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.

After I have figured out an evening meal and delivered it to my children, I can feel my brain shutting down. Up until a few months ago, I would slink off guiltily to my (cool, dark, white-noise-on room)² and scroll on TikTok for a while, then play Tetris or Two Dots, then check my social media, then back to TikTok. All the while, the triggers from the days would drift in and out of my brain. I would no doubt find some content related to Palestine, or Religious Child Abuse, or some other topic that would set my brain racing down the path of trying to Figure Out Why People Harm Each Other and Figure Out A Way to Fix It All.³ This is my brain’s absolute favorite thing to do, to loop constantly on how I can fix the world and stop children from being hurt. And I would be locked into this inner world of racing thoughts until my children or my partner came into my room, crawled into bed with me, and started talking to me about their day. Slowly, slowly, I returned to the land of the living, the land of my actual life. 

In the past few months, I have begun to get more insight and clarity into these rhythms I have. Lately I haven’t wanted to scroll on TikTok or even play any silly games on my phone in the evenings. Instead, I have been wanting to do something a little more strange. I have taken to calling it Vampire Time. I lay down on my bed and I shut my eyes and I do . . . nothing. No scrolling. No podcasts. No books. No somatic exercises. If one of my family members comes in, it looks like I am playing dead.⁴ But in my brain, I am just . . . day dreaming. About whatever pleasant or neutral thing I want. Maybe my garden, maybe a made-up scenario, maybe I am thinking about a fiction book I read . . . but my mind wants to drift peacefully from thought to thought, and it wants to imagine a past, present, and future where I am happy, safe, and loved. 

I often feel guilty about my Vampire Time. For one—isn’t it just so strange? To be a partner and mother and dog whisperer and main housekeeper and to just lay down for an hour in the evenings in utter silence and stillness and darkness and do NOTHING? It’s weird but it also feels bad. My indoctrinated protestant capitalist brain is horrified by my lack of productivity during these times. I feel so incredibly tired and incapacitated every evening like clockwork, and all I want to do is lay down and daydream for 30-45 minutes.⁵ And it shows no signs of letting up.

The ethical and activist part of my brain is also horrified by Vampire Time. What is the point of daydreaming in a world that is burning? Wouldn’t a good person use their time to learn just a little bit more about the systems and patterns and horrors of the world, and then come up with a plan to make it better? Why daydream about love or flowers or make-believe worlds, why think about delicious food or possible future travels or romance tropes during a genocide, or a fraught election year, or the end of the school year when my children need so much from me? Everyone is hurting, everyone is struggling, and to take some time in my brain to feel a little bit better often feels like I am adding more pain onto those who are suffering.

And yet, I have had the sense that Vampire Time is my body trying to tell me something. It is asking me to slow down and take deep breaths and find a happy place to go to for a little while. Throughout the day, my brain gets triggered anywhere between a dozen to hundreds of times a day by the Bad and Sad and Overwhelming News of the world (or just by my family). Sometimes it turns into a full-blown emotional flashback, but more often than not I just end up ruminating on justice issues in the world and how I can fix them. It can be a TikTok, a Facebook post, a book I am reading for research. It can be me showing up for my children in the ways I wish I had been parented. It can be a memory or a feeling or thought that drifts in for no apparent reason. I am often triggered by hanging out with people, or texting with friends, or interacting on social media. I will spend hours wondering if people like me, if they are mad at me, if I said something correctly, if I have disappointed people by speaking up too much or not enough. I am triggered all the time, because I am someone who has CPTSD and because we live in a world that abuses other humans constantly.

The sad part is, these looping thoughts end up hurting me. I become little more than an overactive, overtired brain trapped in a still and shutdown body, losing hours and hours of my life to the swirl of thoughts fixated on solving the biggest problems in our world. 

