Enlightenment is to healing
what flowers are to blooms--
same vibrance under different names,
like air in different rooms--

and just like flowers, both of these
need time and space to thrive--
and courage to face what's underground
and open to new life.

In the notebook

When I was writing the first draft of my current work-in-progress (a middle-grade novel), I kept going by telling myself, “Just get the story out—you can revise it later.”

Now the draft is finished and I’m in the revising stage…now it’s “later.”

And now I need something else to tell myself, to keep me going.

It turns out that finishing a novel feels like a moment of mountaintop glory followed by a long, tired, and still-difficult hike back down to the bottom. Or like an elaborate, expensive party, and now the bill has come due—and the cleanup work, too. Or an exciting ocean voyage, followed by a boggy quagmire.

Revising is not as much fun as drafting, at least for me. I find it hard to keep motivated, even though I really do want to polish my work and get it out there in the world, and I want it to be the best it can be.

But in the everyday grind of life—in which it’s already hard for me to get writing time— I tend to not want to spend those precious moments on revising. I want to just write.

So the revising work keeps stalling out; I’ll go for days without working on it at all. It’s apparently not interesting/stimulating/rewarding enough for my ADHD brain, even though it’s something I do care about doing in a values sense.

I’m definitely open to any and all suggestions!

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

1. Make a structured revising plan. This was/is my plan…sensible, I think, but maybe too much in practice:

   1. First, fix obvious problems and major plot/character changes needed. (Done)

   2. Second, go through page by page and revise for stronger, clearer writing overall. (Done, for now, anyway)

   3. Third, go through and add more sensory/concrete details for even better writing. (working on it now)

   4. Fourth, go through and revise to check for genre appropriateness (in this case, word choices that correspond to a middle-grade reading level).

   5. Fifth, send it to trusted friends/beta-readers; then make any changes based on their feedback.

2. Using a timer for the work each day. This does help…but not really enough.

3. Printing out the manuscript to mark up with colorful pens. This is much more fun than doing revising/editing work on a screen…but still, not enough.

4. Go ahead and start querying. I’ve just begun this idea of going ahead with querying even though the manuscript doesn’t feel perfected, in order to feel like there’s real action happening on the work. I have queried one agent so far (!!!) and haven’t heard back yet; I have the next one picked out for when the stated response time-window expires.

Here’s what I’m thinking about doing next:

(sheepish cringe) I might just stop revising for now and send it to my beta readers as it is, then move on to drafting the next book in the series.

At least that way I would be moving forward with my “Project Writing Practice” (PWP, as I call it) instead of just basically treading water.

Advice?

If you have some advice for me on how to keep myself moving with revising my manuscript to make it better and stronger, please do share!

It’s okay to not have it all figured out.
Clear, sunny days are fun,
but clouds and rain are essential, too.
Take it slow in this fog, little one.

In the notebook

Here is a major reality of parenting: the consent of our strong-willed dependent creatures (whether children or, in the case of my friend, goats) is a thing that we cannot always predict and plan for.

For example, some days my four-year-old is perfectly cooperative with the process of leaving daycare, getting in the car, and getting buckled in her seat, so that we have plenty of time to get to the school bus stop on time to pick up her sisters. Other days, not so much. I have learned to leave extra time just in case, especially during phases when she’s already prone to fussiness. I can’t count on having her consent to cooperate with what I want her to do.

Consent may not always be the most applicable word here: it may be more a matter of capacity.

This is especially the case for kids are neurodivergent (like mine), because they have more needs and struggles that affect their nervous system capacity at any given time than neurotypical kids. If their nervous system is already maxed out from noise, uncomfortable clothes, and being around people, asking them to tolerate a tightly buckled seatbelt right now can be the straw that breaks the dam of meltdown restraint.

So, it’s a struggle to maintain the school/work schedule when we can’t predict their level of capacity and/or consent. This is (one reason) why we are usually late in the mornings!

