Emergent Living: The Series
Emergent Living maps life after long-term performance collapses, and the work of rebuilding coherence without inherited paths.
Collapse, masking,
& the loss of identity.
A record of what breaks when a life
built on performance fails.
Liminal living & reconstruction without a finished self.
Life in the plateau after collapse,
before coherence returns.
Book 1: A Comprehensive Breakdown
A life dismantled,
a self reclaimed
“Original, erudite, candidly introspective, and impressively insightful. An intellectually and emotionally engaging read from start to finish.” Midwest Book Review
In this raw and unflinching collection of essays, an anonymous author lays bare a life unravelled by burnout, undiagnosed autism, and the relentless pressure to perform in a world that never quite fit.
From the collapse of a creative career to a solitary trek across the French Alps, these piercing reflections trace the journey from breakdown to breakthrough. With unwavering honesty, the author dismantles the myths of ‘functioning’, confronts the weight of self-censorship, and finds liberation in embracing a neurodivergent identity.
Through vivid encounters with wildlife, candid accounts of mental health, and a hard-won lens of self-acceptance, A Comprehensive Breakdown speaks to anyone who has ever felt out of step with time, society, or themselves. This is not a guide to reinvention, but a testament to the messy, deeply human process of becoming yourself.
Available Formats
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Early Reviews
Adapted and condensed from original reader testimonials.
★★★★★
A Comprehensive Breakdown is a deeply honest exploration of what it means to live for years without knowing you’re autistic, and what happens when you finally do. Through themes of perfectionism, masking, and the quiet ache of trying to belong, the author traces the emotional fallout of self-denial and the healing that comes with self-acceptance.
Written with sensitivity and clarity, this memoir offers comfort to anyone who feels different, and understanding to those who wish to know what life on the spectrum truly feels like.
★★★☆☆
The essays are short, reflective, and easy to dip into, perfect for reading in quiet moments. The author’s anonymity invites deeper reflection and allows readers to see themselves in the writing. Though non-linear, the structure mirrors the author’s mind and offers a more honest insight into their experience.
★★★★★
An affirming and deeply relatable collection that documents lived autistic experience through a fragmentary, present-tense lens. The essays capture experience as it is lived rather than through retrospective reconstruction, creating a book many neurodivergent readers will recognise themselves in.
★★★★★
A short memoir that makes a deep impression, written with a poetic, metaphorical style and a seamless flow that captures the author’s inner emotions with striking clarity.
Unreservedly recommended for professional, community, and college or university library psychology and self-help collections, and as a valuable supplement to mood disorder curricula. Of particular relevance to students, academics, practising psychologists and counsellors, as well as informed general readers with an interest in autism, collapse, and mental health.
Selected Passages
“I had to forego functioning to discover what I was actually feeling. To realise there is no real self unless others are allowed to perceive it.”
The Myth of Functioning, p. 11
“Healing rarely seems to be a return to where you were. It’s the slow making of space for who you might yet become.”
Reflecting on the Future, p. 68
“This is why I don’t feel alone in the mountains. It’s groups of people that give me a sense of isolation. When you’re silent and solitary, away from the noise, nature is humming with activity.”
The Mountains, p. 37
Book 2: Between Selves
A Record of Living Unfinished
After a breakdown, identity loosens. The old self becomes unrecognisable and the new one has not yet arrived. Between Selves is a record of that liminal space: the plateau after collapse, before coherence.
Written from the perspective of a late-diagnosed autistic adult, these essays trace what remains when long-term social performance falls away. They explore masking, burnout, emotional regulation, and the legitimacy of one’s own perceptions, alongside the social pressures that shape these experiences.
They blend autistic perceptual insight with existential enquiry, examining how perception distorts under pressure and what it means to live without a settled sense of self.
This is not a narrative of triumph or recovery, but of suspension: unevenly inhabiting life after collapse. It speaks to anyone who has felt unmade and found themselves living without a settled sense of who they are yet to be.
Less a guide than a field record, Between Selves looks at rupture, disorientation, and what it means to live through continual adaptation.
About the Work
A Comprehensive Breakdown departs from the traditional memoir arc. Its form mirrors the experience it explores, a mind rebuilding itself, fragments, and loops. The structure is deliberate, echoing the non-linear nature of recovery and self-understanding.
Some readers may find it unconventional, challenging, even untidy, and that is precisely the point. Others will recognise its reflective rhythm and contemplative pace. The book isn’t shaped to meet convention, but to capture an interior reality: the felt experience of collapse, confusion and reconstruction, rendered as it unfolded rather than as it might neatly appear in hindsight.
Together with Between Selves, it forms the opening volumes of the Emergent Living series, mapping collapse, liminality, and reconstruction across a shared field of experience.