the format of these monthly updates are directly inspired by how my family and I stay connected with each other. you can expect some main points, some tangential stories, some vulnerable reflections on things that feel uncertain, and an invitation to share what’s up with you too.

CW: brief mention of miscarriage, descriptions of anxiety-based dissociation and derealization

here’s some snapshots of what april looked like:

💐 I have SO MUCH FUN at a CC spring fete with other CC friends - complete with crafts, trivia, games, a veritable feast, and lots of dancing

😆 I get some lovely appreciation about my laugh / cackle

😴 I have the fattest, most fantastic sunday nap I’ve had in a long time, in the sun on my couch

🪡 I patch a thigh hole in my legging, mend a sweater arm, mend a pants pocket, and begin a bigger shoulder patch on a denim button-up

👩‍🏫👩‍🏫 I co-host two breath circles with Healing Justice London as part of their release of the research report Breathing Spaces: Crisis, Denial, and Building Collective Care in the Age of Pandemics by Dr. Stephanie Davis—give it a read and then go watch the roundtable launch event replay!

👴 Grandpa drops by in my dreamspace, it feels so good to see him back in his homeland

🌑 I host a DFTH new moon circle.

🧄 We have a cozy casual hang with CC friends where we made a decadent garlic bread and tomato-cucumber-avocado salad for communal lunch—yummy!

📥 I send 2 newsletters for my upcoming family reunion

🫶 I facilitate a skillshare of somatic tools for navigating stress at Garden of Queerdom—so much neurodivergent excitement!

🏡 We apply and apply and apply for apartments, and we go to viewing after viewing after viewing after viewing.

🧤 I mend a glove for my partner

💸 We learn about and apply for toeslagen.

🪙 I finish my first quarter ever of VAT reporting for my business.

🔶 I spend Koningsdag perusing the flea markets with CC friends before dancing our asses off at some outdoor stages—including 1 song of bachata at the end of the day!

💁🏽‍♀️ I experience for the first time having my hoop earrings on and comfortable during a full day of moving and dancing

card pulls and personal reflections

🧙🏽‍♂️🪙 King of Pentacles

How can I exist in a way that encourages those around me to grow? How can I spend my resources in a wisely-stewarded way? Practicality. Focus. Instinct.

What are my hesitancies rooted in when it comes to receiving resources and energetic exchange for my skills and contributions? Also, you are ready to be in a process of collective planting!

6️⃣⚔️ Six of Swords

Transition, letting go, systemic problem solving, curiosity for progress, moving despite fear

How can you return to the skills you have with assessing what’s available, starting with what you have, seeing how it goes, and adjusting along the way? No one will take these away from you, they’re yours and you get to treat them like they belong to you.

6️⃣🪄 Six of Wands

Achieving goals, public recognition/appreciation, minimizing distractions, staying focused, checking your ego. VICTORY (over conflicts). Fertile time for donning visibility.

You know enough about yourself and the ways in which you’ve moved to stand your ground. You are whole and sovereign enough to own mistakes as opportunities to figure out more caring ways to show up together with folks. Your uncertainty is an opportunity to ask and find out together if that seems like a possibility, not a checklist of things to constantly chase down and investigate if it takes such all the time. Do yourself the kindness of giving yourself a system for focusing on one thing at a time.

threads from this month that I didn’t get to

• what my afro has taught me about starting at the ends

• the support of co-facilitation and not having to be the only person holding a space

• Always be humanizing myself; keep me off your pedestals but on our communal altars

• wanting to show up for people in a way where they feel celebrated in the middle steps too, not just beginnings and culminations

• for fellow autists who struggle with anxiety around improvisation—how have we been navigating this?

• mothers’ day approaching feels a bit different as someone who both hasn’t ever really wanted to have children and who has also recently survived an ectopic pregnancy miscarriage

• how many times will I have to wonder about writing a poetry book before writing a poetry book?

• bravery in the liminal space between visioning and realizing

• in starting habits around community-building and meeting communal needs, what roles can we play in the lives of the people most proximal to us?

moments of my brain brain-ing

This month I was so overstimulated on a monday night that after climbing into bed I started panic-crying at the thought of: "what if the pressure cooker had violently malfunctioned while my partner was making chili 2 nights ago" and my partner truly trying his best to console me while also lovingly and appropriately trying not to laugh.

He very seriously said "baby it's okay, they have to make these things [fool]-proof or else they'd have too many lawsuits." I can be amused about it now because of how silly that line sounds but also at how he knows me thoroughly enough to know that it would work 🙈

Between the pressure cooker and the drink fizzer, I have this meltdown about fear of exploding appliances 3-4 times per year—despite the fact that it was my idea to buy them, twice! 🫠 (once in the states and again when we moved here and couldn't take ours with us)

Every so often, I'll double check with my partner whether we should keep using them, and every time he pulls out the lawsuit line.

Every time I bring it up, I know that's what he'll say, and every time it still brings relief in ways that don't happen when I try to remind myself of this same thing.

I have no previous experiences of appliances exploding.

conversations with community

I have a standing call every other week with a dear friend of mine. We’re both autistic. Time and again, we end the call feeling supported, refreshed, restored, appreciated, and reminded that we are not inherently or objectively difficult to understand. That there’s not something fundamentally wrong with us that the world is so graciously accommodating by allowing us to exist amongst their constant judgement and complaint. These connections are precious, because there are so few spaces that affirm otherwise, and that celebrate how we are—helping us remember that we get to like ourselves, even and especially when people are committed to misunderstanding us.

