May your sun rise 
  on easier times,
    your dark clouds 
      fade to blue--
compassion to you 
  who hold so much
    with no one 
      holding you.

In the notebook

some simple words to help me learn this concept…because I didn’t learn it growing up

My trust is a treasure
  (I finally see),
    not to give
      but guard.

I'll gladly share it--
  but only when
    I deem it safe
      from harm.

In the notebook

No, it's not perfect, 
  but it's my best-guess
    best option, 
until 
  there's a clear 
    better one.

So I take it, 
  like a torch, 
    to brandish at shadows
of self-doubt, 
  fear, 
    and control-delusion.

In the notebook

Introducing a new, experimental section for brief snapshots in words of fleeting moments

It’s a little after eight in the morning. The kids are still sleeping, and I’m letting them, for now. Outside it’s raining and rumbling, thunder moving away to the west.

I’m on the couch with a dog between my outstretched legs, a mug of coffee, and a piece of peanut butter toast—with a sprinkling of chocolate chips, which I add sometimes for fun.

In this rare moment of quiet, I reach for writing. I want to try something new: describing the details of my here-and-now experience, as if they matter…because I have begun to believe they do.

Now it’s less quiet: over in the dining room area, one of our cats is performing some kind of antics I can’t see but I sure can hear. I’m thinking it will wake up my four-year-old, who decided to sleep in her inflatable Cocomelon “bouncy castle” last night. … Nope, she’s still sleeping.

The thunder is moving back now and the rain has gotten heavier again. There’s a flood watch, and I wonder if I ought to stay home from work today.

Now I’m thinking of the books I’m reading and the other writing projects I’m working on. It seems this moment of quiet has awakened my mind’s hunger. So, off I go to seize what further mind-food I can get, before the day lets loose, like the rain.

This sums up the vibe I want in my home—in my relationships with my partner, my kids, and myself: support instead of pressure.

If I want my husband or my kids to do something, hassling and pressuring them not only doesn’t work (they just dig in their heels), but it also just makes things worse. It adds conflict and raises all of our stress levels.

What works instead is to support them: ask what they need; give reminders that are gentle and non-threatening; and lead by example and collaboration.

It’s a top-down vs. bottom-up approach, like this:

Crucially, the person I most need to relate to this way is—can you guess?—me.

Hassling myself to do things, shaming and blaming myself, operating by force—that’s the pressure mode, based in anxiety, that perpetuates stress and leads into burnout.

I want to build habits of relating to myself supportively. Ask what I need; seek ways to accommodate myself (eg., use strategic reminders instead of expecting I’ll just remember things); and most of all, give myself lots of compassion for all the ways in which I feel inadequate and all the things I haven’t been able to get done.

Who’s with me? 💗

River Roundup

Section posts from the past week

🌀Divergence Deeps

Reflections on the importance of agency for the autistic nervous system

“The common thread is that we feel like our autonomy has been taken away—our consent has been railroaded over—and we are powerless, helpless, and trapped in an unaccommodating situation.”

🪷Serenity Splashes

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There's a kind of enduring
  hard moments and tasks
    that’s not the same at all
as the kind of enduring—
  helpless and alone—
    we did when we were small.

I learned to suppress
  my feelings and needs
    and pretend everything was fine.
You learned that there
  was no one anywhere
    who cared about your cries.

Now we’re grown
  and in the grind,
    but we have points of choice—
to recognize our options
  and respond 
    to our own voice. 💗

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Maybe I don't even know
what strength my power pack holds within--
I'm accustomed to it running low
from letting everyone else plug in.

a reminder to myself

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It literally does not matter
what anyone else may think
about the story of your life.
Don't write it with their ink.

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This life did not come with a map
   (they gave me one;
   it turned out wrong)--
so I have to make it up,
updating it as I go,
sometimes just throwing 
it out and starting fresh.
With time and courage, less
and less my map leads
   me into pits; 
more and more to what I need,
   to what fits
for this life
to feel like mine.

Life is far bigger than what I know,
with complex connections in constant flow.
It’s like a great river going where it will go,
and the drop that is me can only follow.

— from my song “Droplet”

Hi, I’m Anna. I’m a writer from West Virginia (US). Here I post short essays, poems, and songs that reflect on various aspects of my journey down life’s wild river:

• mental health & mindfulness

• discovering & unmasking my neurodivergence

• healing from religious trauma

• learning to parent in an emotionally healthy way

• growing in rationality, thinking skills, and practical philosophy

• reading and writing (I love books and notebooks!!!)

Offline, I write novels, short stories, and children’s stories. I’m currently finishing my debut middle grade novel about a group of kids who spark a revolution in an ancient totalitarian religious regime. I’m also working on various other stories and projects as I can. See here for a current list of my publications.

Sections of this blog

I write this blog in sections. You can pick which sections to subscribe to (all free).

• 🌊 River Reflections (default section) — general updates and musings

• 🪷 Serenity Splashes — poems on coping with life

• 🎵 Song Stream — songs I write and record

• 🏝️ Book Beach — a place to talk about books I read and love

• ☔️ Parenting Puddles — thoughts from my parenting journey

• 🖋️ Writer’s Waters — notes from the ebbs and flows of writing life

• 🌀 Divergence Deeps — reflections on being neurodivergent

• 🫧 Mist of Moments — fleeting moments captured, like snapshots in words

Nature photos

I feel lucky to live in these beautiful mountains of West Virginia, and I enjoy trying to capture its beauty with amateur photography. All photos here are my own (unless otherwise specified). 📷

This life did not come with a map
   (they gave me one;
   it turned out wrong)--
so I have to make it up,
updating it as I go,
sometimes just throwing 
it out and starting fresh.
With time and courage, less
and less my map leads
   me into pits; 
more and more to what I need,
   to what fits
for this life
to feel like mine.

