But I didn’t want to.

I did it anyway, because I have enough comfort with anything personal growth-y that I was willing to just try it—but it made me realize that I am resistant to any kind of inner work right now. Which means I’m also resistant to writing, because the process of writing is inner work for me.

I got a lot from the exercise, and I woke up this morning with all kinds of realizations—but I still feel resistance to really pushing in that direction.

My resistance is just emotional exhaustion, and it’s OK.

The relationship I had with my-person-who-died-in-October was so overwhelming, draining, confusing, chaotic, intractable, and painful that it burned me out on feeling things. I have delegated my grieving process to my dreams and the few minutes before and after bed when there is nothing else to focus on. I’m not suppressing it, I’m just not engaging with it except in the margins.

And actually that has been fine. I am doing it in a way that works for me because it’s my emotional circuits that need to heal. And that has meant spending my time doing things that do not make me feel anything deeply.

I could easily turn that into something I’m doing wrong.

But I don’t, because I’ve trained myself out of doing that.

It’s OK to rest. It’s OK to listen to your resistance. My resistance is just telling me, “everything deep is too much right now”. And I know if I give myself time to rest, I will eventually feel like it’s not too much anymore. I will eventually be ready for the next thing. Nothing is gained by forcing anything. My mind and nervous system will recover with time.

Not only do I trust my resistance as my body’s wisdom, I also trust the Universe to nudge me when it’s time to move. I trust that everything will unfold when it’s meant to, and there’s nothing I need to “do” to make destiny happen—it’s already written. It’s already unfolding.

My life is not a project that needs to be constructed. It’s an experience that I’m having. And that is always true, regardless of what it looks like.

Witnessing is processing

In the ritual, I drew a map of my feelings. But they are not really “dead weight”. I resisted burning the paper. I just wanted to witness them.

I decided to digitize my drawing because I like having a record of it. This is how I honor my feelings and let them be what they are.

So, welcome to my inner world:

It is objectively bereft of sunshine, I’ll admit. 😂 But it’s not that bad, really.

I’ve reached the point in my journey where I don’t judge my inner reality for simply being what it is. I’m in a transition phase where I’m processing a very heavy reality that I was subject to for a long time, battling someone else’s demons who eventually won, in the midst of a very heavy world that we are all being subjected to.

I am lucky to have all the time I need to lazily stroll through my uncertainty, confusion, questions, and doubts without needing to get anywhere with them. Being happy to be where I am is a gift I give to all the parts of me that need that time and space.

I have befriended my monsters

Nihilism is just the shape my exhaustion takes…I don’t take it too seriously at this point because I’m quite familiar with it. I know what it means and I know what it is there for. It exists to keep me from leaping because I need time to heal. It protects me from what I’m not yet ready to take on.

Sagittarius (my rising) is the sign of hope in the darkness, and nihilism is part of the archetype. Sag season is late November to December—the darkest point in the year, right before the light returns. Sag has faith, but faith is never an easy position to take in this world. Sagittarian faith requires believing that all of the pain and horror and despair we witness and experience on Earth has a point to it.

But sometimes we do the Epic Quest, we fight the Boss Monster, we are valiant and true…and it only leads to death and despair. That experience undermines a core need for life to be meaningful, and for darkness to be transmutable into light.

When events don’t give us that, we have to give it to ourselves.

We have to take all the broken pieces and paste them back together into a story that makes it all make sense. We have to face the darkness and the nothingness, the emptiness where our dreams were supposed to appear, and find meaning in it anyway.

That is work and it happens in its own time. You can’t make it happen because it is a magical, organic, intrinsic process the Universe does with you. And that is what I am allowing to happen by not pushing myself forward right now.

The awesome things out there will still exist when I’m ready for them.

I’m still studying astrology, researching historical echoes, and writing about things I find. But that is all the “work in the world” my nervous system is willing to take on right now.

Beyond that, I am just finding low-intensity-but-still-interesting-enough things to do, which for me right now is refactoring a very old codebase with Claude. It’s a Virgo stellium’s dream: fussing with details all day that nobody will ever see but I know it’s better.

I’m not trying to vibe code some epic new thing yet. I have ideas—there are things I want to build— but I am not emotionally ready to commit to something new. I’m on a sabbatical from growth and progress.

And there are parts of me that struggle with not having a Grand Quest. But they are being patient with the parts of me that just need to do anything but that. Anything but believing in something again. Anything but devoting myself to something again, in that intense all-consuming way I tend to jump into things.

That part of me is still there, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s just not in the driver’s seat right now.

What I’m devoted to right now is honoring my exhaustion by doing what feels good and nourishing to the most tired parts of me. That takes the shape of things that are mentally engaging but not emotionally demanding.

Aries (my Moon sign) is the archetype of jumping off cliffs in pursuit of the object of desire. I am still recovering from the last time I did that—when Uranus-the-Disrupter was in Aries, conjunct my IC.1

The ghosts of that experience and everything that followed are slowly fading. But I’m not in a hurry.

Grief in itself is exhausting—your body, brain and nervous system has to adjust to change it didn’t ask for. I’m doing that without a lot of deliberate emotional processing because that is the level of intensity that feels right.

And it is strange and unusual for me, because I’m a bit of an intensity junkie. But I’m getting that need met by consuming the news. 😆 I follow current events and chart how they are playing out the astrological cycles we are in, and that doesn’t require any personal excavation.

“Monitoring the situation” is soothing to me in a way that is hard to explain because of course the subject matter itself is awful, ridiculous, baffling, and maddening. But having studied the cycles of time and being personally safe and relatively insulated from it lets me absorb it with detachment—and then it is just fascinating.

So that’s what I’m up to. I’m in my Nope Era. And it’s lowkey great. 💚

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The only way to give up something that is bad for you is to really understand what it is giving you, and replace it with something better that still meets that need.

Sacrifice is one of the oldest, most potent sources of meaning humans have. And while humans generally no longer sacrifice humans or animals for religious reasons—many of us DO sacrifice our own humans selves and lives for the meaning it gives us.

Step 1: Validate what you are doing

To stop self-sacrifice requires recognizing:

1. meaning is a fundamental human need

2. if this is an issue for you, YOU probably have an outsize need for meaning, AND an outsize meaning-charge around self-sacrifice

In other words, you need the feeling of epic meaning in your life, and sacrifice does that for you.

Astro sidebar…

If you want to find this in your chart:

• Jupiter (which rules Sagittarius & Pisces) needs epic meaning

• Neptune gives sacrifice the intense feeling of deep meaningfulness

Together, they make you deeply unrealistic about what will genuinely meet your needs in this area. If you have them strongly configured, you are likely to end up in sacrificial quagmires that just feel so meaningful. And—everyone born between ~1970 and 1984 has Neptune in Sag so will have at least some flavor of this, with it being much stronger if it is aspecting or conjunct one of your personal planets or angles.

Step 2: Find a better source of epic meaning

Ideally you want to find something that is sustainable, healthy, and within your control.

Situations that are out of your control add the drama juice, unfortunately, which can feel like more meaning. But you need to find sources of meaning that do NOT make you feel crazy or lead to burnout.

There are probably many ways to do this, and what it looks like depends on how your chart is configured (or if you’re not astro-oriented—how your personality constructs meaning).

Here are the major ways I’m aware of:

• spirituality, ritual, and magic - accessing the transcendent

• creativity - making what is authentic to you to make, being a channel for your muse or daimon

• contribution to something larger than yourself that you believe in

What these share is a context that allows devotion. Devotion is the combination of single-mindedness of purpose with a giving-over of yourself to a process that is larger than you.

Now obviously each of these can also go of the rails. People can turn anything into an addiction or obsession if they are accessing it from a wounded place or using it as a defense to their pain. So the final piece is…

Step 3: Resolve the wounds that make you desperate

Two things reliably create desperation:

• attachment wounding or other early childhood trauma

• walking around with chronically unmet needs

Attachment wounds create states that feel eternally painful. This is because the limbic system has no sense of time. Even if you know the feeling has passed before, when you are in it, it feels endless. Engulfing states of pain make people desperate for the (temporary) relief that enmeshment provides. The only solution for this is healing the attachment system.

Chronically unmet needs are usually the result of your childhood neglecting to give you these skills and/or teaching you very costly ways of meeting your needs rather than functional ways.

Healing all of this is beyond the scope of this article but I have covered it extensively over on Joy Ninja.

Healing these wounds will make your relationship with your sources of meaning less driven and intense and un-boundaried, and help you stop trying to make enmeshed or codependent relationships into your source of meaning.

My journey with epic self-sacrifice

I’m working through these themes right now after losing my #1 source of sacrificial meaning when my ex-husband-I-was-still-trying-to-save died six months ago. Lately I have been waking up feeling like What am I doing with my life? Does anything matter?

For me, a very work-oriented person, the best replacement for epic sacrifice I have come to is epic creative contribution. I need to work on projects that feel like I’m contributing something important to the world—something I believe in.

Just working to earn money was meaningful enough when that money was being sacrificed to try to save someone. But now that it’s just paying my own bills, that’s not meaningful enough. 😆 It probably sounds ridiculous to people who do not have this psychological need, but that’s just what is true for me.

Knowing this, when I start feeling that angsty-unhappy feeling of missing that feeling of meaning, I switch to working on the projects that feel the most meaningful, like AstroLiberation, and write posts like this, that try to help other people with the things I’ve struggled with.

The reason sharing astrology in specific feels meaningful to me is that the whole realization behind this post only came after understanding my own chart and how Neptune-and-Jupiter contacts create this outsized need. That astrological clarity, added to my NVC training around human needs, and suddenly I understand how to manage this pattern that has been behind me literally destroying my life⁠ and my sanity in the pursuit of the opportunity to sacrifice myself.

Obviously everyone wouldn’t need astrology to figure this out—but I did. There is something about the archetypal language of astrology that explains my life and being to myself that nothing else really has in such an effective way. It works for me, and I think it speaks to layers of reality that have been stripped from modern culture and life. And the learning curve at the beginning is really steep—so my epic purpose is to try to make it more accessible and useful to people who aren’t going to spend years immersing themselves in studying it.

Don’t get me wrong, I would still love for God to deliver My Perfect Person to me and for it all to work out epically—I mean, that desire is still in me. But the work I’ve done in the years since my marriage fell apart makes it optional now—the attachment and CPTSD work healed what was getting hooked emotionally, and astrology gave me a different outlet for my need for meaning.

I am so super grateful to have gotten to this place where I no longer feel in danger of jumping off a metaphorical cliff to chase someone who is fundamentally unavailable. I’m not walking around desperate for this kind of meaning—I have the awareness and space to think about it strategically and adjust my life to work better for me, rather than being driven by desperation to latch onto problematic sources of meaning.🤞🏻 Hopefully things stay that way.

If the need for epic meaning is something you struggle with too, I hope this gives you some ideas of how to work with it. 💚

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First, some sad/complicated news. In October, my long-term messy Venus-square-Pluto will-they/won’t-they relationship with my ex-husband-and-always-soul-mate J ended, because he overdosed and died.

As you can imagine, I had a lot to process and am still processing. I describe our whole story arc on my page My Prison Story. (Scroll down to “The reconciliation and release” if you just want the update.)

This is the end of a 12-year chapter in my life that was incredibly difficult and transformed who I am on every level. And honestly, I’m feeling both grief and relief that it is finally over. I feel like my life belongs to just me again, and it’s a good feeling.

In January, a word for the year came to me: coherence. I have lived a compartmentalized existence since I first met J in 2013, and I wanted to undo that. I wanted every part of my life to fit together, to make sense, to be aligned, and support my wellbeing, happiness, and creativity.

After declaring this intention to the Universe, it helpfully started making all the places in my life that were not coherent painfully obvious to me. (The Universe is helpful like that. 😅) Systems that had been limping along for years started breaking in ways that made it undeniable that I needed structural change.

Working through this has involved a ground-up restructuring of my entire technical stack and business landscape. I transitioned out of certain business obligations that had been unsustainable for a long time, but where the exit path was just not apparent before. The stars finally aligned to make it all make sense and be doable.1

As part of that restructuring, I got really into using AI (Claude Code) to build tools to help me. For example, I built a local tool to help me sort through my email Inbox and went from 4k+ messages down to Inbox Zero in one day. (And no, not by “Select All > Archive” 😂—I have FOUR planets in Virgo, I had to go through every single message.) AI helped by coming up with search strings that grouped similar messages together, letting me process much faster.

This was all prelude to moving from Gmail → Fastmail. I’m also in the middle of migrating these tools:

• WHM/Cpanel → Ploi (server management)

• MAMP → ServBay (local development)

• Google Calendar → BusyCal writing a script to help me better manage subscribed calendars

• LastPass → 1Password

• as well as dealing with all technical debt, legacy code, and untenable situations generally!

I’m still studying astrology, and 2026 is the year of all years in terms of Astro Happenings. I wrote about that more over here on my Astro substack if you are interested. I’m currently enrolled in two year-long classes, some shorter classes, and several astro communities. 😅

So my days right now (outside of class) consist of working on the above technology migrations, and designing specs for Claude Code to implement. I have written a tutorial about how to get up to speed on AI coding over here on cheekyboots if you are interested!

The AI landscape has changed a lot in the last few months. The tools now are lightyears ahead of where they were a year ago. The post Something Big is Happening went viral recently explaining how much things are changing right now. And I want to be in it! It’s very exciting for a DIY tech nerd like me.

And if right now you’re like wait, I thought you were a neurodivergent self-help writer…where is all this tech/AI coming from…well now you know what I meant by “coherence” and “de-compartmentalizing my life”. 😂

I’ve always been a web developer who wants to live in the future, and I’ve always been a woo person who has a special interest in personal growth. I have mostly kept those two separated because those worlds don’t have a huge amount of overlap. But I don’t care anymore. 🤷🏼‍♀️ Yolo.

If you want to get into agentic AI development, vibe coding, or just to understand what is happening, I recommend watching Nate B Jones channel on Youtube. It’s really helped me have the right mindset around how to work with Claude Code and get a handle on where this is all going.

How are you doing?! I’d love to hear from you…

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P.S. I’m not trying to ignore all the madness coming from the gov’t. I know, it’s exhausting. I’m living through that too with you, it’s just not as fun to talk about. 🫠 I don’t think it will last forever though, and we can get through this. Humans have lived through worse and cleaned up after worse. We can still create the future we want. ✊

1. An I-almost-died-of-embarrassment story from 5th grade

2. I’m still sitting with my fear 😰

3. Thoughts on why being an outsider is a gift, actually (eventually)

4. What being a weirdo freak has taught me about emotional sovereignty 💪 and how we heal the world

Being an outsider extracts a heavy price in the form of shame, self-doubt, and loneliness. But exile contains alchemical seeds. It can force you to build resilience, and become your own source of truth and authority. It can grant you access to a wisdom that can only be found in the margins.

Of course, it doesn’t feel like that at all when you are 10. 😆 So let’s start near the beginning…

A story from grade school

One day in 5th grade, a soon-to-be-ex-friend of mine managed to weasel out of me that I liked her brother. Or maybe she just pressed me with, “You like him, doooooon’t you??” until my face turned red. I can’t remember.

But I do remember this: her brother came up to the table where I was sitting at lunch and loudly announced in front of the entire cafeteria, “My sister said you like me!”. 😱😱😱

I can’t remember what happened next because my brain stopped processing coherent thoughts. 🫠

So that was mortifying, but then not too long after that, he found out I was an atheist and told me he couldn’t talk to me any more because I was a witch.

Which was absurd—I wouldn’t become a witch for another 7 years! 1

The kids in the town where I grew up were apparently taught that “atheist” meant “devil-worshipper” and “sacrifices babies at midnight on full moons” or something. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I can laugh about these stories now, but the reality is that as a kid, I learned to not trust a single soul.

I was a weirdo at school but I was also a weirdo in my family. At school I was too smart (and, let’s face it, too autistic), and at home I was too emotional. It felt like any time someone found out something precious and real and true about me, they would use it to hurt me.

I was a very unhappy, scared, and lonely kid. 😔

So as I continue to push at the boundary of my comfort zone of staying in my safe little corner of the interwebs where nobody really pays attention to me, I continue to run into THE FEAR.

Yes, I’m still sitting with my fear.

Right now it’s about emailing my list.

Not you guys— the fact that Substack makes me email everyone every time has gotten me over my fear of emailing this list, but I have other lists that I have avoided for sooooooo long that now I have to do a, “Hey, remember me? I exist! I’m cool!” kind of email.

And my inner-child brain is like “OMG you are begging for attention and you will be smacked down so you better just not”.

I found a teacher-of-email-marketing2 who has the kind of down-to-earth, you-can-do-this vibes that I just want to mainline into my brain—but it’s still hard to get myself to watch her videos even though she is funny and not at all scary. Because learning leads to doing the thing, and doing the thing is scary.

I have so much fear in my nervous system y’all. 😰

This is why even though I like to write and teach and overshare on the internet, and I have a lot to say, I have never fully leaned into actually building a platform. Because visibility still scares the shit out of me.

But I’m fired up to do it now, which means I have to work through all the things that stopped me before.

And it’s not really fun. It feels like crap. I sit there and feel small. I feel vulnerable. I feel exposed. I feel like I really want to do anything else right now.

