Healing is My Special Interest
A not-so-personal essay, a name change (for now!), book club details, and more!
Hello!
I’ve been struggling to write the past couple of weeks. After I finished the Dobson/ABA piece I was . . . Really wiped out. Couple that with a certain holiday that can bring up lots of feelings for so many of us, plus a few days alone at the beach to contemplate, and I had a realization:
I don’t want to write publicly about what I am currently processing.
I started blogging/writing almost 13 years ago, and it was the first time I was able to have a voice. I had been so shut down and so caught up in being the perfect evangelical child/woman who dedicated their every thought to God, but suddenly I started writing my thoughts on the internet. And a few people even liked it, and resonated with it, and gave me feedback. I was shocked—I had been so used to feeling like an outsider, a ghost, a shell of a person. All of my writings—from my first freelance articles I published in 2010 to my third book published last November—together make up thousands and thousands of words of me trying to make sense of the world. My public writings were and are the revelations of an evangelical golden child slowly figuring out something was terribly rotten in the state of American white supremacist Christianity1.
Writing has connected me to folks and helped me process my feelings for many years now. And yet—I’ve written a “personal” essay for this month three separate times. And all three times I have felt this urge to not publish what ended up coming out of me. I don’t think it’s shame or guilt causing me to pause, but it might be—and it also might be a protective measure2. And I in no way mean this to be a dig on anyone who processes ANYTHING in public! I am ALL for that. It helps all of us, especially those of us who come from high control communities where public disagreement is never allowed.
I am in a phase of healing where I have to prioritize doing what feels safe to my body. I have and will continue to write about all things autism / high control religions / deconversion as I am able to. But I have reached the point where it’s no longer a good thing for me to process some of the particulars of my trauma in public. As much as writing has connected me to amazing folks, being a semi-public person has also meant that I have had a firehose of criticism aimed at me for over a decade3. As I have been regulating my nervous system, been in therapy, and found safe and accepting community (for the first time in my life, which is desperately happy and sad all at the same time) I can recognize I have SO much to work through. And maybe, just maybe, I don’t have to share all of it at once with the world in order for it to be validated4.
I’m happy I am slowly, slowly building an in-real-life community that I can feel safe in. I’m so lucky I have a partner who is such a good person to process the heavy shit with. I also recognize I don’t currently have the capacity to create or sustain a safe online community around some of the issues I am dealing with in a trauma-informed way. I am working towards becoming a safer person who has a lot more tools to self-regulate and to build self-trust, but I am not there yet. My goal is to do the hard work of healing and processing so I can show up better in this space. I don’t want to shy away from thorny issues, but for some of these things I just need more time to make it safer for everyone.
My goal has never just been about processing my own inner world, and I truly want to continue to work towards building communities of support and care for late-diagnosed neurodivergent folks. Especially those processing religious trauma—we will definitely be talking about this a LOT more. But for now, I will be taking a break from writing about how specific evangelical theologies/growing up in white evangelicalism harmed me, and will be focusing more on healing (both of the individual and also the communal aspect). This is a good and worthy and necessary special interest for so many of us, myself included5. I changed the name of this substack for now and that feels fun and like it is scratching my creative itch to be open to change. I have a sense the theme will be healing for awhile here, but I have big plans to do a couple of months deep-diving Dolly Parton (Dolly is My Special Interest).
So for now, we are no longer focusing solely on god/religion over here (although I suspect it will come up a lot). I will continue to do interviews, researched essays, (possibly) podcasts for this Substack (as well as having more FABULOUS guest posts). This summer we will be focusing on C-PTSD and also trauma/recovering in general. We will also be doing community based elements like a book club and a few in-person conversations around topics like Religious Trauma Syndrome and neurodivergence. I’m really excited about what the next year is going to look like over here. And most of that is because the people who are showing up and reading this Substack are truly some of the best people ever. You all are the most curious, deep, tender-hearted, quirky cheerleaders I have ever experienced.
For today’s paid subscribers only post, I’m going to outline a book club and the first few books I have picked and give some general guidelines. If you are interested in joining us, we would love to have you!
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