Sometimes the curtain between ordinary and extraordinary is the flimsiest of dividers!

1950s London, England. A baby girl was born - that was me, and my parents had no inkling I was different. Neither did I of course, and it was quite a while before it dawned on me that not everyone saw and heard as I did.

My first proper memories are starting school, struggling to sift through what people thought, what they said, and what they actually meant - often three completely different things. And all that other stuff circling in people’s heads, snatches of tunes and repetitive phrases sub-texted by overlapping emotions and sensations - happy, sad, cold, hot, sore throat, apprehensive, hungry, tired, worried, fearful. Emotions are the things that seep out the most, and then they tend to become tangled up in what’s seeping out from others. It’s not surprising I got a lot of headaches back then.

One person is noisily discordant, several make a dreadful din, and honestly, output from a crowd is mind-aching. I had to learn swiftly and I did. I taught myself how to automatically tune out, barrier-build, and compensated as best I could by observing and mimicking the reactions of others because the trickiest thing was knowing what I should be hearing and understanding as opposed to what I shouldn't, and seeking guidance often got me even deeper into hot water. Who knew that some questions were fine whilst others generated the sort of bafflement that told me I’d crossed an invisible and constantly moving line.

Luckily my family were on the paranoid side, and as they came to understand more about what I was and what I could do, paranoid proved politic. Actually, taking everything into account I think we all managed rather well, and it wasn’t really anybody’s fault that things took a turn for the dangerous before sliding into life-threatening. After all you have to learn to take the rough with the smooth.

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