Why We Started Talking

When Dave suggested we start a podcast, I immediately said yes. And if I'm honest about why, it's because my first thought was: I love podcasts. That was genuinely it. New project. New shiny thing. I was in.

It took a few sessions before I understood what the podcast was actually doing, and why it mattered as much as it did.

Two consistent threads have run through every major decision I've made in my adult life: wanting to help people, and wanting to do it within community. Not in isolation. Not as an expert delivering knowledge to an audience. But as someone in the middle of the same experience, making space for other people to be in the middle of theirs.

That started, unexpectedly, with childbirth education. After losing a pregnancy before my daughter, I was filled with anxiety. A friend suggested hypnobirthing, not as a guarantee of a particular kind of birth, but as a way of regulating the fear I couldn't otherwise reach. It worked in ways I hadn't expected. I felt like I'd accessed something in my own brain that I hadn't known was available.

I trained as an instructor. Then I created programmes because hypnobirthing isn't the right framework for everyone. Then I co-founded a wellness hub with a business partner, because the conversations I wanted to have kept needing a space. Community kept being the thing I was building toward.

“We've had messages from people who said: I thought we were the only ones. Every time I hear that, I feel it. The loneliness of feeling like your version of life doesn't quite map onto everyone else's.”

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The podcast is another version of that. It's Dave and me in conversation, not as authorities, but as parents, as education support workers, as neurodivergent adults, as people who are genuinely still figuring things out. And what that creates, it turns out, is something other people can see themselves in.

We've had messages from people who haven't been in touch for years. Parents who heard something in one of our episodes and recognised their own family in it. People who said: I thought we were the only ones. We hear that and I feel it every time.

The isolation of neurodivergent life, whether you're the person who is neurodivergent, or the parent, or the sibling, or the partner, is one of the things nobody talks about clearly enough. It's not just about the challenges. It's about the specific loneliness of feeling like your version of life doesn't quite map onto the version everyone else seems to have.

The podcast doesn't solve that. But it can break the silence. It can be the thing that someone plays in their car on the way to pick up their child and thinks: yes. That's what's happening. That's what this feels like. I'm not the only one.

We said it in our very first episode: if this helps one person feel less alone, it's done its job. We've long since done that. We'll keep going.

Different is normal. Not as a slogan. As a conviction that every family who feels outside the mainstream deserves to hear: you are not broken. You are not behind. You are different. And different, truly, is normal.