Transition Phase
The Neitherworld
Transitions are, by nature, uncomfortable. No one wants to linger in an in-between phase — you just want to get to the other side, where life makes sense again, as quickly and quietly as possible. Despite knowing, thanks to all that philosophy study, that these phases can be the most valuable in life, I’ve been giving into the fear and embarrassment, trying to close my eyes and sprint through my current one — chasing stability in a new job, new city, and a new shape of life overall. But what I actually need, is to slow down, live inside it, and yield everything that can be gained. A first step in this I think is admitting the situation for what it is, and sharing how it feels and what I’m going to do with it. But first, some background.
A Long Investigation
Back in 2022, I was three years deep into the girlboss dream — Venture Capital job, public speaking, awards and media attention. But inside, I was consumed by confusion: why did I feel so strange and alien in the world, why did I have no explanation for why I was the way that I was? Why did life feel so much harder for me than for others — enough that I had been experiencing burnout and depression roughly every quarter for 15 years? I quit everything to figure it out, alongside writing a novel (so I could economically justify the sabbatical). That novel, and trying to explain why the protagonist was the way that she was, became my method of self-investigation.
For two years, I reconstructed my entire life story through the lens of neuroscience and psychology. I started a Masters in Applied Psychology, and while I couldn’t afford to pay for graduation or a certificate, I got what I needed from the materials and supplemented it with every textbook, scientific paper and youtube lecture I could get my hands on. Eventually, I landed on a clinical diagnosis stack and ratified it with a clinical psychologist to make sure: autism, ADHD, major depressive disorder, and complex PTSD. An overachiever, even in pathology.
Autism, a pre-birth situation of a differently structured brain, was the foundational layer. I came into the world without the innate, bodily intuition for social behaviours and physical cues — like a frequency I simply couldn’t hear. Instead, I had an unusually interconnected prefrontal cortex, making me exceptionally skilled at learning and pattern matching.
But my environment didn’t allow for the stereotypical autistic experience of being left alone to fixate on whatever niche interest might first capture me (like penguins, as in the TV show Atypical). As a West African girl child, I was surrounded by people — and by social expectations. So my brain’s compulsive learning and pattern matching turned toward people. I watched, scanned, and reflexively catalogued every move others made, mapping them to meanings, categories, explanations, and suitable responses. I taught myself to read at age 2, and from books as well as constant observation, I absorbed everything I could about how people functioned — emotionally, socially, and behaviorally.
ADHD developed in early childhood as a byproduct of all this cognitive overstimulation. It left me swinging between bursts of hyperfocus when stimulated or interested, and complete inertia when not. It also prevented me from developing a whole suite of essential cognitive reflexes: a reliable sense of time passing, short-term memory, impulse control, spatial awareness — the list goes on. Some neural skills simply can’t develop when the brain is in a near-constant state of overstimulation.
Depression began around age 12. The best way to describe it is as the eventual fallout from relentlessly overworking my brain — automatically and constantly processing every human interaction I encountered, and then matching each to a rule or reaction, like “understand everything” or “keep everyone happy.” Eventually, the sheer effort would leave me completely depleted, and I’d collapse into the dense, grey heaviness of exhausted depression. After enough time in that numbed-out, barely-conscious state, something in my environment would reawaken me. Then the cycle would begin again — on repeat, roughly every three months, for 15 years.
Complex PTSD was layered on top of all this, the cumulative result of sustained nervous system damage from years of high-stress experiences: my father’s death, corporal punishment in primary school in Nigeria, violent bullying, and multiple sexual assaults in adolescence and my teenage years. (Autistic tendencies — from social unawareness to simply standing out — can often make you a target in unsafe environments.) The result was a near-constant state of physical fatigue, a deep disconnection from my body, and a frequent inability to feel or move it properly.
If you’re wondering how I managed to get away with it all for so long, the answer is: I unknowingly fought fire with fire. The social difficulties typical in autism were counterbalanced by the fact that people — and human behaviour itself — became my special interest. So not only did I become “good at” social, I loved it. The same ecstatic attachment other autistics might have to trains or languages, I had for people. ADHD, in turn, let me pour bursts of dopamine, energy, creativity, and focus into people-pleasing behaviours and productivity — at least in between depressive crashes. This meant I could build up enough goodwill and output that, when everything eventually fell apart, I usually got away with it.
As for the PTSD — my dissociation from my body helped me tolerate the high levels of stress I was constantly under, without registering the typical physical signs like racing heartbeats, stomach issues, migraines, or allergies.