(Sidenote: I think this dynamic also applies to internal functioning, within one’s own system of body and mind, especially for neurodivergent people: when we’re scheduling plans, we cannot predict how we will feel--and therefore what our capacity will be--on that future day.)

I hear people from older eras of parenting say, “You’re the parent! Your child should obey you! It’s your fault if you haven’t trained them to just perfectly obey you!”

No: that authoritarian model is outdated and harmful. It’s not a developmentally appropriate way to relate to a young child. I prefer the research-supported model of secure attachment (see my recent post about the book Raising Securely Attached Kids by Eli Harwood).

In short: I will not railroad over my children’s consent and capacity.

I want to operate by cooperation, mutual respect, and mindfulness. That means that everyone’s needs matter. It means my kids grow up knowing that their needs and feelings always matter.

It doesn’t mean they always get everything they want--but they do get support, validation, and attunement when things don’t go their way.

If (as my husband would claim) I sometimes err on the side of their feeling like their needs and feelings matter too much (a.k.a. “spoiled” or “entitled”), at this point, that’s okay with me (though I am doing my best to keep holding appropriate limits, boundaries, etc., and I do believe they need to have a lot of practice with frustration and dissatisfaction while in an otherwise supportive environment).

The world will do the rest of showing them ways in which their feelings and needs are not ultimately important to the universe. They will have some suffering.

If their home--and their mom--is a safe place for their needs and feelings to matter, that will at least give them the internal framework for knowing how they feel and what they need (in a way that I very much did not get).

They will learn to recognize and respect their own consent and capacity, as I am still trying to learn within myself.

Forward, enlightenment knight,
to another day pursuing the light
of healing and living with mindful sight,
honest, brave, and kind.

Yours not to perfectly plan,
yours not to meet demands,
yours but to do what you can,
staying self-aligned.

Could this be called “fan poetry” (instead of fan fiction)? I adapted the famous second verse of Tennyson’s classic poem for this exercise.

In the notebook

I recently had a burst of understanding that has quite altered my attitude toward people whose beliefs differ dramatically from mine.

The specific context was about some neighbors (who are also kin, this being West Virginia, after all) whose beliefs have seemed incomprehensibly strange to me until now. The labels “right-wing,” “conspiracy theorists,” and most of all, “anti-vaxxers” seemed to apply to them, but I couldn’t grasp what they could be actually thinking (and just simply asking them seemed like not a great idea for several strong reasons).

Then one night recently, it occurred to me to ask an AI chatbot to help me understand—and, almost instantly, it did. Despite the issues and conflict going on these days around AI, this is one area where I feel its use is a powerful tool for good! I will paste my question and the answer I received below, because it was so helpful to me and may be for someone else too; but first, here are my own takeaways and reflections.

In short: those people are trying to do what they truly think is the right thing. They’re trying to protect their children from what they see as evil and harm.

That is something I can understand!! Just because we come from different paths—and disagree about what is actually harm—doesn’t mean we don’t want the same basic things!

This new perspective enabled me to suddenly view those neighbors with a much warmer outlook. Now, when I next see them, they won’t seem to me so alarmingly other. (I may still seem so to them, but genuine warmth from within me can only help.)

I could see that this general concept applied to all sorts of other contexts, too. It seems to me that overall, most people are trying to do what they think is right.

Especially on the most polarized and conflict-generating issues (which would not be such problems if they had answers that were simple and obvious to everyone!), this principle seems to very likely apply—and to even form an essential building block for bridges of connection, communication, and cooperation.

This is the point to grasp: the people on the other side of a political debate are real people too with the same basic needs underneath. They just have been taught a different way of getting there—a different set of values, strategies, and beliefs.

So let us seek to understand, instead of vilify, each other. Let us seek to meet on the common ground of our basic desires and fears, and only then discuss our differing perspectives and strategies. Let us build bridges.

That’s my own aim, anyway, now more strongly than ever.

