The Patty project

This morning I made a cup of tea, grabbed a muesli bar and sat at my dining table listening to music.

It felt so simple. So ordinary. And yet, it felt quietly profound.

Years ago, when our household was in the depths of overwhelm, burnout and what we believed at the time was “just” depression, something as small as this was impossible. Music playing out loud was a no-go. It was a trigger for dysregulation, heightened anxiety and overload. So, like many families living in survival mode, we adapted. We went without. We learned to be quiet. We learned to make ourselves smaller. We learned to tiptoe around each other’s nervous systems.

And before we knew it, what we thought would be temporary — a few weeks of struggle — turned into months… then years.

The music stopped.
The laughter became less frequent.
The simple ritual of sitting and enjoying a warm cup of tea disappeared.

At the time, we told ourselves this was just what depression looked like. We blamed the heaviness on mental health alone, without fully understanding what was happening underneath. What we now recognise, with the gift of hindsight and diagnosis, is that we were living in a home filled with chronic nervous system overwhelm, autistic burnout, and years of masking to try and “fit” into a world that was never designed for our neurodivergent family.

Masking takes a quiet but devastating toll. It doesn’t always look like distress on the surface. Often it looks like functioning, pushing through, holding it all together — until the body and nervous system simply can’t anymore.

We have learned so much since then.
We have grown.
We have unlearned.
We have softened.
We have rebuilt safety in small, intentional ways.

And now, years later, I can sit at my table with music playing gently in the background and wrap my hands around a warm mug of tea. I am deeply grateful for this season of our lives — for the healing, for the awareness, for the growth.

But the truth is, my nervous system still hasn’t fully recovered. It still remembers the years of hypervigilance, the constant stress, the emotional load of caring, advocating and surviving. Healing doesn’t happen overnight when your body has lived in survival mode for so long.

And that’s okay.
We’re getting there.

I share this because so many families live in this quiet, invisible state of holding it all together. Because sometimes the biggest victories aren’t the loud, public milestones — they’re the soft moments that once felt impossible.

A cup of tea.
Music playing.
A nervous system that is slowly learning it is safe again.

If you are in the thick of it right now, please know this: the hard season will not always look like this. And one day, in your own time, you may also find yourself sitting quietly with a cuppa, realising just how far you’ve come.