How I stay when I want to run away

On running away to Glastonbury Festival back in my twenties, to my current menopausal autistic midlife trap of fight/flight/freeze; and perpetual burnout.

Sam is standing in a flood zone at Glastonbury Festival in 2009. She is wearing welly boots, diamond-patterned tights, a knee length burgundy skirt, and a brown sleeveless top, She is squinting at the camera in the sun smiling. There is farm machinery approaching behind her moving hay onto the flood to make it a walkable surface. The Other Stage and a circus tent are in the background, and there are lots of people walking around in the mud.

It is in my nature to live in a chronic state of fear. Before I was diagnosed autistic, ADHD and chronically anxious in my late thirties, I always wanted to hide under a rock, where I could be left alone and in peace, free of the demands of social interaction and sensory overload. Flotation sensory deprivation tanks were my second home. These days my anxiety shows up more as panic, resulting from the unending demands of parenting in a brain and body that feel they were not made for this world.

Image description: Sam’s outstretched legs wearing black leggings and black ankle socks. Sam is suspended in “The Cloud” - a lycra hammock in her family’s indoor sensory frame at home. Cocooned in a womb-like red lycra, with light filtering in through the window. She is most likely trying to listen to a yoga nidra meditation track via noise cancelling earphones.

Deep in autistic perimenopause, I am more now inclined to want to run away. Feeling trapped, resentful and “too grumpy” (in my sons’ words, although I fondly call it “The Rage”), my response is to want to escape from everything - and, just as hiding under a rock large enough to conceal my presence would have resulted in certain death, I have nowhere to run to. My instincts to fight (The Rage), flee (run!) or freeze (hide under a rock or, more practically speaking, in my locked bathroom) now manifest within me as burning pain, elevated blood pressure and a tumultuous sickened stomach.

My exhausted body aches from perimenopausal joint pain making me walk slower than ever, and so it is ironic that I have never wanted to run away more from my adulting duties, yet I remain in autistic inertia. Even if I could go for a run, I would melt from the resulting hot flush, my bladder would undoubtedly leak and I would forget to take a door key.

During my early twenties, I took up running as a new form of punishment to beat myself up with exercise. My eating and movement habits were disordered, and influenced strongly by my neurological tendency towards OCD. It took a very disordered determined mind to track daily runs mileage and calorific intake back in the days of analogue life. Young obsessives don’t know how easy they’ve got it with all the apps and smart watches recording their data to now brag share every movement on social media!

Running away just isn’t a viable option any more, so I need to address this primal urge for what it is - my overwhelmed, dysregulated nervous system ringing alarm bells, and telling me I need to change my environment immediately and seek psychological safety. Upon reflection, my unmet need to run results from a double deluge of autistic burnout and carer burnout. I have a fear that things are never going to get better, and I will ultimately die a hopeless wreck with no lasting legacy… So it makes sense that to avoid this, I want to hide from myself and run away from my life.

According to many menopause experts, rejecting societal expectations placed upon women all comes to a head in midlife, and post-menopausal women can relish what Kate Codrington refers to as their “Second Spring”. A time for inner growth and acceptance, free from the biological drive that fuels us to be accepted so we can form relationships and reproduce. I cannot wait for the time when my own periods stop and I am no longer at the whim of my surging and plummeting hormone levels.

Before the responsibilities of mortgage, marriage and (neurodivergent) parenting, literally running away felt like a legitimate response to whatever was driving my undiagnosed anxiety. Growing up in London in the 1980s and 90s with an anxiety disorder had been incredibly frightening. I lived close to a Royal Air Force base during the Gulf War, there were constant local IRA bomb scares, and local high crime rates. I can recall taking a school trip on the London Underground and was convinced there was going to be a bomb onboard - certainly that’s what was implied by the deafening station platform and train tannoy announcements, with their insistence of “all passengers being vigilant of unattended luggage”. All the non-autistic pupils, free from the vivid imagination gifted me from my high anxiety and capacity to predict the worst possible scenarios, only took notice of the classic “Mind the Gap” announcements.

