Journaling while the world burns

Your story, your emotions, and your processing matters.

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. I, like so many Americans right now, am reeling from how fast events are unfolding in the US. While this newsletter is centered around the concept of healing, I do not believe that means the absence of grief, terror, anger, or hopelessness. In fact, I think it means allowing for and getting curious about those emotions instead of struggling to remain regulated 100% of the time. As always, if you appreciate my work please consider supporting it in whatever ways make sense for you.

Photo by Minh Đức on Unsplash

A month or so ago I had a dream. In the dream, someone told me they used to love my writing. “You used to write so powerfully — so raw, so full of emotion. And then you changed.” When I woke up from my dream, I knew my poor brain was just trying to process one of the many seismic shifts my life has undergone in the past 10 years or so. The one where for a period of time my writing was very popular among a certain sect of people, and how that is no longer the case. Before, I could write about terrible evangelical men and horrible things happening in the world, but if I made sure to mention the Jesus was amazing and God would work all things out for the good then people would read and share my work. They called it honest, until one day I was a little too honest. Until the day I said I no longer believed that Christianity was good.

Now I no longer have any hope in god or institutions to save any of us, which means the subjects I write about have no convenient pressure release for the mind. No spiritual bypassing, no toxic Christian positivity. I am writing about terrible men, terrible theologies, abusive systems, and the long slow work of diving deep and connecting to our autonomy and true selves. To me that last part is the gospel, the only true good news there is for our present and also our future. But for people trained to interrogate or even hate themselves as soon as they could think and pray, connecting to yourself doesn’t feel good. It feels scary. For so many people raised evangelical or in some other high control group, getting in touch with your true self is dangerous. It leads to the loss of love and care and attachment to your caregivers, your community, your worldview, and sometimes your livelihood.

Still. So many of us have done this work and will continue to do it no matter the cost. And that, more than anything, gives me hope for the future.

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I lost my readership over the last decade which means I lost getting positive feedback for my work that helped me keep going. In many ways this has been good for me, as I have had to dig deep and create my work out of something beyond public opinion. Despite all the changes I have undergone, I still keep writing. I still keep publishing. I still keep thinking and researching and struggling and connecting. I wouldn’t keep doing this work if I didn’t think there was something beneficial about it, something central to whatever kind of society comes next. And after careful consideration I have decided that the world I want to live in is one that centers children in every regard — including listening to those who have been abused at the hands of the powerful.

Do I want to continue to be obsessed with Dr. James Dobson and other awful religious authoritarian parenting experts?¹ Frankly, no. But is my inner child happy to have someone banging the drum about the pain of growing up in a religious authoritarian home? Yes, I think they are. So even though I get less feedback on my work than I ever have, I am in touch with something better. I am making myself proud. I am becoming the grown-up I needed as a child. And it is never too late to do this work.

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I keep wishing I had something better to offer everyone right now. Something more pleasant than 10,000 words on serial child predators and how they are continually on the hunt for places where they can and will get away with committing countless crimes against children. But as I keep thinking about the world beyond my special interest of religious authoritarianism, I find myself returning to a similar theme:

We need to continue to do the work of connecting to our emotions, and processing what we are experiencing.

For me writing has always been the main way I do this work — I was trained as an evangelical child to journal daily to god, and now I find a lot of comfort in journaling thoughts that most certainly would make that god mad. Being honest about what I am feeling right at that very moment is incredibly cathartic. Because one thing I know about intense times is that there are a wide range of emotions that will be felt all in the course of a day or even an hour — terror, courage, hope, despair. All of those emotions matter because we experience them. They are not good or bad or moral in any way. They just are. And these emotions have so much to teach us, if we will let them.

What if we took the time to record our emotions in these tumultuous days? As someone who likes to muck around in historical records I have always been a big fan of oral histories². I love how diverse, unique, and human the stories we tell are. Now more than ever we all have the chance to record our own oral histories — what was it like to live under American Christian fascism — and we all get to choose how to tell our stories. I hope you consider taking the time and space to connect with your emotions and embrace them. Write it down in a journal, or make a collage. Write a piece of music or a poem. During the day scribble your emotions on a piece of paper or onto your notes app on your phone. Keep doing this, and don’t let the messy imperfection of it all stop you from making some kind of record of what it was like to be you right now.

If you need some prompts for starting to record your inner world, start here:

1. What is something that made you feel afraid today?

2. What is something that made you angry today?

3. What is something that made you feel hopeful today?

4. What is something that made you feel gratitude today?

Start there, and see what happens. If you write or send yourself a voice note or scribble some drawings along these prompts often enough, you might start to see some patterns. You might start to connect to yourself a tiny bit more. You might start to see yourself as the author and expert of your own story, one that is not bound to any institution or god or person except yourself.

Record what it is like to be you, and write your own emotional history down in whatever ways make sense for you. You get to decide if you want to share this with other people or keep it just for you. There is no right or wrong here, just you making choices for yourself. Allowing ourselves to be human in these times is one way connect to yourself, but I believe it also paves the way for a better future for us all. And, as a bonus, learning to identify your emotions and express them in ways that do not harm you or others is essential to processing childhood trauma.

At this point I don’t think you can truly center the wellbeing of children in your life and in your society unless you have done the work of connecting to the child you once were, the child that is still a part of you. Which includes allowing space to feel what it was like to be you in this world we were born into — all the pain, fear, wonder, joy, and confusion we experienced. That we are still experiencing to this day.

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I think about my dream, about the people in my life I have disappointed with my honesty, especially in recent years. And I think about how shame is used to silence us in so many ways. For me personally, writing, journaling, and expressing my feelings in creative ways just for me —without fear of judgement — has been a lifeline of connection to my true self, and maybe it could be one for you too.

Here’s your permission to take your own inner world seriously these days. Make some kind of record of the mood swings, the big thoughts, the big feelings. And honor your inner child by letting these emotions exist without rushing to tie them up in a neat bow.

And, if enough people are interested, I would be up for hosting some journaling/personal history writing sessions on Zoom if people feel like they need a safe space for some body-doubling to do some of this work. Let me know in the comments or message me here on Substack. I feel very strongly that this is work everyone can do and that it will be beneficial to us all, but I also know people are totally exhausted just trying to survive these times³.

Much love to you all, especially to those in the thick of standing up to fascism. Thank you for standing up against cruelty. Thank you for being a part of a better world that is being born, right this very moment. Thank you for doing this work so that future generations have a chance at living a life connected to their true selves. Just like we all deserve.

1. Almost two years of research went into my Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture series, which I just released a podcast episode about if you are interested in helping stop predators.

PODCAST: Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture

2. For over 15 years I have been a huge fan of Voice of Witness, which puts out oral histories of people experiencing human rights abuses. You can learn more about them and their books here.

3. I also want to slowly work towards collecting oral histories of people who left high control religions later in life — think 20s and later — because I believe these voices are often ignored or unheard and they have a lot to teach us. So if that is you and you are interested in being a part of a project like that, feel free to reach out and also get in the habit of writing/journalling!