For as long as I can remember, my body has been unreliable. I was the child who was always “a bit unwell,” the one who tired easily, got sick often and never quite bounced back the way others seemed to. For years, it was brushed off as growing pains by doctors, something vague and inconvenient but not serious enough to name.

Everything shifted when I reached secondary school. The structure, the long days, the constant sensory and physical demands were more than my body could carry. Symptoms intensified, multiplied, became impossible to ignore. I wasn’t just tired. I was dizzy, in pain, faint, unsteady. Each day felt like wading through wet cement while everyone else moved at a normal pace.

Eventually, attending school in person stopped being possible. I dropped out and continued my education online.

For a long time, the hardest part was not the symptoms themselves, but how consistently they were dismissed. Appointment after appointment, I was met with the same quiet scepticism. Blood tests came back “normal.” Scans showed nothing alarming.

Without an obvious explanation, my experiences were reduced to anxiety, stress, or hormones. I was told I was worrying too much, that I would grow out of it, that everyone feels tired and dizzy sometimes.

When you are young and repeatedly told that nothing is wrong, you start to doubt your own body. I learned to second-guess my pain, to downplay my symptoms, to rehearse how I spoke so I would sound believable enough. Even when I was struggling to stay upright or function day to day, the message was clear. If it could not be easily measured, it could not be real.

That dismissal had consequences. It delayed diagnoses, prolonged my suffering and forced me to become my own advocate far earlier than anyone should have to. I learned medical language out of necessity, not curiosity.

It took years for answers to arrive. Years of being unwell without explanation, of learning to minimise my pain so I would be believed, of adapting to a body that felt like it was constantly changing the rules. When the diagnoses finally came, PoTS, hypermobility, and more, they did not fix me, but they did something important. They confirmed that what I had been experiencing was real and measurable.

Living with chronic illness has taught me how to listen closely to my body, even when I would rather not. It has reshaped my relationship with time, productivity and rest. Like discovering I was autistic, receiving these diagnoses helped me reframe my story.

I've always felt different. Throughout my life I've often felt like an alien trying to assimilate into society, but failing miserably on their goal of appearing human.

Eye contact has never felt comfortable for me, it has always been an internal battle of when I should make eye contact and when I should look away or pause. This plus matching my facial expressions to the situation, timing when I should speak and what to say and not say makes social situations exhausting a lot of the time.

Had I ever questioned whether I could be autistic? Never. Not until I saw that many of the followers of Colourblind Zebra were autistic. This lead me to do some research in hopes of understanding my audience more. I had no idea it would lead to me discovering and understanding myself so deeply too.

Since being diagnosed, I've learnt lots about being autistic and how it impacts my life. I feel so much more comfortable in my skin in ways I did not know were possible. The static I had lived with for so long finally had a name, and naming it softened the noise.

Traits I once treated as personal failures slowly rearranged themselves into neutral facts, sometimes even strengths. I was not broken or lacking effort. I was wired differently, and that difference had been there all along.

I began unlearning the reflex to mask at all costs. I let myself stim without shame, rest without justification, and say no without rehearsing an apology. I stopped forcing eye contact like it was a moral obligation and started listening to my body when it quietly asked for space. Social energy became something to budget, not something to prove I had in endless supply.

Understanding my brain did not shrink my world. It gave it clearer edges and softer lighting. I learned how to advocate for myself, how to build routines that hold me steady, and how to connect with people who speak a similar internal language. The alien metaphor faded. I was not from another planet after all. I had simply been navigating without a map.

Now, I am still learning. Still adjusting. Still human in my own particular way. And for the first time, that feels like enough.

The philosophy behind my work is shaped by what it means to survive in systems that were never designed with me in mind. My experiences of neurodivergence, chronic illness and medical dismissal have taught me that knowledge does not always come from textbooks.

Often, it lives in bodies, in patterns of fatigue, in learned workarounds, in the quiet calculations people make just to get through the day. I treat lived experience as expertise, because it is the most honest source I know.

At its core, Colourblind Zebra challenges the idea that difference is something to be corrected or softened for comfort. I do not believe in translating disabled experiences into palatable soundbites for non-disabled approval. Instead, I focus on honesty, nuance and respect. The messy, complex, often contradictory truths of living in a body and mind that the world is not built for.