I got to talk about how it’s difficult for me to definitively know what I want and how I’m feeling without talking it out. I don’t know what I want to say without first trying on saying it. I happen to be in the middle of wrangling a lot of documents both for taxes and for proving I make enough money to deserve a place to live. The government already knows how much I should owe, and yet I have to put it all together myself and hope it matches what they already have on file. If it doesn’t, I’m penalized—through time, fees, and potentially even an audit if my educated guess is far enough from their records to raise suspicion.

This is how the majority of my interactions with many people feel. That they have some response they’re expecting from me in their heads, that they’ll expect me to know exactly what that is without telling me, and that if I deviate too far from it, I’m difficult, inconsiderate, strange, not listening, or suspicious in some way.

In fact, my friend and I both talked a lot about trying to listen very intently to what people are saying and still sometimes not understanding 1. what people are saying, 2. how it makes sense to others in the conversation, and 3. juggling how to “appropriately” approximate looking like we’re listening and understanding in the unspoken ways people expect listening and understanding to look.

An experience of masking for me has looked like having to dissociate a little bit every time I prepare to form words to converse with someone I don’t know very well. I have to dissociate a little bit to stem the flow of social, contextual, and sensory information coming from external stimuli, and to stem the flow of internal search results flooding to the surface of my mind in response to what is being said. Then there’s the process of estimating what’s important, what’s interesting, what’s “appropriate.” Then there’s the process of translating it into something “digestible” according to my own guesses about how much or little someone is wanting/expecting to hear. And then there’s the polishing of putting the words in the order that is most likely to be most comprehensible within the context of the conversation, our relationship, and the expectations of this other person.

After 34 years, results are mixed at best, but progress is rich. Having this mask/system in place has been necessary to mitigate a lot of the panic that happens in my body when asked to speak. And the cost is that, for a long time, I had no idea what I truly sounded like and I hated the sound of my voice. Every word that had come out of my mouth for my ears to hear was a sanitized, watered-down betrayal of the full width and breath of my thoughts and feelings (maybe that’s why singing has always felt so powerfully healing).

In a personal peak of undiagnosed madness, I spent 2018 feeling both like I didn’t exist but that there was definitely something in there, and how could both of those things be true? The implications became more and more distressing. As I started to notice this mask, the revelation was horrifying: the mask was fused to my face, the stitches have healed over such that I cannot tell where it ends and I begin, it had been there for so long that I’d forgotten it was there. That unplaceable sound I’d hear every so often in the quiet was my own constant gasping for air, and the occasional ringing in my ears were my own muffled screams. The only other experience in my life that I could relate this to was when I came off of hormonal birth control. That was like realizing I’d been living wrapped in cellophane — experiencing sensations, emotions, a sense of self, and the world from behind a thin numbing film of opaque blurring plastic. The clarity was both excruciating and a relief flanked by fury.

So when I say that systems of oppression impact our bodies, this is one of the many, every day, every moment ways. I’m learning about programs and structures in my mind and body-memory that I don’t even remember building. I’m only noticing they’re there because my sense of self is growing, and I can feel the new nerve endings pressing up against something I either didn’t put there or erased the memory of erecting. It is a constant churn of rewilding, deconstruction, and reclamation.

As I continue to unmask, I’ve been practicing pausing more in conversation, even if it’s uncomfortable — a part of uninstalling the impulse to immediately put my original thoughts through plastic surgery before even getting to know what they look like. Many times, people have thought the phone cut out, or that my video screen froze in virtual conversations. No, I’m just reformatting my brain and body to have more agency in when I choose to express or censor myself and to what degree, don’t mind me. Not a bug, a feature if you can believe it.

My partner has often and lovingly pointed out my ‘crab hands’ — the physical gesture that I do where I hold hold my hands near my face, fingers pointing upwards, opening and closing like little crab claws trying to grasp what I’m saying straight out of the air, as if plucking them that way was so easy. In those pauses, I am fighting to put space between the execution of that mask function and the interaction I end up putting forth — space for choice. It’s clunky, awkward often, and many times I still end up using that program to some extent anyway (albeit to smaller degrees and with more awareness and agency, which does make a difference).

As I got to discuss with another friend who shares an ADHD diagnosis, progress requires at least a little bit of mess, and most of the time, it’s mostly mess. It’s a crucial and demonized ingredient for change, and people hobble their efforts from the start by underestimating (and therefore underpreparing) for how much mess is really needed. Speaking from loads of experience, thanks in large part to ADHD.

I got to use the phrase “feral trial and error” in conversation within a queer care group by Garden of Queerdom this month, to great resonance from other neurodivergent folks, and it represents so much of my life. As I reflect on april, I’m so fortunate to be in community with so many other folks navigating neurodivergence with care, tenderness, and understanding.

Sacred are the feral experimenters, the mess minders, the doing of things alongside the fear without having to evict, conquer, or dehumanize it.

Thanks for reading, wishing you moments of ritual, rest, and restoration.

misha | ritual as:

p.s. you can now read about May here!