I worked these thoughts into a Serenity Splash poem earlier this week:

People who hold an opposite view
politically from yours
aren’t evil, of course. They’re people too,
with the same needs at their cores:

to feel safe, to protect their young,
and to have the means to live.
It’s just a different route they’ve come.
Let us seek to build a bridge.

Conversation with the AI chatbot

Me:

I have some neighbors (who are also relatives by marriage) who are “anti-vaxxers”—they don’t believe in vaccinations—to the point that they homeschool all their kids because they won’t comply with state board of education requirements for vaccinations. As far as I know, they aren’t in the Christian Science cult, though I think they are Christian and certainly far-right. As a left-leaning, educated person, I have a hard time understanding what they could possibly be thinking. I would like to have some grasp of their views in case I ever get a chance to build a bridge with them somehow (figuratively speaking). Can you help me fathom what is motivating their anti-vaccination mindset?

AI chatbot:

Yes—I can help with that. And I want to start by saying something important: your impulse to understand rather than simply dismiss is already the bridge. Most people with strong anti-vaccination beliefs do not experience themselves as ignorant or malicious; they experience themselves as protective, moral, and awake. Understanding that internal logic is key.

Below are the main psychological and cultural drivers that commonly motivate anti-vaccination views, especially among far-right, religious, or rural communities. Not all will apply to your neighbors—but several likely overlap.

1. Mistrust of Institutions (Not Just Science)

At the core is often deep institutional mistrust—not only of medicine, but of:

• Government

• Public schools

• Media

• Universities

• Pharmaceutical companies

Vaccines become symbolic of external control:

“The government telling me what to put in my child’s body.”

For people who already believe institutions are corrupt, captured by elites, or hostile to their values, vaccination mandates feel like coercion—not care.

💡 Key point: Their resistance is less about the science of vaccines and more about who is doing the telling.

2. Parental Identity: “I Protect My Children”

Many anti-vax parents are driven by a fierce sense of parental responsibility.

They often see themselves as:

• More attentive than “sheeple parents”

• Willing to do “real research”

• Courageous enough to go against the crowd

In that mindset, vaccinating can feel like betraying one’s child—while refusing feels like heroic protection.

This is emotionally powerful. Once someone’s identity is wrapped around “I’m the kind of parent who won’t poison my kids,” evidence that contradicts that belief feels like a personal attack.

3. Intuitive Risk Perception (Vivid vs. Abstract Harm)

Human brains are bad at comparing:

• Abstract statistical risk (disease prevalence, herd immunity)
  vs.

• Vivid anecdotal risk (a story about a child “damaged by vaccines”)

A single dramatic story—even if false or rare—feels more real than epidemiological data.

So they may think:

“I’ve never seen polio, but I’ve seen videos of kids harmed by vaccines.”

Emotion beats statistics every time unless trust is already present.

4. “Natural Is Moral” Thinking

Many anti-vax beliefs are rooted in a worldview where:

• “Natural” = good, pure, God-designed

• “Artificial” = corrupt, dangerous, human-tampered

Vaccines can feel like:

• Interfering with God’s design

• Weakening the immune system

• Replacing “natural immunity”

This overlaps easily with religious belief even without being formally theological.

5. Reactance: Resistance to Being Told What to Do

Psychologically, this is called reactance—the instinct to resist when autonomy feels threatened.

Mandates often backfire because they trigger:

• “You can’t make me.”

• “If you’re forcing it, you must be hiding something.”

For people with strong independence values (common in rural and far-right cultures), coercion validates suspicion.

6. Community Reinforcement and Echo Chambers

Once someone enters an anti-vax social world:

• They hear constant reinforcement

• Dissenting voices are framed as corrupt or brainwashed

• Belief becomes social belonging

Homeschooling often intensifies this, because:

• Children aren’t exposed to alternative narratives

• Parents bond with like-minded families

• Outsiders feel increasingly unsafe or untrustworthy

At that point, changing views isn’t just about facts—it risks social exile.

