From Content Writer to Health Educator: Why Neuroscience Matters for Women's Wellness.

My grandma was a witch.. 

Not in a Halloween fun way 

In the most real, most gasp-provoking way.

She knew things and would often get caught in the frenzy of her soul, scrabbling pieces of information only her mind could understand.

She was my best friend.

And she was constantly called crazy 

Weird

My mum?

Follows no one's path 

She's the black sheep, the rebel spirit, and if you ask her about it, she'll say she's very proud of herself.

That's my inheritance 

And it's only a quarter of who I am.

Okay…

But why the hell am I sharing this with you?

Well, living with a neurodivergent brain means that oftentimes, our actions feel like watching a movie from afar.

Very afar 

While I was researching options for the first blog of The Lotus Cortex, I didn't find any that suggested sharing your personal life.

The marketer in me pointed out that I needed to focus on high-ranking subjects. 

She is slightly offended that I rejected her expertise.

But I didn't build this space to rank.

I built it to share 

I built it from a sense of intimacy, an open door to my inner world. 

And the only way my brain would give me a rest from its inner monologue.

So, sorry, not sorry —former professional career.

This is about to get personal.

The Path I Didn’t See Coming

One thing I've always struggled with is accepting the person I see in the mirror.

People have said on more than one occasion that she has a radiance around her. 

People didn't know what lies underneath her light.

Tiredness 

Numbness 

A permanent sense of failure was walking along with her.

Her

Myself 

I was that kid 

The one who read before anyone else in her class.  The one who didn't want to have a teacher by her side when she gave her graduation speech…

She was five years old at the time. 

I never studied for a test, and if you give me an hour with a new subject, then I'll come back as an expert on it.

Nice, right?

Not so much when you are left frozen, without a clue of what you're supposed to do. 

Not so much when you want to scream with all your might and no words leave your mouth.

Being autistic isn't something I expected to discover in my late 20s. 

But gods, if it wasn't helpful 

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, meaning the wires making our brain work are either too loose or too cluttered. 

We don't function on balanced neural connections. 

We move, no, we jump from one point to another with the speed of a supernova.

And we land? 

It's often with a crash 

No wonder we are exhausted 

Funny how people can label me as a high-energy person.

In a way, it's kind of true. When I devote myself to something, I'm so into it that I forget about the world.

Me included 

Hyper focus at its best 

But my batteries are short-lived and don't get along with the normal life of an adult.

That's a fact hard to digest at any point in our lives, but even more when you're close to being 30 years old.

The good thing?

I was never normal 

But autistic?

Nah

Autism was kids’ stuff

Little boys were autistic

No grown-up ass women

Wrong

It wasn't that girls could be autistic, it was that conventional science was too blind to see it, leaving us as casualties.

Fortunately, that's starting to change.

And the little activist in me is ready to ride the wave.

With such strong women in my family, I guess being a feminist was only natural. After learning about my autism, though, I directed my values to understand why as many as 80% of girls might remain undiagnosed.

Is it because nobody looks at them?

Is it because girls are forced to fit the mould?

Or it's just because we were girls?

Two years on from my autism discovery and I still have lots of questions.

Always had, at the school my teachers couldn't shut me up and gods help them if I spotted a mistake in the lessons.

Those were good moments

The rest?

Making friends and doing things following instructions?

Ranged from non-existent to plain chaos.

Not fitting in the crowd has been a pattern in my life since I was a child. Sometimes it's cool, like finishing 10 different things at the same time in 10 minutes; sometimes it's painful, like being paralysed when your phone rings because you don't know how to speak on the phone.

Oscillations

That's how we survive

That's how I'm learning to live, and speaking of learning.

How the hell does a public health graduate who has worked on marketing for the majority of her career wake up and decide to be a health educator?

Glad you asked

When Science Met Self

I shouldn't be alive

No, really

I was diagnosed with not one but two brain tumours before my 10th birthday.

A fracture on my finger opened the doors to CRPS, a neuropathic pain disorder.

COVID?

Gave me pericarditis

And let's not mention my Sjogren syndrome.

Milestones as an adult?

Sure, as long as they come in the form of crazy diseases.

I learned from a very young age that I couldn't rely solely on doctors, so I guess it was normal that I felt at home researching complex stuff even before I started my health sciences degree.

If I couldn't understand what the hell was going on with my body, at least I could understand my mind.

My mom's 24/7 positive energy felt alien to me during the majority of my 20s.

Little did I know that getting stuck in my never-ending low self-esteem and overall sense of failure was pushing me and pushing me to a dark corner. Physically, I was already used to it.

Mentally?

That could make me disappear

And for all my faults I'm a stubborn witch.

I climbed, fell, and lost

But I came back hungry and decided to build something out of my shattered pieces

I specialized in the science of mind and a bunch of other courses, decided to get ready to finish another degree, in psychology this time, and prepare myself for a master in cognitive neuroscience.

Sounds like a lot but for a mind that's more often than not in overdrive with a dozen open tabs, it's not enough.

And so I asked myself…

What if I remove the dust from my public health degree?

What if I use all that unwelcomed humour of mine to good use?

And if I make it a bit feminist?

A bit pretty?

What if science finally gets us?

That's how The Lotus Cortex was born, a place where we turn awareness into art, and science into softness.

If you’re curious to start your own version of this journey, to slow down, refocus, and reconnect with yourself, I made something for you.

Download your free The Lotus Cortex self-love cards , gentle prompts for awareness, reflection, and grounding, created with the same messy magic that started all this.