreat to other places…because wouldn’t I have done the same, if I had had wings?

The other thing I noticed was how blackbird song would only ever happen in high spring now, and only one or two males to be heard at that, so beautiful but oh-so brief compared to the long summers of blackbirds on every chimney pot in the old days. Perhaps these details wouldn’t even register to another person; perhaps because I am a stickler for detail and my brain processes through comparison, I was troubled and affected by these things more so than the next person but there it was.

All I knew was that those life affirming dawn choruses that had been the morning soundtrack of my life for decades were now so faint, so much further out to the fringes of the village, and so brief that five minutes over-sleep would mean I had missed them and it spooked me to start my days without them. All I also knew was that the deer that used to gather in the edge of the woods at dusk…maybe 30 or more of them, of all generations, the youngsters chasing each other around as the antlered ones looked on from their circle under the tree on the hill, were no longer there and even a solitary deer now become the abject rarity since their corridors of movement had been chopped up and disturbed by new housing developments.

I tried so hard not to give up on the old place and would have told you I hadn’t given up right to the bitter end of living there, as I repeatedly told friends who had already moved away and to whom I tired to sound bright and cheerful…but my body told a different story.

So tied into the disharmony, the pollution, the subliminal stress was I that I would feel like I was drowning within days of returning back there from anywhere more neutral or natural, even as I told myself I was glad to be home surrounded by all my things. I would blame my inevitable crashes on being over-tired from travel but, really, I knew not so deep down that it was the returning back there, to what was supposed to be my home, that was eroding my morale.

In fact, looking back to that house, I had really cluttered it to the nth, more so than I could even see with my own eyes at the time; every space filled to the brim with far too many things, colours, stims, in an attempt to drown out or outnumber all the stressors coming at me from the outside…that part is obvious to me now. Like when you enter the house of a kleptomaniac and realise they don’t even know that their behaviour is in any way unusual, I had become that person who used “things” to make me feel more in control and somehow reassured and safe, laughing it off as a sign of my “artiness” and love of interesting objects and books.

Only now that my nervous system is lapping up, like a cat with an enormous bowl of purest white cream, the  neutral, soothing, minimalist effect of a house not quite fully unpacked and still like a blank canvas waiting to be painted on….yet, somehow I am in no rush to do so…do I realise the extent to which I have been barricading myself into a place of refuge by piling too much stuff onto walls, shelves and surfaces, unable to let go of a thing. The moving process itself necessitated the first rationalisation of this…oh how much stuff did I clear…yet even that which has been brought here now feels like way too much and I find myself longing, at last, to let go and hold the moment of this uncluttered, fresh feeling for the rest of my life.

Whilst my old house felt utterly abhorrent and quite disturbing once all our possessions were removed, like it was no more protective than a cardboard box left on the side of a road, I find that I’m in no rush at all to clutter this place and, in fact, it feels like an abuse to upset its cleaner surfaces with superfluity. But who am I, saying these things, because I am already not the same person that lived in that other place!

If you had ever seen my old house you would have been forgiving for thinking I had embraced the modern trend of maximalism (though mine was no trend…) but now I find out I am a minimalist at heart. Which makes perfect sense, as I am someone who is very easily overstimulated and like to surround myself with orderliness and systems, requiring this for my thinking to work and my nervous system to gain respite. So why-oh-why did I self-inflict so much clutter for so many years, unless it was to, somehow, make myself feel more safe, like building a stronghold out of familiar objects that boosted my sense of self in a world of otherness.

As carefully selected objects of beauty or usefulness enjoy their backdrop of neutrality in my new home and all my resolves to paint this room that certain colour or wallpaper that wall with this lively paper, as made before I moved in, dissolve away like so many ice cubes left out of the freezer, I realise there has been another me screaming to be let out…or to be allowed to live a different, far less cluttered, overstimulating way…all these years, but it would never have been possible in the old place.

As the need to barricade myself into a place of refuge slips away, as my new friendly neighbours (another total culture shock) convivially laugh at me for so diligently locking our gate and I apologise, yet again, for my ingrained London mentality, and as the dawn chorus floods my bedroom like the figment of a dream from childhood, I feel my coils start to unravel and my constant inner tension abate, a little more every day.