And then, there were the systems. Thanks to that autism-powered pattern recognition, every noticed deficiency became a trigger to engineer a workaround. Alarms and calendar reminders to manage time. Keys always by the door. A quarter of my income budgeted to replace lost items. Music to help regulate movement, emotion, and energy. I created a finely tuned infrastructure just to function.
Had it not been for the quarterly emotional collapse, the permanent exhaustion, and the persistent, nagging sense that life wasn’t supposed to feel this difficult — it might have all been perfectly fine.
Curiosity and the Cat
By 2024, I felt like I had finally “solved” myself. I was living in Berlin, rewriting the novel, coaching and counselling a brilliant group of people, and focusing on healing both body and mind. I practiced yoga to repair the damage from complex PTSD, and had undergone psychedelic therapy to rewire old neural patterns — helping shift certain mental processes from laborious cognition into something more embodied and intuitive.
With no pressing questions left about who I was or why I was the way I was, I continued learning simply for the joy of it — textbooks, academic papers, lectures, theories. Quantum physics? Absolutely. Jungian psychodynamics? Of course. Gnostic esotericism? Naturally. I became almost monastic. Most of my closest friends were still in London or scattered across the world, my once-vast professional network had faded after years away from the superconnector life, and relationships in Berlin tended to be transient. But I had discovered a new, internal way of delighting myself — one that matched the highs I used to get only from rich social interaction.
It felt like being two years old again, consumed by the thrill of understanding. So I leaned in. Sometimes I went weeks that winter without spending real in-person time with anyone, my mind constantly spinning with whatever I was studying or imagining.
Then, things started to get strange. Toward the end of the year, I began losing track of time while deep in thought — say, reflecting on a linguistic theory — and missing scheduled meetings. I’d head out for a quick walk and return hours later, having been completely absorbed by ideas sparked from dense books like John Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin.
Eventually, something frightening happened: a moment of rapid-fire, cascading realisations. One insight after another, eureka after eureka — faster than I could process. It tipped into overwhelming confusion and a rising panic that something terrible might happen to me physically if I couldn’t find a way to stop thinking.
In the grip of that fear, I fled Berlin. I returned to London, where I’d once been the opposite of the deep-thinking recluse I became in pursuit of self-understanding. Not necessarily to return to the girlboss socialite I once was — but definitely to become something less strange than the creature I had turned into.
The Reckoning
The first few months of 2025, back in London, were rough. I was re-acclimating to social life, abstaining from all the fuel I’d been running on — deep study, weed, emotionally evocative music, ideation in general — and feeling deeply uncertain about myself. There were a couple of weeks in there when I was consumed by regret and shame. I couldn’t believe the state I’d landed in.
Standing in the city where I’d once felt powerful and successful, with nothing to show for my hero’s journey besides depleted savings and a novel manuscript I couldn’t sell, I found myself asking: what the hell I’d done?
The disappointment was so intense I even regretted doing the somatic therapy that had helped me feel emotions properly — because now I was feeling everything, and it was unbearable. For the first time in my life, I had no trust in myself. How could I have gotten it so wrong, while feeling so certain it was right?
I ruminated endlessly. Why hadn’t I built community in Berlin instead of isolating myself so completely? Why had I left so abruptly? How could I have understood the brain so well — mine especially — and still not known that learning, of all things, could be what undid me?
The regret snowballed, stretching back to 2022. With all my long-sought answers now feeling so known they seemed almost obvious, I couldn’t remember how desperate I’d been to find them. It felt absurd that I’d traded professional success and financial stability for something as intangible — and, in that moment, as underwhelming — as self-understanding. Why hadn’t I just suppressed the questions and kept going like everyone else?
More than anything, I was devastated that the book deal I’d imagined — the public proof that this whole inner journey had been worth it — wasn’t materialising. No triumphant banner to wave. No clear story to tell.
So I scrambled to find a new fancy executive job somewhere. I just wanted a title — some identity to hold on to, something to anchor myself to and say, “This is who I am now.”
But, thankfully, a few wise and well-timed conversations pulled me back from the edge. I didn’t take the great opportunity that came my way. Instead, Instead I made the decision I had resisted for months: I’m going back to Ireland, to my mother’s house. A place where I have the support to move slowly. To allow this strange, liminal space to unfold. To figure out what it looks like to integrate the self I was before this quest with the self I became through it.
I want to create again. And to find a way to balance learning and doing — so that I can still feel the joy and satisfaction it brings me, without losing touch with the world or tipping into obsession.
I’ll be taking support from the Upfront Global community, and getting some stimulation from hosting weekly gatherings. And, finally, I’ve decided to give myself the platform I was waiting for a future book tour to provide — by launching a podcast. Talking for a living has always been my dream, and since transitions are prime time for experimentation… I might as well try.
I hope you’ll tune in when it launches.