Summer of Accommodations: Play Edition

A guest post by Hannah B. Makes

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control religions. This summer we have been discussing various accommodations and I have some great guest posts to share with you in the next couple of weeks / months on this theme! Today I am SO excited to share a post on getting in touch with play and playfulness in a capitalistic society by

Hannah B. Makes

(make sure you check out her Substack!). Speaking of which — your support of this newsletter allows me to pay neurodivergent folks for their wisdom! Thank you all so much for enabling my dreams of building a tiny publishing empire :)

Photo by cheng xiao on Unsplash

Accommodating Play

A guest post by Hannah B. Makes

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Since I was eight, storytelling through writing and performing has been my passion. It has been a way for me to engage in a form of play that fills my soul. Once I realized as an adult that I was autistic, much of my intense, life-long obsession with theatre made sense. However, I was forced to live internally with that passion in my adolescence because I was taught that “playing pretend” didn’t add value to our society.

In our capitalist productivity culture we’re conditioned to only use our time for things that create revenue or have a greater purpose for personal gain. But it’s important to our self-care and our overall well-being that we create space for play that brings us joy, especially when it’s not tied to our income. Societal pressures tell us that anything that doesn’t contribute to society or to our lives in tangible, productive ways is a waste of time and resources. But what gets sacrificed when we deny ourselves our delight in play is our sense of self, leading to burnout.

Once I graduated from high school and gained a slight amount of autonomy, I was able to study storytelling in college with a theatre and creative writing degree and worked as a theatre educator in non-profit organizations for a short amount of time after undergrad. As soon as I entered adulthood I bought into the capitalist narrative that my passion for storytelling play was a waste of time and resources. I left working in the theatre and assimilated into 9 to 5, cubical, office work culture, believing that this trajectory would give my life value and meaning.

Through a lot of therapy and healing in my last decade, I’ve realized that I sacrificed years of my life, myself, and my passion for play on the altar of capitalism. I was on a road to a career doing exactly what I love, but I gave it up because I gave in to the conditioning that all I was doing was “playing pretend.” Now, at almost forty, I feel a responsibility to intentionally play in my life in order to feed my soul and to advocate for the younger me that gave up what she loved.

Not everyone has an option to pursue their specific type of play as a career. But no matter how we make our living, it’s important to make room in our lives for play that feeds our soul because the joy it brings is a way to accommodate ourselves in this capitalist world.

Getting to a point where we decide we want to engage in play may come as a challenge. It’s not uncommon for adults to be so far disconnected from their sense of play because we’ve been conditioned to believe that childlikeness is synonymous with childishness. Hard no. Childishness is emotional immaturity; Childlikeness is a connection to our inner child, seeing the world with wonder, and engaging in the things that bring us delight simply for the joy of it.

Explore what type of play brings you delight. 

Most adults have been conditioned to disconnect from anything that resembles childlikeness because we’ve been told it’s childish (it’s not). So we may not know the particular style of play that engages our soul at this point in our lives. I highly recommend exploring different types of play. You could read about play personalities, take a quiz, and read about the various modalities of play. You may know immediately which type resonates with you or it may take some experimenting to discover what brings you the most delight. It’s okay to explore different modalities of play until you find what best suits you! For some, play could look like painting minifigures, playing board games, singing karaoke, or participating in role play or tabletop games. Or it could be growing a collection of antiques, learning gymnastics, scrapbooking, traveling, reading comic books, or learning about a specific subject. The concept and practice of play relies on each individual’s motivation, mental attitude, and perception regarding their state of play. However, “if its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, then it’s probably not play,” says Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play.

Keep your play to yourself until you’re comfortable letting others in.

You don’t have to start engaging in play in front of others. If you haven’t connected to playfulness in a long time, doing so while being perceived by others might make connecting to your sense of play more challenging at the start. There’s no immediacy for anyone to know about how you engage in play. For example, if you want to learn to tap dance, you don’t have to tell anyone and you don’t have to start out by going to a class. This example is specific to me and you’re hearing it here first! I bought a pair of tap shoes at a thrift store, put a piece of plywood on the floor of my office, and watched YouTube videos to learn simple tap steps. No one except the people in my home have known about it. I decided to learn basic tap steps simply because I want to. It brings me joy, I like the way the rhythm makes my body feel, and I love the sound it makes!

Release control over others’ perception of you. 

