Hello from hermit-land
A catch-up, mash-up, link-sharing little newsletter
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today is a short little catch-up post with a few links for your listening pleasure. Stay safe, find some ways to be happy in your today body, and as always thanks so much for your support. I will be responding to the rest of the pitches I have received for my summer guest post series and thank you to everyone who has reached out!
I was so excited for this full moon cycle. I had some creative clarity, I was going to work on a creative writing memoir project, I was going to finish up not one but TWO intense chapters for STRONGWILLED1, I was going to refresh my writing space, I was going to have the mental capacity to reach out to friends more. I was going to be creative, productive, and healed. I was going to be so on top of everything and so mentally healthy that everyone would be FORCED to listen to me.
By day 2 of trying to ride the waves of the full moon high (I had spent quite a bit of time writing in the mornings) I was felled by wave after wave of back pain in the afternoons. By the third day it was hard to ignore that writing about my childhood AND researching/writing about abusive evangelical men while also trying to stay just the tiniest bit informed about what fuckery the American government was up to was causing me intense amounts of pain. Both existential AND physical (the former I have learned my entire life to ignore, but the latter? That’s the one that keeps pushing me forward in processing).
It’s been almost a week of me trying to respond to the pain in my body. I thought I was sad but instead deep down I found rage. I found my body pleading with me for more safety. I listened to my body and it said it was tired of hurting itself in order to help others who never listen. The story of my childhood, playing itself out over and over again as I absorb the news, write another chapter, and try to convince people that the abuse of children in evangelicalism should be taken seriously. Only to have my thesis be ignored, my body be in pain, and my gender identity, neurodivergence, and personality denigrated whenever my work somehow makes it’s way outside of my little bubble2.
I have been finding ways to let out the anger this week, and it’s been good. I am learning to move through the patterns of the nervous system — being shut down and depressed in the dorsal state, feeling my anger and big feelings in the sympathetic, and finally getting to experience a little bit of rest in a regulated state every once in awhile. I used to want to rush from the sadness to the calm and now I know that the anger is essential to feeling safe.
Perhaps I had the wrong idea about this particular moon cycle. I was focusing on creativity as productivity and now I am thinking about anger as producing safety. Curiosity. Complexity. And yes — even calm.
I keep getting in my head about what to write here. Of course I don’t want to come across as a huge mess of a person but also — I sort of am? And that seems like a really normal and human response to everything going on in the world right now. I’m also having a hard time future-casting for all sorts of reasons. But I wanted to really quickly give a few updates and a heads up about some online events I am planning on!
First off, thank you SO MUCH to everyone who pitched to me for my guest post series on deconstruction. I have responded to most people by now but I am still working my way through the pitches. I have already said yes to twice as many pitches as I had planned on, and there are still so many great ones that I simply don’t have the money to pay for. Let me just plant this little seed for everyone reading this : if you want to write an essay, you should go ahead and write that essay. Try getting it published somewhere, or publish it yourself. This is the summer of being angry and creative and true to yourself! Also this continues to keep my wheels turning about the need for some micropublishing opportunities for autistic people. I am looking for possible collaborators to start some kind of online literary publication aimed at publishing autistic voices, so if this seems like your kind of thing, reach out to me!
Speaking of autism, I don’t have the capacity to write about it a lot right now and honestly it is such a minefield culture war topic I am content to let other, better equipped folks be on the front lines in this area. However, I got to talk to Jon from Christianity on the Spectrum about autistic people and religious authoritarian parenting methods and it was nice to have a container in which to funnel some of my passion. Jon wrote a guest post for HIMSI a few years back on the research he is doing on autistic people and Christianity, and I think it is fascinating stuff. For our chat I finally bucked up the courage to read one of the shitty parenting books being recommended to Christians. Here are a few excerpts from that book (all the TW when it comes to the abuse of autistic children):
There was SO much to unpack in this book (and you can listen to me do that on the Christianity on the Spectrum episode) but the saddest part was a chapter where Cathy is shown what occupational therapy looks like for kids (this was in the Tacoma WA area in the late 1990s) and she finds it horrifying.
I love how the occupational therapist assumes Cathy would be pleased by how happy the kids in therapy are . . . when in reality Cathy is freaking out because she doesn’t want her kid to be happy she wants her kid to be cured of autism.
(NACD is of course on org that promises cures of autism and uses ABA therapy as well). As someone who is writing a larger project on parenting methods I thought this excerpt was very telling. Of course if you asked a child how they would want to be parented they probably wouldn’t choose a mom like Cathy Steere, who is literally obsessed with reformed theology and how desperately sinful her child is (with or without the autism).
ANYWAYS American Christians are totally normal and totally aren’t abusing their children and getting book deals out of it or anything like that. There is totally no reason at all that being raised by parents like this could give you some kind of complex wherein it’s not OK to be happy, and that everything in you should strive towards being cured so you stop annoying all the people in your life who need you to have zero needs. Right? Right?!?!?
I have such an odd relationship with the title of my newsletter. Is healing still my special interest? I suppose it is, in that learning to process the pain of my childhood so I don’t continue the cycles of colonizer violence is what I think about a lot of the time. But I am also learning how to live each day in my actual reality — my pain-addled body, my beautiful sad depressy creative brain, my garden and my cat and my kids and sour cream coffee cake. Being alive to it all does feel like healing, even when it brings attention to the painful parts of being alive.
I appreciate the moon for reminding me of the cycle nature of being connected to this wider world. The ebb and flow, the waves, the waxing and waning. While this moon cycle is already kicking my ass in so many ways, I am still so grateful for it. The chance to set intentions, to dream slightly bigger dreams, to embrace what actually is available to me — these are patterns I want to continue on.
So in that vein, I am going to host a few online zoom events for folks who want to have a conversation around the ebb and flow of creativity and being a human in these trying times. I will be hosting the first anti-fascist witchy creative online gathering on Wednesday June 11th at 6PM PT. This will be for paid subscribers only. The first gathering will be very chill3 and I encourage people to come with an expectation to spend some time thinking about creativity and setting some intentions for the next moon cycle. Bring a tarot deck with you, an oracle deck, a journal, some art supplies . . . and be prepared to have a bit of fun body-doubling with other neurodivergent creatives!
I am hoping to have another zoom in August with someone who can talk a bit more in-depth about tarot and then hopefully a few times a year we can keep checking in, setting intentions, and connecting our creative practices with nature and general witchy shit. The week of June 11th I will be sending out a post to paid subscribers only with instructions for how to join the zoom.
Thanks for being here, for letting me be me — and that includes showing up rather imperfectly. I hope to see you at our anti-fascist full moon creative gathering (can anyone help me come up with a pithy title?!?!?) and I am SO excited to share some guests posts and my own personal essays in the coming months. Times are tough out there, but we just keep digging deeper into being in relationship with out bodies, with the earth, and with each other.
Now it’s back to being a hermit with a bad back who loves you all very much!
Are any of y’all listening to our Hunger Games recaps? I am enjoying this little side quest SO much.
Obviously this only happens when my work travels outside of the little bubbles I have created. But it happened this week and it really sucked on top of everything else going on in my life.
Please don’t expect a polished presentation or anything too overcomplicated— I am just going to be my weird self and am looking forward to setting out a time to connect with other creatives in fascist times :)
Where are you overalls from they are sweet?
I cannot wait for June 11th!!