7. Far-Right Ideology: Sovereignty and Suspicion

In far-right frameworks, vaccination often intersects with beliefs about:

• Government overreach

• Globalist conspiracies

• Loss of national or bodily sovereignty

Vaccines can be framed as:

• Population control

• Profit-driven harm

• A slippery slope toward tyranny

Again: this isn’t usually felt as paranoia—it’s felt as vigilance.

8. Why Arguments Rarely Work

From their perspective:

• Pro-vaccine people are naïve or manipulated

• Experts are bought

• Dissent is censored

So more data often strengthens their position, because it confirms:

“See? They’re pushing the narrative.”

9. What Does Build Bridges

If you ever want to engage gently, these approaches tend to help more than facts:

• Start with shared values
  “We both care deeply about kids’ safety.”

• Ask curiosity-based questions
  “What first made you start questioning vaccines?”

• Avoid language of superiority
  (No “educated vs. ignorant” framing—even implicitly.)

• Acknowledge uncertainty honestly
  “Medicine isn’t perfect—but I’m curious how you weigh risks.”

• Separate people from beliefs
  Respect the person even if the belief is flawed.

You don’t have to agree—or even debate. Often, being the first non-hostile outsider is already meaningful.

A Final Reframe

From the inside, many anti-vaxxers are not anti-science villains. They are people trying—often imperfectly—to:

• Protect their children

• Maintain autonomy

• Preserve moral order

• Resist systems they distrust

That doesn’t make them right.
But it does make them human.

If the voice in your mind
is strict and unkind,
that's not a voice of wisdom.

It's a scared, hurt child
alone in the wild
who needs help and compassion.

In the notebook

People who hold an opposite view
politically from yours
aren't evil, of course. They're people too,
with the same needs at their cores:

to feel safe, to protect their young,
and to have the means to live.
It's just a different route they've come.
Let us seek to build a bridge.

In the notebook

You don’t scold a daffodil
for not blooming on command.
It will open when it's ready:
this you understand--

and yet you scold a child
for not jumping to obey,
instead of adding light and time
to help them bloom their way.

In the notebook

You feel like a mess and a screw-up, I know,
   but listen: what you are is real.
Real people have complex feelings and needs,
   and real life is a messy, screwy deal.

      You're doing great
      with your very full plate.

In the notebook

Spring—my annual savior—has finally arrived, and I’m once again looking back on the grueling grind of winter and saying to myself, “I’ve got to find ways to cope better next year.”

I’m still working on building more supports into my life in various ways, but I have found one thing that seems to strongly help me, that I hope to lean hard into next winter: deliberately feeding my mind.

This is not an easy thing for those whose lives (like mine) are largely consumed by survival-level needs: work, childcare, and upkeep of body and home.

Add in the programming of “my needs don’t matter” (thanks, Christian patriarchy), and it’s hard to even remember that feeding my mind is important.

But it’s not just important; it’s crucial, as I wrote in a “Serenity Splash” poem:

The cares of life and loved ones
will squeeze me flat if I
do not push back and fill me up
with what ignites my mind.

This concept keeps getting reinforced for me: the more I manage to fill up my mind with adequate mind-food that engages my interest and creativity, the better I can hold up against the ongoing onslaught of life.

My current system for feeding my mind has been working pretty well for me, though I’m still being slow to catch on to its importance. It’s quite simple: I have four daily goals for feeding my mind. Meeting them requires intentionality and even stretching myself a bit; I don’t often get all four done in a day. But when I do get to, my soul feels rejuvenated!

