Bambi on the Moon

Hypermobility, nervous systems, being held together by tape… and apparently learning how to walk at 45.

I didn’t know it was this much work holding my body up - how could I? I’ve only ever known being inside this body.

I’ve always carried my arms around in my pockets. Leaned against door frames. Sat on the floor. Sat with my feet up. Leaned against the wall in the shower.

And I loved being upside down when I was wee.

I remember my gran visiting and saying to my mum:

“Why does she always lie on the floor?”

No idea, Gran.

I just liked the floor.

My mum would make me walk around with books balanced on my head because my shoulders slouched inwards and I had a swagger.

I am always bumping into things - Walls. Door frames. People. My wee pinky getting caught in other people’s clothes.

The tighter the corridor, the worse it is. Sometimes my ankle does this wee twist and somehow the rest of my body drags along the wall for another 30cm.

I’ve fallen off kerbs, tripped over thin air - I’ve pretty much always been covered in bruises.

I remember being about twelve and my PE teacher shouting:

“Why can’t you run in a straight line?”

And I remember thinking: What do you mean, I am?

Pfft there weren’t even any lines to follow, so how am I supposed to know?

None of this ever seemed particularly significant.

It was just me.

A bit clumsy.

A bit slouchy.

A bit crap at standing up straight.

Then, hitting 45, my neck and shoulder became unbearable trying to sleep, I kept googling 'why does it feel like my neck and shoulder is caving in'.

And eventually I went to see a hypermobility physio - an awesome one too, btw.

She assessed me and I scored 6/9 on the Beighton scale - This was interesting.

But... it was actually a bit of tape that gave me my biggest holy shit moment.

She taped a big X across my shoulders and back and I could immediately feel myself sitting more upright.

I remember looking down at myself thinking Oooh, Hello there.

I was standing like 'I'm a lady' (in a Little Britain voice) New feeling for the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But otherwise, I didn’t think that much of it - I got dressed, chatted to her, walked out of the room and closed the door behind me.

Then I started walking.

Woahhhh.

I felt like Bambi on the moon.

There’s a Billy Connolly joke where he talks about being drunk from the waist down.

It was a bit like that.

My feet didn’t quite know where to go because suddenly the weight of my whole body felt different - I had to find my footing so I didn’t moonwalk down the street. (The Buzz Aldrin one — not Michael.)

But I also felt incredibly light - doing an alien motion with my arms.

Could I fly? lol.

And, because apparently my life requires its own soundtrack, I found myself walking down the street singing:

🎵 I wonder if one day that, You’ll say that you care, If you say you love me madly, I’ll gladly be there like a puppet on a string 🎵

Which was particularly appropriate, because that’s exactly what I felt like.

A wee whimsical puppet - and someone had finally picked up the strings.

Or like someone had put a coat hanger through the back of my jumper and was gently holding me up. I felt about a tenth of my normal weight.

That is maybe a massive exaggeration, but honestly - that’s how extraordinary it felt.

And once I’d figured out where my feet were, I catwalked it home like a smiling legend, with sound effects, of course.

I kept the tape on for three days.

I didn’t want to take it off, there was something incredibly comforting about feeling held up.

And I had stopped banging into walls, that was the bit I reaally wasn’t expecting.

Something I’ve done my entire life, without really thinking about it had changed.

I’ve often described walking as feeling like I only have one propeller working. I can feel myself drifting sideways, so I always make sure I’m on the left side of people. Then I have to consciously straighten myself up again.

With the tape, I wasn’t doing it. I was just… walking freely.

Ahhhhh.

Naturally, I immediately wondered whether there was some kind of permanent version of this.

Because, as life-changing as a few strips of physio tape apparently are, two or three days wrapped in tape gets a wee bit itchy - probably not the greatest long-term plan for anyone with sensitive skin.

I’ve tried a posture corrector too.

Nope, Definitely not the same thing.

It's the tape, somehow seems to give my body information.

I’m not entirely sure I have the language for it yet.

So, any proprioception/interoception inventors out there, please??

And this is where the therapist part of my brain became very interested.

Because I talk about nervous systems all the time.

I talk about interoception. Proprioception. Sensory processing. Regulation. Autonomic nervous systems. The incredible ways our bodies adapt to get us through life.

I work with neurodivergent people who have spent years being told they’re too sensitive, lazy, anxious, dramatic, difficult or not trying hard enough.

A huge part of my work is helping people become curious about what their body is actually communicating rather than immediately deciding something is wrong with them.

And there I was.

Being held together by physio tape, thinking:

Ah.

Apparently my own body had a few things it wanted to add to the conversation.

Then I took the tape off.

And I felt it.

Not new pain.

Nothing had suddenly gone wrong.

I just noticed my normal.

The feeling of collapse.

My hips.

My lower back.

My left shoulder and hip clicking and sometimes feeling like they’re coming out of the socket.

My knees labouring under pressure.

And this bloody exhausting feeling of holding my head up.

My daughter and I have a silly saying:

“I’d love you even if your head fell off and rolled down the street.”

I’ve said it for years. And now I’m wondering if my body has been writing the jokes this whole time.

I was actually quite disappointed.

Because once you’ve experienced your body feeling different, it’s very hard not to notice what it normally asks of you.

And I started thinking about exhaustion.

I’ve been exhausted for years.

People sometimes assume I exercise because I’m thin and have a bit of muscle.

Nope.

