Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Happy 2024 from me and my overstimulated neurodivergent family to yours! I have a lot of fun, intense, and weird posts planned for this next year and I felt like putting out my personal manifesto might help people know if this is going to be a place they might want to hang out. For everyone who has stuck around (and made this place so much better with your presence) THANK YOU! I’m so glad we get to navigate these truly wild times together.
January is such a good time for manifestos1, don’t you think? Sometimes I get in my head a little too much about how every post I write I need to over-explain my positions, add a million caveats about my specific experiences and privileges and disabilities, and work really really hard to try not to trigger people while also being radically honest about my true feelings. That is . . . a lot of mental work for me, and feeds directly into some of my ethical OCD stuff. So this year, 2024, I think I will write a manifesto right here that will help people have an idea of where I am focusing my energies 2024, and then I won’t have to stress about repeating myself every single week. But you all will know where I am coming from, and what I am thinking about as I tackle various topics throughout the year, which can make everyone feel a bit safer, you know?
Now, manifestos can get me into a bit of trouble as well. The challenge for myself is how can I come up with some clearly defined values and boundaries while also not giving into all or nothing thinking? I don’t have those answers, but it’s something I am working towards in myself. I understand the allure of binary thinking, and how it is also a product of trauma and being raised in evangelical Christianity (but we will get to that in a minute). It is also the natural outcome when extremism is on the rise, as anybody who has studied systems can tell you2. And yet, I see a world already living and functioning beyond the binaries, and that’s where I am slowly headed.
So here, without further ado, is my 2024 manifesto.
1). This year, in 2024, I promise to pay attention to my physical body.
Nobody else lives in my body and nobody else has been in my body. It is mine, all mine, no matter what the priests and the prophets say. It is connected to the world and to other people, but at the end of the day, it is mine and mine alone. I promise to honor this body, to spend some time thinking about and taking care of all the parts of it: my feet, my shoulders, my head, my belly, my thighs, my fingers, my skin and my skull. I promise to build up the skills to be in my body, when it would be so much easier to disassociate and live in my mind as much as possible. I promise to treat it like a beautiful, wounded animal. To honor it when it is tired, to honor it when it is tense with anxiety. To feed it good things and to stretch and wiggle and move when it wants to. I promise to remind myself I am almost 40 years old, and that bodies change over time. My body does not belong to god or to my partner or to the greater good. It belongs to me, a precious and grounding resource, my first home and my only home. I love you, body, and I can’t believe we have made it this far together. I know we will make it through 2024, no matter what comes, together.
2). In 2024 I will show up for my fear, and I resolve to try not to outsource it to anyone else.
I am fiercely committed to showing up for the anxieties and terrors that course through my brain and my body at regular intervals. To be autistic and raised in an end times evangelical household means my nervous system is on constant threat alert for signs that the world is ending. 2024 will have multiple events that happen which will no doubt trigger my catastrophising (and pattern-seeking, and traumatized) brain.
But I commit to showing up for my fear myself. I commit to never outsourcing that job to anyone else ever again—not religion, not god, not activists or politicians, or friends or self-help gurus. I promise to honor my fear, to be curious about it, and to feel the feelings with the knowledge that they will pass. They always do. And if I can breathe through them, I can come out on the other side of an anxiety attack without becoming vulnerable to exploitation and fear-based propaganda. I will continue to do everything I can to connect with the parts of myself that have been afraid for so long, and who desire love and connection and care. I promise to limit my social media when I need to, and put my anxiety and my body above my need to be informed about every horrible thing happening in the world. I will show up for my fear, and as much as possible I will never ever let anyone else use it for their personal or political or religious gains.
3). In 2024 I commit to divesting from communities that harm more than they heal.
As I connect with my body and show up for my own big emotions (like fear and anger and joy) I have less and less time and energy to muck around with toxic systems. Be they in a family setting or a non-profit or political system, they all suck the life force out of people for their own benefits. This one isn’t as easy as my autistic pattern-seeking brain would like to believe. Because the trouble is, so many people and families and organizations loudly proclaim that they ARE doing good works while their results testify otherwise.
For me, this is a metric my brain can rest on when I am feeling tired: looking at the patterns, the history, the lived evidence and experience, *I* trust myself to be able to decide when a person or entity is harming more than they are healing. And I commit to working through the big feelings that come when I have to divest from those places, instead of placing those big feelings on someone else to fix.
It’s not easy when you do this work, and it’s where I think so many people tap out. In the United States, for instance, it often feels like we are ensnared in system upon system that is predicated on the exploitation of others and the earth. Which is . . . accurate, because that is what capitalism is all about! It’s the same when it comes to white supremacy and the patriarchy too. These systems shape individuals, families, religions, politics, and more. And no matter how much they proclaim the good they do, we are at a point in history where we can clearly see the harm in our society, in global politics, in our climate and in our bodies. So many young people—not to mention people who are systematically marginalized and oppressed because of race, sexuality, gender, and ability—are already here. They have the eyes to see through the bullshit to notice how harmful the dominant culture ways of being in the world are. So if we can do the hard work to join in with the youth we can partner with them to envision a future that actually does heal more than it harms. And that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
Each tiny step we make to divest from these places that harm is a step in the right direction. This might mean cutting ties or going low contact with family members that hurt others with their beliefs, words, and ideologies. It might mean finding other ways to bank, or use your money. It might mean leaving a religion that harms more than it heals. It might mean re-thinking friendships or relationships. And the more space you get from toxic people and systems, the more energy you will have to invest in folks who are actually committed to the healing and thriving of all. I believe we are at a point in history where we simply don’t have the time to waste pouring into toxic systems. They have no interest in real change, as they have shown us time and time again. So it is up to us to divest. There are a thousand ways we can do this, and it really, truly adds up.