The four goals are (currently):

1. “Project Writing Practice” (PWP): working on my current main writing project, which right now is revising my middle-grade novel

2. Write & post a “Serenity Splash” poem or other poem — this works especially well as mind-food when it’s something I can tinker with in my mind as I move through various parts of my day, such as driving

3. Write & post another blog post (in my other sections and blogs)

4. Do one study lesson — currently I’m rotating between studying physics, Latin, and rationality (via Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “sequences” essays on Lesswrong.com)

I usually have other books and audiobooks going as well, but those are just for whenever I can; same with my other writing practices, such as journaling and songwriting.

The more I practice these four daily mind-food goals, the more correlation I see with my sense of wellbeing. More mind-food goals met = happier mood and less anxiety.

I’ve heard that this is particularly a thing for people with “high intelligence”: inadequate intellectual stimulation leads to destructive anxiety. It makes sense, and I’ve certainly seen that dynamic play out with our dogs (mostly, of course, the Border Collie)!

So, next winter I plan to buckle myself in to floor it toward those daily goals (in whatever form they might be at that point), in order to shore myself up against the winter blues until lovely spring again returns.

Sunday Springs

Section posts from the past week

🏝️Book Beach

🖋️Writer’s Waters

🪷Serenity Splashes

reflections following an encounter with extreme prejudice

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It hurts when I hear someone
  call a group of people "trash"
    (especially when it's about
      skin color or some such).

What stones are thrown
  from base and baseless hate,
    primitive tribalism,
      and crude indoctrination!

When your mind is free,
  it costs nothing to see
    people beyond your group
      as people.

A note to my younger self--and anyone else who needs to hear it

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To question 
   all that you believe
can feel 
   like facing death,
but I promise, 
   on the other side,
there's life--
   and freer breath.

I want my writing to ring with truth and presence.

I want not to just write, but

WRITE.

Not tiptoe apologetically or twitter sheepishly.

Not mollycoddle, but manifest.

Not dithering, but damn.

I want to say what I think and feel
like I believe it’s real!

I want to not be guided by the ever-shifting opinions and conventions of the crowd. I do care about connecting with people and trying to build bridges rather than burn them, but it seems to me that my best path for accomplishing that end is not more reserve, but more honest presence.

May I keep whacking away at the weeds of learned smallness, to speed my inner Writer on her path of rising up.

“Insist on yourself; never imitate.

…There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these.

…Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

It hurts when I hear someone
  call a group of people "trash"
    (especially when it's about
      skin color or some such).

What stones are thrown
  from base and baseless hate,
    primitive tribalism,
      and crude indoctrination!

When your mind is free,
  it costs nothing to see
    people beyond your group
      as people.

In the notebook

This one is more soapbox-y than my usual; and as you can see, there were a lot more thoughts and feelings I had than I ended up including in the final (for now) version. Maybe I’ll incorporate some of those other pieces into future efforts. I’m guessing the main work ahead of me on this track will be about further exploring and/or expressing my feelings of anger about this stuff.

If anyone asks me to recommend a parenting book, this will be my answer. It’s far and away the best one I’ve ever read!

Eli Harwood, a therapist and psychologist specializing in parent-child attachment research, writes with both experienced depth and accessible warmth about how—and why—to build secure connection with your child. For example, in chapter 1, she writes:

“The fascinating paradox that attachment research has revealed about human development is that when we feel securely attached to our caregivers in early childhood, it actually increases our independent adventuring later on. The more secure nurture and co-regulation a child receives, the more internalized confidence and trust they have in us and in themselves, which allows them to focus on the tasks of learning and exploring!”

The book is highly readable, and Eli’s quirky, enthusiastic personality shines through, just as it does in her social media videos (@attachmentnerd).

I particularly appreciate her gentle, non-blaming tone. She emphasizes throughout the book that it’s never too late to work on your relationship with your child.

She then shows, in generous detail, how to proceed with building a more secure parent-child relationship at every stage of a child’s development.

For example, I love the conversation scripts she weaves throughout the book for talking to children in validating, supportive, and connection-building language, like this:

“‘I hear how upset you are about this. This feels terrible to you. I am here. I got you. We will get through this together.’”