Its not that the move-in was a breeze, in fact it was highly demanding on all levels, not least because it took almost 24 hours to gain vacant possession as the previous owners were still here with all their stuff (having cut corners on a “cheap” removal firm that let them down…) at the same time as moving all our stuff in, with a freak one-day snow storm on moving day to boot, so we haven’t exactly been without our stressors. Yet, for all that, I can still feel the subtle but important changes embedding in my nervous system from being in this quiet house, this friendly neighbourhood, this no-through-road, this visual environment, in fact this whole other kind of place with a healthy and diverse bird population chirping away right outside my window and, this morning, a proper dawn chorus that had me hanging out of the window and resolved to write this post.

It’s still work in progress trying to mentally assure myself that this is forever, that we are here to stay in a village so invested in itself that it is not drowning in complacency, where people care about what they have and work hard to secure its joists in the face of snatch and grab policies, where they pay attention and invest their time well and communicate and care. Where quietude is prized and nature is woven into community green spaces and wilded areas, into bird watching enthusiasm and hedgehog highways plus other initiatives to encourage and protect nature.

Already, the need to feel defensive, almost all of the time, is dissipating. I’m hopeful that all those cellular barricades built into my highly vigilant, over sensitive body will likewise start to dismantle and disarm, that nerves so tightly coiled they’ve become brittle will become more robust and resilient again, that an ability to slow down will come naturally as I realise that the pace in general is on quite a different footing here and that to race would make me the oddity not the norm, that an ability to breathe deeply and slowly will replace a tendency to hold my breath as though waiting for the hammer to drop.

It’s early days but I am already clocking the changes, in my strength, my stability, the ability to sleep with surrender, the refound gift of pacing myself instead of charging to the finish line, a slower and less preoccupied mind, increased presence and floods of appreciation for little things, waves of “joy for no particular reason”, increased calm, far less inflammation or flare-up, much better ability to bounce back if I do overdo it, far less sensations of having run out of all my reserves even before I start something plus, as I mentioned already, the absolute thrill of being able to create the kind of soothing and organised environment I really want to live in rather than one that serves as a deflection or distraction from things I am trying not to pay attention to. I intend to explore this new-found love of space and order to the full as I settle in but it is quite the change in me!

If only my body can find the same kind of spacious order…

All of this has made me realise just how impactful “place” has been in the long unfolding of my health deterioration…and therefore just what a key role it is likely to play in my rehabilitation. For years, because I felt as though there was nothing that could be done about where I lived or kidded myself it was “all fine really”, this one key factor was allowed to run amok in my health situation when it was actually the one needing far more urgent attention than most things. It was all too easy to say to ourselves that it “wasn’t the right time” to move or that we had no choice and were tied there, but now I wonder how high the price has been…which is not to regret or to blame but to learn from my mistakes and be grateful for the gigantuan effort I made (and it had been a massive undertaking to uproot and relocate, taking up almost two years and most of my stamina) to move somewhere more fitting, at least for me. The lobster has jumped out of the pan!

When you can’t change the immediate world around you and have run out of the stamina to even try because it is breaking your back, and your spirit, being this canary in the coalmine for everyone else, you sometimes have to do what’s right for you and move on somewhere else rather than continue to suffer alongside everyone else in that struggling place, especially if those people are apparently oblivious to there being a problem…perhaps, to them, there really is none. When you start out as highly sensitive or neurodiverse in other ways that mean that you pick up on, and are impacted far more deeply by, even the subtlest things that seem to slide right off other peoples backs with impunity, including soaking up all the aggravation, anger and generalised unhappiness of people in close proximity, you need to accommodate that factor as top priority, something I have finally learned for myself. You’re probably not the person who should just push through or stick it out…that bit I have finally learned.

Find you own kind of place and your very best way of life, as urgently as you can, and as a top priority for safeguarding your most resilient and sustainable health as you age, is my very best advice. Carve your space and make it your own, somewhere you can be fully yourself and surround yourself with nature if you can, away from the everyday brutality of constant damage being inflicted on others or the natural world as these things will repeatedly traumatise you, even if they are only taking place in your peripheral vision, because your highly vigilant, super-empathic nervous system probably doesn’t miss a trick and is likely soaking it all up, all of the time…mark my words. Do your very best to find a space where you settle into your own version of neutral, at least some of the time, for respite; one where your hyperactive system is no longer under constant assault or attack, and see what your nervous system can then do with it all…because, in such a space as this, you get to realise that you were not so much broken in the first place as being broken by circumstance that didn’t ever quite fit you. Find your own fit and then see what happens next.

Image: “Looking Back” ©Helen white