4). In 2024 I commit to identifying binary thinking3 in my own life and work.
I am under no illusions that I will stick to this part of my manifesto, but maybe this is a way of holding myself accountable? Binary thinking was literally programmed into my brain by my parents at a young age—there were good people (evangelical Christians) and bad people (everyone else). My parents found solace in this easy way of categorizing the world, but in the decades since having me I have seen it warp their perception of themselves and the world in truly frightening ways. They also believe that at our core we are all bad people who can only be made good by devoting ourselves to a deity/worldview that can never be changed. This binary thinking sowed the seeds of distrust towards humanity that I still carry in my bones. I struggle with wanting to be alive in a world where so many people are cruel to each other—while failing to notice or see all the people who are creating lives of love and safety and connection.
Binary thinking—sorting the world into good/bad, safe/unsafe--is also inherently pessimistic. For example, white evangelicals believe themselves to be a persecuted minority under siege by the rest of the world—all the while holding enormous amounts of political, personal, economic, and religious. By identifying with god/Jesus of white evangelicalism, they feel that they have become the “good” people in the world and the rest are morally depraved and doomed for eternal suffering. Therefore, what happens to the vast majority of humanity ultimately doesn’t matter, since they will be experiencing god’s wrath soon enough anyways—and in the meantime, when their own beliefs are pushed back upon they take it as more evidence that they are on the “narrow” path that few will be a part of4.
The surest sign that I am in a chronically dysregulated state is if my brain starts fixating on binary thinking (along with catastrophizing the future—they are both very much linked for me!). As someone who was heavily indoctrinated into white evangelicalism, I believe I will always struggle with this kind of threat response. My brain will always seek to sort people into categories in order to feel safe. I like having a known enemy (be it Republicans or Nazis or white evangelicals) because there is a weird kind of safety in that (plus, it makes me feel like one of the “good” guys). But as much as I wish it were that simple, it never really is. The truth is much scarier than the idea that there are simply some “bad” people out there. The issues we are facing in 2024 are so much larger than we want to realize, but in a strange way naming this reality puts my energies back where they belong. The enemy is not my fellow humans, but it IS the systems in which humanity is caught up in: white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and high control religions being the main culprits I focus on.
Focusing on these systems5, and how toxic they are, helps me see the humans that make them up as complex, full of trauma, and deserving of basic human rights and dignity. And that includes myself. These systems have shaped me, and I will always be aware of that and be working towards changing my worldview. Away from us/them and towards a worldview where we need as many of us as possible working across disparate and varied places in order to ensure the survival of humanity. And I hope to do whatever is in my limited power to help folks heal and divest from toxic systems in order to mitigate the harm they do to themselves, to others, and to our planet6.
So whew, that was a lot. But this is my manifesto for 2024 and I feel pretty OK about putting it out into the world. I’m not going to be able to follow it perfectly, but at least I will have it here as a roadmap of sorts.
I’m curious to know if anyone else does these sorts of exercises around the new year or if you have some thoughts/directions/words/themes for 2024. If so, share them with us in the comments!
A manifesto simply means to make plain your aims and where you are coming from.
This is something that is addressed in Internal Family Systems work, but it also has a lot to say about politics (which makes me think about how inherently flawed the two-party system is, and how it leads to more and more extremism on one side and the other is forced to mirror it)
Krispin LOVES to joke about how I must be so good at not engaging in binary thinking because I am non-binary. He thinks it is hilarious, every time.
That’s one hell of a toxic stew of binary thinking that has direct results on the geopolitical situation in our current world--including the huge block of millions of white evangelicals who are Zionists and believe that supporting Israel's military will usher in the end of the world (the ultimate showdown of good/versus evil and the end result of generations of binary thinking).
One last over-explanation—I have no problem calling out specific systems for the harm they are doing. Israel is committing a genocide against Palestine in front of the world, for instance, and the US is financially backing them. This is not binary thinking, it is just naming what is happening, using history, global consensus, and an awareness of power differentials to make this judgment. To not engage in a deeply triggered us/them response is not the same as not being able to call out systems that harm and to advocate against it!
Already I can see that the Democratic party in the United States is not ready for an entire generation of young folks who are not moved as easily by binary thinking. They will not vote for Biden as the “lesser of two evils” because he is only the lesser of two evils for certain kinds of people. But once people have moved beyond the binary—be it in gender, ethnopolitics, or religion—you can’t really stuff them back in babes!
Divesting from oppressive and capitalistic systems is something I also want to focus on as we move forward! And as a fellow autistic, former-homeschooled-white-evangelical, I feel the same struggle with binary thinking. It’s in my bones, but I don’t want it to be.
Bravo. Every time I read your work, and I finish it, I think “that’s it? they’re not coming into my life to fix it for me??” and I have to remember that my OCD loathes the uncertainty of trying to fix my own issues, of trying to change, of trying to take comfort in other ways of thinking without knowing if they’re absolutely 100% the right way of thinking. Binary thinking is so sneaky and alluring, just like you said. Thank you, again, for putting a lot of my thoughts into words and helping me label some of my feelings! Hope the new year gives you all some peace!