I also love how she spells out what is the parent’s job and not the child’s:

“It is not our children’s job to keep us calm; it is our job to recognize when we are getting activated and model taking the steps to get into a more regulated brain and body state.”

This is something I am fervently trying to work on! (See my latest “Parenting Puddles” post.)

Everything Eli says adds to my toolbox for unlearning the parenting mindsets that I (and I think most of my generation) received and learning a new and better way of relating to my kids.

In short, I strongly recommend this book to any parents, at any stage of life—even those whose children are already grown.

Eli has several other books out as well, plus one coming out soon that I’m excited to read: How to Deal with Your (___) So Your Kids Don’t Have To.

Check her out, and if you’re on social media, definitely follow her for insightful, powerful content. I’ve never met her, but I feel like she is a friend, because of her relatability and transparency. And I deeply respect her for her work. 💜

To question 
   all that you believe
can feel 
   like facing death,
but I promise, 
   on the other side,
there's life--
   and freer breath.

In the notebook

Recently I had a big perspective shift about my relationships with my kids and pets. I realized, for the first time, that they love me—I am an object of affection for them beyond just what I do for them. That is to say, they like me—even despite my flaws, imperfections, and (perceived) failures, and including all my quirks.

I guess I just didn’t grasp this before. I didn’t see myself as loveable in that way. I was too focused on my perceived failures, too wrapped up in my harsh internal narratives.

Now, I am glimpsing this outside-in view of myself in a positive light, and it feels like healing.

I can see myself now as their “Mommy Anna” (which phrase originally came from my mom, I think, and I’m glad for it). It’s like a persona I didn’t realize I had, but it actually is really me—and that persona is someone I respect and want to be even more.

When I think of myself in this way as their “Mommy Anna”—who is gentle, sweet, nurturing, smart, and doing her best to take care of them all (and whom they love and like even when they don’t appreciate her particular decisions in a given moment)—I want to inhabit that persona even more. I want to be worthy of their love and affection.

From all this I generalize that it can be a powerfully helpful thing to perceive, and lean into, a positive outside-in image of ourselves and our roles in others’ lives.

Perhaps you are, without fully realizing it, a “Guru Auntie,” “Encourager Friend,” “Hero Trailblazer,” “Memories Holder,” or some other loveable role in your life and the lives of others around you.

(I am thinking of specific ones of you for each of those examples, btw! You know who you are…I hope!)

In short: our harsh inner narratives can hold us back from seeing the beauty that others see in us.

May you be graced with eyes to see your beauty and loveableness. 💜

Sunday Springs

Section posts from the past week

🎵Song Stream

☔️Parenting Puddles

🪷Serenity Splashes

A litany for women and other high-achievers

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Push your boundaries, 
      not your body.

Raise your standards, 
      not your scope.

Stretch your liberty, 
      not your limits.

Learn to claim, 
      not to cope.

Uncertainty can make you scared.
Certainty can make you scary.

Uncertainty is bravery
facing hard questions.
Certainty is fear
dressed up as answers.

Uncertainty lets truth steer,
even if it goes off road.
Certainty just lets fear drive,
even if it runs over creatures in its path.

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The grief that you carry
   is yours to bear--
and the ache 
   of aloneness you feel--
but so is the light 
   that is only yours
and the power 
   you solely can wield.

The grief that you carry
   is yours to bear--
and the ache 
   of aloneness you feel--
but so is the light 
   that is only yours
and the power 
   you solely can wield.

In the notebook

Note: I first wrote it as a sort of teaching song, that theoretically my kids could sing to themselves; later I added the revised first verse as me singing to them.

Maybe your inner child would like to hear you sing it to yourself, too. 💜

“It’s Okay to Be Scared” Lyrics

It’s okay to be scared.
It’s okay to be sad.
I love me even
when I’m feeling bad.
No matter what happens,
I’ll take care of myself.
And when I need it,
I’ll reach out for help.