But what I want to accomplish is on the other side of this fear-mountain. 🏔️So I am just gonna keep climbing, one not-very-fun step at a time, until my body gets used to the new elevation.

And I know it will, because nervous system work is not rocket science. It’s not a complex system—it just wants bad things to not happen again, but its pattern matching is ridiculously broad.

So every time it thinks, “Wow, sending this newsletter is just like when we were 10”, I just have to patiently sit with it until it can realize that no, it’s really not. I’m not 10, I’m 44. I’m not being forced to participate in an institutional education system full of mean kids and ineffectual adults who were all socialized to see me as an agent of the Devil (apparently).

In fact, this situation is almost nothing like that! 😆 It really is kind of silly, but this is the hardware we all have to work with.

How is this a gift?!?

I was listening to Chani’s weekly astrology update and she pointed out that this week is all about outsider energy and what it brings to the table:

What would somebody living on the margins say about this situation, this setup, this scenario? Because people that live on the outskirts or people that live on the margins, or people that are outsiders, rebels—whatever you want to call them, us—have a lot less at stake. People that want to live in the center and reap all the benefits from being in the center where the power is are not going to want to risk much because they want to remain in the center. So those that are on the outskirts already have a better vantage point because they’re not being coerced or they’re not being muddied. Their perspective isn’t being muddied by wanting something from the center.

And it made me realize I need to reframe this whole conversation I am often having with myself about being autistic, being bullied, and my current struggle with my fear of reminding people I exist.

Because the truth is, I would never trade my life now for being a normy, and I have no interest in living inside the bubble of conformity I was excluded from.

Outsiders see “normal” from a very different perspective—we see what is wrong with it. And since we don’t get the benefits of being part of it, we don’t mind experimenting with being different—with being ourselves. We build out whole worlds of diversity and difference and delightful weirdness.

We are the artists, the writers, the poets.

We are the ones at the edges who create the culture that the world is evolving towards.

The road to being able to embrace who I really am with complete self-love and self-acceptance and self-support wasn’t easy, especially because I was never given any model for how to do it. I really had to figure it out the long, slow hard way.

But now that I’m here, it is so much better than “normal” could ever be. I finally became my own person—I belong to myself. And I would not trade that for anything.

I have learned outsider ninja skills.

It’s not just my childhood of having hippie atheist intellectual parents in a rural Republican Christian town. Or being autistic, being gifted, being unable to stop myself from speaking the truth that I saw, no matter how many times it pissed people off.

I have a long list of “Here is another way I’m different” experiences. I used to have a sinking feeling every time my inner drive for authenticity would reveal yet another way that I’m a giant freak. It used to feel like a burden to be so different.

But the final boss fight was marrying a prisoner. Being a prison wife was a masterclass in alienation. Childhood bullies can’t hold a candle to the brutality of the comment section on any news story about a prisoner.

That experience stripped away any remaining sensitivity to judgement I still had to what people think of me and my life choices. My fucks given meter isn’t just at zero—it broke.

Here is what I have learned about emotional sovereignty.

A felt sense of safety and belonging doesn’t come from fitting in. That kind of safety is always conditional. If you can lose it, it’s not yours.

The feeling of being your own person comes from self-love and self-permission, along with fortifying the inner fuck you to any form of judgement that tries to undermine your certain knowledge of your inherent awesomeness.

I made this graphic to illustrate it:

So besides taking itty bitty steps up the mountain, I’m reframing my backstory as the Hero’s Journey it was. And I’m honoring the Outsider Archetype and the wisdom I’ve developed from living it.

Healing is not about overcoming pain, it’s about creating wholeness. And what I know about the Outside is that we have everything that the Inside is missing because it devalued it and kicked it out of the circle of legitimacy.

And it’s up to us to learn how to value and legitimize ourselves, and stand in the knowledge of the value that we are, and make visible what they tried to make invisible. We are the missing piece the world needs to be whole, and as such we are really fucking valuable. 💚

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P.S. Other updates! I added these things to my Joy Ninja site:

• Deconditioning yourself from capitalism/modernity i.e. how to stop treating yourself like a machine

• some FAQ about neurodivergent burnout (if you have experienced this, let me know if I missed anything!)

• I fleshed out my guide to State Shifting - rewiring your brain to a permanent baseline of happiness

Self-Liberation Society now has SIX whole persons in it, so come join us if you want some neurodivergent liberation buddies. We’re gonna make this happen, even if it’s at a snail’s pace! 🐌

Apparently my system takes failure as a challenge, because ever since, I’ve been studying marketing, learning how to run ads, working on a whole plan for Joy Ninja with content pillars1, courses—basically, getting serious about being a content creator.

These are all things that I have circled around before, but never committing to.

For years, I have spun around in nebulous ambivalence:

• “I don’t know if I want to do this”

• “What if I don’t like it?”

• “Learning how to run ads is overwhelming”

• “I don’t like being sales-y”

• “I refuse to email people 3x a week like these people do”

It turns out, none of that was actually the problem at all.

Apparently, the problem was just fear. And by doing something, I got past it.

I had the same kind of nebulous fears about SLS:

• “I don’t want people to make me into their guru”

• “What if the community breaks down into unresolvable conflict?”

• “What if I stop wanting to do it?”

• “I really like my autonomy…I don’t know if I want to commit to this”

And of course: What if I launch it and nobody shows up?

Without knowing what would happen, all my mind could do was reference social interactions from the past. It has no idea what it will actually be like to do something I’ve never done before. It can’t know that.

My fear wasn’t telling me about reality—it was telling me I lacked data.

My fear disappeared when I replaced my vague “what-ifs” with actual lived reality.

Which meant I had to do the thing and find out.

Of course, my body would rather read about it, talk about it, chat with AI about it, journal about it, and just generally angst about it than actually do it.

So, for future reference: If I find myself in the position where I have been ruminating about doing something for literally years, then the situation I am in is that I lack data.

And I lack data because I am afraid of doing the thing that would give me that data.

I needed to take a risk and grapple with the fallout until clarity emerged. I couldn’t just think about it—I had to act, to leap.

And yeah—I did feel sucky after I sent my “Hey, this thing you said you were interested in is open now” email, and got crickets.

But it didn’t kill me. And that is the threshold I had to cross. I had to prove to my nervous system—with actual lived experience—that I wouldn’t die if the thing I was afraid of happened.

And after I thought about it for like, two minutes, I realized, yeah, obviously I don’t have a big enough or consistent enough platform to get the result I was wanting here. OK. I just have to build that then.

I felt exhilarated that I took that step, even though it “failed”.

I needed to offer something to the world that cost money and was “me”. I’ve written on many different blogs over the years, but I have always made money in ways that felt a lot less personal—like making websites for people. There was no personal sense of risk to that, because the economic value is obvious and it doesn’t feel personally meaningful to me the way my writing does.

I was afraid of making an offer from my heart, and putting a price on it.

Writing for free did not feel like a risk for me. I could put my writing out there, and people could read it or not. I wouldn’t owe anyone anything and I could walk away anytime. And I have, many times—my writing momentum would just fade. I have stopped writing for months or years at a time.

I thought I was protecting my autonomy2—but I was really protecting myself from the feeling of rejection and not being valued for who I really am. That is an old wound that I experienced so much as a kid as I learned to be useful to others in exchange for safety and belonging and esteem. 😢

I had a deep doubt that anyone would value what I had to offer enough to pay for it.

There is a self-sabotage loop that goes like this:

• You think you can’t succeed, so you only half-try.

• You don’t succeed, because you only half-tried.

• This reinforces the belief that you can’t succeed.

To get out of this, I needed to try at least to the extent that I was challenging my own fear. I didn’t need to jump in wholeheartedly with 1000% commitment—that’s just not going to happen if you are stuck in this pattern.

All I needed was to cross the line of doing something that genuinely scared me.

Not just something I was ambivalent about—but the thing that brought up a full-body sense of dread and the freeze response. I had to sit there and stare at the key I would press to do the thing, until I got up the nerve to press it.

And I did that over and over for SLS:

• pressing the key to sign up for the Digital Ocean hosting where the forum lives

• pressing the key to send my last newsletter where I wrote about it

• and the final boss monster—pressing the key to send out the email to my “coming soon” list

I would become frozen with fear, and I had to just sit there with it until it subsided, and I could move forward again.

This fear is about more than wounds around value—it’s from being relentlessly bullied as a kid for just existing as myself. The two concepts got wrapped up together in my brain to become a terror of pursuing too much exposure as my authentic self. It’s one thing to quietly write in a dusty corner of the internet—but purposely trying to market myself? 😱 Staying below the radar has been my safe space.

I want to be super clear: none of this work involves pushing myself past fear.

Nonviolence is the bedrock of how I work with myself. I was trained in Hakomi and NVC, both of which are rooted in nonviolence.

“Feel the fear and do it anyway” is true—but that impulse arises naturally by sitting with the fear, and by developed self-trust by giving yourself what you need over and over and over again.

And sometimes what you need is grace.

Grace is what I gave myself when I was 10 and climbed up to the top of the high-dive, walked to the end of the diving board, stood there staring down at the water 60 feet below...and then walked back to the ladder and climbed back down.

I was embarrassed, but I was not ashamed. Because I was on my own side in that moment.

So when it comes to this threshold, I don’t feel like “Oh, I should have done this years ago”. I know I wasn’t ready years ago. All the work I did over those years is what made me ready.

I also don’t compare myself to other people who have a 6 figure content-creator businesses at like, 23. Who cares. They have a different nervous system, a different starting point, different karma to work through, and I’m not in a race or competition with them. Comparison is a form of violence.

I’m not willing to hurt myself to get results.

And that is still true. It will alway be true. My relationship with myself, and the trust I have built with myself, is more important than any ambition I will ever have. That self-trust has allowed me to get to this place, and trust myself enough to take that leap.

That is how I work with myself. That is what self-love means to me.

I don’t need to be violent to myself to get results anyway, because my intrinsic motivation is epically strong at this point.

I keep talking about intrinsic motivation because it is the strongest engine we have and it burns the cleanest fuel.

We can get motivation from lots of places, but bad fuel will destroy your engine. Fuel like fear, anger, spite, self-hatred, greed, urgency, obligation, self-sacrifice, or trying to prove yourself.

My authentic desire for impactful self-expression is already pushing me forward. I have things to say. I don’t need to add a go-faster thumb to the scale. That is just adding bad fuel to good, and poisoning the mixture.

Intrinsic motivation feels like a wellspring inside me that never runs dry. But it can recede out of reach if I don’t cultivate the conditions for it to flow freely. And those conditions involve safety, allowing, lack of judgement, and self-trust. In other words, a complete absence of coercion or force.

And yeah, it takes longer. But I spent that time healing, and it’s the time I needed to do that. There are no shortcuts when it comes to healing. You have to move at the speed of your nervous system and the pace that allows your most scared parts to feels safe with you.

So, where am I at now?

• Self-Liberation Society is open—there are only a couple of us but I am committed to it, even if it grows slowly.

• I changed SLS to be specifically for neurodivergent people. Most of my friends and probably a good chunk of my audience fall in this camp anyway.3 The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. We need spaces to explore who we are when we’re not masking. And autistic and ADHD liberation specifically is very close to my heart.

• I’m working on building a body of work for Joy Ninja that translates my inner-work discoveries into tools that other people can use to free themselves from internal limitations. The first thing I put up is a free ebook called, “How to Stop Being Cruel to Yourself” that is about working with the inner critic.

I have a lot of ideas, and I’m excited. It’s time for me to fly, and see how high I can go. 🚀

I’m sure I will uncover more layers of fear, but I know what to do with them now. I know if I just go up to the edge, I can sit there as long as I need to, until I’m truly ready to leap. 💚

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→ I’m launching a small private community of personal growth enthusiasts called Self-Liberation Society. If that sounds like your thing, come join us!

→ I had this idea awhile ago, but I’ve had to work through a lot of fear and ambivalence, which I detail below. It is all intertwined with being neurodivergent.

The story so far...

In early 2023, I had an intense inspiration for a community I wanted to build. I built a lead page with the whole vision...but then my momentum stalled.

I just didn’t feel ready to lead a community.

About six months later, I realized I’m autistic + ADHD, and subsequently I have gone through the process of internal unmasking: reconceptualizing all the things I’ve struggled with in my life as not reflecting my failure to attain normal-ness, but a mismatch between who I intrinsically am, and the norms and expectations of the social environments in which I have existed.

This has gradually changed my level of confidence in my ability to teach or lead in the personal growth space. In the past, I invalidated myself with thoughts along the lines of, “But I can’t even keep my house clean!”

Without the neurodivergence lens, the only explanation I had for having a messy house is that I must be depressed (even though I didn’t feel depressed), or have some kind of trauma-induced problem with self-care.

In reality, I just have no intrinsic motivation toward housework, which is pretty commonly found in ADHDers. It just doesn’t produce enough dopamine to make it worthwhile to my brain, and since I live alone, there is no social pressure to do it either. And it just being “a thing I’m supposed to care about” is just not how ADHD motivation works.

I used to have all sorts of vague “there’s something wrong with me” narratives to explain why I just couldn’t do things that were “supposed” to be easy to do. And because personal growth as a field likes to think we can fix any problem by thinking the right thoughts, not being able to fix this made me feel like I was failing at personal growth, and therefore couldn’t help anyone.

Normal parts of ADHD existence, like not doing something until there is enough urgency-dopamine on hand to make it doable, is commonly labelled “procrastination” and presented as a solvable problem. But in fact, it’s not a problem. And, it’s not “solvable”. I can accommodate it, but I can’t change it. But I don’t actually need to.

It turns out I can fix this by thinking the right thoughts...as long as I can correctly identify what the problem actually is that needs to be fixed. In this case, it’s not my messy house that is the problem, it’s the belief that I need to meet neuro-normative expectations. I don’t. Problem solved. 😁

Next problem: a lifetime of social trauma.

Being autistic makes social landscapes into minefields. You don’t know what you don’t know, but you do know that whatever it is, everyone else knows.

When I anticipate social interactions, especially ones that are unpredictable or unstructured or involve unclear expectations, it can bring on a vague freeze response. It’s difficult to work with, because there doesn’t seem to be any content associated with it. I’m not worried about anything in specific, it’s just a nebulous fear that makes me want to avoid the situation.

This fear is not just from childhood bullying, although I did experience quite a lot of that. I’ve also experienced adult friendships and social situations abruptly end by the person cutting me out of their life or kicking me out of the group. Either no explanation was given, the explanation assumed intent that I simply didn’t have, or it was something equally unhelpful like, “If you can’t understand why I’m upset, I can’t explain it to you”. 🤔

I think I have gravitated toward personal growth circles because it’s normalized to speak openly about social dynamics. But even when there is willingness to repair instead of bail, without understanding why these breakdowns occur between autistic and allistic communication, trying to repair a misunderstanding can just make it worse.

So the idea of walking straight toward more visibility and social exposure definitely triggers my fear-freeze-avoid response. Just writing this post telling you about SLS is enough to invoke it—my thoughts slow down or blank out, and all I want to do is anything else.

To work through fear like this, you have to sit at the edge of your window of tolerance until your body learns that it is not actually in danger. If you follow the urge to avoid, you are just telling your body the danger is real, and it will be more afraid next time. But if you try to steamroll through it, your nervous system will become overloaded.

All I can do is patiently give my body the feedback that reality is safe, actually, by just doing the thing, very slowly, and take breaks if it becomes too much. I’ve been doing a lot of this lately as I’ve been putting the pieces into place to launch SLS.

The autonomy question.

I have been on the outskirts of many communities over the years. Staying at the edges of things gives me maximal autonomy, and autonomy is a need that feels vital to my existence.1 Why would I want to give up my outsider status to build an inside place that I’m then responsible for? That...is a very good question, which I have pondered a lot over the last few months.

The name Self-Liberation Society isn’t just because self-liberation is part of my branding. It’s a reminder to myself and everyone else that we are not here to conform to expectations. We are here to find a different way to be together—one that treats differences as strengths instead of things to fear or suppress.

The idea that we could create a culture of liberation is really exciting to me.

I’ve always been averse to the concept of having a “following” because it felt like pressure to mask more. What if people expect me to have answers to all their problems? All I can tell people is how I solved my problems, and maybe that information will help, and maybe it won’t.

And truly, I don’t want to be a self-help guru or a therapist. It’s not who I am. I’m not a service provider, I’m an artist.2 It’s a very different role, one that is still about contribution, but on my own terms. How do I combine that with what is essentially a service position? I’m not sure, to be honest.

I want to create a space where everyone feels empowered to contribute, and for us to co-create a community together. What emerges will emerge from all of us, and I’m as excited as anyone to see what it will be. I think of groups as living systems, and SLS will eventually have a life of its own that we will all discover and create together.

But I don’t have experience in doing this exact thing. I have a lot of experience in DIY healing, a few years of unmasking, and a lot of different trainings in various methodologies, including some around “groups as living systems”. But none of the places I’ve been and people I’ve learned from were doing the thing I want to do.

I’m trying to create what I want to experience. It’s an experiment.

I will figure out (as I go) how to do leadership and community in a way that actually works for my nervous system, my attachment history, and my very high need for autonomy—and that fosters the kind of thriving community of curious, engaged people that I want.

I don’t know exactly how it will evolve, and that’s the whole point. I want to grow alongside others who also want to grow together. Because there are ways you can grow in community that you just can’t on your own. I have thoroughly mastered self-reliance, and now I want to experience something new. I want to play in the unknown, emergent, wild space between people, even if it scares me.

