healing

July 2026

Last year I was alone for a few days at the cabin and I went fully crazy. Now I'm alone here again and the person I was then is barely recognizable to me. I have finally started to figure out who I am when I'm alone with myself and how to actually live instead of just survive and I've never been more proud of myself or more sure of the path I'm on. It is outrageous that it took this long for me to get here, but the peace I feel at my center now is unprecedented and the confidence I have in my ability to rewire my brain, inhabit my body and learn entirely new ways of being is exhilarating. I'm grateful to my brain for keeping me alive for so long when it was such a struggle to live, even though so many of those survival strategies were ultimately harmful - to me and others - and I'm grateful to be learning how to listen to my body and spirit again, after so many years of ignoring them.

I'm incredibly lucky to have the support and resources I do and am acutely aware how much my privilege has insulated me from much of the harm of being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. In spite of that privilege, I waited way too long to ask for the help I desperately needed, and the negative consequences of that choice for me and for the people I love were significant. The medical system is broken and society is collapsing, but we can build small with each other right now, something collaborative and flexible and sustainable and more human, and we can purge ourselves of the sickness that capitalist, colonialist systems saddle us with. My lived experience is that somatic and energy work have been significantly more impactful to my wellbeing than medication or talk therapy, alone or combined. I spent so many years disconnected from my body and spirit and invested in the belief that logic was all, and rejected or ridiculed beliefs and practices that could have actually helped me because they seemed unserious or too woo.

I'm proud as fuck to be finally figuring out who I am and how to live in a way that doesn't make me chronically suicidal after a lifetime of unknowingly playing life on hard mode. I sincerely thought everyone else suffered like I did - or worse - and that I was just weak and lazy, and so I never asked for help. Internalized ableism is so real and I'm working hard to unlearn all the self-loathing and judgment I've heaped on myself for being too lazy, too rash, too detail-oriented, too disorganized, too emotional, too logical, too insensitive, and too sensitive when really I'm just super autistic with ADHD and my brain is at full-time war with itself and never shuts the fuck up. This is why diagnosis - including self-diagnosis! - is so important, especially because neurodivergents tend to attract and birth other neurodivergents, so we see our experience reflected in those closest to us and assume it's "normal," and therefore we blame ourselves when it is hard to function, instead of meeting ourselves with compassion.

This is also why I'm being public about my disability, because my privilege insulates me from many of the negative consequences of being publicly disabled in a way that people with visible disabilities, BIPOC and trans disabled people, and people at risk of losing employment if they disclose their disability cannot. If you are struggling to live, stop sitting in judgment of yourself for it and start asking for the help you need and deserve. Set shame on fire and reach out to the people who love you or to organizations in your community that support people in crisis, or go search the internet to find supportive communities of people who struggle in the ways you do. Capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy divide us from ourselves and each other and we need to fight the fuck out of that shit and stubbornly find ways to live and build community that both preserve our humanity and dismantle the systems that rob us of it. We can still save ourselves, if we can lean on each other.