If you are neurodivergent, you may have spent years becoming very good at something that has no name in most people's lives: performing normality. Watching how other people behave, then calibrating your responses so that you appear to fit in. This is called masking, and while it can be a genuinely useful survival skill, it comes with a cost that is rarely talked about honestly. What masking actually is Masking refers to the way many autistic and ADHD people, and those with ot

Have you ever found yourself completely consumed by thoughts of another person? Not just enjoying someone's company or hoping a relationship might go somewhere, but thinking about them almost constantly, replaying conversations, and feeling your whole mood shift depending on whether they noticed you that day. If that sounds familiar, there is a word for what you experienced. It is called limerence. What is limerence? The term was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in her 1

Have you ever wondered why the same social situation that feels energising to one person leaves another completely depleted? Or why certain environments, like a busy open-plan office or a difficult conversation, seem to cost some people so much more than others? Part of the answer may lie less in personality or willpower and more in something more fundamental: the state of the nervous system. What is polyvagal theory? Developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges, polyvagal theo

If you've ever been told you're too sensitive or too much in your head, or spent years trying to be more outgoing and more the kind of person the room seems to want, you'll recognise something in Susan Cain's work before you've finished the first chapter. Her 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking made a case that feels obvious once you hear it, and yet clearly needed saying: that somewhere between a third and a half of the population is w

There is a particular kind of grief that doesn't get much space in the conversations around trans experience. Not the grief of loss that others can see and name, but something quieter and harder to hold: the grief of wanting something for yourself that you cannot have, or cannot have yet. This is not a grief that comes with condolence cards. There is no ritual for it. And because it sits alongside an identity that is already so often contested and debated, many trans people f

We live in a culture that talks endlessly about happiness. Get the right job and the right relationship into place, and the feeling will follow. And yet, for many people, the feeling doesn't follow. Or it arrives briefly and then slips away, leaving something harder to name underneath. Writer and researcher Emily Esfahani Smith spent years exploring why. Drawing on psychology and philosophy alongside interviews with hundreds of people, what she found is that happiness and mea

A parent's hand gently holding a baby's hand, representing what is passed down between generations, both the love and the unspoken weight. Have you ever noticed yourself reacting to something in a way that feels bigger than the moment? Or perhaps you carry an anxiety you can't quite name, one that doesn't seem to belong to any single event in your own life? You might be carrying something that was never originally yours to carry. Generational trauma, sometimes called intergen