Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

I’m 45, and in some ways, my emotional growth feels decades behind.
Not because I didn’t want to grow, but because I had to survive.

My neurodevelopment (in the family of neurodivergences), for me, has been a long apprenticeship in hiding. Masking. Suppressing. Twisting myself into shapes that fit a world that never wanted to see the real movements, sounds, or pace my body needed. Forty-five years of holding back my stimming have taught my muscles that tension is the default setting.

And then there’s the PDA profile, that paradox where even my own healing feels like a demand I must resist. It’s not that I don’t want to change. I do. But there’s a part of me with a default program to defend itself against being told what to do, even by me.

Now, I am tired. I don’t want to hear another should. I want to move, fidget, and grow on my own terms, and stop playing a game I never liked in the first place. “Opportunit’a,” find out who I might have been if I’d been allowed to unfold naturally. I guess that’s the joke on the late bloomer, life begins at 40!

The Nervous System and Pattern Seeker.

My nervous system notices what others miss. I’ve stood at the edge and seen accidents before they happen. To them, I’m “just anxious.” In reality, I’m watching a timeline unfold in advance, and sometimes, that’s what has saved lives.

But the same sensitivity that protects can also dismantle me. When my one safe person died (mum), and then COVID stripped away co-regulation, it was like being dropped into the wild west without a map or time machine. I froze. I disconnected. I burned out.

The Cost of Masking

Small talk is painful and tiresome. I want to understand it, but my brain is just too busy. Something as small as grocery shopping can feel like swimming through broken glass. I crave deep conversation, patterns, philosophy, the architecture of the human mind, and the myths of old. But the trauma pile-up has kept me in constant hyper-vigilance. I apologise for everything, even for existing. The internal critic is a crowd of old voices, sometimes joined by delusion. Fear of rejection turns my behaviour erratic, even when all I want is to belong.
(The I’m too intense, even today, is real and hurtful) I don’t want to be that person, but when meltdown hits, my executive function is limited.

The word rude still haunts me. Like most people, I was not allowed to swear as a child, but swearing is one of my stims. So is crying. So is screaming, clapping like a seal and throwing my arms.
These are not acts of drama; they are pressure valves for the fire under my skin and the bees in my head.

Meltdown and Burnout

When a meltdown comes, it’s not just noise or chaos. It is a soul-disconnection so deep it feels like a thousand deaths at once, lifetime after lifetime. Sometimes I throw things. Sometimes I scream.
And sometimes I collapse into stillness so complete I disappear inside, or go rant on repeat, never stopping, even when I’m so tired the words are not coherent.

Burnouts arrive like winter storms, three or four a year, and each one is like an epic hero’s journey.
And yes, it is exhausting to keep coming back. This is why I can’t go back to the old me who doesn’t know the truth about herself. And then you hit midlife, perimenopause!

Living in the In-Between

For six months now, I’ve been living in a small cottage, breathing one day to the next. In the past 14 months, I’ve only been well enough to work for a couple of them, and even then, poolside is not a safe place for an overactive nervous system and a poor lower back.

I have no funds. I need a new passport. I crave connection and purpose. I seek meaning where others seek transaction. I fear attachment because rejection has been more common than validation. If only I could get validation, I could rewrite my story; it has become clear that I will need to be the one giving it.

My needs are not unusual, belonging, purpose, safety, just with the added intensity of a colourful mind and a buzzing nervous system.

And Now

I am not “poor me.” I am a complex human with complex needs, some of which I don’t always understand myself. But I cannot “just get over it,” because biology does not bend to wishful thinking.
I have been a master of masking, but I will no longer be a master of disappearing. Sometimes, resilience is the problem, or a faulty toolkit not built to support this nervous system.

What I want, more than anything, is to live again and to feel safe inside my own skin.

Declaration

Writing this is not just a memoir entry. It is a vow. A vow to myself to never go back to the old ways, the ways of masking, suppressing, shaping myself into a version that is easier for others to be around.

Life has been like a video game I’ve been trapped in for decades. I’ve fought the same battles again and again, respawned at the same checkpoint, stuck on Level 3 while others seem to soar ahead.
I’m repeating the same survival moves over and over.

But this time, I am not just playing to survive. I am playing to be. I am allowing the authentic me to surface, to take up space, to bloom without asking permission.

I will still fall. I will still respawn. But I will not wear the armour that hides me from myself.
This is my next level.

And I am -ready.

Opportunit`a = where hardship meets possibility – trying to prove my right to belong to be seen, valuable, and safe after a lifetime of being unseen.

©️ Elke T.B. Stevens 10/08/2025