This newsletter is my attempt to migrate my work off of social media and onto a space where I'm better able to control who sees it, how it shows up and how it's discussed. I'm going to link to these essays on my socials, but the idea is that the canonical work lives here.

Topics

What am I going to be writing about? Mostly the same things I have been tweeting about for almost 20 years. Primarily:

Neurodiversity

I'm AuDHD, and I write about that extensively. I have a lot to say, and a history of genuinely helping people better understand themselves and those around them. I've created multiple online resources that have helped tens of thousands of people put words to experiences they were struggling to articulate.

You can find my writing at the Public Neurodiversity Support Center, as well as writing from guest authors paid for their contributions.

You can find my subreddit, /r/autismTranslated, where over 40k active users are every day showing up to collaboratively co-create one of the most supportive communities on reddit.

And you can find my coaching practice at Skew North, where I spend time talking to anyone who wants to talk to me (and appreciating those who can pay!) about their problems, and about how to build a thriving neurodivergent life.

This newsletter may or may not have neurodiversity as a "focus" - but regardless, this is a neurodivergent newsletter.

Philosophy

Listen, this thing we're doing? This world we're living in? This society we're contributing to? I can't help but feel like maybe - just maybe - we got a few things wrong. Like really wrong.

I studied philosophy in college, was reading old dead thinkers long before that, desperate to understand. Surely, I thought, someone understands. I just have to read. But the more I read western philosophy the more confused I became; and the eastern stuff hit me differently, but in ways I wasn't sure how to understand.

Then I discovered Whitehead, the process critique, and realized that Western philosophy was mostly 2000 years of people trying to explain how and why objects have properties in some deeply true ontological sense. But objects and properties don't exist, not in that way - there's only process and perception.

These days I'm into rhizomes and metamodernism, and I'm going to have a lot to say. I've been slowly coalescing my own thoughts into a metaphysics I'm calling Turtle Beam - if this resonates, reach out!

Trauma Recovery

This is a big one. Listen, our whole society runs on trauma. People participate because if they don't they are destroyed, and structuring your world that way means that you are always going to be doing harm, to others and to yourself.

I think a lot about trauma, and as I heal my own CPTSD I am learning just how much trauma actually informs almost everything around me.

Around here we think about trauma as a form of self-abandonment. You have some experience you can't accept and so you allocate a portion of yourself to denying it as the rest of you moves forward. The cognitive dissonance goes away as long as you don't think about it - but of course, when something reminds you of it you get "triggered" and have to find a way to reconcile the abandoned part with the current situation.

This can be challenging.

Technology and AI

This is complicated for me. I spent my professional career in tech, and also, I'm deeply skeptical that much good will come out of tech in general given the current incentive structures.

One particularly violent space in the larger tech ecosystem these days is AI. The rise of LLMs and generative image/video mean that a lot of old assumptions about everything from what technology is to what it means to be a person are suddenly being relitigated.

My position on this stuff is: these things couldn't exist in their current form without stealing the work of countless people. And also, these things are here now and there is no making them go away, so it's probably worth learning how to use them in a way that minimizes harm.

To that end I've become a bit of an LLM expert, and am able to do things with this tech that most people aren't thinking about.

Spirituality

This one may throw some of you for a loop. Even a year ago it would have thrown me for a loop. But I've had some Experiences now that have led to certain Understandings, and it has changed me in ways I couldn't have anticipated.

We are living in what William Blake called "Newton's Sleep" (everyone else calls it The Enlightenment), and that means that we all tacitly accepted a whole slew of assumptions about what reality is that we never even think about.

One side effect of this is that as good rationalists we eschew the supernatural, spiritual and subjective. After all, if spirits were real, science would be able to prove it, right?

Well. Literally no, actually. Because science concerns itself with material reality, whereas spirits... don't? There's this whole category error where as a society we simply discarded centuries of wisdom because we tried to interpret it through a rationalist lens and decided it was nonsense.

A big part of this project is realizing that spirituality isn't some sort of esoteric con for stupid people - it's at the core of what it means to be a person.

On Walking Between Worlds

The core thesis of this newsletter is that there are many ways of being, many ways of knowing. That it's good and fine to choose the ones that work for you while excluding the others - but that in order to do that you have to understand what it means for them to work for you, you have to understand what you're giving up.

Reality isn't one thing. Being a person isn't about figuring out how to be a person "right". Objective Truth is not possible, certainly not accessible to human beings.

It's one thing to accept certain ways of being and to reject others - but when you then turn around and say that the ways you have chosen are the only valid ones, and that that's objectively true? You're making a huge mistake. You're literally becoming a form of trauma, as defined above - you're allocating a portion of yourself to denying the validly of things you don't want to accept.

What if it were possible to be truly agnostic as to what's true? What if "true" isn't actually that useful? What if the real power was the ability to choose your truths on a case-by-case basis?

What if the idea that there's only one way to be is just the trick that Empire uses to exert control? What if PKD was right and The Roman Empire Never Fell? But... what if you could leave anyway?

That's what this newsletter is going to be about. It's impossible for me, sitting here on the last day of the worst year of my life, to know in advance what I'm going to say.

What I can tell you is that we need, collectively, to figure a lot of shit out really fast.

This newsletter is going to be my contribution to that end.