Vampire Time, weirdly enough, helps me to break out of the loops of these triggered thoughts. I have a rhythm now, where I get a bit of time to myself to daydream before helping everyone feel peaceful about going to sleep and winding down from the day. For too long I chastised myself for this weird thing I was doing, and I kept hoping against hope I could “heal” myself enough where I could stretch my hours of productivity and emotional regulation farther. If I was more healed, less disabled, less traumatized—think about how much MORE I could do? If only I needed less time. Less quiet. Less stillness. Less daydreaming. Maybe then, I could finally, finally, feel good about myself.

But honoring my limitations, and honoring what my body and brain want to do is helping me. Acknowledging that I am disabled—by my past, by my nervous system, by the ways in which the world treats children, by the amount of demands placed on me every single day, by my chronic pain⁶—has been hard for me. But as soon as I can accept my disabilities, I can also start to listen to what my body is demanding from me. And most days, what it is demanding is a chance to dream about pleasant things.

When I was a child, I was always seen as the dreamer. I was often chastised to come back to the “real world”. When I was forced to be on a sports team, I always chose the positions that gave me the most license to “space out” — right field was the perfect position in softball to pick daisies. I eventually absorbed the idea that it was wrong or bad to daydream, and in recent years I have also wondered if this wasn’t a form of dissociation (something I definitely engaged in as a child to survive some stressful years).

But I don’t think dissociation is the right word for what I am calling Vampire Time. It’s more aligned with what I see amazing activists like The Nap Ministry talking about. As someone whose nervous system won’t allow them to nap, I am finding my own ways to reset, reframe, and get little hits of dopamine during a long and busy day.

The other day one of my children mentioned that I am “always in bed.” I felt a burst of shame bloom in my chest. This child leaves the house to go to school, and has a few hours with me before I do retire to my room, my trauma cave, for the majority of evenings. Am I hurting my children because I can’t seem to get it together like all the other moms? But after Vampire time, I usually have another way of looking at the situation.

I am disabled, and I am finding accommodations that allow me to show up in my life that aligns with my core values. This is what I dream about for both of my children, that they could build lives where they are able to do the same. While it is strange to have a mother who lies down in darkness and stillness every evening after dinner, I also know that my children always, always know where to find me. Instead of feeling stuck in my bed, I feel grateful to have a relationship with both of my children where they feel comfortable and safe finding me in my room, snuggling up to me, and processing their long and busy and complicated days with me. Where we watch silly shows together and tell each other jokes and process injustice. Every evening, like clockwork.

I don’t need Vampire time every day, but it is quite often. A few times this past week I have noticed instead of stillness I craved movement—so I found my swinging chair, or I had a dance party to my favorite Ratatat album, or I went outside and pick a few leaves of my favorite herbs and smell them.

But there is something about daydreaming that I still need, and crave. And I am bound and determined to listen to my body and brain and protect this impulse however I can.

Thinking of myself as disabled still feels like a minefield (so, too, does writing about it—thanks to having ethical OCD!). But for today, this is where I am at. Understanding my rhythms, understanding my limitations. Making accommodations, and being surprised at how weird and strange and happy they make me. And wanting the same for every single person in the whole wide world.

I’m sure tonight I will be daydreaming my vampire dreams . . . with slightly less guilt and shame than before. And in my world, that is a huge win :)

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Let me know in the comments: how are you thinking about yourself, disability, and accommodations these days? Has your body been asking to do anything that seems strange or (gasp!) anti-social? Let us know!

1. The more I sit with this impulse I have, the more it seems like a CPTSD thing.

2. I always call my room my trauma cave!

3. Again, this seems like maybe a CPTSD thing. I am always, always trying to figure out why people hurt children, and if I can help stop it. Seems pretty connected to my own experience of being a vulnerable and unprotected kid myself.

4. Should I call this possum time?

5. Honestly I would love to day dream for even longer but the queue of people and animals wanting to hang out with me starts lining up.

6. Just now, as I am preparing this for publication, my jaw is aching. Because I keep clenching it at night — maybe because I am writing / researching Dr. Dobson right now???? Anyways pain sucks.