And whenever I’m scared,
I can use my mind
to investigate
what I’m thinking and why
and turn my attention
from “what if” to “what is”—
and notice what things
in this moment are gifts.

It’s okay to be scared.
It’s okay to be sad.
I love you even
when you’re feeling bad.
No matter what happens,
I’ll take care of yourself,
and when you need it,
I’ll be here to help.

I’ve long been interested in the power of quietness. I’ve written poems and songs about it, read books about it, and explored quietness in my daily life—consistently finding that the fewer words I managed to speak, the better everything felt. I viewed quietness like a Zen art of wisdom and mindfulness: something to practice and aspire to.

Now, that viewpoint has changed like a dandelion into puff that blows away.

Quietness is not just something I value and aspire to, like some lofty virtue. No: quietness is something I need.

And it’s something that was taken from me, that I am trying to take back.

The chatty mask

My culture (fundamentalist Christian) and environment (eldest daughter, baby boomer parents, etc.) shaped me to be a friendly people-pleaser. Being chatty and cheerful was the way to be safe. It let others know that I was happy, fine, pleased, not a problem, and ready to help with their problems. It also provided protection against unpredictable, unsafe intrusion: if I was cheerful and chatty, there was no need for anyone to inquire deeper into the actual state of my mind.

I truly had no idea that I did not want to be chatty. My world had nothing to do with considering what I might actually want or not want. Being a good Christian girl meant learning to suppress my thoughts and submit to what I was supposed to do.

I was fascinated, though, by the quiet kids at school, as if they had some kind of magic that was forbidden to me, as I went chattily on, carefully spelling out my very approval-worthy thoughts for everyone to witness, and ignoring my embarrassment and discomfort.

That was my safety strategy—my persona or “mask” that I thought I was—and, for the most part, it worked.

The real me likes quiet

Now I’m a grownup with actual safety that I can reach for directly, without having to rely on sideways strategies like people-pleasing. This has freed me to discover the real me underneath the mask, as I wrote about in a poem several years ago:

You mean I can be quiet
without an excuse?
I don’t have to fill silence
with words glib and loose

so that others won’t think
I don’t like them or that
I’m unfriendly, depressed,
distracted, or mad?

I’ve been so long so busy
with what they might see
that in crafting my image,
I forgot to be me.

And the real me likes quiet
and space in between
my own mind and others’—
like an opaque screen

behind which I can listen,
choose words with care,
stay in touch with myself,
and just be aware.

Another, shorter poem from around the same time similarly expresses these feelings as well as my dawning understanding that friendliness is not the same as kindness:

I was raised to be friendly,
to extend my hand
to be shaken,
as if from my own land–

for I want to be quiet.
That’s all I ask.
I can be kinder
without a mask

of smiles and chatter.
I want instead
to speak what I choose
from a quiet head.

I now also understand that “friendliness” doesn’t have to mean outgoing, bubbly chit-chat, as I used to think it did: I can still be warm and approachable, but in a quiet way that feels truer to me.

Ohhh: the real me is autistic!

My journey toward quietness took a sharp swerve last year when I got diagnosed with autism (level 1, formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome). In other terms, I am “neurodivergent”—or, if you will, “neurosparkly.” :-)

As you may know, some autistic people don’t speak at all, while others have a very limited ability to speak. I’m obviously very grateful that I can speak. But what I didn’t realize all this time is that speaking costs me significant mental and emotional energy, of which I have a limited amount to get through each day.

It’s a strain to make words out loud to people (I gather this is not the case for those who are not autistic), due, I think, to various particular dynamics in my brain and nervous system, most of all my slower processing speed. It’s hard enough to hold the track of my thoughts—which are taking in a ton of information and making a ton of connections all at once—even when I’m not talking to someone. Conversation introduces unpredictable variables that can feel upheaving, confusing, overwhelming, and demanding.

