Not Every Struggle Announces Itself with a Cyclops

If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you’ll probably have noticed a pattern. I rarely write about my life. I write from it.

Whether the subject is autism, social cohesion, artificial intelligence, Greek identity or leadership, the starting point is almost always lived experience. But I have never been particularly interested in autobiography. I’m interested in taking something personal and asking what it reveals about the systems we build, the cultures we inherit and the institutions we create. The personal matters because it is evidence, not because it is exceptional.

Over the last year, though, something changed.

I found myself navigating one of the darkest periods I can remember. And here is something I have learned that I rarely hear said aloud: for those of us who are neurodivergent, it is not always possible to know where the darkness ends and the condition begins. They do not arrive with labels. They blur into each other, and you can spend months inside that blur before you realise you are no longer simply tired, or simply overloaded, or simply yourself.

What finally loosened something was, of all things, writing about a film.

When I found myself writing about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, I argued that Greek culture’s defining strength has always been generosity, not custody. We are not the guardians of our stories. We are the people who gave them away, and were made larger by the giving.

I thought I was writing about Homer. I was writing about myself.

For years I fought the Greek label. It felt like a box: the ethnic broadcaster, the community representative, the hyphenated identity that explained me before I could explain myself. I wanted to be read for my ideas, not filed under my surname. But sitting with the Odyssey again, I realised the label was true all along. Just not in the way people meant it.

Being Greek, I have come to understand, is not a heritage you guard. It is a way of understanding journeys. Everyone remembers Odysseus for outwitting monsters. Fewer remember that his longest battle came afterwards, on the slow, ordinary voyage home. Not every struggle announces itself with a Cyclops. Some are measured simply by continuing to put one oar in front of the other.

That is the tradition I actually belong to: not the flags or the festivals, but the rowing.

And once I remembered that, I could finally say where I had been.

Then, this week, I recognised familiar weather. A year ago I would have done what I had always done: closed the door, kept working, said nothing. This time I chose differently. I spoke, publicly, for the first time. In Greek.

Greek is where I go when I need to confide. It is the language of my grandmother’s kitchen, not the language of my board papers. The response, mostly quiet, private conversations from people I never expected, turned out to be exactly what I needed to keep going.

I said then that one day, when I was truly out of the woods, I would tell the whole story. That day hasn’t come. But I can tell part of it.

For much of my life, I was a broadcaster. Everything I have done since, the writing, the facilitation, the campaigns, the conferences, has really been the same job in different clothes: connection with an audience, with a community, with people I may never meet but always imagine.

I only recently understood what that connection was actually doing for me.

For me, autism has often been a profoundly lonely way to move through the world. My remedy, long before I knew it was a remedy, was to visualise the people beyond the microphone. As long as I could picture them listening, reading, nodding, disagreeing, I was never entirely alone. For years I thought I was broadcasting to an audience. Only recently did I realise they were quietly holding me up as much as I hoped I was helping them.

So when the darkness came, the cruellest thing I did to myself was not asking too much of my mind. It was withdrawing the very connection that had always kept me tethered. I went quiet in exactly the place where I had always done my best thinking out loud. And without the people beyond the microphone, the darkness was bigger than it needed to be.

There is something particular about the way my autistic brain works. For all the barriers autism has placed in front of me, it has also given me an extraordinary capacity to compartmentalise. To keep showing up. To keep speaking, facilitating, writing and serving communities while quietly placing my own wellbeing into a locked room somewhere inside myself.

People often call that resilience. I’m no longer sure they are the same thing.

We celebrate people who keep functioning. We call them resilient. But functioning and flourishing are not synonyms. Sometimes what looks like resilience from the outside is simply compartmentalisation from the inside. It keeps you alive. It doesn’t necessarily keep you well. Sometimes the strongest person in the room is simply the person who has become the hardest to reach.

My work has always existed somewhere between mourning and hope; between trauma and comedy; between helping people tell stories of unimaginable loss and then asking an audience to laugh five minutes later. What I didn’t say, until now, is that eventually those worlds stop ending when the meeting ends. They travel home with you.

For a long time, I thought protecting people meant protecting them from my own struggles. I thought leadership required certainty. I thought kindness meant carrying my own weight in silence. I’m beginning to suspect the opposite is true.

Silence is not always strength. Sometimes it is isolation disguised as dignity. Perhaps kindness is telling the truth before it is tidy.

Some readers will inevitably wonder what this is really about. They’re asking the wrong question. I have never been interested in the personal as spectacle. I have always been interested in what a personal story reveals about the systems beneath it: what we allow to silence us, why we mistake survival for strength, and what happens when we confuse functioning with flourishing.

So this is not a promise to become an open book. That’s not who I am. But I will try, painfully and slowly, to write more honestly about the things that happen before the lessons are complete.

Not because my story is remarkable. Because somewhere, someone else may still be sitting in that same darkness, convinced that everyone they admire somehow escaped it. Most of us didn’t. Some of us simply became very good at hiding it.

I have always written from lived experience rather than about it. Perhaps this is no different. The difference is that, this time, the lived experience hasn’t finished yet.

Perhaps the voyage home can only be understood while we are still rowing.

First published on Substack, 22 July 2026.