It takes vulnerability to let others in on our playfulness. Once we choose to let others in on the way we choose to play, apathy toward how others perceive us is a gift to our inner child. On some level, we may have been concerned with perceptions as a child in order to fit in. But when we were alone, engaged in our deepest imaginations as children, we were free to imagine and play as we pleased. Tap into that part of yourself. When we release ourselves from caring about others’ perceptions of us, we become the adult that our younger selves needed. We advocate for our younger selves simply by enjoying play for the fun of it and not caring about others’ perception of us when we engage in that play. And once we’re able to embrace our play regardless of perception, we’re able to more fully enjoy ourselves.

Find your play people!

This is a silly example, but when our kids were little my husband, Aaron, and I used to play this absurd game we made up called “elbow ball.” One day Aaron challenged me to try and catch our toddler’s rubber ball with my elbows. It took a few tries but I did it! Then, I had the wild thought of trying to throw it back to him with my elbows. I gave a good wind up and hurled it back to him but it took my whole body to thrust it forward. Both of us started rolling with laughter. I challenged him to give it a try and we howled with laughter as both of us tried to catch and toss the ball with our elbows. Elbow ball became a ridiculous and fun game in our house and I’m grateful for a partner with whom I can engage in this kind of silly play and feel safe doing so.

It’s amazing to find people who enjoy the same things you do and it’s equally amazing when you find folks who delight in you finding joy through play, even if they don’t relate to it. There are people in my life who don’t engage in play in the same ways I like to through singing, dancing, and musical theatre. But they’re the people who, when I light up about these things, they choose to enter my world and my excitement. They love me, find my childlike joy endearing, and safely hold that space for me. And I do the same for them.

Work toward releasing shame and embarrassment.

This is very close to the same idea of not caring about others’ perception of you but this is about releasing judgment you hold toward yourself. If we negatively judge the ways we engage with play, then there is no way we could ever freely operate in play that brings us true joy. 

Whether we judge ourselves in play because we think it’s childish or because we haven’t reached some advanced level we anticipated…whatever may cause that feeling inside that makes us want to retreat, it’s important to recognize when it happens and acknowledge that true freedom in play cannot coexist with shame or embarrassment. To be truly free to engage in play we have to choose to acknowledge shame and embarrassment each time it creeps in, choose to work through it, and continue to play despite those feelings. Working through this may be a journey, but what matters most is that we take it. It helps me to remember that when I engage in play, I am engaging with my inner child. And when I engage with my inner child, my goal is always to be the adult that I needed in my adolescence. And what I needed as an adolescent was an adult to encourage my desire for play, not shame me for it.

Play doesn’t have to be a consistent, all-or-nothing focus on one specific form of play. 

Play is as simple as engaging in a little creative magic amidst the monotony of daily life. Play is a mindset. It’s something that you begin to carry with you throughout your day to day life and can be as simple as engaging with the wonder of the world. Play is an act of rebellion against the rush of society. We rebel by stopping to notice the details of a flower petal, the way a piano melody floats through a song, the sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree, or to boop a mushroom.

When we connect to joy through our play, we bring a sense of hope and joy into the world.

By participating in play, we bring beauty to the world in ways that aren’t necessarily quantifiable in the way our society prefers. Engaging in play allows us to see the humanity in one another. Whenever I’m around an adult monologuing about their lego collection, or astronomy, or Taylor Swift lyrics, or their fan theories about a particular book or movie series, I can’t help but see their twelve year old inner child come through and it endears me to the adult in front of me and engages me with their humanity.

There’s so much to despair over the events happening in our world. But we can’t only exist in despair. Doing so will choke the life out of us. We must feel and process through these feelings. I believe that participating in childlike play helps us process our despair. Play facilitates our engagement with wonder, allowing us to see the magic that exists in the world, and creates a sense of equilibrium that allows us space to process the harsh realities of existing as humans while also bringing joy to ourselves and others.

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Hannah is a writer, artist, and theatre lover. As an autistic ex-vangelical, she is on a life-long healing journey advocating for her inner child who was indoctrinated into high control religion. She loves to explore the topics of spiritual mysteries, creativity, play, and the performing arts.

Through her writing, she enjoys sitting in the uncomfortable middle thresholds of life, nestled between two seemingly opposite dualities. She invites others to sit next to her in the liminal spaces to examine the sights through meandering thought adventures and playful exploration to discover the beauty and wonder of this wild human existence. This space of Paradox is the place where she’s learned, a life worth living is lived.

She lives in Houston, Texas with her spouse, Aaron, and two kids.

Instagram: @h.b.makes

Substack:

What are ways you like to engage in play that bring you joy? What is something that would help you better engage with your sense of play?