Why sharing our stories is important

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Hi loves,

I hope this newsletter finds you well, preferred warm beverage in hand with a few moments to yourself, to read my words and perhaps re-center yourself in the process.

Let’s all maybe stop and take a nice long exhale. I definitely need it.

I’m writing this weeks newsletter from home - the day after hosting my postpartum healing retreat and a few hours after I realised I could not do any actual ‘thinking’ work today. It’s still taking me a little while to figure out what I need as an autistic woman and to accept the limits this sometimes places on me. In this post about Substack growth by , Amanda shares her experience of hosting groups and workshops and somehow manages to hold me in my post-people fatigue today.

What I wasn’t sharing with anyone is that after each session, I felt dizzy, disoriented and exhausted while also feeling elated and connected. (This can happen when you have an auditory processing disorder.)

Amanda B. Hinton - The Editing Spectrum

Reading the words of other autistic women is always so powerful to me. Here, in one sentence - in a post that was not about autism at all - Amanda has fully captured and explained the beautiful but hard way I experience holding space for others. It’s something I was vaguely aware of from holding retreats last year but also something I was blindsided by as we opened up The Women’s Health Hub and I began to hold weekly workshops, often multiple times a week. It’s the reason I have had to step back from a lot of that now, four months into the space being open. I now mainly just do journaling on Thursdays and then hold one off sessions throughout the month (you can find our timetable of events here). I hold a lot of guilt and sadness and some other slightly confusing feelings around all that.

Because I love holding space. I love planning the day - to the minute detail. Choosing the rituals I want to share. Planning out the journaling prompts and activities. Carefully deciding which words I want to read from which authors to set the scene for each part of the day. I love baking a big celebration cake and clearing the space. I love setting out the floor cushions just so and lighting the candles and preparing the coffee. I love all of those parts just as much as I love welcoming everyone in. Seeing people get more comfortable over time - opening up and sharing things that had previously just been in their own heads. I love watching the sparks those words and experiences make as they land with the others in the room. I love hearing the stories and the brand new awareness in others, brought to the surface by the power of shared experience.

A comfy corner just for you - I love setting up space for people, packing them a gift bag and showing them abundance

But I also find holding space beyond exhausting. Something I need time to recover from. Like running a marathon. Something I can only do every so often. Like overindulging with delicious chocolate or cake. And then I feel silly and ashamed. That something as seemingly simple as sitting in a room and listening to others can feel so hard.

I think that feeling comes from a few places. I think some of it is part of the late-diagnosed experience. Growing up not knowing you’re disabled means you spend an awfully large amount of time doing things that are incredibly difficult whilst everyone around you finds it super easy and is shocked that you don’t. Consciously or not, they put that difference on you. So I grew up thinking that, when I found the ‘simple’ things hard, it was because of some personal failing within me. Not just a difference in neurotype or a processing difference. There are physical reasons why, as an autistic woman, I would find it tiring to spend six hours listening and speaking to others.

When I unpack it all a bit deeper though, I think actually it comes down to us, as a society, not seeing the value in having spaces where we can truly be heard. Listening is a soft skill. Particularly active listening where the purpose is to have your full attention on the speaker and their word. In contrast to a back and forth conversation where both people are of equal value and where oftentimes no one really gets heard (at least not in my experience and accounting for my auditory processing differences). This is where the belief comes from that listening to others should be simple, should be easy, should be something you can do often with little recovery time of your own.

When in actual fact, listening - truly listening - is hard. It takes an immense amount of energy to focus fully on what someone else is telling you, without inserting any of your unconscious beliefs or biases, without centering the story back round to you and your experience, without giving unsolicited advice or trying to fix it in any way. That shit is really, incredibly difficult. And I know this, not just because I try my hardest to hold space in this way but because it is so rare to be given the opportunity to be heard in this way. Which would just not be the case if it was remotely easy or simple.

But having the space to be heard in this way is vital to healing from any kind of even slightly difficult experience. It’s even more important to heal and process a traumatic life event or a seismic shift such as we experience when we birth our babies. This is why waiting lists for mental health services are so incredibly long and why private therapy is so expensive. I truly believe that we would all be so much happier, healthier and whole if we had that kind of space to just blurt out all the minor inconveniences of our days, every day, safe in the knowledge that our struggles would not be minimised or would not launch the listener into a monologue of their own day whilst paying no heed for the words you just spoke. But we don’t value it enough. So we aren’t taught how to listen and communicate in this way. So we feel bad or like we’re failing personally when we find it difficult.

I do digress though and what I thought would be an introduction has turned into a complete Substack newsletter of its own.

To come back to the point in hand - I found solace today in reading the words of someone else. I spent a whole day yesterday seeing the benefit of creating a safe space for others to share their words. Of seeing the collective benefit when you share your experience.

And that is what I want to leave you with today.

An invitation to speak or write or draw the words or the story within you.

And to share them as far and as wide as you feel comfortable.

Whether it is in person to a trusted friend or plastered loud and big all over the internet. Maybe it’s in a group setting like the women’s wellbeing club which meets at the hub every Tuesday? Maybe you practice first with your cat?

Maybe you start in the comments section of this post? I’d love to hear

This field of larger than life sunflowers at my local farm is always just magical gold and green to run around each year.

Thank you for reading Postpartum Matters CIC. If our words or work resonate with you, we would be so grateful if you could share it with a friend. So they can experience our work for themselves and to help us to grow and build our reach. Thank you so much!

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Aug. 22, 2023, 6 a.m.

and why listening is not just a soft skill but a vital tool to serve ourselves and others

A comfy corner just for you - I love setting up space for people, packing them a gift bag and showing them abundance

This field of larger than life sunflowers at my local farm is always just magical gold and green to run around each year.