Burning Eye Books

Adaptive Strategies for a Sensitive System - Kate Ireland

Adaptive Strategies for a Sensitive System is a lovingly disordered field guide for surviving a world that keeps turning up the brightness. Disguised in the respectable badge of a diagnostic title, this is in contrast a poetic log of being too sensitive in a society built for the perpetually unbothered. From violent mornings to dreich late nights, Kate sifts through bedrooms, public transport, supermarkets, her Gran’s house, the surveillance-era optimism of mindfulness apps, and the wild terrain of her own mind- gathering softness, silliness, and unexpected wisdom along the way. With raw energy, wry humour and the stubborn softness of someone who has spent a lifetime feeling like a faulty blue tooth speaker trying to connect, she questions what’s innate, what’s inherited, and why everything seems to be “improving” faster than any of us can adapt. Connection, dislocation, loneliness, identity, social failure, and the strange hope that still glimmers beneath it all; this is a companion for anyone who has ever felt out of alignment with the world’s settings, and is still learning how to stay tender without falling apart.

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