Vampire Time

A personal essay on learning to understand disability

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Once a month I write a personal essay for paid subscribers of this community. Below the paid content line I link to the wonderful Nap Ministries instagram account — please be sure to check out Tricia Hersey and her entire framework. My somatic therapist uses the Rest Deck by Hersey and I highly recommend it!

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Photo by Igam Ogam on Unsplash

Several years now into my autism journey and I find myself in a very interesting place. 

I don’t read very much about autism anymore, nor do I follow too many autistic content creators. I had a few years and months of reading books and taking tests and sharing all about it here in this newsletter. I drank from the firehose of the internet, and it was great. 

But now? It is much less about gaining more knowledge about autism and much more about paying attention to my specific body and what it is telling me. I find that my brain cannot handle too much information these days, and I certainly cannot handle the ethical complexities that come with writing and reporting on autism in 2024. There are people who are doing this work beautifully, and I salute them! But I have had to drop out of the race of being the Perfect Writer Who Understands All the Complexities of Every Issue They Write About.¹ It’s my daily struggle currently—just letting myself be an imperfect human who doesn’t have the capacity to fully research every topic they are vaguely interested in writing about.

The past few months I have really had to sit with some uncomfortable feelings. Feelings that came up as a result of my daily limitations. I just cannot do all the things I want to do in a day. I can’t cook and clean and co-regulate my children constantly and shop and keep track of all the appointments and playdates and help everyone’s mental health healthy and be an excellent partner and take care of my physical, emotional, and mental needs and work on two constant writing projects simultaneously and slowly work through childhood trauma and be a public person on the internet and take care of my dog and my cat and be an incredible friend to a handful of people. 

But every day I forget this, and try so hard to do it all, until my brain hits a wall right around 6pm.