If I’m just mostly listening to others speak, that’s all right; but when I have to make words in response right then and there, I feel like I’m being thrust out onto thin ice, and I have to just self-abandoningly skate around and hope for the best. It feels risky, uncomfortable, and stressful.

Thus, speaking taxes my nervous system, in the same way that noise, social interaction, eye contact, and external demands do. (Those are other autism-specific struggles that I’ve come to recognize in my own life.) And just as wearing noise-cancelling headphones helps to reduce my overall system strain, finding ways to speak less helps, too.

To spell it out more clearly for anyone reading this who doesn’t get it yet (because I have had some naysayers of the “but you don’t look autistic!” variety): Yes, I can speak. I can make eye contact. I can endure noise, social interaction, and external demands. But all of those things cost me significant coping-energy. They stress my nervous system and, over time, lead me into burnout, exhaustion, depression, overwhelm, anxiety, and so on.

(Here’s an amazing thing, though: writing, by contrast, gives me mental and emotional energy! It’s no wonder writing became one of my main “special interests”—it’s a way of expressing myself that feels good rather than hard!)

I’m trying, therefore, to find and claim ways of speaking less in my daily life.

It’s a practice of boundaries, of self-respect, and—crucially—of paying attention to what I need and what I feel like in relation to speaking.

Finding new options for speaking less

With my kids, at my job, and in my other relationships, I do have to speak some, of course. But there’s a lot of room to practice speaking only as much as I want to or as is truly necessary—and thus being more frugal with the mental energy that speaking costs me.

Work is the easiest, because I have a pretty solid set of conversational scripts built up, by this point, for most issues that arise for my customers. (I work in insurance.) I’ve also learned over time that phone calls with customers go much better if I keep my own words as minimal as possible. Still, though, every single conversation is a strain from which I need to recover.

At home with three highly spirited kids, however, I am very much still struggling and trying to find my way. One thing I’ve started doing is sometimes saying, “I can’t talk right now” (especially if I’m driving or trying to fix dinner, and my kids keep asking me questions like, “Mom, when can we get a pet snake?”)—and then just keep quiet, unless and until it becomes truly necessary for me to speak.

My husband, meanwhile, has grown quite used to my using micro-expressions instead of words to answer his many off-the-wall comments. (We could be a comedic team with him as the comic and me as the straight man staring deadpan at the camera, like Pam on The Office.) It’s a matter of boundaries here, too: when I reply only to communication from him that feels to me respectful and sane, it elevates our interactions to the standards I want.

With my close friends (who are also autistic), all I have to do is say something like, “I don’t feel like talking right now,” and they not only get it, they celebrate with me that I managed to notice my feelings!

There are some other general methods I’m experimenting with, like using wordless sounds (especially “hmm”) and hand gestures to spare me having to speak as long as possible. When words are necessary, I’ll use them; but if something can be solved by my pointing a finger or nodding my head, I’ve just saved myself some energy.

Another strategy I’m beginning to use, this time consciously borrowing from what I’ve learned about autism, is intentional “echolalia”—repeating back phrases the other person has said, as a way to signal that I heard them. This is much easier on my mental bandwidth than requiring my brain to form its own words in reply. Again, when this suffices, it saves me energy.

Sparkling More

After all these years of paying attention to what other people wanted from me instead of what I felt, it still feels mind-boggling that I can be sparing with my speaking, and things will be okay—even better than okay. The more I practice speaking less in pursuit of self-accommodation, the more honest and sustainable my relationships feel, and the more my true joy—which is not a mask, but is from my authentic, connected self-awareness—can sparkle.

May your journey, too, lead you to your own sparkling joy, in whatever form that may take.

Uncertainty can make you scared.
Certainty can make you scary.

Uncertainty is bravery 
  facing hard questions.
Certainty is fear 
  dressed up as answers.

Uncertainty lets truth steer, 
  even if it goes off road.
Certainty just lets fear drive, 
  even if it runs over creatures in its path.

In the notebook