I’m possibly the most fittish looking unfit person on the planet.

Exercise and I have never really got on.

(P.O.T.S. blog coming soon.)

I get exhausted. I struggle with exertion. Sometimes breathing feels difficult. The gym has always felt like something other people apparently do and then, inexplicably, choose to go back to. I’ve spent years shamefully thinking I was just crap at exercise — which, naturally, came with a whole load of inner-critic nonsense.

That’s a fight I’ve worked bloody hard to win.

Then I had this thought:

Maybe I’m already exercising.

Not literally, obviously.

But maybe my body is already using a lot of energy just getting me through an ordinary day.

Maybe I’ve been carrying a whole human around with me all day. (yes, like the Rock, Dwayne and I go way back)

My physio said something about the supported feeling being closer to how other people go about their day. I laughed, then I thought: FML. :(

Because this is where it all gets a bit messy.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 36.

Nine years later, autism.

Then POTS.

And now hypermobility.

And there’s trauma in there too.

So which one is responsible for what?

I have absolutely no idea.

Is the exhaustion ADHD? Autistic burnout? POTS? Hypermobility? Trauma? Now Perimenopause is turning the volume up on all of it?

Is bumping into walls proprioception?

Is sitting on the floor regulation?

Was being upside down as a child sensory seeking?

Was the swagger compensation?

Were my hands always in my pockets because it was easier than carrying the weight of my arms?

I don’t know.

And I’m becoming increasingly okay with saying that.

Because I think perhaps we’ve become a little too interested in deciding which box owns which symptom.

Bodies don’t really work like that.

My autonomic nervous system doesn’t stop at the door and check whether something belongs to ADHD, autism, POTS, trauma or hypermobility before responding.

It’s all happening inside the same human.

And that’s probably one of the biggest things this whole late-diagnosis journey has taught me.

I don’t know which bit is which anymore.

Maybe I never will. And that’s okay.

I just know that for most of my life I thought many of these things were simply flaws in me.

And that’s the bit that hurts.

I wasn’t feminine enough - hated shopping.

I was messy.

I couldn’t be bothered doing my hair and makeup.

I wanted to sit on the ground every where.

I didn’t have enough energy.

I was clumsy.

I hated sport.

I felt I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I was too much in some ways and somehow not enough in others.

And when you experience rejection often enough, eventually you stop thinking my body is struggling with something and start thinking there’s something wrong with me.

Then after lots of research, at 36 somebody finally says ADHD.

More study.

Nine years later - autism.

More research, more listening, more experience - POTS

And now hypermobility.

But the curiousity continues.

There’s still so much we don’t understand about how all these things overlap.

And you find yourself looking backwards through your entire life going:

Oh.

Ohhhh.

Wait. That too?

There’s grief in that.

But there’s something else as well.

Language.

I sometimes think this has been part of my own wee Hero’s Journey.

Not in an 'everything happens for a reason' way - some things just suck.

But there’s something about going into your own wilderness, getting completely bloody lost and eventually coming back with something you didn’t have before.

For me, that something has often been language.

And maybe that’s part of my why.

I’m a therapist.

I get to sit with people while they try to make sense of experiences they’ve sometimes carried without language for decades.

I get to say:

Tell me more.

What does that actually feel like for you?

Rather than immediately deciding I know.

And the more I’ve had to advocate for my own body, the more strongly I feel about that.

It frustrates me enormously when I see people’s lived experience dismissed by professionals.

Professional knowledge matters.

Clinical training matters.

Evidence matters.

But so does actually listening to the person sitting in front of you.

They have lived inside that body every day of their life.

They’ve been collecting data for years.

They might not know the medical terminology. (tbh neither do many professionals)

They might connect things that turn out not to be connected.

They might be wrong about the explanation.

But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong about their experience.

I think that’s what the tape gave me.

Not a diagnosis.

Not an answer.

A comparison.

For three days I experienced my body differently.

I had fun being Bambi on the moon.

A puppet with somebody gently lifting the strings.

A coat hanger underneath a tired human.

Then the tape came off and I could feel what had always been there.

And I believed myself a little bit more.

So if you’ve spent years thinking something about your body doesn’t quite make sense, I suppose that’s what I want to say.

Trust yourself.

Not 'Google it and diagnose yourself with seventeen conditions by Tuesday.'

Just trust yourself enough to stay curious.

Keep asking questions. (You can always ask me too)

Keep advocating.

Notice the weird things.

Tell people about the things you nearly don’t mention because they sound silly.

The leaning against walls.

The sitting on floors.

The tripping over air.

The feeling that your head is too heavy.

The things you’ve done since childhood and assumed everyone else did too.

You are the expert of living in your body.

A professional might have knowledge you don’t have.

But you have knowledge they don’t have too.

We need both.

And that’s why a few other awesome neurodivergent professionals and I keep dreaming about building a not-for-profit centre where people can be understood as whole humans, in the context of their own experience.

Where people’s experiences can be heard and believed, and nervous systems understood and supported.

Where we can be clinically curious without immediately pathologising someone.

Where different professionals can look at the same human without carving them into completely separate pieces.

Where somebody can say, “This sounds weird, but…” and the response is:

Tell me more.

Because sometimes the weird wee details matter most.

Sometimes it’s just a bit of tape.

And sometimes a bit of tape makes you realise you’ve been carrying a human around your whole bloody life.

Anyway, I’m off to lie down - thanks for listening :)