Welcome to Healing is my Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. The most life-giving parts of this substack for me have been the community-building elements—and I discovered I really like publishing other people’s thoughts! I’d love to solicit some pitches and get your feedback on how to make newsletter even better. Read on to give me your input (plus to see a pic of the tattoo I got last Friday!)
Hey there, it’s officially February and I am still trying to envision what 2024 is going to look like for this newsletter. In the first year we had a lot of fun taking autism tests from Embrace Autism1 and chatting about the results (I still encourage folks to take the tests--and maybe re-take them a year or two later!2). In the past year we sort of bounced around with my special interests and my deconversion journey, plus had a ton of great guest posts and a handful of podcast interviews with incredible thinkers.
This newsletter will probably always contain some element of me writing personal essays (some of which will be behind a paywall) and whatever my special interest is at the moment. However the truth is that I’m currently on a journey of identifying how many of my special interests (if not all) are tied to topics that are inherently triggering to me (or related to OCD-like patterns). The toll on my mental health that it takes for me to be public about some of the issues I write about is real. It’s manageable, but it’s real.
So. I will be trying to engage in special interests for the next while that aren’t so taxing or triggering to my nervous system (while knowing I will irrevocably be drawn to intense topics and try to be OK with that). Already I am planning on writing about the history behind Asperger’s syndrome, an autistic person’s guide to Disneyland, and Dorothy Day’s history of not voting despite going to prison for women’s suffrage. While I will probably always be hopelessly interested in topics that pertain to white evangelicalism, high control environments, and religious trauma, I am also interested in having conversations about a lot of other things! Like: the PDA profile of autism, low-demand lifestyles (especially with kids), and reviewing various books and TV shows and movies that depict autistic characters.
That all seems good to ME, but I need your help with the planning of everything else!
First of all, I want more guest posts. I truly enjoy doing big-picture editing with folks who want it, and I REALLY enjoy publishing other people’s work, especially if they are autistic. It gave me a sense of satisfaction I don’t get when I publish my own words, which I think is interesting. I love interviewing folks I vibe with and getting their perspective out there, but it felt even more incredible to solicit, edit, and publish works for my own newsletter (omg, am I the teeniest bit like Dorothy Day? Are substack newsletters the new daily newspapers they used to hand out?!?!?!
If you have an idea for an article or essay or interview you would like to pitch, and you think it would be a good fit for the tone and readership of this newsletter, consider submitting an idea for a guest post to Healing is My Special Interest. Give me your main idea/thesis and two to three sentences on what will “hook” people to want to read it (or why it’s important/timely). Guest posts can be anywhere from 700--1500 words (interviews can go longer). My readership is at 5,200 folks and they are a very thoughtful and engaged bunch. I can pay $100 per post plus a free one-year paid subscription to Healing is My Special Interest. If you have emailed me in the past about a guest post idea and you haven’t heard back from me, please reach out again! Sometimes I get overwhelmed at my inbox and forget things, so I greatly appreciate when people “circle back” or reach out again without assuming the worst.
Secondly, let me know what writers/thinkers/public people should be on my radar! I am not online as much these days and I rely on y’all to let me know which books or content creators are worth checking out. Email me at dlmmcsweeneys@gmail.com.
And lastly, you can take these polls I created and give me some feedback about the content of the newsletter (and what you want to see more of).
If you have made it this far, thank you so much! Your input is so valuable to me.
And as promised, here is a pic of the tattoo I got last Friday (we recently had a great community discussion on tattoos and being playful with various aspects of our appearance/bodies if that sounds nice to anyone!). I will be writing about this tattoo a bit more in March to celebrate my 40th birthday, but I will say that I had an autistic tattoo artist and it made everything SO MUCH BETTER. We got to talk about cats and existential crises for 4 hours straight it was awesome.
Thank you SO much to everyone for being here, and for helping keep my little family able to pay our therapy bills. Your insight, community, and solidarity have been SUCH a positive impact on my life. As I continue to figure out how to do this work and have it be less taxing to my mental health, I recognize that I am also writing for one of the best corners on the ding-dang internet. Burned-out late-diagnosed neurodivergents are truly the best!!!!!!
Embrace Autism really does seem to be the best place to access autism screening tests that work for a lot of people. It’s no surprise to me that the site is made and vetted by autistic adults--which is why it is so great!
Here’s one of the posts on autism tests:
It was really hard to one among the answers you gave. I particularly want to add, I chose personal essays over podcast interviews—but the interviews were a VERY close second. They have been phenomenal and had so much staying power. I think we all feel a little less lonely when we read your essays, but hearing your voice in synergy with other voices doubles that impact. So I hope their low rating (so far) on this pole doesn’t dissuade you from doing them.
Can I choose all four replies for your last question? Only (kinda) joking...
I could gush about your newsletter and you for a while. So so grateful for you and this space.
The PDA topic is probably most pressing right now. My youngest is PDA, I'm 99% sure, and this morning was so hard. I'm following a couple PDA moms online who are super helpful. But today I'm back at, how do I help my kids get through school, especially my PDAer and his brother? Homeschooling would be terrible for me and therefore them, unless we had a 2-day a week program they could go to. There's a fantastic one but we can't afford it. I don't like (read: hate) teaching and had to teach my younger sisters multiple subjects throughout my high school/early adult years, so there's plenty of baggage around that. But the emotional toll that school takes on both of us (my PDAer and I) is exhausting. I worry about burnout for all four of my kids. I know this isn't sustainable. I'm in knots, so venting about it. Gah!