Every Travel Guide Was Written for a Brain That Isn't Yours.

Nothing is wrong with you. What is wrong is the airport. What is wrong is the hotel room with its unpredictable heating system and its unfamiliar smell and its mattress that is not your mattress. What is wrong is the restaurant where the menu is fourteen pages long and the waiter is hovering and you cannot find a wall to put your back against. What is wrong is the travel industry’s decades-long project of designing travel experiences for a hypothetical standard traveller who does not actually exist - a traveller who finds noise stimulating rather than overwhelming, who reads uncertainty as excitement rather than threat, who can sleep anywhere and eat anything and ignore the texture of the sheets, the pitch of the air conditioning, and the quality of the light filtering through inadequate curtains at three in the morning.

A substantial proportion of the traveling population - estimates suggest between fifteen and twenty percent, encompassing people with ADHD, autism spectrum conditions, anxiety disorders, sensory processing differences, OCD, PTSD, and many other neurological variations - experiences the standard travel environment as genuinely hostile rather than merely inconvenient. These travelers are not weak. They are not dramatic. They are not in need of the advice to simply relax and enjoy themselves. They are people whose nervous systems process information differently from the neurotypical default - and who have spent their lives navigating a world that was designed without them in mind.