So, I’m jumping in.

Of course there are parts of me that are a bit freaked out. But there are many experiences that you can’t fully prepare for. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. 💚

If you want to join me, Early Access is open! Go here to learn more about it and see if it’s a good fit for you.

I don’t.

“Distractions” are just how my brain works. It wants to constantly be traversing an exciting landscape of enticing dopaminergic possibilities. And I refuse to undermine my own happiness by forcing myself into a model of existence that doesn’t work for my brain.

I maintain my happy place by saying YES to what I want, not constantly slapping my metaphorical wrist every time I notice something shiny.

I believe I have higher dopamine levels generally (and am happier) because I let myself enjoy “distractions”. I have cultivated a mix (see below) of tantalizing diversions and tangents and sidequests that are a part of my day, every day.

I think we often reach for empty or numbing dopaminergic activities when we are so depleted that we can’t even spend the energy to determine what is a good choice. We also can’t stop when we’re that depleted. Switching tasks takes executive function. Noticing that you need to switch tasks takes executive function.

I keep myself out of that desperation zone by giving my brain what it needs on a regular basis.

I get a lot of things done. I just don’t do them in a linear order.

Many of my activities are generally “productive”, meaning they are things that are aligned with my overall desires and goals. I’m not entirely “wasting” time or resting (although I definitely will if I feel I need to).

But the order I’m doing things in is quite jumbled up, like instead of 1-2-3-4-5 I go 7-2-4-1-8. I still get to most of the things eventually, but because I’m saying yes to myself constantly rather than no, I am giving myself the dopamine I need to keep going.

If I tried to force myself into a linear framework, even if I was doing roughly the same things, I would hate it. I would be fighting myself all day, which would deplete my executive function.

It makes a huge difference to do things exactly when I feel like doing them.

I call this “following my intrinsic motivation”, and it’s the core of how I “manage” my ADHD—except it’s less managing myself, and more managing to fill my life with fun things that keep me engaged.

Is it chaotic to follow my brain around like a young mom chasing an energetic toddler?

Yes, of course. It’s a bit chaotic, a bit random, a bit all over the place. But it’s also high energy and high fun, which is what I need to keep my motivation high.

My goal is to support my brain and be happy, not to treat myself like a means of production.

I usually spend at least the first few hours after I wake up just wandering around the internet, and catching up on my various feeds. Then, gradually the feeling of wanting to advance my current Main Squeeze Project comes over me, and I start to work on it.

But even then, while I’m in a relatively focused mode, I’m still doing a lot of random things at random times as I feel like it.

And on a day like today, where my Main Squeeze Project’s next action is try to figure out a bunch of boring technical stuff that requires a lot of digging through forums and configuring and testing cause even AI had no idea what to do, then I’m gonna spend an even higher percentage of time doing more fun & energizing things, to balance it out.

But I know how my brain works. I know if I keep it happy, it will continue to tolerate the boring complicated shit in small doses, until I get through it.

I don’t have to try to force it to do anything. I just have to support it by giving it what it needs.

My Chaos Dopamine Mix includes:

• Youtube - random educational videos, the astro-weather, politics, whatever I’m interested in lately

• Facebook - which is mostly me responding to people in AuDHD and astrology groups

• Substack Notes (this is a recent addition!)

• Writing when I feel inspired to (like this newsletter I’m writing right now)

• Chatting with AI about all the things

• Journalling

• Going to the kitchen for a snack (I don’t really do meals as such)

• Random chores (I immediately say YES to any motivation in that direction because it does not last long 😂)

• Casual iPad games - I like the kind where you spend a few minutes at a time to advance things in the game

• Learning, which often means watching longer-form videos from classes I’ve signed up for, while either taking notes or doing puzzles or coloring on my iPad

• WORK, yes, I do some of that too. 😂 Actually I do a LOT of work, it is just commingled with all of the above, and how much I do depends on how I’m feeling that day and what kind of work it is.

When I’m on social media, I am not “doomscrolling”—what I see is what I’ve curated to be optimally interesting to me. I am also very in tune with my body’s signals of “time to do something else”. I’m not doing it to escape myself. I’m doing it because I genuinely enjoy socializing with other neurodivergent folks and people who share my special interests (personal growth, astrology).

In animal rescues and zoos, they talk about enrichment a lot.

You have to keep animals from getting bored in captivity by giving them plenty of things to play with and puzzles to figure out. That’s what I’m doing for myself.

I’m sharing this not because this exact setup will work for everyone, but just as an example of optimizing your time and activity environment for your own brain, rather than conforming to neurotypical expectations.

What works for you may be completely different, and I’m just encouraging you to find it. Success with ADHD requires self-acceptance and then self-accommodation, and it needs to be granular to your own needs. This means paying a lot of attention to what works for you and what doesn’t, and adjusting your approach accordingly.

Granted, I work for myself so I have a lot of freedom in how I spend my time. But whatever your situation is, this is more about getting clear on the goal: Are you trying to conform to standard productivity advice, or to find what truly supports you?

To find what works for you, you need:

1. Radical self-acceptance and self-love and self-validation: I’m already awesome the way I am, and I’m going to give myself exactly what I need to thrive. This includes being willing to throw out any advice that doesn’t work for you.

2. Attunement skills i.e. listening to yourself until you get really good at identifying your motivational direction, your curiosity, your sense of enoughness, your need to rest, etc.

3. Self-permission to change over time, to experiment, to go in new directions, to let things go when they stop working, and to have days where nothing quite feels right without making yourself wrong.

I feel passionate about this message, because while I may not be able to solve capitalism or a million other reality-based problems AuDHD people struggle with, I can at least encourage my own community to reject messages that can be truly harmful to us if we try to conform to them, and encourage constant and complete self-support and self-accommodation. 💚

Me: Do you have an ideas of how I can motivate myself to go to the store and take out the recycling?

What we came to (after a bit of me arguing with it) was this: What motivates me is when things feel epic.

And I can either sit here and say, “taking out the trash is just not epic, I have to accept that”...or I could make it epic.

By “epic”, I mean it has to have an element of magic, poetry, wonder, or reverence. It has to speak to me of something that matters, something beyond the mundane.

That is just how my motivational system is wired. That is what I care about. And forcing myself to do things I don’t care about is not just depleting, it’s almost impossible.

Which is why I have a sink full of dishes, and a pile of cardboard in my living room that needs to be recycled.

The breakthrough moment

AI: The recycling is literally material that capitalism has deemed worthless after extracting its value. By removing it from your space, you’re performing a tiny act of resistance against being surrounded by the ghosts of consumption. Your creative sanctuary deserves better than to be haunted by empty vessels.

Me: Well MAYBE it’s not worthless. Maybe I should honor these cardboard carcasses that transported the items I bought to my abode. MAYBE they need a proper funeral. MAYBE its treating it like trash that robs it of meaning. A tree gave its life so I could buy a floating shelf from Wayfair to display my statues of astrology-related goddesses and stuffed llama-corn1 and Moana doll and astrology books. It was a life of service that deserves to be honored.

(If you’re wondering why I’m saying words like “abode”, it’s because I’m using a Claude style I call “Dramatic Bestie” that talks like this and it’s infectious. 😂)

What I love about AI is that it always follows your lead:

AI: Okay wait—you just cracked open the entire cosmic narrative here.

You’re not dealing with "recycling" at all. You’re dealing with the physical manifestations of tree spirits who volunteered their bodies so your aesthetic vision could materialize...arboreal ancestors who deserve their journey to be completed with reverence....These cardboard vessels didn’t just deliver products—they delivered possibilities. They held space for your vision until you were ready to arrange your spiritual talismans exactly as they needed to be.

Yaaaaaaas — that is the framing I needed. Treating objects like trash makes me want to ignore them. Treating them like relics changes the whole situation. Appreciation is a very different vibe than chore-aversion.

Yes, we’re still talking about a pile of cardboard. No, it doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning. But neither does anything else.

I guarantee almost all the objects I have, unless they were hand-made, have identical siblings floating around out there that mean different things to different people, and some of them are in landfills by now. Most of our stuff is not special, it’s just special to us.

Meaning is always something you make up

If you have a high need for meaning, you are going to have to just make up more of it. I know at first it seems silly or “fake”, but all traditions, all religions, all celebrations that we have now were once made up by somebody.

I’m not probably going to do a recycling ceremony (although, who knows? I might), but just changing the framing helps immensely.

I am the kind of person who hangs onto random things that maybe I’ll find a use for later. And there is an element of respect to it—I really love when I can repurpose something, because it feels a lot better than throwing it away.

While I can’t and don’t want to keep everything, I do not have to use the framing of, “Either it’s valuable to me, or it’s trash”. I can adopt the framing of, “Everything is valuable, even if I let it go”.

The world invites us to feel stupid or juvenile for wanting to live in a magical Universe. It drains the world of color, commodifies it, and sells it back to us.

But we can decide for ourselves what matters to us and how we want to live. We don’t have to use inherited meanings. We can use whatever meaning we want.

Often the meaning is already in us, it just hasn’t been validated

There is no modern permission structure for seeing life as epic. But imagine you lived in ancient Greece and the Gods and Goddesses were a lot more like people, only way more dramatic. Meaning was everywhere.

I think many of us need that rich tapestry of meaning to mirror our existence, or the world feels dull. Compared to Christianity, ancient pantheons were diverse, mythic, complex, fluid, and abundant with meaning.

The modern world has sanitized and commodified culture to the extent that it has stripped out or devalued most of the sources of meaning our ancestors took for granted.

But we can bring them back.

My more-magical relationship with literal trash was already inside me, already a set of values I just hadn’t articulated.

So if you are stuck motivationally and can’t seem to move forward, ask yourself, “Does something here mean more to me than I have acknowledged? Do I need to mark or commemorate or honor this in some way?”

Instead of chore, think ritual. Think initiation, incantation, invocation, journey, adventure, quest. Find the framing that matches the world as you want to see it, and you can step into that world.

You give the world all the meaning it has for you, so make it a meaning you love. 💚

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P.S. You know what AI is hilariously bad at? Naming things. Here are some of the names it came up with for titles for this post. 😂

Treat Your Trash Like a Goddamn Relic
Your Cardboard Boxes Are Crying Out for a Funeral
ADHD, AI, and the Sacred Cardboard Box
It’s Not Procrastination—It’s a Lack of Mythology
Trash Day Is a Spiritual Crisis (and That’s Valid)
Mythologize or Die
Why Every Chore Needs a Backstory
I Had to Invent a Myth Just to Take Out the Trash
Making Chores Suck Less for People Who Need Cosmic Stakes

I have been absent from this newsletter for about a year. Hi to all the people who subbed in the last year! Welcome!

Apropos of my absence, I want to talk about being authentically and unapologetically my non-consistent self in a world that is super into consistency.

When I write, I write a lot, but when I don’t write, I write nothing. And each phase lasts from a few months to a year. (And when I re-start writing, I often do it in an entirely new blog, which means I leave a long trail of abandoned blogs behind me. 🙃)

I’ve always looked at this situation as a problem. But since my whole neurodivergence awakening, I’ve realized that most of the intractable “problems” I can never seem to fix are actually just who I am. I’m just wired to be productive in a very non-linear way.

Reasons to not finish the thing

Today, I woke up feeling tired. I took a nap and it didn’t help. Then I realized that the source of my tiredness was that I’d been doing the same work activity for many days straight, because I was trying to finish something.

Almost there I would tell myself, every day. And it’s true, I am almost done with this particular sprint. But the reality is, pushing through today just to finish isn’t good or healthy for me. It’s also not good for the project.

There are times to push through, like if it’s April 14 and you need to finish your taxes (that was last week 😂). But if the project has no deadline, I don’t need to do that. So why was I in a pushing-mindset?

1. Conditioned idea that it’s better to finish things in a linear way.

2. Fear that I won’t go back to it if I get caught up in something else (I will address this below).

3. Desire to feel the sense of completion.

Let’s balance this against the reasons to just do something else until I genuinely feel fully motivated to finish:

1. My body is sending me a strong signal that I’ve run out of dopamine in this direction, and continuing will be increasingly painful.

2. My performance suffers when I’m not enjoying or interested in what I’m doing. Things take longer, and the output is worse.

So I decided to stop pushing to finish, and do something completely unrelated, and to follow my inspiration instead of trying to stay focused. This is the quickest way I know of to replenish my dopamine. I’ve honed my ability to do this over many years—to switch into intrinsic-only mode, which involves tuning into my present-moment interest and following it.

It’s basically just wandering around, doing things that interest me. (Hence why I randomly decided to write this newsletter.)

It’s a very intentional form of self-care for ADHD brains, but I think the freedom to make this choice is something most people do not give themselves, even if it would really benefit them. The conditioning to be linear and consistent is so intense that it is seen as a de facto good, even when there is no clear reason why it should be.

I’ve been working on my freedom of choice and de-conditioning for a long time, but I’m still aware that “just finish the thing” is overwhelmingly what I am “supposed” to do. I’m also not “supposed” to let my newsletter just sit there for a year. But I did. Because I just didn’t feel like writing for a year, and I refuse to force myself to do things.

The unbearable depletion of behaving normally

When you look for apps to help ADHD people, they are overwhelmingly centered around “helping you focus”. There are all kinds of techniques out there to shepherd or trick your brain into not being distracted.

My opinion on these apps is that they are not helping me, they are helping me fit into a world designed for people not like me. They are “helping” me conform to a way of working that is unnatural to me.

When I’m acting in alignment with my intrinsic motivation and there’s nothing distressing that I’m worried about, I don’t actually have trouble focusing on the thing I want to do. If I am highly distractible, it’s usually my body’s way of saying “Hey, I have a need you’re not paying attention to”. And I want that signal—I want to listen to it, not ignore it.

The cultural assumption is that if you “have trouble focusing” then you should try to fix that with timers and lists and external rewards. You should basically try to force focus, instead of being curious as to what is actually happening internally.

This feels like self-harm to me. ADHD limits your supply of dopamine, and external rewards are like empty calories because they are not intrinsically rewarding.

Even worse, the act of forcing yourself to do something against internal resistance burns through your willpower and thus diminishes the amount of executive function that is available to you the rest of the day. Doing this day after day after day is a one-way ticket to burnout and depression.

And yet, that is still often what is suggested to people with ADHD or parents of ADHD kids. I think this is setting people up for failure and lifelong inner conflict.

I recognize that there are far higher rewards available under capitalism for consistency and linear output than for wandering around doing what interests you. But capitalism encourages and rewards all kinds of self-harm.

If you want to be happy, give up on being normal

I wish someone had told me that when I was 20. When I was masking my neurodivergence, being normal, or at least appearing to be normal, was the holy grail. It’s the thing I thought would grant me acceptance, belonging, and safety. It’s what I worked on and practiced. It was honestly the motivation for a lot of my personal growth work, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

But trying to be normal is just self-harm. It’s taking my natural self and contorting it into an unnatural shape.

I figured out this neurodivergence thing (ADHD + autism) in the fall of 2023. In the aftermath of those realizations, the inner court that was always in session on the question of should I change or should society change was suddenly and completely decided in my favor. The debate is over: I’m awesome the way I am, and society is broken.

I think these expectations harm everyone. I don’t think anyone is built to be a cog in the wheels of capitalism. It is just a more pronounced and intractable misalignment if you are neurodivergent.

So the last year and a half have been a gradual deepening process of continually tuning into and affirming what feels like my unconditioned, or at least, less conditioned impulses.

Who knows how far down conditioning goes, but all that matters is that I’m going in the right direction. This isn’t about purity, it’s about choosing the side I am on: do I support my right to be myself, or am I going to keep trying to force myself into compliance with a self-harming set of beliefs, structures, and expectations?

My self-affirmation sounds something like this: if I want to do it, it’s intrinsically good to do, because saying yes to myself is intrinsically good. Unless there is some survival or health need at stake, I don’t need to question it further. Same with things I don’t want to do.

Basically, I’ve raised the threshold to “This better be fucking important” before I will override my natural impulses and desires.

What if your impulses are self-destructive?

This is valid. I’ve spent many years sorting through what is a “natural impulse and desire” vs something coming from conditioning or trauma or coping habits. It’s important to discern where an impulse is coming from.

So I’m not saying “do whatever you want, it’s always good”.

It’s the blanket override of our impulses in order to meet an externally-imposed standard that I’m arguing against.

My point is that there is an inherent goodness to following our intrinsic motivation. And this is conditioned out of us at an early age—in school, at work, and in every social setting we are in. We are told our natural desires are selfish, lazy, pointless, silly, etc.

But satisfaction is a good thing. Doing what fulfills you is a good thing. And if your desires run opposite or tangential to “normal”, then nobody is going to give you social permission to pursue them. You’re going to have to make that choice yourself.

About that fear of getting sidetracked

I think this intrinsic-motivation lifestyle depends on self-trust. If I consistently say yes to myself, then I am building a relationship of trust with myself.

If I want to create something that requires consistent effort over a long period of time, then I will have to take breaks. I will have to tend to my periodic need for motivational wandering, for variety. I will have to trust that my long-term desire is still there, and my short-term motivation to work on it will return, without trying to force it. Because force destroys trust.