By the time I had taken up running as an adult in the early 2000s, I was certainly more motivated psychologically to be running away from an imagined “someone”, rather than using the sport as a tool towards reaching my next athletic goal. I embodied high alertness, and was always looking back over my shoulder. I had the regular intrusive thought that I was going to be stabbed in the back on the streets of London, even in the outer suburbs where I lived. I was fear driven in every sense, and I responded to any real or imagined danger by pulling on my Aasics, taking my state-of-the-art Creative ZEN (failed iPod competitor) and plugging my ears into Razorlight’s ‘Up All Night’ album and pounding the pavements until I couldn't feel or think any more. It was therapeutic and self-medicative for me. I still play that album when I need to rage clean the house at speed thanks to the high energy associations I have with it…

Running away was also a strategy I used in other aspects of life. As a newly qualified teacher in an infant school full of newly arrived immigrants (located close to Heathrow Airport), I had a strong drive to put my Reception (4 and 5 year olds) class’s needs above the wrath of my first (junior school minded) Head Teacher’s enforced daily whole school assemblies and guided reading sessions. Far more in line with the principles and guidance of the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum of the time, I worked to develop a garden area where the children could engage in free flow play and take respite from the trauma and upheaval they may have witnessed in their four to five years. I also found the school’s insistence on Biff and Chip (Oxford Reading Tree early literacy programme in UK primary schools) as a tool for the children learning to read English quite pointless. Many of the children were mute in class, had rich cultural and linguistic heritages that deserved celebrating. I needed to engage them in learning the English language in a more natural, relatable, and less contrived, manner. The richness of their different cultures felt far more valuable than that of my own, since I had felt so innately dejected from and misaligned with my own society.

In my first school as a teacher, I cried in my Teacher’s Cupboard every single day as a way of processing the overwhelm resulting from the incongruence between the Head Teacher’s results-driven agenda, and my pedagogy of age-appropriate learning through play and nurturing positive learning dispositions in my school children. (And also due to sensory overload of a classroom environment. I had become teacher to “save” the children like myself who had failed to thrive in this environment, yet it felt a hopeless situation where I could not save the pupils nor the system from the inside.) Writing this now, I still staunchly believe I was in the right, as autistic women, diagnosed or not, tend to be incredibly strongly principled, with research skills that could match any academic.

When I could take no more, I left that school to teach in a Nursery School (3 and 4 year olds) where the staff’s philosophy aligned with my own. This was a better fit and I was comfortable enough there to teach full-time whilst studying towards my Masters degree in teaching and learning. There was a lot of pressure from the Head Teacher to push staff as hard as possible, and contributed again to another state of burnout.

Feeling trapped, overwhelmed and overworked with no capacity to relax in my working environment, I ran away to take on another job at a different Nursery School. This was my final teaching job before I became a parent, and I have not returned to the classroom since. This Nursery School had a much more relaxed vibe that was a better fit for me, with a Head Teacher who shared and appreciated my values. (I have wondered about her own neurodivergence - she would return to school from Heads’ conferences and such and tell me that she had walked out telling them all that their drive for academic results over valuing each individual child was “Bullshit”. Legend!)

Despite having more freedom and emotional safety to be myself, upon completing my Masters though, I was once again exhausted. (As much as I adore academia, and would still love to work on a doctorate programme, it feels like this is a goal for me to metaphorically run towards in years to come. Autistic perimenopause is not a safe time for me to be striving towards such destinations, as I fluctuate so greatly and it’s important to not set myself up to fail.)

By way of finding reprieve, I made the following request to the Head Teacher, my boss at the time: “I need to go to Glastonbury Festival this year or I am going to lose my mind”. Thankfully, she interpreted this as a need to take mental health leave during school term time, which was accepted through the local education authority’s HR department. Phew - this was possibly the first year I had attended where I hadn’t needed to lie to my boss about my unrequested absence!

Image Description: An unmasked Sam is looking and feeling very relaxed at Glastonbury Festival in 2009. She is wearing sunglasses, a brown sleeveless top, black leggings and a short short denim skirt. Sam is sitting on a camping chair and holding a bottle of flavoured water with tents and trees in the background.

Glastonbury Festival was always my sanctuary. The first year I attended was a happy accident, the tickets were first prize in a newspaper competition! Had this luck not befallen me, I may still be unaware that there was such a place on Earth where I could ever feel so at ease.

Glasto always falls on my birthday weekend - midsummer in Europe, midwinter here in New Zealand. I used to attend it every year, but I have sadly not returned since becoming a parent. Now that I live in Aotearoa New Zealand, I do worry that I may never get to experience this personal bliss again.

Given my aversion to anything deemed popular or mainstream, I wonder whether I would enjoy it as much now that it is so popular and part of mainstream culture, and less so a respite for society’s misfits and champions of social justice. I just remember it as a place where I could finally fit in. A temporary community, free from the archaic societal expectations that can be enforced within walls and geopolitical borders.

Image Description: groups of people in a a field under poles that are holding up flags, shade sails, hanging baskets of flowers and giant sculptures of flowers. People are seated on the grass, on benches, or standing. The sky is blue with some clouds and there is a single decker bus that may be a food truck.

