Community Input time!

Let's talk about what we want to talk about here

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed autism and healing from high control environments. Today we have a little catch-up post where I write about some upcoming themes and topics and ask this community to weigh in on some online event ideas — as well as some info on guest posts I am seeking for the summer. As always, this is a reader-supported publication and I am so grateful for your support!

Photo by Katie Rainbow 🏳️‍🌈 on Unsplash

I’m in the throes of being my weird little autistic antifa gender gremlin self to own the authoritarians these days. I am working on a few big chapters for STRONGWILLED on the abuse/grooming of children and how authoritarianism loves rigid gender roles. I am putting out a special side quest podcast series on The Hunger Games (plz listen and then chat with me about it!!!)¹. I am repainting everything in my house because it has been 9 years since we moved in and it desperately needs it (this is the longest I have lived anywhere in my life!). I still haven’t sorted/donated/burned all of the shit I accrued for my religious trauma art show. My youngest child is turning 10 and my oldest is starting to write essays on what it is like to grow up in the United States for them. I vacillate between being totally overwhelmed at the state of our government and being quietly optimistic that maybe we are actually exposing the rot at the core of the white supremacist patriarchal machine.

Today is the day of the homeschooled child and I could have written a post about it but I didn’t have the energy². Thursday is May Day and there are big protests planned and I thought about how Dorothy Day launched her Catholic anarchist newspaper on May 1st 1933 when the US was on the cusp of fascism back then. I thought about writing about this moment and talking about the importance of the labor movement when it comes to defeating fascism, but once again — I didn’t have the energy. Later tonight I will check Bluesky and probably hear about ten new horrible things happening at the federal level in the space of 15 seconds and have to spend a few hours calming down / reminding myself that I can’t fix everything and I can’t save everyone. So then its back to being the autistic non-binary little gender gremlin to own the authoritarians. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.

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Like every writer who spends even a few moments thinking about the state of the world, I am a little bit at a loss to know what to do these days. I think everyone is completely, utterly overwhelmed by life (it’s the early stages of fascism, so that checks out). So instead of pretending like I have great plans and a well-organized brain I wanted to hop on here and give a few ideas I have had rattling around in my head and ask for some feedback from this amazing community.