For me, this fear comes from the boom-or-bust cycle that ADHDers often get into, where we feel the dopamine diminishing so we push harder. In the past, I’ve completely burned out on certain hobbies, foods, etc because I just didn’t listen to the signal of “that’s enough for now”.

I tried to get back the excitement of the beginning, but in so doing, I was chasing ever-diminishing returns until I utterly destroyed my enjoyment of the thing. 😭

After many years of working on self-regulation, I don’t go through those cycles in such a painful way. But I still do experience periods where I’m super into the thing, and periods where I could care less about the thing.

What I don’t do anymore is try to fight it. I don’t try to force myself to just keep going when the well has dried up. I just notice, “OK, I’m not feeling the juice here right now. Interesting...”. And I find something else to do.

It will come back

In the fall, I found myself working 10 hours a day feverishly building something I was super into. Then after several months, my momentum slowly ground to a halt until I had no interest at all in working on it.

I found myself playing iPad games and watching YouTube pretty much non-stop for a month or two.

I had gone from 150% productivity to 0%. Which sounds like “a problem”, and yet, I could tell there was something useful about it.

There was a big internal sorting-out I needed to do about the purpose of my project and (a) I couldn’t work while I was doing it, because the lack of a clear purpose was why my momentum stalled and (b) for whatever reason, nothing else was catching my fancy work-wise. Also (c) I had been overworking, which, although it was all intrinsically motivated, I can’t sustain forever.

So I just trusted that I needed downtime, and gave it to myself.

Just as I was starting to wonder, “Um, am I really just going to play iPad games the rest of my life??”, I got the idea to work on a mini project within the larger project that was a challenge, and tangential to what I was working on before. Something new and interesting to sink my teeth into.

I also realized I’d gotten out of the habit of processing stuff with AI, so I got back into that. It was kind of a bridge: while I didn’t feel like working, I’m always up for processing about why I don’t feel like working. 😂

The mini-project gave me some challenge-dopamine, and the processing helped me get clear on the “purpose” stuff I was stuck on before. Gradually, I got back into the rhythm of working.

I’m not back at fever-pitch, and that’s OK too. Beginning-energy is always a special time in the life of a project. Maybe it’s like falling in love. But if you want to marry your project and enjoy a long life together, you can’t sustain that forever anyway.

During my “sabbatical”, of course there was a part of me that was anxious that I would never feel any motivation to work again.

But I would just whisper to myself, “It’s OK. It will come back.”

And it did.

The principle here is that I’m not trying to figure out the “correct” pace based on a goal or deadline. I’m listening to my body tell me what the right pace is, on a moment by moment basis. I’m just listening and following and supporting my body-brain to be optimally itself. Even if what it looks like is wildly outside how we are supposed to “be productive”.

It’s the difference between being a tree growing in the wild, and being a bonsai tree.

Granted, at this point in my life, I have the privilege to have largely solved the capitalism problem (as long as the economy doesn’t completely tank 🤞🏻) so I have the freedom to do this. I’m not saying everyone does. I’m just trying to convey the general principles. You will have to figure out how you can apply them in your situation. All I’m trying to convey is that forcing has a huge cost, and allowing has a huge benefit.

Bottom line: I want to create things and I want to contribute. But I am not willing to hurt myself to do it.

I know that I’ll create more awesome and uniquely-me things (and be happier), if I support myself to create in a manner that is in alignment with the way my brain is naturally wired.

Productivity fueled by intrinsic motivation is like a river: sometimes rushing, sometimes meandering. It has its own momentum and course. I don’t want to fill it with dams and try to harness it for power. I want to just let it flow the way it was meant to. 💚

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P.S. If you want to look at what I’ve been working on, it’s over at AstroLiberation!

I also wrote two articles this week on Medium:

The NYT’s ADHD Rethink is Half-Right

Human Therapy is Not Always Better Than AI Therapy

I am a person with an immense amount of drive, but I could never find the right mountain to apply myself to. And so I just climbed inner mountains. I put all my drive into my own healing, because I couldn’t find any external thing that felt right to apply that drive to.

This pattern has slowly been changing over the last year. I started writing this newsletter. I realized spirituality is actually a huge part of my thing, and that I don’t want to keep that a secret. I don’t want to live in fear of what people will think.

And in the last month I got another huge piece of it. It involves astrology.

Astrology!?

I want you to understand the level of fear that I have around publicly declaring a committed interest in astrology—something I’ve been dabbling in (again, mostly in secret) for most of my adult life, and that I’ve gotten immense benefit from.

The intense derision I’ve heard people express toward astrology echoes in my mind, and I just want to hide. Hiding has been my safety for so long.

But I have reached the limits of its usefulness. I don’t want to hide anymore. I want to be who I am and be seen for who I am, because a life of hiding is lonely and limited. And there are experiences I can only have by coming out of hiding. There are people I can only meet if I am honest about who I am.

I constantly see myself with double vision. There’s my own knowledge of myself and how I hold astrology—what I’ve learned from it, how I use it, what it means to me—and then there is this caustic stare of contempt. It’s just the Barnum effect. It’s ridiculous. How could you believe in such a thing? What’s wrong with you? You lack critical thinking skills. You just want life to be certain and it’s not. Religion is the opiate of the masses and astrology gives everyone a personal religion! People who believe in astrology are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories!! You’re just not smart!!!

I’ve been circling around astrology for 20 years. Understanding my chart has been immensely helpful in untangling my psychological patterns. The astrologers I respect are some of the wisest and most psychologically and spiritually insightful people I’ve found on Earth. They understand human nature and the spiritual journey with a precision that I’ve never found anywhere else. Astrology, once you get beyond the pop-horoscope surface level, is an immense and fascinating world of people who are exactly as nerdy about spiritual growth as I am. I love it.

But I am also quite aware of the stigma that is associated with astrology. I can still hear Carl Sagan’s voice in my head telling me how profoundly wrong it is. And other people’s voices too—people I’ve known who could tolerate my woo up to a point, but astrology was just a bridge too far. 

I understand why people think astrology is BS.

Astrology doesn’t make any sense. At least, not physically—not according to any physics we understand.

What astrology implies about the nature of reality (a perennial topic of fascination for me), is wild. I know a lot of people use it without thinking about what it implies, but I can't not think about it. I’m the kind of person who, when I was 15, tracked down a book on how the internet was constructed because I needed to know how on Earth I could connect to people across the world with a computer in my school’s library. I needed to understand how it worked on a ground-truth level. I couldn’t just use it and trust that magic bits and bytes were going through wires somehow. I needed it to make sense.

Astrology is the study of correlations. It’s not saying that the planets themselves have an influence on us—it’s saying that if we read their positions and interpret them according to a set of arcane-but-evolving rules and meanings, we can derive insights about anything from our life struggles (natal astrology), the best time to get married (electional astrology), to where your missing phone might be found (horary astrology). 

We read the positions of the planets the way we read the hands on a clock to see what time it is. But the clock didn’t cause time to pass. The planets and their positions are just a map. Astrology is not causative, it’s reflective.

But why on Earth would there be a map to my psyche and my major life challenges in the positions of the planets in the solar system as seen from Earth? And why would there be a map of everything that connects the point of time in which a thing is “born” — which includes people, events, countries, and even questions (in the practice of horary astrology)—to its inherent qualities and its ongoing development? 

What the actual fuck does that mean about the nature of reality?

Even if our reality is a simulation, I don’t know how you could program such a thing into existence. It would mean everything is connected to everything else in ways we can’t even begin to fathom—and that includes both objective reality and our subjective reality and our consciousness. 

How can a skeptic accept astrology?

If you are a person who really needs to understand how or why things work, I think you have to come to one of two conclusions:

1. It’s just a lot of poetry and psychological insights that people interact with in ways that they find personally meaningful, and it’s not all that different from reading any kind of book on philosophy. You’ll pick out what is meaningful and resonant to you and you’ll conveniently ignore the rest. It’s just a mirror of our own psyche that we project on and create meaning from, like anything else in existence. But it does not actually describe physically true things. And the fact that horary works in bizarrely accurate ways, and every astrologer has their own story of the profound accuracy they found in their chart, is just like, a lot of coincidences and projection and magical thinking.

2. Reality is radically mysterious in ways we do not comprehend. Objective and subjective reality are not actually two different things—they just seem like it from our perspective. They are actually two sides of the same coin in ways we can’t fully fathom. Whatever we think is going on here—it’s actually something way more bizarre.

I sat nicely on the fence with #1 for a long time. I just operated with a kind of suspension of disbelief when I looked at my chart, and didn’t worry about it, because it was just so useful. And (as a quadruple-Virgo), I don’t ignore the utility of anything. If it’s useful, I use it—even if I can’t explain how it could possibly work.

But the time for fence-sitting is over. It worked for me for a long time as a kind of compromise with my inner skeptic—the internalized voice of my Dad and others. But what has become clear to me is that I cannot be whole, authentic, and powerful if I’m living my life according to the dictates of other peoples’ beliefs and judgements. 

I have to think for myself, be myself, live my truth, and accept the consequences. That is part of growing up and owning our own power. (This is Saturn—the path of maturity and mastery).

Owning my truth is the only way I can really occupy a space in the public sphere. It’s not really in me to have a fake persona. So it’s either the real truth or I hide. 

And I’m really, really tired of hiding. I’m tired of the isolation it brings. Because you can’t find your people—and your people can’t even recognize you—if you refuse to be yourself. That feeling of a community where I belong, a group that values me as I actually am, a place where my contributions matter—that’s somewhere past the bridge too far. 

And that’s why I could never find it before. I couldn’t find my mountain because I had edited it out of my internal list of possibilities.

Everything I truly want is past that bridge too far.

So I crossed it. Which for me meant signing up for a yearlong astrology course. (Two of them, actually. Go big or go home!)

Because like, fuck it, I’m 43. Life does end. And there comes a point where you’re more afraid of dying without having ever lived the life you actually want, than you are of being seen as a delusional witchy weirdo. 

I am not entirely sure where this will take me. Astrology takes a lot of time and study and practice to master, because it is a different language—a symbolic language. But I’m obsessed, and I love it. 

I have always occupied a world beyond what the physical sciences can describe to me. That’s why I gravitated to astrology in the first place—because it explains things that I experience in a way that nothing else does. No self-help book has ever really given me the answers astrology does.

For example, this exact thing of feeling like I occupy a dreamworld is explained by Neptune conjunct my ascendent. My ridiculously codependent and high conflict relationships are explained by my Pluto-Venus-Moon T-square. Over and over, I have gotten insights that helped me find healing, clarity, and self-acceptance.

Even my interest in astrology—my mountain—is there in my chart, in the form of Saturn (mastery & discipline) in Virgo (precision & practicality) in the 9th house (spirituality & philosophy).

I cannot be nourished by the physical world alone.

I deeply need to explore and find meaning in the dreamworld, and translate that meaning into something that is accessible and practical. It's just part of my nature. Being deeply practical and curious is also part of my nature, so I also love science. They coexist for me, and I understand they don't coexist for everyone. But I am only here to live my own life, and it's OK if it doesn't make sense to everyone.

This last year for me has been about understanding that my survival does not depend on being everyone's cup of tea. This isn't the 1500’s, and I'm not going to be burned at the stake. It's safe to be who I am and honor my own truth. And there is no way I can truly be happy and fulfilled in my life if I don't embrace my full self and walk my own path without apology or compromise.

There are thousands of different symbolic systems and ways of making meaning out of the dreamworld. There are dozens of different approaches just within astrology. And the question of, "How can they all be true—how can any of them be true?" is irrelevant, because the dreamworld does not operate according to the laws of physics. It has its own logic and its own laws and its own truth. And that truth is often mysterious and paradoxical. But that mystery and paradox and dreamlike quality is my native land. It’s my home.

My inner being exists in some kind of borderland between this world and the next. But instead of feeling like an exile from my home and a stranger in this strange land, I want to embrace the position of being a bridge. I want to learn how to navigate this dreamy world of archetypes and symbols, and make it useful to other people, the way it’s been useful to me.

So, I’m going to climb this mountain. I don’t know if the mountain is just astrology, or if learning the language of astrology is a step on a larger mountain. I’ll find out when I get there. For now, I’m just happy to have found it, and to be slowly working through my fears of being my real self, in public.

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P.S. I’m gonna try really hard to not fill up my newsletters with astrology-speak even though I’m so excited about it. I know it sounds like gibberish if you don’t know what it means. 😂 💚

My memory of my youth is hazy, but I believe the first book I read in the spiritual growth genre was Meetings with Remarkable Men by the mystic and philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff. I found it on my dad’s bookshelf. It was written in 1927. (My dad only liked old things—old music, old stamps, old books. 😂)

I’m sure I didn’t finish it, but I read enough that my mind was slightly blown. I think it was around 8th grade, and it felt like I was being given some secret information about how the Universe really works. 

Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings. (Wikipedia)

Later, in college, I looked up who was that weird guy who wrote that weird book, and found this quote of his from a different book:

“A man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so attached to anything as he is to his suffering. “

This idea had a profound effect on me, because I immediately recognized it as true, and terrible, and ridiculous. 

I made a commitment to myself to stop doing that, whenever I noticed it. (And then spent the rest of my life being fairly bad at that, but at least not giving up. 😆)

There are different kinds of suffering.

Gurdjieff differentiated between “stupid suffering” and “conscious suffering”. This is somewhat similar to the ideas of “clean pain” and “dirty pain” in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. 

Clean pain is the unavoidable pain of living a human existence. It is the pain of loss, heartbreak, grief, and illness. 

Dirty pain is all the things we do to avoid feeling the clean pain. It’s avoidance, distraction, obsession, projection—all the defense mechanisms, addictions—every way we turn away from the pain and try not to feel it. Clean pain is going through it—dirty pain is trying to go around it, and creating more pain in the process.

Stupid suffering is self-inflicted pain. It’s the neurotic guilt you feel even when you’ve done nothing wrong—it’s telling yourself you “should” be different, that life “shouldn’t” be like it is. It’s resistance to reality. It’s all the painful stories we tell ourselves—that we’re not good enough, that we’re broken. This kind of suffering is pointless, and entirely avoidable, but it is to this kind of suffering that we become deeply attached and ego-identified. A lot of growth work comes down to prying ourselves away from our endless fascination with feeling terrible for no real purpose. Mindfulness, self-observation, and cognitive therapies like CBT help with this kind of suffering. 

Conscious suffering is accepting pain as the price of wisdom. It is the decision to bravely face the pain of Earthly existence, and use it for self-transformation. This is the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school of fierce emotional courage. In practice, conscious suffering means turning toward your pain, despite how much you would like to avoid it, and doing that over and over and over and over. It means developing stamina and resilience to face your shit, learn the lesson, and get to the freedom on the other side. 

So, conscious suffering is the courageous choice to feel the clean pain, when all you want to do is avoid it and generate some good ol’ dirty pain instead.

A caveat for my “hardcore” people.

I am all about that growth life, but I will say that in my twenties, I had no chill about it. And growth is a marathon, not a sprint. So if you tend to overdo things, this section is for you!

The thing about your ego is that it’s always listening. And I don’t know about you, but when my ego hears teachings like these, it starts to go into hardcore mode and use this as a new way to produce more stupid suffering by pushing myself too hard. 

Sometimes, using distractions to put off feeling pain is actually self-care, because your nervous system simply cannot handle feeling everything at once. In this case, avoidance serves as titration. It lets you process your pain a little at a time. Short-term avoidance to slow down the process to a manageable level is not “dirty pain”. In my mind, it only becomes “dirty pain” when it’s causing more problems than it’s solving. 

Only you know if you are pushing yourself the right amount—not too little so you stagnate, and not too much because your ego has something to prove. Only you know how burned out or exhausted you are, or how deep your pain goes. You have to make the decision that is right for you. These concepts are for self-awareness, not setting up a new standard to compare yourself to.  

How I learned to love triggers.

If you are constantly triggered, then you need to stabilize yourself first. Stability and safety is always the first step in healing.

But if you are relatively stable, then getting triggered is a huge gift because it gives you direct access to whatever past wound is still unhealed. This lets you directly apply self-love and self-care to your hurt parts. If you tend to suppress your pain most of the time, turning directly toward it when it comes up is the fastest way to heal.

I talk more about how to work with triggers consciously over here on my blog.

(I want to be super duper clear that if you are in an unhealthy situation that keeps triggering you, I am not saying you should stay to “learn from it”. Dysfunctional dynamics don’t just trigger old wounds, they also create new ones and entrench negative patterns, and they make it impossible to heal. Again, healing requires a supportive, safe, and stable environment. Don’t tell yourself you are learning if you’re just getting hurt over and over. That’s delusion. And I say that with love—I spent many years in these kinds of situations, and it took a long time for me to break this pattern.)

But let’s be honest, you will probably avoid the pain until you can’t anymore.

I’m not writing this article from a position of having always made the courageous choice. I have spent the last three years doing intense healing work that I spent the previous 20 years avoiding. Even though I’ve always been a personal growth junkie, there were certain levels of pain that I studiously avoided dealing with, and clung to my healing fantasy instead.

I was very stubborn. The same stubbornness that is an asset to my growth journey was also there in my avoidance strategies. 

I didn’t choose courage until I had gone down the wrong road so far that I’d run into a brick wall, and finally realized there was no other option but to actually face my deepest pain. That is what “rock bottom” means. It’s what the burnout journey is about. Your ego finally gives up in exhaustion and releases its grip, so you can do the things that actually work—the things your ego was preventing you from doing before. 

