An exploration of the intersection of neurodivergence, obsession and disorder

Obsessive was, still is, my natural state, and I never wondered why. I didn’t mind, didn’t know that other people could feel at peace. I always felt like a raw nerve, but then, I thought that everyone...

“Without obsession, I have nothing. It’s taken me on journeys across the world in pursuit of things that interest me, and it always wins against the things that I find hard about being alive.”

Eloise, a culture writer and journalist, describes a mind that never switches off. Her lo...

Her ruminations cluster around specific themes: time, water, fire, nightmares, the city of Los Angeles. Through her fascination with Walt Disney it is revealed that, as a child, Disney stamped an owl to death.

His life’s work perhaps sprang from the associated guilt, but Eloise – as an adu...

In her late twenties now, she has also been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, nightmare disorder, dyspraxia and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissues.

“Diagnosis is a lifeline”, she writes. “It empowers me to live the way I need to, to a...

Marianne Eloise’s brain operates differently from those of “neurotypicals”. Once the “weird” child both at school and at home, she has lived in an embattled emotional state for as long as she can remember, with repeated episodes of debilitating anxiety and depression.

She has also suffered...

She processes trauma. Her mother, a mental health nurse, suffered too, with a gaze wandering far from her two daughters.Eloise made sporadic efforts to get help in the form of therapy.

“It turns out, though, that if there is an irresponsible adult in your home leaving the gate open...