A Record of Living Unfinished. After a breakdown, identity loosens. The old self becomes unrecognisable and the new one has not yet arrived.
Between Selves is a record of that liminal space: the plateau after collapse, before coherence.
Written from the perspective of a late-diagnosed autistic adult, these essays trace what remains when long-term social performance falls away. They explore masking, burnout, emotional regulation, and the legitimacy of one’s own perceptions, alongside the social pressures that shape these experiences.
They blend autistic perceptual insight with existential enquiry, examining how perception distorts under pressure and what it means to live without a settled sense of self.
This is not a narrative of triumph or recovery, but of suspension: unevenly inhabiting life after collapse. It speaks to anyone who has felt unmade and found themselves living without a settled sense of who they are yet to be.
Less a guide than a field record, Between Selves looks at rupture, disorientation, and what it means to live through continual adaptation.
A Record of Living Unfinished. After a breakdown, identity loosens. The old self becomes unrecognisable and the new one has not yet arrived.
Between Selves is a record of that liminal space: the plateau after collapse, before coherence.
Written from the perspective of a late-diagnosed autistic adult, these essays trace what remains when long-term social performance falls away. They explore masking, burnout, emotional regulation, and the legitimacy of one’s own perceptions, alongside the social pressures that shape these experiences.
They blend autistic perceptual insight with existential enquiry, examining how perception distorts under pressure and what it means to live without a settled sense of self.
This is not a narrative of triumph or recovery, but of suspension: unevenly inhabiting life after collapse. It speaks to anyone who has felt unmade and found themselves living without a settled sense of who they are yet to be.
Less a guide than a field record, Between Selves looks at rupture, disorientation, and what it means to live through continual adaptation.
Stuck in No Man’s Land Between Breakdown and Reformation
I used to play a good game. It feels now as though that person has turned their back on me, and I can no longer rely on them to carry me to the end.
I had been overextended for years, socially calibrated and performing my idea of the ideal. I was a high-functioning over-performer who kept up appearances and tightly regulated my emotions through habit and suppression. But my coping mechanisms were failing me, and I began sabotaging the very stage I had spent my life performing on. Until I couldn’t. When the collapse came, that person could never return. My body would no longer allow the lie to continue. I wanted a moment to reset, but instead I found myself trapped in an update that could not roll back to the old operating system. All the masking had been nothing more than unsustainable survival strategies posing as traits.
The landscape of psychological flora, all the textures and colours, slid away as if washed out by a flood, leaving bare rock beneath. A whole mountain stripped back to its core, its future shape not yet defined by new growth. That will require time. I did not recognise who lay exposed underneath. I could only see the crumbled remains of the personality I had carried for so long.
After the unravelling I could no longer pretend. That resource had drained away. If a friend called, I met them with tears and an inability to speak. The numbing pretence was gone, replaced by a hyper honesty I had no filters for. I could not force anything. Not motivation, not patience, not performance, not the old social face.
There are moments when I walk into the kitchen and feel as though I have entered someone else’s life. The room looks familiar but not coherent, as if I am visiting a place I used to know. I stand there with the sense that my memory has gaps, and I must retrace how I ended up here.
Where I once saw breakdown as failure, I now see it as a levelling. A demolition back to the foundation the self needed in order to rise again.
Routines began to slip from conscious thought. I would be mid-task and suddenly unable to remember what step I was on. Had I added salt? Was I checking something? Was I pacing the room aimlessly or scrolling through a mental list? It felt as though the frames of my life were skipping, small pockets of time tumbling out of existence.
My tolerance evaporated. Irritability spiked. Small tasks became monumental. The old personality structure crumbled.
What feels like a more emotional me is simply an unarmoured me.
Unfiltered now by pressure, perfectionism, or the need to hold the line for other people’s comfort.
The sense of losing myself is not disappearance but the arrival of someone else. Someone unfamiliar perhaps, but someone who feels more aligned at a deeper level. It is disorientating. Where did I go, and who has shown up instead. What is happening here. Untethered from the old me, I am following this new presence through low visibility. They do not tell me where we are going, but I have no choice except to follow.
When life can no longer distract you, it becomes a form of self-enquiry. Emotions sharpen, scraping against every movement. The rawness magnifies small things. Sadness becomes a heavy yet comforting cloak. I miss the old me who could cope, who could perform on demand, who could endure. But it is the passing of someone who had been unwell for a long time, and there is relief in letting them go. They no longer need to suffer in silence.
Now I live in the no man’s land between who I was and who I might become, sitting with the pieces of identity reconstruction. I am resting on a liminal plateau halfway up life’s climb. You cannot go back the way you came. You can only move up the next ridge. I was stuck between two selves. The old me was no longer available. The new one had not yet formed.
This mutant self is not deformity but exposure. A vantage point. A place to pause and study the terrain I have crossed, and consider where I might go next. Suspended in transit, I am cautious of rushing up the wrong path. I catch glimpses of lucidity and flashes of insight, but stable ground is still beyond reach. I may need to retrace a few steps to find a better route upward.
It’s saddening to spend so much of life as the wrong version of yourself. I am mourning the familiarity, a grief for the competence and certainty I once held. I have to orient myself towards a more honest emergence. To understand that I am not lost, only unfinished. I must shape a way forwards, because there is no return journey. Going back would be like growing older in order to visit your younger character. I have to trust the new me knows the way, because the old me became lost.
Between Selves is about learning to live with a neurodivergent nervous system after burnout. It explores the journey of a man who left the corporate world to protect his mental health and his reflections on self and becoming once the desire to fit in and to ‘mask’ had stopped.
This is a journey of living between worlds, living between who he thought he should be and who he might become. It’s an exploration of the past self, his relationship with work, reading, family, and art, and the growth of asking what he wants most for himself, the expectations he placed on himself, and the information he accumulated along the way.
As he argues, neurodivergence draws on a different operating system and a different perspective of the world, one that is out of sync with a top-down, collective perspective. It brings struggles, but it also brings talents, and this view explores both the costs and the benefits. It also explains some of the manipulations that impact mental health and well-being.
Written in journal form, each section is easy to follow and is clearly written. Each section has a lot of depth, and some sections carry a lot of weight, but they are more meditations that readers can resonate with than raw emotion without solution. And so as a reader I was free to resonate or explore rather than to hold any weight myself.
Between Selves is an excellent read for people who have been diagnosed as neurodivergent or who have made life changes because the past isn’t working but who haven’t found a new path. The messiness of the journey is clear, and it offers the value of exploring without needing clear answers.
Peak Afflatus has written a reflexive and open story on what it means to be neurodivergent. It makes a great read for people coming to terms with a neurodivergent identity, and it’s an excellent choice for anyone who has a loved one who has been diagnosed. It’s an honest, sensitive, and gentle read, which I am grateful to have in my collection.