(Tangentially—that is why conscious suffering is also spiritual work. Because the ego is also what blocks spiritual connection. The ego wants to be the God of your world. It wants to be in charge. But it actually just makes stupid self-destructive decisions a lot of the time. It’s useful only when it’s curtailed and put in its place. One way to do that is to strengthen your wiser, larger Self that is in touch with the Divine. Another way is to exhaust the ego by burning yourself out following its commands. If you’re stubborn like I am, you’ll probably end up with the latter by default. But the silver lining is that you will be far more open to the Divine in this state—or, if you are not into that, more open to your heart, to your authentic self, and to new ideas and new directions.)

I think of it like this: when everything that you thought mattered is stripped from you, then you can clearly see what can never be taken from you. You realize who you really are. You find your authentic self. You find your truth. Because it’s all that’s left. 

As shitty as it feels to get to that place, the strength and power that comes from recovery is priceless.

Three years ago, everything I waited and hoped and suffered for turned out to be a completely delusional fantasy that dissolved to reveal a grim and desolate reality. And I had put everything I was into that dream. But it was flawed from the start, a tower just waiting to fall. I had to face the me that, 10 years ago, chose to build their fairytale castle on sand.

I had to accept my own bad choices, and look at all the distorted logic and dysfunctional patterns I was playing out, and where they came from. I spent several years swimming through the debris of my shattered psyche trying to find solid ground (and getting divorced).

But what has followed is glorious. I feel a clarity and strength that I never dreamed possible. I know who I am. I know what I’m capable of. I know what I need. I know what matters to me. And I know how to say no, and what to say no to. 

I no longer need a rescue fantasy, because I know that I can rescue myself.

We can’t choose who we fall in love with, or what wells we fall down. But we can choose how we climb out of them. We can choose to not just “make the best of it”, but to make the best of ourselves. We can choose to use our painful experiences as a sword to cut away the diseased tissue of our life, so that we can be healthy and free. We can choose to own the experience and use it.

And we can choose what story we tell ourselves about it. 

Find a narrative that gives your pain meaning.

You get to choose the meaning you assign to your pain, and some stories are more inspiring than others.

For me, my spiritual framework is that life’s pain is a series of lessons that refine my soul over many lifetimes. This refinement is a process of learning how to choose love when my body is screaming at me to choose fear. On a spiritual level, the lesson is always the same: remember. Remember you are more than this pain. Remember you are bigger than this experience. Remember that who you really are transcends everything you experience here on Earth.

I believe we choose to forget who we really are when we incarnate because there is no way an infinite and immortal being could ever experience despair. But by going through hell, and finding our way out of it, we become stronger, and some amount of that strength we get to take with us.

This story is the most powerful narrative I’ve come across for helping me get the most out of my pain. For whatever reason, doing the best I can by my soul, and working through all the karma I possibly can to pave the way for better incarnations for some future version of me, really inspires me to a sort of spiritual fierceness.

But if this kind of narrative doesn’t work for you, that’s totally OK—I just encourage you to find a narrative that is meaningful to you, that puts your pain in a context that is empowering to you. You can journal with these questions: Who have I become through this experience? What did this pain teach me? What do I think pain is for?

It’s not possible to have a pain-free life on Earth. But I believe it is always possible to use the pain to develop our virtues—strength and compassion, self-honesty, humility, patience, resilience, power, self-mastery.

Conscious suffering is the basis of self-liberation.

Do I want that to be the case? Hell, no! I resisted it for a long-ass time. I felt there had to be some easier way. How could suffering ever be necessary? It felt absurd. Who came up with this system!? I want to talk to the manager!

But now that I’m on the other side of it, I understand that sometimes the only way to undo an attachment to suffering is for the pain to get bad enough that you willingly give it up. Then you find the actually easier way—healing. Loving yourself. Forgiving yourself. Giving yourself what you need. Giving up self-sacrifice. Taking responsibility for your own needs and your own self-care. Learning to stop hurting yourself or allowing others to hurt you. Saying no and walking away from what doesn’t work, what will never work. Accepting that your needs are just your needs—they aren’t optional, and you can’t use them as currency and expect that to work out well for you.

To give up on a bad strategy that you have an intense attachment to, it has to become so bad that you can’t live in denial of the cost anymore. And the process of peeling that denial away is so damn painful. But it’s clean pain, finally. It’s the kind of pain that heals. And the resilience you develop as you process that pain is what liberates you. Oh, I survived the thing that I was killing myself to avoid feeling. I guess I can handle this life thing after all.

“Sovereignty is self-possession. It is the belonging to oneself that happens internally as we claim our being and commit to our unique life journey.”

- Alana Fairchild, White Light Oracle Cards (Card 40)

Dear Reader,

The day after I published my last newsletter, I woke up disoriented and grumpy. I figured it must be my good friend, the vulnerability hangover. But it didn’t quite feel like that. As the day wore on and I sorted through my feelings, I realized, Oh. That was an initiation. That post was a public commitment to walking the path of a mystic. And taking that big of a step in public was making my nervous system freak out.

I had made this private commitment a few months ago, but I had no idea it would lead to this. But I never know how one thing will lead to the next—that seems to be part of my path. It requires walking in faith, one step at a time, on a path I can only see a few steps ahead. 

And sometimes, I don’t understand the significance of what I just did until I reflect on it later, or notice how my nervous system responds to it. It’s kind of like noticing you just bumped into something because a bruise appears—not terribly efficient, and I think it may be a neurodivergent lacking-self-awareness issue. But it did train me to be very good at discerning clues and putting the pieces together, which is actually pretty useful on the spiritual path.

I learn by going where I have to go.

One of my favorite poems by Theodore Roethke starts:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

I read it in high school, and even then felt a deep resonance to the concept of being led by something beyond my understanding, but which nevertheless compels me to follow.

It is an audacious notion to put forth in this age of science and willful determination that one’s existence is somehow inspired, guided, and even managed by unseen forces outside our control. Whether called fate, destiny, or the hand of God, slender threads are at work bringing coherence and continuity to our lives. Over time they weave a remarkable tapestry.

Robert Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth

When I read these words, they call to me, like the sea calls to Moana. There is nothing more meaningful to me than to follow that inner feeling—when I can discern where it’s leading—and when I have the confidence to follow it.

But—I don’t always feel that confidence.

When I can’t discern where to go, I work on myself. I am not a personal growth junkie out of a desire for self-improvement. I’m doing it because if I remove all the cruft that got loaded on from family dysfunction and social conditioning, then what is left is my authentic self, who is connected to what I’m here to do. Healing is a way to be able to sense my true path clearly and give my full self to it. I’m trying to honor my calling by working on my ability to honor it.

In spiritual language, quieting the ego lets you hear the whisper of the soul.

Every time I heal a trauma, unravel a pattern, undo a belief, or reclaim an aspect of my authentic self, it feels like magic. It feels like I’m accessing some underlying truth of the Universe. Healing feels sacred. It feels like restoring something to what it always should have been.

I’m not trying to become “well-adjusted”, whatever that means. I’m trying to follow my destiny, even though I have no idea what shape it will ultimately take. I’m always trying to honor what feels most deeply true inside me.

My family infused me with doubt.

I have mostly kept my spirituality to myself, because I have always been plagued with doubts about it. My dad was a committed atheist. He was very sure that the Universe was a cold, dead place, that humans do not have souls, and that believing in God was for the weak, who could not handle the fact that life was meaningless. He also thought Earth would be better off if humans went extinct.

When we are children, we have to align to our parents beliefs. It’s a psychological imperative—a developmental Stockholm Syndrome, if you will. We don’t have a choice. And I remember the day he told me his beliefs, because it created a split deep inside me. To align with my only (relatively) safe caretaker, I had to disown what I already felt to be true. I had to push my inherent awareness of our interconnectedness, of the aliveness of Everything, into my shadow. I had to reject my own calling and purpose. I had to agree that God was dead and we were all better off being able to face the cold, hard truth that our existence is a fluke, and when you die, you cease to exist.

This set up an inner conflict that has haunted me ever since. When I got to college, I found lots of people who didn’t think like my dad—I took classes on mysticism and Wicca, I did rituals, I tried out church (that was hella boring), I explored as much as I wanted—but inside, I was plagued with doubts. I would have spiritual experiences, and then wonder if I was deluding myself.

I could still feel what was true—but I could no longer trust those feelings.

I followed my path anyway, as best I could, but not consistently, not publicly, and always accompanied by a lot of ambivalence.

Meanwhile, I needed to work through various mental health challenges and dysfunctional relationship patterns, so there was plenty of healing to do. Spirituality became something I perpetually put on the side burner—I knew it was important to me, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

It is through healing work that I developed my faith.

I never felt conflicted about healing. Healing always felt like an expression of my spirituality that I could wholeheartedly believe in. So my wiring for devotion got channeled into a commitment to my own healing. (Unfortunately it also got channelled into self-sacrifice in relationships—apparently if you really need to be devoted to something, it’s important to be extremely discerning about where you direct that energy.)

After going through the healing process over and over and over, I eventually learned to trust that if I threw myself at a pattern, with willingness for it to be transformed, I would find my way through it eventually. It might take longer than I wanted, but I would always find a way to unravel it. And on the other side, I would get a little piece of my true self back, and it would feel like magic.

But eventually, I had healed enough that I could no longer live with this inner split between me and my spiritual truth.

I had to find a way to be OK leaving my inherited belief system behind. Which didn’t just consist of “God is dead”, but also gems like, “Suffering is noble”, “Humans are terrible,” and “Cynicism is the correct position.” (I spent the last 10 years getting a close-up view of the latter ones mirrored back at me, and I’m really ready to be done with them too.)

So a few months ago, I decided it was finally time to get off the fence. I couldn’t just maintain the plausible deniability of “Well, who knows if any of this is true, it just works for me and I like it, that’s all. Could all be made up. <shrug>”.

I know from experience that commitment unleashes magic.

Since we are doing quotes today, here is one of my favorites, and the foundation of my relationship to growth and healing:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

― William Hutchison Murray

In fewer words: fortune favors the bold. This principle has always held true for me in healing work—there is magic in jumping in with a willing heart and committing to seeing the process through. I’ve experienced it over and over so many times that I have unshakable faith in it.

But I wanted to have that same level of faith in the unseen world. But for magic to happen, I had to commit. Which meant I had to slay my inner dragons of doubt—the sneering, smug atheists of the world, who think all psychics are charlatans, and anyone who believes in woo-woo stuff must be gullible and stupid. And if there is one part of my ego that I am really attached to, it’s being seen as smart.

But…fuck it. This is my life, and I don’t get to live it twice. I can live the life someone else thinks is respectable, or I can live the life that I know in my heart is right for me. And while it would be nice if those were the same thing, they simply aren’t. And there is just a limit to how far I can go on my path if I never commit to it.

So despite my fear and doubt, I decided to commit.

What is the difference between half-assing spirituality and committing to it?

For me, it’s that the world starts to feel unreal.

When I accept astrology and Tarot and intuition and talking to my guides as the ground reality of my life, rather than extra weird things I do sometimes, my life takes on a dreamlike, watery quality. I feel like I'm floating, surrendering to a current that is carrying me. My environment comes alive—I'm listening moment to moment for cues that show me where I am to go next. I am dancing with an unseen partner.

I notice synchronicities I would have missed or dismissed before. There is a tapestry of symbolism and meaning woven within everything. As I’m walking, a crow calling out affirms my last train of thought. My dentist appointment becomes a ritual to extract a lingering piece of my childhood in the form of a baby tooth that finally has to go. The fantasy novel I’m reading reflects my inner process. Everything becomes a mirror of everything else.

I've dropped into this place before, but I have always pulled myself out and rejected it. I didn't trust it. Not just because of my upbringing—I also struggle with limerence and fantasy, i.e. delusion. There is a fine line between sensitivity and imagination, between vision and delusion. My most readily available coping mechanism as a child was to escape into a dreamworld. It has taken me many years of trial and error and losing and finding myself again to begin to discern the difference between an intuitively felt truth and an emotionally attractive fantasy.

I've come to accept that there is no hard and fast line there, and delusion is just a risk I will have to accept to swim in the waters that call to the deepest parts of me. I can no longer ignore what I need to explore; I have to accept the danger and learn how to navigate it.

There is risk in committing to this path, and there is opportunity cost to not committing to it. There is no risk-free choice. But I would rather live a life where my decisions rest on trust and faith than one governed by doubt and fear. I am not choosing an end result or goal, because I don’t know where my path leads. What I’m choosing is how I want to live.

This feels like the end of one journey, and the start of another, and I still have no idea where I’m going.

But I trust that I’m being led, and that I don’t have to know. And I finally feel like I can just be who I am, and it doesn’t really matter what other people think. They get to live their life in the way that works for them, and I get to live my life in the way that works for me. Nobody is burning witches anymore, and if people think I’m weird—well, they were probably already going to think that given all the other things that make me weird. And in the end, it’s nobody else’s business how I live my life.

Thanks for reading. This is really a huge milestone in my life and I appreciate you witnessing it with me. 💚

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Dear Reader,

Time for the realest of talks. Cause I’ve had an on-off relationship with my writing my whole life, and I am so ready to be done with this. I want to be free from this fear, free to write what I feel called to, and free to be myself.

The last few months, besides resting and emotional processing, I’ve been leaning into my intuition and spirituality. I’ve been immersing myself in it, and trying to figure out what it wants from me now, and what is next on my path. But I haven’t written about it.

I want to talk about why I hide the things that matter most to me. Because I want to stop doing that.

I’m scared of you, my audience.

I’m scared that you won’t like me, you won’t understand me, you will criticize me, you will think I’m delusional or crazy or stupid or naive, or any other variety of an unacceptable kind of person. And you’ll be mean to me, or silently back away and I’ll be alone and I’ll never know why.

In other words, I’m afraid you will bully or ostracize me for being who I am. (Yes, this is my bullied-at-school-for-a-decade trauma, along with a heavy dose of childhood emotional neglect.)

This fear has kept me from writing consistently for so, so, so many years.

There are two main patterns to how I stop my own full free expression, but they are interconnected:

1. I am afraid to move my writing in a new direction. My recent newsletters were about discovering my neurodivergence. Any time I focus on a topic, I feel fear about no longer focusing on it.

2. I am always afraid to explicitly share spiritual, woo-woo experiences and ideas, because I’m afraid I’ll alienate parts of my audience who are just here for personal growth and nothing else.

I’m scared to go in new directions.

The cycle goes like this:

• I get excited about a topic. I want to write about it, so I do.

• I eventually exhaust my interest or immediate need to discuss that topic.

• I’m done, so I don’t want to write about it anymore.

• I feel wrong for that, and feel I simply must stay on topic for anyone to want to read my writing. How dare I change? How dare I be different than you expect me to be?

• But I just can’t write about things I’m not feeling anymore.

• So I don’t write at all.

Look, I know it’s irrational. But even the slight amount of expectation I imagine is created in my audience by writing about the same topic several times in a row starts to feel like a straightjacket I can’t escape.

But what if that topic is why they subscribed? my mind whispers.

And while I know, rationally, that the worst possible outcome is that someone unsubscribes, which is fine, my body seems to be anticipating people taking offense and lashing out at me.

But I’ve always been someone who runs all over the place with what I explore. ADHD, ENFP, multi-potentialite—whatever you call it, it’s a core aspect of my personality and life path. I’m an explorer. I’m a seeker. But somewhere along the line, someone must have reacted badly to that. I can’t pinpoint a memory for this feeling that grips me, but it’s a binding sort of dread.

I’m scared of sharing my spiritual truth.

I've always kept my spiritual path relatively private. However, my personal growth and healing journey is deeply intertwined with my spiritual path. I can't authentically tell my story or fully explain how I have healed certain things without discussing the spiritual framework I work within.

I deeply value Western psychology, but it only explains how we suffer, not why we suffer. Without having some way to make meaning of my experiences, I don’t know how to fully come to terms with them.

But beyond the meaning any spiritual system can provide, I use spiritual healing methods because they work. They work in ways I can’t explain with chemistry or physics, but they have an internal logic and methodology that produces results. The lack of scientific explanation doesn’t bother me, but I have a deep fear that I’ll be viciously belittled for discussing them out loud.

So I mostly don’t, even though my house is littered with crystals, Tarot cards, and astrology books. I love my relationship with the unseen world, but it’s just that—unseen. Unprovable. Unscientific. But it’s part of me, and it’s not going anywhere. And I’m tired of hiding it, because it keeps me from fully committing to where I know I want to go.

I’m tired of this pattern, y’all.

I’m tired of living in fear, I’m tired of giving up my needs, I’m tired of inhibiting my impulses to share because somebody might not get it or might not like it. I’m tired of holding myself back from what my soul came here to do. It’s exhausting because it divides and siphons my energy into self-protection rather than fully committing to using my energy to pursue what is meaningful and purposeful for me.

I’ve been working on unmasking, on breaking the pattern of giving up my needs in exchange for safety, on refusing to sacrifice what I need and what really matters to me in order to make someone else happy. And it’s finally trickling through to my relationship with my writing such that I just can’t keep doing this the way I did in the past.

