Overview

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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9781913958688

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Kate Ireland is a Glasgow-born poet, artist, and performer whose work balances lyricism with a healthy dose of cheek. She’s performed across UK theatres and festivals, had poetry featured on BBC 6 Music and at Glastonbury, and produces spoken-word-driven music with DJs and electronic artists. Her debut album Self Regulating Behaviours came out in 2024, and in 2025 she premiered her one woman spoken word show Golden Time and other behavioural management strategies at the Pleasance Dome Edinburgh Fringe. This book functions as the final piece in a triptych within a broader body of work defined by administrative, often jargon-laden titles. It extends Kate’s ongoing critique of the prescriptive, systemic tools used to define normative behaviour. Kate also runs the Manchester arts collective Blether (Scottish verb meaning to talk in a long winded way without making very much sense) and works as a creative facilitator within mental health settings and youth engagement. It’s safe to say she’s keepin’ busy.

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