I recall Glastonbury Festival as a small dreamlike city created for a weekend from canvas and stage lights, where thousands of us had all run away from day to day life to communally take part in something spectacular. Alive in my memory, I can feel the Summer breeze on my face as it ripples through the flags in the Field of Avalon. The taste of the hot chai in the purple plastic mugs in the Green Fields, where I could lie back on a beanbag, soaking up the spices and serenity. It was always a location where I could achieve a mind-altering state, without any need for substance use or misuse. My default memories are of the sun breaking through the rainclouds as it set behind the main Pyramid Stage, and the ensuing uproar and outpouring of delight and unadulterated joy from the crowd. For some reason, the inevitable flooded long drop toilets are never in the forefront of my mind when I hark back to Glasto years gone by. Even thinking about the event now whilst looking back through old photos, my breathing and (recently elevated) heart rate slowing down as I think about the safety and emotional regulation in our collective unmasking.

Image description: the “flag” my friends and I fashioned from a tent pole and a pair of socks at the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival.

There was always such a vibe of hope and community for the future of humanity and environmentalism at Glastonbury. Social justice warriors congregated, relieved that we were accepted and validated as a highly sensitive community. It was always an enormous come down to leave Glasto and return back to day to day life after the surreal event. Back in “real life”, all colours were muted, smells were absent, and the buzzing ceased. Instead replaced by the dull drone of small talk, and the expectation to interpret my vivid internal thoughts into words, losing all their vivacity in the process. Back to feeling misunderstood, an outsider once again, depressed and anxious from the inevitable sickening loss due to the impermanent zeitgeist of my spiritual home.

Back to now: pathologised for my natural way of being in this world. Exhausted from masking, trying and failing to fit in. Medicated to buffer and obscure my enigmatic presentation, making me more amenable to those outside my own inner mind. Vulnerable both here on the page, in my own home, within my community and out there in the world.

I have mostly been authentically myself throughout my life. It turns out that running away doesn’t get me anywhere. I cannot outrun my differences. There is no destination to run to where I will feel at home, as I don’t identify well as human. I cannot hide away to shield my overloaded nervous system from the unending sensorial assault caused by existing in this world. Flotation tanks even operate within social constructs of time: booking sessions, that bring the relief from sensory deprivation to a crashing halt.

The best autistics can hope for is to be heard and accepted for who we are, and how we experience this life that neurotypicals comparatively sail through. Justifying our need for accommodations places extra work on our minds, which are already struggling to cope. Autistic menopause is a phase of life where our masks unexpectedly fall, as the soul crushing weight of pretending to be normal surpasses our capacity to function.

During autistic menopause, we need additional help. We are often trying to manage a household, paid and/unpaid work, growing children, ageing parents and everything else social norms can pile on us until we drown. Autistic burnout is the warm up act to the headliner that is autistic menopause. It gives us an idea of what we are in for: chronic exhaustion, regression in functioning, and a record low level of tolerance for sensory input.

Rather than running and hiding from myself, my symptoms and society, these days I am more inclined to reject the expectations placed on me as a “good woman”. Reading Deborah Levy’s ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’, this insightful quote stood out to me:

“We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicised by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother. All the same, we felt guilty about unveiling this delusion in case the niche we had made for ourselves and our much-loved children collapsed in ruins... Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure - and unhappy too - but never as miserable as the twenty-first-century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel… If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong.”

It seems we are expected to judge ourselves against covert standards that have been surreptitiously handed to us. The rules are unspoken, we have to figure them out for ourselves, then try and fulfil them. We compare ourselves to others, usually falling short, and feeling unspoken criticism to our very core. There is no barometer that we can measure ourselves with as autistic women and mothers, assessing how close to the expected norm we are running, and when we are off course. We must appear to be coping, achieving and progressing, regardless of our inner desires and mental state.

I reject this, and I am coming to believe that we must forge our own paths ahead, sensing inwards for guidance, rather than looking outwards for reassurance and validation. We need to carry ourselves and run towards radical self-acceptance and authenticity; judging ourselves by our own values, and showing self-compassion when this is all too hard. Which it is and it will be, because this world wasn’t designed for humans to prosper, exploiting its resources and exploiting each other. That is just unfortunately how it has evolved to be in its present form. Yet we individually evolve from day to day, and have the reflexivity and authenticity to do so consciously. Getting older is a privilege, and we need to know who are to feel psychologically safe within ourselves.

I am told this is what lies ahead for me, for us, in our Second Spring. Sounds blooming marvellous, I look forward to evolving alongside you.