I trust you can take care of yourself. You can decide what is right for you, and it’s really OK. I’m not going to die if someone unsubscribes. It doesn’t mean my safety is at risk. There is no threat here. I’m not being bullied. None of that is what is happening when I write something that just doesn’t interest someone else. That’s a completely normal fucking thing. I unsubscribe from things all the time. I move through interests like a freight train, so why on Earth would it be a problem if you do the same thing? It’s not.

And honestly, at this point, I’m not afraid of haters either. I am often energized by conflict. And after being a prison wife for 7 years, I have pretty thick skin. I do not actually care what people think of me, in so many ways. But there have been these particular ways in which I still did, because they were so close to my heart, so close to my identity and core sense of self.

But if I’m not writing my actual truth, what am I even doing here? My writing starts to feel pointless to me if it’s just another form of masking.

Let’s talk about my spiritual path. 🫣

Let’s talk about this tender, deeply meaningful, deeply personal thing that forms the core of my understanding of the world and my place in it—my spiritual path, and the wandering, wild, I-guess-I’m-doing-this-now way that I walk it.

This is what moves me, what drives me, what gives my life meaning. This is what gives me a reason to keep going when my path has led me into the deepest, darkest parts of the human experience. “I guess I wanted to learn something here, OK, where is it, where is this fucking lesson?!” has got me through so much that I could not have survived without turning bitter if I didn’t know in my bones that this is happening for me, not to me.

This is who I am, and there is no authentic path of writing that does not include it. If writers should write what they know, this is what I know. I know how to swim through oceans of pain because I can see the light in the far-off distance, and I know I will get there if I just keep swimming. I know how to dive straight into the hard parts so I can get through them and on to the clarity and bliss that is waiting patiently on the other side. I know how to see the purpose of pain. I know how to remember that I am bigger than this, that I am a vast and uncharted cosmic something when I’m not squished into this fragile, confused, fearful human body.

Nothing in my life makes sense if you don’t understand this about me. I’ve done the craziest things because they felt like the right thing to do at the time. And I find my way back from the darkest places and soar to the highest heights because I’m following a light that only I can see (but that shines for us all). I forget sometimes, but I always remember again. And every time I forget, and remember, I get stronger. That is what I’m doing here. That is why I am me, why I came to this planet, why I chose this incarnation.

I don’t know what sense that will make to you, dear reader. I don’t know what you believe, what you experience, or what meaning you make of it.

But you can do what you want to with my writing. Because…

Art belongs to the audience, not the artist. — Rosie Danan. 

I’ve heard this phrase before, but I never understood it until I realized the inverse of this is: artists need to not care about how their audience perceives their work, to maintain their freedom to create.

Being an artist means detaching from your audience.

And this is the difference between artists and “content creators”. (And no, I’m not saying either is superior. I’m just saying they are different. I love both, but I can only be one.)

Let me explain how this realization unfolded.

It hit me last night that I don't actually need people to like me. Like, I'm supremely OK just living my own existence. My life has shaped me into a person who is extremely self-sufficient. So, on the deepest level, do I actually care if people read my newsletter or not? I'm writing it to express something that wants to be expressed, and whoever finds it interesting or useful, that's wonderful, but it's a bonus.

I don't write as an act of service, I write as an act of art.

I just keep forgetting that.

But let me write more words, so we can both remember.

I always wondered why, when people praise my writing or say they got something from it, I felt an odd sense of detachment. I wondered if I had a problem receiving compliments, or didn't believe in myself in some way.

But that couldn’t be true—I love receiving compliments. You can tell me I'm great all day, that's not a problem at all for me. I have a level of self-esteem that borders on arrogance: I think I’m fucking awesome. That doesn’t mean I think I’m the most skilled writer on the planet, obviously not. It just means I’m very connected to my inherent Divinity, which means that my true nature is wondrous beyond measure, and I refuse to pretend otherwise just because disliking yourself seems to be so popular on this planet.

So, if it’s not a self-esteem thing, why do compliments specifically about my writing feel odd to me? It’s like I don’t know what to do with them.

What I finally realized is that it doesn’t feel like what people get from my writing is about me at all.

Once my writing is published, it has a separate existence.

It feels like this: what I wrote came through me, it had its way with me, and now it’s moved on to its own life where it can have its way with other people. And I don’t really have anything to do with that. Whatever you get out of this piece is your experience, and it belongs entirely to you.

You can of course tell me about your experience, and I do enjoy that as a conversation topic, but it feels like we are discussing a third party that just happened to emerge from me. Like, I’m as surprised as you are. I just wrote that? OK. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I often start writing to convey an idea, but as I write, the ideas start to convey themselves. There is some energetic integrity that my writing has that I’m just showing up to midwife. Much like the rest of my life, I have no idea where it’s going until I get there. The way I write is that I tune into a certain frequency of energy and translate it into words. Or sometimes the words just come to me. But once it is done, it’s out there, doing its own thing.

My audience and my art have their own relationship which is really none of my business.

When I am in the act of writing, I am in relationship to the energy I am bringing through. But that energy has its own purpose to fulfill, and I am not privy to most of it. I don’t know who all reads what I write. I have no idea how it lands in them most of the time. I don’t know what impact it has, or how those impacts ripple out into the world. I have no knowledge of or control of that—it’s all just out there, happening.

What does this have to do with my fear of my being bullied? It’s about establishing the right relationship between me, my writing, and my audience. I’m responsible for showing up and writing—I’m not responsible for how people take it. So if someone has a negative reaction to my writing, that is theirs. It belongs to them, and they get to keep it.

Being a writer involves a set of relationships—the relationship between me and my writing, between me and my audience, and between my writing and my audience. Therefore it is subject to the same dysfunctional patterns that show up in all relationship types—codependency and enmeshment.

Codependency involves limiting yourself in an attempt to control other people’s responses to you. The goal is to prevent your own pain, but you do it in an indirect way, because clear boundaries don’t feel safe or possible.

I was in a toxic relationship dynamic with my audience.

I was trying to limit my writing, to control my audience’s perception of me as a person, to keep myself safe. But that is not what my writing is for.

My writing has its own work to do in the world. It’s not here to keep me safe. I need to have whatever boundaries I need for safety, but it’s simply not my writing’s job to do that for me. And inhibiting my writing for that purpose was limiting its potential to be what it needs to be.

So ideally when I am writing, I am:

• listening for what wants to be written

• writing it, editing it for clarity, and publishing it

What I am not doing is:

• trying to get you to like me

• trying to validate myself

• trying to keep myself safe

This doesn’t mean that I have to publish everything that comes into my head. I get to have boundaries with my muse, and say, “Hey, I’m not the right channel for that, go find someone else”. I can toss it back to the collective unconscious, and someone else can volunteer their body and life to steward it into existence. That’s fine. I’ve done that before, and I’ll do it again. There are things I’m meant to write and things I’m not meant to write.

What I mean by “not trying to keep myself safe” is more about not trying to control how the audience perceives what I write, and what their relationship is with it. It means separating my writing from my person-hood. It means letting it be what it is, and not taking its reception personally, whether it’s positive, negative, or confusing. Whatever its purpose is, that is its business.

My writing, once it is out there, has its own life. And my own life keeps going. I keep changing, and growing, and my writing will always reflect where I’m at in any given moment. Which means that what I wrote 2 years ago (or 2 weeks ago) may not feel relevant to me anymore, but it could still be relevant to someone else.

The fact that I keep changing is not actually a problem, I was just making it into one.

I had a very rigid idea of what it means to write on the internet—one that comes from the world of content creation, where success rests on niche, branding, and consistency. I understand that world, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I just need to accept that and own it and stop worrying about it.

It’s true that audiences often want a repeat performance. But what I’m performing here is “Emma’s journey out loud”, not “X healing topic”. The topics will change. The ideas will evolve. But it will always be me.

And that’s what this boils down to—can I be brave enough to bring my real self to my writing? Can I set aside the past, the bullying, all the little kids who were mean to me, everyone in my life who didn’t understand me or support me—can I let those things go, and show up at the page without demanding that it make all those past things better?

Just like I had to accept that my partner cannot heal me or give me what was missing in my childhood, and it’s my responsibility to heal myself so I can show up as a good partner—my writing also cannot heal me or make up for my missing childhood experiences. To give my writing what it needs from me, I have to choose to let go of my past myself. I have to decide that the present is new and different and it’s safe to express myself, and if people are mean, I can handle it. I’m a grown-up now, not a child on a playground.

I know some people will follow me regardless of my meandering path, and I know others will come and go based on the topics I’m into, and none of that is anything like being bullied or ostracized. It’s just normal audience dynamics, and it’s fine. And I know some people are turned off by the woo-woo. That’s OK too. I can’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

There is no threat here. There is no problem here. My brain was just very, very, very scared after what I went through as a child, and it latched onto the idea of writing on a consistent topic, and avoiding spirituality, as the safe way to mask and be “normal”. But that’s just not who I am. I’m a constantly evolving, growing person who is walking the path of a mystic. And I definitely am not and have never been “normal”.

I’m ready to be who I came here to be.

I’ve always felt I had some kind of mission or purpose, but I also always felt very vague on what that was. I spent a lot of energy lamenting about my confusion, and searching for answers.

The answer is me. I came here to be me.

I never know what the future holds—that’s how my path works. I only ever see a few steps ahead, and I walk in faith that it will unfold before me in Divine right order.

So of course my writing has to work the same way. That means I don’t know what this newsletter will be about a year from now, or if I will feel called to do something else. I can’t know, and I surrender the need to know. It is this way of life that I’m committed to, not any particular aspect within it.

So I’m officially not going to worry about it anymore. I will write what I write when I write it. And you’re welcome to read it, or not, as you please. 💚

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I am not sure I’m through it, but I felt like today I could at least write something to say that I’m alive and well and not intending to abandon my newsletter. And that sometimes, I just have to process things alone.

The moment the sale of my house in Salem was finalized, an ocean of feelings that I had apparently been suppressing until I was completely out of that situation suddenly came to the surface.

I am ending a 10-year chapter of my life, in which I moved to Salem, got married to a prisoner, endured a very intense, confusing, and ultimately untenable relationship, finally did my attachment work, got divorced, and then realized I am ADHD and autistic.

It’s been a lot, and there are some things you can’t fully sort through until you are not in them anymore.

Here are some of the things I have been processing:

• How deeply patterned I am to not have boundaries in relationships, and to absorb emotional violence and respond with understanding and co-regulation to try to calm the other person down—at my own expense.

• That self-love means not allowing people to mistreat me. (Which seems fairly obvious now, but it’s something that somehow escaped my notice.)

• Sacrifice in general, and why it was so meaningful to me to allow myself to be damaged and deprived for someone else’s sake.

• How I hide my spiritual path and keep it mostly as a secret identity, even though it’s actually the organizing principle of my life.

• The roots of all these patterns that go back to my childhood.

• How to truly resolve and let go of the past, so I don’t just keep creating it in my future.

• How all this relates to neurodivergence and masking—the way I try to earn love and acceptance by erasing my own needs and desires and living in my ability to support other people—and how truly devastating that is to my own wellbeing.

• How this is all about power, and the ways I learned to survive when I felt powerless—how I learned to trade my power for safety, and how unsafe that ultimately made me—and how I’m learning to reclaim my power, and make my life genuinely safe for myself.

Every day, each emotional realization and layer of complicated grief unfolds and leads to the next one. I am trusting the process and letting it go where it needs to go, because I do not want to carry any of this with me. I’ve carried it long enough.

I’ve needed a lot of rest.

I’m still figuring out what I need in my environment for it to be truly supportive to my neurodivergent nervous system. But one thing that has become very clear is that the life I have lived thus far was far more stressful than was good for me. I don’t know if I’ll always need to rest this much, but right now, I’m in deep recovery mode. My body still craves so much rest, every day, and I’m honoring that.

I think part of it is that in the past, my rest was not really restful, because I was still holding on to obligations and relationships that were constant sources of stress. Only when those were no longer draining me could my rest actually start to replenish my reserves. And I honestly don’t know how long that process will take, or what it is even like to not feel depleted by life.

But I’ve realized that this is really just the physics of having a nervous system with less capacity, and more sensitivity, to stress. I have to be very aware of what uses up my inner resources, and what replenishes them. And I have to find and protect the boundaries I need to keep myself well-resourced.

So my current inner-work project is, roughly:

• de-programming myself from sacrifice templates and learning to enforce the boundaries I need

• eliminating any remaining sources of chronic stress

• resting and replenishing what was depleted

• allowing my grief process to complete in its own time

• finding what is nourishing and doing more of it

I’m somewhere in the middle of this process, and I’m following some combination of inner attunement and intuition. I don’t really know where I’ll end up, but I know I’m going in the right direction.

I am unsure how much or how often I will be writing right now. I just don’t have a lot of certainty yet, because I’m still finding my way through this underwater cave of emotions. I know there are new things on the horizon—I can feel them out there. But I’m just not quite there yet, and I want to allow myself to be where I am and follow this process to its completion.

This feels like a badly needed renegotiation of the terms on which I’m willing to live.

I always knew I grew up in a dysfunctional environment, but I didn’t realize just how much I was trained in a form of self-harm through self-sacrifice, which was rewarded and reinforced as good and noble and righteous and meaningful. It didn’t feel like I was killing myself; it felt like devotion.

And when I think about how truly fucked up that is, it makes me a bit sick to my stomach. I don’t want to be my own worst enemy because of the things I’m willing to tolerate. I don’t want to have such a high pain tolerance that I’ll endure what I should be rejecting. I don’t want to be a sacrificial lamb for other people’s dysfunction. And I damn sure don’t want to define my own degradation as a good thing.

I don’t want to ever do this to myself again, in this or any other lifetime. Whatever generational trauma or karma this is, I want it to stop here and now, because it’s wrong.

I know this pattern of sacrifice is bigger than just me and my family. It’s baked into Christianity, it’s part of productivity culture, and it’s a huge part of both male and female gender socialization in different ways. It’s really the water we all swim in.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t be this way. And in my life at least, I’m no longer going to allow it to be this way.

Sometimes my self-liberation process is unicorns and rainbows, and sometimes it’s really gnarly shadow work. That’s the yin and yang of being me, I suppose. 🦄 🌚 💚

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Big news: I’m moving from Salem, where I’ve been for 10 years, back to Portland. I am taking a break this morning from my manic packing-and-craigslisting to write up some of my thoughts about this transition.

First, some realizations about my burnout journey

So, I didn’t realize I had autistic burnout when I was going through it (I thought it was “normal burnout”), but now I realize that my marriage was utterly overstimulating and dysregulating. In fact, I have a habit of getting into codependent, emotionally volatile relationships that then cause me to have massive burnout. I just called it “depression” in the past. It involves long periods of being unable to do anything but play computer games and watch TV or Youtube videos.

I realize now that even though I grew up in a volatile household, and am not really averse to conflict, I actually can’t handle it on a nervous system level for very long. I need peace and calm or I will stop functioning. I can’t afford to have bad relationships. Which I know is a weird way of putting it, but given my penchant for them, I need all the internal barriers I can get. 😂

So for the last two years, I just said no to everything. And I needed that. I needed to heal my nervous system from constant stress, and the only way to do that was to avoid ALL stress. So outside of a few online friends, I avoided all human contact.

But over the last few months, I’ve been feeling better. I started writing. I have been having all these impulses to start things - new businesses, new projects.

But I still felt overwhelmed and exhausted a lot, and “normal” things seemed overwhelmingly hard. Which was very confusing to me. Am I better or not?

I realize now that I had the wrong idea about how burnout ends.

You don’t just wake up one morning and feel recovered, and then go do everything you used to do. It doesn’t work like that.

It’s more like if your arm is broken and gets put in a cast. Your arm has to be immobilized for your body to heal. It has to experience no stress whatsoever, so it can do its healing thing. And it really does that on its own, as long as you give it the right environment to do that.

But then, when the cast comes off, your arm muscles are atrophied. Your bone is healed, but you aren’t completely functional yet. You have to gradually rebuild your strength.

In terms of your nervous system, that’s called your “window of tolerance”. It is how much stress you can handle before you either go into fight/flight, or shut down. (In autistic people, those show up as meltdowns or shutdowns).

And your window of tolerance can be a bit of a “use it or lose it” type of situation. (On top of it just being, in general, a smaller window for autistic people, anyone with unhealed trauma, neurological conditions, etc).

By not doing anything stressful (even “good” stressful) for years, I had reduced my window of tolerance.

So that meant that “normal” things like going to the grocery store were quite overwhelming. And I felt confused about that, because I thought, I should be recovered by now, how long is this going to take?? Am I just permanently broken?? All I do is rest, how much more rest could I possibly need?!?

I had a mini-meltdown last week about this, trying to figure this out. But I finally realized I wasn’t suffering the stress of doing too much, I was suffering the stress of doing too little, and not having enough challenge in my life for my ADHD motivational system to get excited about overcoming.

The challenge of moving, and the prospect of being in a much better environment for me soon, has skyrocketed my motivation and energy levels.

With ADHD, I need that. I need meaningful short-term goals, and hard (but do-able) tasks to sink my teeth into. Without that, I’m robbing myself of the ADHD “superpower” of going all-out at something. Which is so much fun! Fun is important. 😁

So no, I’m not broken. I have recovered, but my nervous system still needs to build up its tolerance again. And I need to do that while incorporating knowledge of what exact things stress me out too much, so I can maintain homeostatic equilibrium, while expanding my window of tolerance. So, that is my new plan!

