By Jack Waddington
I didn’t start writing because I thought it would help. I started because I didn’t know what else to do. After my brother died from Duchenne muscular dystrophy – a rare muscle-wasting condition that gradually weakens the body over time – everything felt a bit scrambled. My head couldn’t really switch off. If you’re neurodiverse, you might recognise that already. Grief just turned the volume up.
People say things like ‘talk to someone’ or ‘take time to process it’, which are both good bits of advice, but I didn’t always know how to actually do that. Sitting still and trying to organise my feelings wasn’t exactly my strength. So, I started writing. Not properly, not in a journal with nice pages and a plan – just in my notes app. Messages to my brother like he was still there. Sometimes it was heavy, sometimes it was just me talking about something stupid that had happened that day. But it did something important. It got things out of my head.
When everything’s stuck inside, especially if your brain already moves quickly, it can feel overwhelming. Writing slowed things down just enough for me to look at what I was thinking, instead of being completely lost in it. And there’s no right way to do it. You don’t have to be ‘good at writing’. No one else even has to read it. It can be messy, repetitive, unfinished – that’s kind of the point.
Some days I wrote a lot, some days nothing. Some days I opened my notes app, stared at it, and closed it again. That still counts. Grief doesn’t follow a neat pattern, and neither does the way you deal with it. If you’re neurodiverse, you might notice grief shows up in ways you weren’t expecting – maybe everything feels more intense, or maybe you feel nothing at all. Maybe your routine goes out the window, or your thoughts feel harder to organise. None of that means you’re doing it wrong.
Writing just became one way of making sense of it, or at least making it feel slightly less chaotic. Over time, those notes turned into something bigger, a published book: I’m on a Journey to See You, Sam, but that was never the aim. The aim was just to cope and have somewhere to put it all without needing to explain it properly.
If you’re going through something similar, you don’t need to start big. You can just open your notes app and write one sentence. Or a word. Or nothing at all. Just know that whatever you’re feeling – whether it’s sadness, anger, confusion, or even moments of nothing – is valid. And you’re not the only one trying to figure it out.
Jack x