What's In A Name?

On The Conundrum Of Book Titles

“All of these people you talk about, Lydia - all of them are criminally misunderstood because of a diagnosis”.

The time is August 9th 2022, and I don’t know what to do with my life. A few months prior, I had caught Covid 19 just in time to make it out of quarantine on my twenty third birthday; life on the daily has never been the same since, a rigmarole of hospital appointments and ableisms (plural) from medical professionals. None seemed at all interested in what was wrong, other than blaming either my mother for a delayed delivery almost quarter of a century prior (I was an overdue baby), or my Autism (neurological, pre-existing, nothing at all to do with Long Covid but a great revealer of your sexism.)

Functioning as a journalist had become even harder, thanks to the daily pain in the lower half of my body. Trying to get into court rooms or bars, newsrooms or conference placements, had become an almost deadly game of ‘will legs work today’, while crime stories were happening all around. Weird episodes of timing out were all too present, with me coming around dazed and confused. I was missing a world waiting.

Despatched with a friend, S, to film an Instagram reel for a company I use to work for, timing was everything and nothing. We get together maybe twice a year, in coordination with her childcare access and other health issues - which would rapidly win me my own comrade in arms. Plant life still holds a fascination for us both, a place to just feel emotionally safe.

The garden was absolutely gorgeous - possibly because of a heatwave that year, which in-part merited a ‘stay inside’ order from the national government. Water features, statues - even the damn crawling inside the castle in tiny spaces that were not at all accessible - it was *an* assignment of an ‘interesting’ kind. Notes were taken, hundreds of photos gathered, especially when it came to getting up close and personal with an abundance of bees. I remember the continual exchange of information, the friendly silences when each would stop to take a breath - down to the notes on the Fibonacci sequence, all of which was clearly displayed by the symmetry of the plants.

Work was becoming harder, still, as well as just the daily functioning of trying to manage while also advocating for myself. My GP at the time tried to insist I was seriously ill with a progressive illness - that would take a year to overturn, on the basis of a simple, standardised hearing test she failed to even bother to conduct, but tried to forcibly medicate me for. I was in the middle of editing for my first book, which arrived into the world that November; there was very little support over that book, which I feel no love for at all now. It was a heartache that was not worth it, ultimately.

Going viral is not the dream you think it will be - still to this day I receive abuse from people said to ostensibly be ‘like me’.

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Separation & Silence

Dearest Gentle Reader