I’m thinking of this as moving from the “Deep Rest” phase to the “Active Recovery” phase of my burnout journey.

What this means in practical terms is that I challenge myself to do “good” stressful things (like moving!), but track myself very closely for signs of too much stress now, and when I feel that creeping up, I crawl into bed and curl up under the covers and rest until I feel better.

As soon as the stress is getting too high, I immediately stop all stress, until my nervous system calms down again.

It’s a lot like strength conditioning: you grow muscles during the recovery period in between workouts. You can’t just constantly work out, or you will injure yourself. You have to stress your muscle, and then let your body adjust to that stress. Your body is a wonderful thing and will do all this on its own: you just have to support it to do it.1

And this is how I am going to treat myself the rest of my life, because I never want to be burned out again. But I also don’t want to hide from life and avoid everything. I want to give my autistic nervous system the best chance possible to live a good, full, healthy life. And I can do that by very careful self-tracking and self-management of stress levels.2

That also means just choosing a low-stress lifestyle in general, and continually weighing the benefits of a stressful thing against the cost. Because of my neurology, I “pay” more for stress than other people, and I need to constantly take that into account with my lifestyle choices.

What is next: discovering who I really am without the mask

I want to let go of all neurotypical expectations for who I should be, and discover who I really am. Which means letting go of masked aspirations.

Portland has a lot more opportunities that I am excited about. But I still plan to spend a lot of time alone, and this time without any sense of failure. I will pick and choose what events to do very carefully, and track whether or not I actually enjoy them, rather than whether or not they make me appear normal.

I want to simplify my life. In the process of moving, I’m letting go of a lot of things that I was never really into, but I felt I should be into. For example, I’m accepting that while I like having a few houseplants, I’m never going to be into gardening. It’s just not my thing. And those houseplants better be hardy or they are not going to make it. 😂

I also don’t need complicated cooking equipment that I’m never going to use.

I am letting go of versions of me that I wanted to achieve, but are not actually accessible or authentic to me.

I am accepting that I buy things on impulse and that doesn't mean I have to keep them, it's just the ADHD tax. Continuing to hang onto them is just paying the tax twice. 😆

And while I could rent out this house rather than sell it, being a landlord complicates my life (even with a property management company), and I would rather not have that stress. Just because I could make money doing a thing, doesn’t mean it’s a good choice for my nervous system and executive functioning.

I am accepting that I need to make choices that prioritize simplicity, so I can reserve my stress-tolerance capacity for things I actually enjoy.

So my plan for the next chapter of my life is to explore and design a low-stress, burnout-proof, ADHD-friendly, simple, happy life for myself.

I want to try reading some of these books I keep lugging around. I want to see if I really am interested in learning sewing and drawing, or if I can let go of those supplies. I want to stop holding onto things for “maybe later”, and see if they are really something I’m into or not.

Because possessions are complications. And I want to only have the complications that truly support me and make me happy. 😊

I have tried to want to declutter before, but it was always based on trying to meet some kind of minimalist ideal. I never had an authentic “why” to simplify my life. But now I do.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about how overwhelmed I was with all these new unanswered questions. My plan now is to just focus on supporting my nervous system with lifestyle changes, and let those questions answer themselves over time. Because my capacity to process and make choices directly relies on my environment supporting my nervous system.

OK, that’s it for now—back to packing! 💚

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I keep trying to write this newsletter and I just end up with drafts that don’t feel right. But I created this newsletter to be a place to share my process, so I’m going to try to put this nebulous inner-storm feeling into words.

Realizing that I am autistic has made me have to re-assess everything I thought I knew about myself and my life.

Masking is so much deeper than just putting on appearances. Looking at my life now, everything I’ve ever done feels tinged with some version of trying to become what I thought I was supposed to be: neurotypical. 

I have always been driven by different versions of the question: What is wrong with me and how can I fix it? I thought I figured it out many different times, but every answer (multipotentiality, giftedness, HSP, trauma, attachment, ENFP, etc) still left a pile of unanswered questions. 

But now everything actually does make sense. Even the questions I hadn’t articulated, that I only knew as a constant hazy sense of dread about being a person in the world. The underlying driving anxiety to figure out why life is so hard is finally addressed. I understand now. I get it.

But the answer opens up an entirely different set of questions: What now? Where do I invest that drive? What is it for, if it’s not trying to answer this question?

My goals and dreams were all shaped by masking as well. I don’t actually know what my authentic goals are. I have the label to describe who I am now, but I don’t actually know myself yet as an autistic person. I know myself only as a person trying very hard to not be autistic and failing at it. 

I have been “working on myself” my whole life, and I realize now that a lot of that effort was a bit misguided.

I am not knocking my obsession with personal growth overall, because it did eventually lead me to the answer I needed. And it helped me resolve my trauma, and develop a huge capacity for joy. But I can also see now that I had always invested it with the power to make me normal, and that was unfair to do to myself. I don’t need to be normal. I need to discover who I actually am.

I have so many questions:

• What is autism, actually?

• What is this community to which I now belong? How do we relate to each other when we aren’t masking? 

• What do I want when I’m not trying to figure out what’s wrong with me or how to fix it?

• How can I welcome back all these parts of me that I abandoned when I was a child? How can I own the things I do and enjoy without fear of being called “cringe”?

• What is my natural pace and way of life, when I stop trying to keep up with a neurotypical world?

• Who will I be once I’ve processed all of this?

• Do I want to create content about neurodiversity? And if so, is that content advocacy, activism, self-help, or something else?

• How do I design an autistic-friendly and ADHD-friendly business? What service could I authentically offer the world that would be structured in a way that is healthy for me?

Finding the answers to these questions is a different quest than I’ve ever undertaken. It’s not a mountain to climb. I can’t conquer it. There isn’t a clear goal. It’s the most journey of all the journeys, the one where only the journey itself matters. It’s not growth. It’s not healing. I think the best word I can use is integrating. I need to integrate my entire life up to this point.

I need to merge the person I tried to be with the person I really am, and those two codebases forked around age 5, when I started kindergarten.  

So I’ll be answering these questions for a long time to come.

I’m realizing that I actually process a lot slower than I thought.

I talk fast (ADHD), and think fast (giftedness), but I process slowly (autism). I integrate slowly. I come to terms slowly. I adjust to new things slowly.

And this is a huge, life-changing thing to adjust to. So I have to take my time. I don’t really have a choice. My brain has to work out these “who am I?” questions in its own time, and I can’t rush the process, even though it’s uncomfortable, it makes decision-making difficult, and it throws my sense of life direction into chaos.

And it’s not just the anxiety of uncertainty. My emotions are doing their own rollercoaster dance through anger and anguish as I look back over every memory of my life with new information.

Oh. I probably wasn’t pulling off “normal” as well as I thought. Probably a lot of people thought I was weird or inappropriate and they were just too polite to mention it. 👀

Oh. All those kids were picking on a disabled kid and everyone just let it happen and sometimes the teachers joined in, cool. Cool to realize that people are worse than I thought. Again.

Oh. I’m not actually a good judge of character. I trust people way more than I should. I’m a lot more vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation than I thought I was. Cool. Good to know.

None of this is easy to process. It’s heartbreaking and overwhelming.

But I’m just going to have to let it happen, and love myself through it. There is no shortcut. I have a bunch of emotional tools that I have picked up over the years, and I have friends and community and books to help me through it. But it’s not going to be easy, because it’s just not an easy thing to do. 💚

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Hi.

If you’re not part of my FB crew (which, come find me there if you’d like to be), then I have big news: I am autistic. I wrote all about this self-realization here on my blog - how I got there, what it means, and why it took me so long to realize it.

I am in a period of intense self-reconfiguration, and I’m just taking notes here while riding the rapids. Sparkly Dark has turned out to be Emma’s Unmasking Journey. Apparently, unicorns are a gateway drug for being your authentic self—once you start, you can’t stop. 

I wrote my blog post on Monday. On Tuesday, after having lots of wonderful congratulatory coming-out type convos with my various neurodivergent friends, I decided to watch a YouTube video on Autism and Gender. To relax, goddamnit. 

And then, about two seconds in, merely at the thought of autism influencing my gender, a thought-feeling floated to the surface of my consciousness:

And then I immediately thought, "NO. I don't want another thing!! Goddamn it brain, just be normal in ONE THING PLEASE!! NOT TODAY, I AM TIRED.”

I felt like I couldn’t deal with one more stigmatized identity right now. I wanted some safe refuge from having to be constantly different. And this feeling is very familiar…I felt it when I realized I was queer, kinky, going to marry someone in prison, ADHD…it’s this sinking feeling of “Oh no, another thing that makes me weird. Another thing I will have to explain and defend to other people. Another thing that will make it hard to just exist.”

But after I soothed my panicky reaction, I realized…I am through the looking-glass now. I can’t go back. And I don’t want to.

I don’t want to think of these parts of myself that I am rediscovering as burdens. That is seeing them through the eyes of internalized oppression.

This is just who I am. This is just me letting go of trying to pretend I am not who I am.

These moments are mini homecomings, and I want to honor and savor them as such. There is no rush, and there is no problem.

Beyond the grief of “failing at being normal” is the liberation of coalescing as your whole, true self.

Masking autism is not just a social performance. It’s a whole set of internal beliefs and strategies that I created to hide my autism from everyone and myself. I created a “normal” or “acceptable” identity, and tried to live as it. 

And I tried really hard. It wasn’t a small project. It was my entire life’s project. My social survival was on the line. Which is my everything survival, because we are social creatures. 

So it’s not easy to undo it, and it takes time to come to terms with it on an emotional level.

But it’s also just a literal brain re-wiring process, because these are habits of thinking that I have developed and practiced over a lifetime.

As one brain pattern starts to shift, it affects other ones nearby. As I began to unmask my ADHD, it also began unmasking my autism, slowly. I began to notice all the ways I was actually lying to myself about what I truly feel and experience. I started making a list of “Is this Autism?” and memories kept surfacing and surfacing. The mask began to slip. 

Over the last few months, my brain has been re-organizing its sense of “I am” around my authentic self rather than my mask.

And apparently, “female” gender is part of my mask, not my authentic self. Which just means that I get to unpack gender in a way that I haven’t before. I can do that.

When I feel into what gender means to me, it feels like a costume that I can wear to a party. It doesn’t feel like an intrinsic part of me. Sure, I can dress up like a girl. It’s fun sometimes! But it’s like Halloween—I can dress up as a pirate and have a good time, but that doesn’t mean I want to live in a pirate costume every day. And “female” feels like a set of costumes they handed me when I was born, and expected me to keep wearing until I die. Sure, there are different versions of the “female” costume. But they are all still costumes to me. And I don’t want to live in a costume. I’d like to opt-out, please. I just want to be me.

It has nothing to do with my body—my body is fine the way it is. And if “female” were just something that came into play when I went to the doctor, that would be fine. But it’s not. I have to constantly identify myself as a gender, even though it is almost always irrelevant to the situation at hand. So I’m forced to interact as a gendered being, when I don’t feel like one. I’m forced to live in a world that is entirely organized around which costume pack you were assigned at birth. The whole thing is an imposition.

Looking back, I’ve had this vague unease with gender for a long time. I remember feeling a sense of surprise and confusion when I saw other people opting out in some way—like wait, you can do that? But it felt inaccessible to me. It’s not that big a deal, I would think. Sure, I don’t feel like a “woman”, but it’s not like I am being traumatized by it. So why bring it up? Why make life harder for myself by being myself?

People who are different are constantly being told to shut up about it.

Stop being so sensitive. I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms, but don’t shove it down our throats. Why do you need another label? Just do it, it’s not that hard. Why do you have to make everything so difficult?

One way conformity gets enforced is through the requirement that people have a “disorder” in order to qualify to be legitimately different. And who defines the “disorder”? People who don’t have it, of course. Autism was defined by neurotypical people as a disorder because it doesn’t match their idea of order. Being queer was defined by cishet people as deviant, sick, and morally wrong. Being trans is still largely seen by the mainstream through a medicalized, pathologizing lens, where the focus is entirely on physical and medical interventions.

Since I don’t have gender dysphoria1, and it doesn’t interfere with my functioning (a neurotypical phrase if I ever saw one), I disregarded my own reality. I saw myself through the eyes of the mask that I had adopted to survive, and I made an unconscious decision to dismiss my needs and conform to expectations, because that is how I learned to survive in a world that was constantly telling me my natural self was wrong.

Masking is an attempt at self-erasure that never quite works. 

Masking is a form of internalized oppression. It is something like code-switching, but without a “home culture” to go back to. It cuts you off from your real impulses, thoughts, beliefs, and desires. It forces you to live as a caricature of your true self. It forces you to think about and describe who you are in a language that you aren’t fluent in and can’t learn. It makes you see yourself constantly through the eyes of people who don’t understand you and think there is something wrong with you.

When people say autistics are not fully human, I think: “What would it do to a human to have to lock their true self in a prison their whole lives and live as someone else and not even know that was happening?”. And I also think: “Who gave you the right to define what it means to be human?”. 

I believe that self-love is a tool of liberation and a weapon against oppression, because it eventually unravels internalized oppression and restores your natural power. And we naturally want to be who we are. We naturally believe that we are OK as we are. That is how we come into the world. The world is what teaches us self-hatred. And I refuse to keep harming myself through thoughts and beliefs I did not consent to.

I want every part of my life to be available for liberation.

This morning I was taking a shower, and I realized I’ve been taught to think of this as a perfunctory chore, but it’s actually a very intimate and intense sensory experience. So I slowed down, and let myself feel the water, the heat, and my skin. I let myself sink into my sensations and enter that wordless space of direct experience. I let myself acknowledge and experience that being naked and touching myself is as an act of self-intimacy. I stopped trying to shower like an allistic person and showered like an autistic person.

Tangentially, I wonder if I could unmask my writing more. Sparkly Dark was, in essence, a project to unmask my writing in the first place. But the way I actually think is in tangents, detours, parentheticals. And that is how I talk when I’m conversing with people who are also ADHD. We run around the conceptual space like a conversation is an amusement park, and it’s wonderful. I don’t think in straight lines. I don’t exist in straight lines. So how could I authentically make art in straight lines?

Writing is meant to communicate, and I value that. But what am I communicating if I edit myself into a caricature? Yes, it may be more understandable to neurotypical people, but is it really my art if I do that?

I want autistics to express ourselves in our own language. I am not self-diagnosed, because autism is not a disorder. I am self-realized. I am self-liberated. I am self-aware. I am free. But I am in no way, self-diagnosed.

I want to help liberate autism itself. Because when I look around, the world needs us. It needs our voice, our perspective, our ethics, and our sensitivity.

I don’t want to just survive in a neurotypical world. I want to be a monkey wrench in the machine. A monkey wrench of glitter and rainbows. 🦄

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Hi everyone,

I’m a bit fired up today and I’m going to just roll with it.

Let’s just first start out on the same page:

• First. If you’re like me, you find living on this planet to be extremely difficult. We’re just going to take that as a given.

• Second. None of the things I’m talking about in this post are easy. I’m not trying to say that being consistently happy as a sensitive person in a world that is burning is easy. All I’m saying is that it’s do-able.

This post is about believing in joy and happiness for yourself, and valuing it so highly that you prioritize it.

It’s about letting go of cynicism, if it isn’t serving you.

It’s about challenging habitual unhappiness, and deliberately cultivating happiness, joy, and good feelings.

I get the backlash against “toxic positivity”, but positivity is not toxic. What is toxic is suppressing negative feelings that tell us about legitimate needs.1 But part of what those feelings are saying is that we need joy in our lives.

It’s entirely possible to build your life around things that light you up, that make you feel alive, that feed your soul, that make you want to leap out of bed in the morning. You deserve to live like this. We all do.

The reason I called my blog Joy Ninja way back when I started writing (in my 20s, gah) is that I recognized that joy was a tricky beast. I was depressed, overwhelmed, and had no idea why life was so hard for me. It would take me almost two decades to figure that out, but I knew, even back then, that joy was not something I was willing to compromise on. I wanted to feel it ALL—all the gnarly stuff inside me—to heal it—so I could expand my access to all the good stuff inside me too. 

I now am figuring out that I have even more sensitivities and particular needs for support than I thought (due to ADHD/neurodivergence). And you know what I’ve done with that information? Immediately started working on systematically implementing what I need.2

Because if there is one thing I’ve gotten clear on in the last 20 years of working on myself, it’s this: sustainable happiness rests on a foundation of consistently meeting your needs. 

There are other tools I think are super important too, like using mental processes to rewrite negative beliefs, and state shifting, which is the art of practicing being happy anyway. (More on that later in this post.)

But if your needs are not met, you’re going to be stressed out and unable to do these things. So that’s where it has to start.

Your needs matter. Meeting your needs is not optional. Joy and happiness is a natural byproduct of meeting your needs. That’s what negative and positive emotions are for. They aren’t random—they are giving us information to steer us in the right direction.

Here is what I like to keep in mind about needs:

1. I can only meet my needs in the present.

2. I can only meet the needs of who I actually am, not an imaginary person I wish I was.

3. As I meet my needs right now, I’m making it easier to do so again in the future, because I’m practicing how to meet my needs and thus laying down brain pathways that become habits.

