You don't have to call it a breakdown. You don't have to call it anything.
Sometimes it just looks like a person who can't stop making things. Who wakes up at 5am with gremlin lore and CSS problems and somehow that's the thing keeping the lights on inside.
I'm late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD. I spent most of my life thinking I was too much, too loud, too weird, too broken in ways I couldn't name but plenty of people sure did try and made it clear that while being too *whatever* I was simultaneously also failing to meet whatever expectations they might have had.
And then someone handed me a label that said *no, actually — you're just wired differently* and I had to figure out what to do with that information at an age when most people have already built their whole life around the wrong blueprint.
What I did was build a multiverse.
40 blogs. Books. Albums. A rock band made of gremlins. A bureaucratic taskforce. A gremlin librarian with a duck named Solas and a roll-top desk with 72 drawers. A wellness card deck. A TV network. A tavern. A card game. An emotionally supportive lobster.
It looks insane from the outside. From the inside it looks like survival.
This is what mental health support looks like for me. Not a hotline. Not five tips. Just — make the thing. Put the noise somewhere it can't hurt you. Make it funny if you can.
I have design skills. Photography. Photoshop. I can draw. What I don't have is time — not the kind of time it takes to build consistent characters across 40 interconnected sites while working full time and raising two kids alone in rural Mayo with no blueprint and no roadmap and no one who's done this particular thing before.
So I used AI to illustrate the stories.
Not because I couldn't. Because the stories needed to exist more urgently than the illustrations needed to be hand-drawn. The AI didn't replace an artist. It replaced the version of this project that stays in a folder forever because the skills aren't developed enough yet and the time isn't there yet and eventually the whole thing dies quietly and the noise stays inside with nowhere to go.
The AI is why the folder became a multiverse instead. The reason I could finally start this project after years of sitting waiting for the time to draw.
And the multiverse is why this post exists. And this post might be why someone at 3am, not knowing why they can't function like everyone else seems to, finds something that makes them feel slightly less alone.
That's the reach. That's what it made possible.
I started this because I was drowning in a way I couldn't explain to anyone. Late diagnosis gives you answers but it doesn't undo the years of being wrong-shaped for a world that wasn't built for you. It doesn't fix the exhaustion of masking, or the grief of realising how much energy you spent pretending to be someone you weren't, or the strange vertigo of being in your forties and finally understanding why everything was always so hard.
What it gave me was permission. Not the official kind. The kind you give yourself quietly, alone, at a desk at stupid o'clock, when you decide to just — make the thing. See what happens.
What happened was this.
It's not perfect. It's not finished. It probably never will be. But it's real, and it's mine, and it exists in the world where before there was nothing.
If you're reading this and you're in the folder-that-never-gets-finished stage — that's okay. The folder is not failure. The folder is where everything starts.
You don't have to be ready. You don't have to be good enough. You don't have to have the hours or the skills or the energy or the certainty that it matters.
You just have to make the thing.
Whatever the thing is. However badly. However slowly. However quietly.
Make it anyway.
The gremlins didn't wait until they were ready.
🦞