Love Letters From My Younger Self: The Inner Bloom.
What You Already Knew Before the World Taught You to Forget. An Essay on the politics of self-awareness and the emotional logic of ADHD.
Author’s Note:
Your soul is your heart, and all the emotions you kept in it after life broke it apart. It carries the early impressions of life, the texture of sound, the shape of a room, the scent of a season.
These impressions don’t just sit in the past. They form your wiring. They explain why you move a certain way through the world, why you’re drawn to chaos or stillness, or why certain things feel like home before you’ve had time to explain them. It’s not about choice. It’s about identity.
This series of love letters to my younger self is a search for what was *already* written, like a serial number woven into the early fabric of memory. I’m not constructing meaning from scratch. I’m *uncovering* it. They are a way to excavate the lightness and beauty of a childhood I didn’t fully understand until it was gone. A world where movement made sense, before life taught me to sit still and perform.
Some Velvet Morning, Primal Scream
I’ve always been a little sad. Even in joy. Even in momentum. Not a crisis kind of sadness, but a hum, a quiet, constant weight I carried without knowing why. For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me because I couldn’t hold peace for long. But peace, I’ve realised, was never stillness. For me, peace is *motion*. And maybe that’s the truest way to describe how life feels with ADHD.
I often imagine myself in motion, on airplanes, trains, boats, you name it. It’s a recurring image: me sitting quietly, surrounded by strangers, yet lost in my own abstraction. I watch the landscape blur into a single canvas, green fields, blue skies, cotton clouds, rocky coastlines, or icy, fog-draped mountains. The world outside moves too fast to name, yet just slow enough to feel.
There’s something deeply comforting about being carried forward without needing to steer. A passenger in time. That is the closest way I can describe living inside an ADHD mind: a runaway of thoughts, sometimes scattered, sometimes ordered, critical, abstract, analytical, methodical, or suddenly revelatory, but always moving.
ADHD doesn’t let you forget, only reshuffle. Your memory, and your notion of past, present, and future, are caught in the same spin and randomised like a playlist on Spotify.
When I was younger, I mistook this restlessness for something broken. Now I understand: it’s not dysfunction, it’s design. ADHD taught me to experience time through texture, over sequence. I don’t remember things in order as much as I remember through scent, through colour, through sound. The typewriter clicking in the background. The vinyl crackle of Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. My mother’s voice humming Mozart, Bach, Chopin, or Tchaikovsky from the next room. These are more than memories, they’re anchor points.
I remember the smell of eucalyptus in the sauna, wooden floors creaking beneath my feet, the way grass felt on bare skin in early morning light. The scent of rain falling gently on dry earth. People smiling without needing a reason. A line of laundry dancing in the wind. Fresh brewed coffee. Oranges being squeezed into juice. All of it stored somewhere in the body.
Fade Into You, Mazzy Star
When I began to open up, life expanded like air in my lungs running through Battersea Park on a Sunday morning. I felt myself returning to something primal, a rhythm I had forgotten but never lost.
That’s the thing about healing, it’s not always about acquiring something new. Sometimes it’s just remembering what you already knew before the world taught you to forget.
Writing has always been part of that rhythm. As a child, my grandfather would pay me to write him a letter every week. I thought it was a game. A way to earn money I then converted into candy. But now I see it for what it was: an initiation. A ritual. He was teaching me to notice. To articulate. To sit with my feelings long enough to name them. And in doing so, he gave me the greatest gift: the habit of reflection.
When he passed, I didn’t just lose a ritual, I lost someone I loved, someone I wrote endless letters to. I hadn’t realised how tightly love and writing had been braided through my life until both were gone. Yet writing never truly left me. It waited, patiently, quietly. It returned through movement: in my solo travels across Europe and North America, in my daily London chronicles on Instagram, in work, and in moments of unexpected presence, like a flicker of light at the edge of vision that turns out to be your own soul, waving back.
Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Verve
I used social media for years to try and belong. To reassure myself that I existed. That I was seen. I built personas, versions of myself shiny enough to survive. But they were projections, not reflections. I was raw. I didn’t grow up with beautiful, polished things in the way Britain defines them.
My childhood home in Brazil had wool carpets, linen threads, soft cotton sheets, and wooden furniture passed down through generations. There was always food on the table, clothes neatly pressed, fire and water running, light pouring in, and the steady presence of people’s attention and care. Abundance wasn’t absent, it was simply shaped differently.
Beauty wasn’t empire-polished; it was lived in. A middle-class immigrant family weaving European habits into the Brazilian climate, where life carried texture and presence instead of staged permanence. Here in the UK, polish means something else. It means empire, heritage estates, centuries-old oak, facades scrubbed until history gleams like marble. A ritual of power, of continuity.
In Brazil, polish was comfort and natural resources. In Britain, polish is architecture and institution. That difference taught me to feel before I understood what I was feeling. It’s why people have never been able to universalise me, and the very reason I never fully understood bias or prejudice directed at me.
I like to remember the comfort and exploration of my childhood, the continuity of touch with sports, community and nature, the rawness woven into city and academic life. It was a different sense of belonging, one I wish everyone could know: what it means to feel comfort as something natural, not extravagant. Comfort makes life easier, more joyful.
In Britain, even within the sovereignty of empire, post-war scarcity still lingers in the social ethos. That austerity shapes how resources are seen: guarded, rationed, finite. For a long time, I struggled to build a relationship with that idea. It felt foreign compared to the endless fields of southern Brazil, horizons that seemed to stretch without boundary. There, abundance wasn’t questioned; it was lived.
Keeping Your Head Up, Birdy.
Coming to terms with the fact that everything in the world today is finite and perishable changed me. When I finally absorbed that truth, my mind became freer, released from the misconception that abundance means permanence. That realisation is why reconnecting with my roots matters now: they remind me of a kind of belonging where comfort was not excess but the natural state of living.
I’ve never been a product of my environment. I either resisted it or reimagined it.
The real glossy things in my life aren’t Instagram-worthy, they’re the parts you read between the lines. That’s why I write. To make sense of my existence. To create relevance out of noise. To name the movement that never stops inside me and say: *this, too, is beautiful*.
As I put these letters together and share with you all over here, I am also writing an existential non-fiction book, diving into the themes I explore here and uncovering a story that, rather than being constructed, was never told!
Through it, I hope to shed light on what life feels like with ADHD, the lengths one must go to fully exist in their own right. In that process, I share how I began acknowledging, naming, re-signifying, and finally releasing the pain of being a misfit, even when perceptions of me suggested otherwise.
It’s about the weights we carry and the ways we shed them. It’s about watching the world pass outside a plane window and knowing you don’t have to control the direction to arrive at something meaningful.
It’s about the shape of identity when you’re not just living, but performing an existence for others. And what happens when you stop performing and start *becoming*.
I admire those who can hold who they are without apology. Who live without filters. Who aren’t afraid to say: I am not okay, but I am alive. That’s what I want my book to be, a mirror, a map, a place where your own light might catch and reflect back something honest. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not making it up.
You are free to exist ✨