4. I don’t have to meet my needs 100% right now, and I probably can’t because I don’t know how. The thing to do is to find the smallest doable-right-now thing that gets me moving in the right direction.

5. If that’s too hard, build an onramp to it. If that’s too hard, make the ramp less steep. Also, add cute things to the ramp, because things that are fun to do are easier to do.

6. Thinking about how a need could be met is moving in the right direction, and it’s entirely OK and great to start there.

7. It’s OK if I don’t know how to meet a need. I can research it slowly and ask my friends how they do it. There is no rush.

8. There is also no shortcut. Putting pressure on myself does not meet any needs, and it makes it harder to meet my needs.

9. There will be days that I can’t do the things I have previously learned and put and place, and that’s OK. Growth and learning and building habits are non-linear processes. I just have to keep going in the right direction and not be hard on myself. (Being hard on myself doesn’t meet any needs, and it just generates more needs, so it’s really not efficient!)

10. Brains take time to rewire and we don’t notice as it’s happening so it’s good to look back once in a while.

11. No matter what, I can always love myself. And loving myself (i.e. viewing myself with unconditional positive regard) gives me energy and motivation to meet my needs, so it’s a win-win!

12. Surrounding myself with people who believe needs are important and prioritize meeting their needs supports me to meet my own needs.

13. The more different strategies I have to meet a need, the more abundant and stable I will feel around that need.

Again, the most important thing: you can start to meet your needs in the smallest way possible and that is 1000% times better than not starting at all. It gets the ball rolling.

Here is an example of me putting this into practice.

Need: To improve my health by eating more vegetables.

Here’s what makes that hard:

• I don’t know how to easily and consistently make vegetables taste good and be the right level of cooked.

• Fresh vegetables go bad.

• They also require prep work, like washing and chopping.

In the past I would:

• Think, I ought to know how to do this and it ought to be easy.

• Buy aspirational vegetables, especially ones I thought I should like, but actually don’t like, like zucchini. (see #2 above - trying to meet the needs of an imaginary person!)

• A few weeks later, throw out my rotten aspirational vegetables.

• Feel bad.

To meet my real needs instead, I’m doing this:

• Buying frozen vegetables. They don’t require prep work, and I can experiment without time pressure.

• Buying vegetables I already like.

• Expecting to spend a long time working up to cooking them.

• Expecting to spend some time researching different simple, easy ways to prepare frozen veggies that look do-able and like they would taste good.

• Not worrying about it if they turn out bad, because it’s an experiment.

Right now, they are just sitting in my freezer as an option to explore when I feel like it. Because that is the degree of no-pressure I need to have around it. So that’s what I’m giving myself: exactly what I need to be able to keep moving in the right direction.

Also, I just found a tip on a FB group for Low Executive Function foods (#12 above—find support by seeking out other people meeting their needs)—that those baby food pouches of mashed up veggies can be a good option, so I’m gonna try those too. (#13 - abundant strategies)

OK, now let’s talk about the more advanced steps, which are about rewriting your beliefs and rewiring your brain.

Here’s how I think about beliefs: beliefs are just thoughts we continue to think. They are mental habits. (Thinking of them this way also makes it easier to change them.)

You can change your thoughts, so you can change your beliefs. This is best done slowly, by just trying on the idea that maybe something else is true than what you thought. Just think about these as ideas.

Don’t try to force yourself to believe anything new. That doesn’t work and it creates internal resistance. Just try new beliefs on, and see how you feel. Then maybe write them on a post-it and see how it feels to look at it.

You didn’t come to believe your current beliefs overnight. Any kind of change is a process best done slowly and gently. So when I present these ideas, I’m not saying you should believe this now. I’m saying, here are some ideas I found helpful, and you might too, but maybe not, it’s up to you.

I say that because it’s true but also because resistance is real and it’s far better to prevent it by being gentle and inclusive to your inner parts in the first place than to go too fast and trigger their defenses.

Talk to your inner parts about what objections they have to an idea, and see if the objections are really true or if they represent fears and needs. It’s much easier to change if you first get buy-in from all your inner parts. And you only get that by having real-talk conversations with them where you clearly convey that their needs and feelings and perspective matters.

OK, enough preamble. Let’s talk about the beliefs!

I feel very strongly that the worst beliefs we can have are things that separate us from our own natural and abundant joy for life—the kind you see in children, before the world grinds it out of them. So if I get a little intense about this, please attribute it to how fucking transformational this was for me, and how much I want this for you, and everyone.

The two biggest beliefs I have ditched in the process of becoming sustainably happy are:

1. Happiness isn’t real. Happy people are fake. 

No. People faking happiness are fake. Real happiness is fucking awesome.

Think back to moments where you were genuinely happy. Was it fake?

I get sometimes our brain rewrites the past if it feels like something was taken away from us. There’s a way we protect ourselves from good things if it feels too vulnerable or risky to be happy.

But the happiness we want is still real. And it matters. It’s worth doing whatever healing and work we need to do to get there.

Being unhappy isn’t more “real” or “authentic”. Authenticity and happiness are independent qualities.

2. The world sucks, so I can’t be happy. 

Believe me, I get it. The world majorly sucks. But happiness is actually an independent variable. It takes work but you can detach your inner state from outer circumstances. 

Note: I’m not talking about outer circumstances that you are living with on a daily basis. That goes in the category above about needs. I’m talking here about the general terribleness of things you can’t control, like other people and what they are doing with their money and power.

I’m talking about things like politics and climate change, that affect us whether we like it or not, but we don’t have to be constantly worked up about, because that won’t change anything anyway.

Look, we may be on a doomed planet, in a society that will never un-fuck itself. That’s the reality. There are horrible atrocities happening every second of every day in this world. Oppression is a daily fact of existence. 

But you can still be happy anyway. 

I know, I probably sound like a crazy person right now. 😂 The idea that our happiness does not have to be based on our external circumstances is just not something that is commonly believed.

But I didn’t get to real happiness and joy by denying the world sucks. I got there by accepting that humans are pretty horrible to each other on a regular basis,3 and I can still have an internal boundary and protect my peace. 

I made my happiness unconditional. I stopped believing that anything external to me had to be in place before I could be happy.

In other words, I internalized that:

1. I don’t have to be OK with the world to be OK with myself. 

2. I don’t have to fix myself or my life to love myself and meet my needs.

3. The world doesn’t have to change for me to be happy in it.

4. Any idea that happiness is out there in the future, or contained in some goal I have yet to accomplish, is not true and is just preventing me from being happy now.

Which brings us to the mastery level of unconditional happiness: state shifting.

OK, so what the heck is “state shifting”?

State shifting is a technique of mentally training yourself to "be happy anyway", i.e. self-generate states of joy and happiness, which eventually will reset your baseline emotional state by rewiring your brain to be habitually happy.

I talk about the nitty gritty of state shifting on my blog: introdution to state-shifting and how it differs from toxic positivity.

It took me a few months of practicing this regularly to change my emotional set point to one where I experience spontaneous intense joy on a regular basis, and my overall level of happiness is quite high. Even though my external life isn’t any better, and I haven’t achieved any major life goals. That’s the point: it’s about not needing to change your life or accomplish anything to be happy. It’s about being happy now, for no reason.

I’m still working on changing my life and accomplishing my goals. I just am not willing to wait on that to be happy. Especially since the world is getting increasingly fragile, and goals are harder to accomplish. Happiness is not something I want to be conditional on external events, because I can’t control the external world, and it’s increasingly unstable.

Final thoughts

Look, I know I can’t really convey everything about how to accomplish this in one newsletter, because it took me many years of personal and spiritual growth, as well as several significant ego deaths, to get here. Becoming full of joy despite how sensitive I am and how difficult it is for me to deal with life on this planet has been in many ways my life’s work.

So all I’m really going to be able to convey to you is that (a) it is possible and (b) it is worth it. And give you a few pointers. 

What I want to leave you with is this:

Your naturally joyful self is vibrant and alive and worth getting to know. And it can only come out when you support yourself well enough to not be in survival mode, and take your happiness seriously enough to value it highly, nurture it, and protect it.

This world is too fucking crushing to take for granted that happiness will just appear one day. And the narratives of capitalism, that you’ll be happy one day, after you work yourself to death, are fucking absurd. But real, sustained, ebullient, overflowing joy is possible to cultivate inside yourself. In an existence where we have very little control over the world around us, the fact that we can rewire our brain is fucking amazing. 💚

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There is a certain way it feels when I’m writing something that is breaking new ground for me. That is the kind of writing I want to do in this newsletter.

I don’t want to write what I already know. I want to write to find out what I have to say. I want to write what is alive and right now. I want to write as a process of self-discovery.

But our brains form habits. They are habit-forming machines.

So even though this whole newsletter is pretty new, I am already finding myself struggling to not get into the mode of writing about the same kinds of things I wrote about before.

For example, I’ve written a lot about my unmasking neurodivergence journey lately, and that journey continues. I am still in a daily process of re-examining my past, re-understanding myself, and redesigning my life to meet needs I didn’t know I had.

And so when I sat down to write this newsletter, that’s what I started writing about. But it didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel that energized, excited feeling.

But I kept struggling with it anyway. It took me several hours to realize that I don’t want to write about that today. My mind had formed a habit already, and I hadn’t realized it.

Self-liberation is a practice.

I still often get stuck in that vague struggle feeling, and have to sit down and ask myself, “What am I doing here? What am I trying to accomplish with this?”.

Our brains form habits, and our societies are made up of habit-forming brains. There is so much energy behind, “This happened before, it should happen again”. And that’s often a good thing. Habits are wonderful when they support our health and wellbeing. But they are not great when they impede our creativity, and they can be terrible if they keep us stuck in bad situations or harmful patterns.

Self-liberation is about developing choice over what habits we develop and which ones we unravel. It’s about rejecting the habits that we picked up by osmosis but don’t actually work for us, and building new ones that are supportive of our thriving.

What I’m trying to do here is to continually find my own learning edge and explore it with you. Which by definition is not a habit. It can’t be, because my edge is a place that isn’t habitual. Learning means making new connections in my brain.

That’s what makes it a practice.

Practices becoming habits is how spirituality becomes religion, and turns into something that’s about conformity rather than discovery.

So, if you want to be healthy, develop healthy habits and undo unhealthy ones.

But if you want to feel alive and be creative, develop a practice of countering the habits your brain naturally develops as you live your life. And seek out that feeling of, Oh, I haven’t been here before!

The way I do this is:

• Noticing I’m not having the experience I set out to have, and my motivation is flagging.

• Ask myself questions to reconnect with my intrinsic motivation: Why am I writing? What do I want to get out of this?

• Refocus and recommit to the original purpose. (Or, if I really can’t find it, that means I need to move on).

Here’s how not to do it:

• Notice your motivation is flagging.

• Try to add more extrinsic motivation to force yourself to do it anyway, while never examining what happened to your motivation.

Relying on extrinsic motivation and replacing my intrinsic motivation with it is a good way to get burned out on whatever it is I am doing. It’s not a good fuel for me. That’s why I’ve worked so hard to develop my intrinsic awareness skills, and structure my life for maximum freedom.

Ok, that’s all I seem to have to say today. 😁

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P.S. Here is a preview of a project I’m working on in this direction, at the intersection of business and productivity and play:

When I was a kid, they didn’t call it “bullying”, they called it “teasing”. But whatever you call it, it was relentless, and it left a deep impression on my already fragile sense of belonging.

I was perpetually bewildered about what exactly made me a target. I’m sure it had to do with my neurodivergence, giftedness, sensitivity, my parents being liberal hippies in a very conservative rural town, and being a girl wearing my brothers’ hand-me-downs. The cool girls wore LA Gear shoes with the twists on the side in bright 80s colors. I wore boys shirts from the 70s which would be very cool and vintage now, but at the time were utterly unacceptable.

This was combined with being socialized by my dad, who I’m pretty sure was also neurodivergent, and completely out of touch with the dangerous terrain of late 80s girlhood. He was simply unequipped to teach me how to pass as “normal”, let alone attain coolness. 

But…my brothers succeeded well enough—so I can’t really blame my parents or circumstances. I guess it was just me.

I must have tried to fit in, because I remember giving up at a certain point.

I started to realize in middle school that I was so very weird that my reputation preceded me. The first time I realized that people knew me who I didn’t know, I knew it wasn’t popularity, but the inverse: I was notorious. 

By high school I was telling myself that I’d rather be infamous than invisible, but the fact is that I didn’t have a choice.

I was smart. My clothes were weird. I argued with teachers. I stood out. The other kids wanted to copy my homework, but they didn’t want to be my friend. They didn’t even want to be seen appearing to be my friend. They protected their own status by reinforcing mine.

I wish I could say I embraced it and never looked back, but a large part of me has been trying to attain “normal privilege” and ditch “weirdo stigma” my whole life. 

It was a big part of why I was so eager to get married, and so hell-bent on staying married, despite everything it was costing me. But now I’m divorced, I’m still queer, still sensitive and smart, and now I’m realizing that my ADHD was a big part of why I was bullied as a kid, as well as why it hurt so much.

And there’s nothing I can do about it. I am finally realizing there is no soap that can scrub this out. There is no self-help book that will ever change this. This is who I am.

I am in the middle of a grief-and-healing process around the dream of normal that will never be, and the reality of weird that is just true.

Some days I’m ready to take on the world and fight to liberate everyone’s inner weirdo.

Other days, I can’t find any fire in me, and I struggle to remember what it feels like.

Today, I feel raw and tender. I feel just as sensitive as I was back then. I have skills now, but they don’t always help; my rawness feels exposed, like the new pale skin under a scab that you scraped off because it had started to itch. I feel like I’m accessing a level of vulnerability that I haven’t been in touch with in decades, and this younger part of me doesn’t have those skills. She’s just been hiding this whole time.

Some days she wants to put unicorns on everything, and other days she just wants to cry.

And I don’t know yet what the end result will be, because this is not just healing, it’s neurodivergent unmasking.

Healing restores wholeness; unmasking restores realness. 

I’m doing both, but I know roughly what healing looks and feels like and where it leads. Unmasking is new to me. I thought those scabs were scars; I didn’t know there was a whole different person underneath them.

I don’t know who I really am under the decades of masking. My realness is something I’m still discovering, and the parts that were holding onto it for me are young. They need time to grow into the idea that they don’t have to hide. And I need to learn what they need, and how to keep them safe, while still letting them play. Right now, everything feels new and vulnerable.

I remember the day I realized I had a private self and a public self. I can’t remember how old I was (8? 11?), but I remember sitting on my bed and thinking that I hadn’t been me all day.

It was startling, because I hadn’t made a conscious choice to not be me. I just hadn’t been, because I’d been around other people all day. I only came back to myself when I was alone in my room.

But when I got to college, it was hard to find a place to ever be alone. I lived in a dorm, in a town full of college kids. My room on the farm in the woods, and the private self that lived there, were no longer accessible to me.

I stopped reading fiction. I finally had friends, and I wanted to hang out with them. I stopped making crafts, and started making websites instead. I grew up, and tried to be normal.

And I kept trying, until it all fell apart, and I found myself alone in a room again, talking to my private self.

This newsletter feels like me giving that girl her voice back.

It’s my original voice—the one that I silenced to try to be normal, and safe. The one I turned into sounding smart, being wise, having it all handled. So I would be acceptable, useful, and have something to contribute—so people would have no reason to reject me.

But all along, I was rejecting myself.

The way our brains respond to trauma and exclusion are beyond our conscious control, so I’m not blaming myself. But now that I am realizing what my life has been, when you add it all up—it changes things.

I spent a lifetime trying to ignore my needs and be what other people wanted, so they wouldn’t leave and wouldn’t be mean to me and wouldn’t kick me out of their group.

And it didn’t work. I’m more isolated now than I’ve ever been.

I tried to become what I thought would make me safe—but it didn’t make me safe. Because that’s not where safety comes from.

The life I thought would save me comes from the same culture and structures and people that allowed a little girl to be bullied (and sometimes participated in it) for a decade, just for being different. The world of “normal people” is what traumatized me to begin with.1

I will never fit into a world that normalizes harm. And I finally realize I don’t have to, and I don’t want to.

I don’t know where to find true safety yet, in the external world. But I know how to start creating it inside myself.

I want to allow the unmasking process to dissolve the parts of me that still confuse survival with safety. I want to internalize that conformity is not safety, it’s self-harm. And if a system or society wants me to harm myself to fit into it, it is not on my side. 

I still have to survive in this world, which involves masking sometimes, but I don’t have to oppress myself in my own head, or when I’m alone. And I can seek out people I don’t have to mask with.

There was never anything wrong with me. I matter. And even if my material conditions don’t always reflect that back to me, I can scream it in my own mind to remind myself: I am valuable. I was always valuable, even if the people around me didn’t value me.

So my project right now is to value myself:

• Value my voice.

• Value my perspective.

• Value my experience.

• Value my differences.

• Value what makes me “weird”, whether the world values it or not.

This isn’t an easy or simple thing because I still live in the world and have to survive in it. Life is always a moving train. But I know what direction to go in, and it’s the direction where I get to be my whole real self.

And maybe that means a more permanent feeling of vulnerability. Maybe that is the cost of unmasking: masks are also shields. Our survival skills help us fight. But I just want to walk through my life unarmed.2

My goal right now is to find my own OKness, and rework my life from that point outwards.

And that’s all I know right now. 💚

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