In the notebook

It literally does not matter
what anyone else may think
about the story of your life.
Don't write it with their ink.

In the notebook

Maybe I don't even know
what strength my power pack holds within--
I'm accustomed to it running low
from letting everyone else plug in.

In the notebook

I’ve been noticing that a common experience among myself and my autistic loved ones, as well as autistic people I hear from online, is the experience of crippling distress in reaction to a perceived loss of agency or autonomy.

Some close-to-home examples:

• If my 9-year-old autistic daughter has had a long day, and I say that she has to brush her teeth before having more screen time, she utterly melts down.

• If I give my 4-year-old something to eat that she hasn’t consented to, she’ll throw it right on the floor.

• My autistic BFF sometimes gets debilitating depression and emotional paralysis when she feels powerless to protect herself from victimization.

• My autistic sibling has been known to lash out when feeling trapped in some way.

• I (diagnosed level 1 autistic) notice that I start emotionally shutting down in significant distress when I feel trapped and unable to take care of my needs, like at an overwhelming social event that I feel powerless (even just too overwhelmed/paralyzed) to leave.

These examples are overt, but I often notice many more subtle instances of this dynamic in all of the individuals above, especially myself.

The common thread is that we feel like our autonomy has been taken away—our consent has been railroaded over—and we are powerless, helpless, and trapped in an unaccommodating situation.

We then react like my cat Milky when he’s forced into a cat carrier: scrambling and squawling, in our own particular ways.

Here’s an earlier version of this perspective, from my journal in June:

Maybe the main difference between being regulated/grounded/“in my seat”/well and not—at least for me—is whether I feel enabled to make my own free choices and get what I need, or I feel trapped and subjected to constraints from outside myself. (I’m guessing this is a common experience of autism.) Autonomy —> wellness; constraints —> depression.

Understanding this about myself and my autistic loved ones shows me how to better help us: in addition to general practices of regulation (routine, connection, etc.), during distress, try to find choice points of autonomy. For example:

• With my kids, when they’re melting down, reduce (if possible, eliminate) demands, and try to find real choices I can offer them. (This may have to wait until they’re calmed down enough to think/hear me. I try to stay right with them during meltdowns, until their nervous system slows and co-regulates with mine.)

• For myself, when I’m feeling overwhelmed or powerless, get as rational and mindful as I can in looking for choice points and options. It can even help to name options that aren’t actually options I want, just to show myself that I have options: I could not fix lunch for my kids; I could skip work today; I could leave the milk and other food out to spoil overnight. When I choose not to take those options, I am instead choosing what seems to me my “best-guess best option” (a helpful phrase my friend and I use a lot), even if it’s hard and I just have to get through it. It’s still an option, and just recognizing that can help tremendously to shift me from feeling like a helpless child to feeling like a mindful, consenting adult.

I think the word “agency” is a helpful distillation of all this. We need a sense of agency in order for our nervous systems to feel regulated and safe. This is perhaps true for everyone, but at least/especially for autistic people like me and my loved ones.

All of these thoughts were part of what went into my latest Serenity Splash poem, “Enduring (self-abandoned) vs. Enduring (self-companioned),” so I’d like to close this by sharing it again here.

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There's a kind of enduring
  hard moments and tasks
    that’s not the same at all
as the kind of enduring—
  helpless and alone—
    we did when we were small.

I learned to suppress
  my feelings and needs
    and pretend everything was fine.
You learned that there
  was no one anywhere
    who cared about your cries.

Now we’re grown
  and in the grind,
    but we have points of choice—
to recognize our options
  and respond 
    to our own voice. 💗

There's a kind of enduring
  hard moments and tasks
    that’s not the same at all
as the kind of enduring—
  helpless and alone—
    we did when we were small.

I learned to suppress
  my feelings and needs
    and pretend everything was fine.
You learned that there
  was no one anywhere
    who cared about your cries.

Now we’re grown
  and in the grind,
    but we have points of choice—
to recognize our options
  and respond 
    to our own voice. 💗

In the notebook

I wrote this poem to help myself sort out the difference between enduring hard moments now—say, when one of my kids is melting down while the others also need things, and I need to eat and use the bathroom—versus in my past, when my needs utterly did not matter and were even perhaps sinful, according to the hellfire and brimstone preaching I heard every day. I’m also thinking of close friends who are likewise on journeys of healing from traumatic developmental years.

I’m including a sentence from my preceding journal entry, in which I was starting to explore this stuff. It reads: “So while I may, in the difficult moment, practice some amount of shutting down my reactivity and suppressing my needs until I can attend to them, I am doing so with strategic awareness and BGBO [best-guess best option] coping, not self-abandonment.”

Thank you for witnessing this moment of my healing journey. Does it resonate with you at all?

The control dynamics of unhealthy relating have to do with entangled enmeshment, like two hands trying to function while the fingers are entwined and pulling different ways.

By contrast, the respect dynamics of healthy relating have to do with secure individuation, like two hands functioning together but separately.

Here’s a visual I drew up a few weeks ago:

Again, whatever the particular outward manifestations, one way is about entangled control—trying to get the other to do what you want—and the other is about individuated respect—recognizing the other’s autonomy and separateness.

To simplify: it’s a difference between control-based relating and consent-based relating.

I think we’re all pretty familiar with the various dynamics of control-based relating, but perhaps less so with those of consent-based relating, so I want to say more about what it looks like.

Healthy relating, based on consent, respect, and recognition of the other’s separate autonomy, involves:

• - taking responsibility for your own feelings and needs

• - asking clearly for what you want

• - accepting “no” as an answer

• - not pressuring others, but protecting and even celebrating their autonomy, along with your own

• - valuing others’ authenticity and wellbeing, along with your own

It’s like an open hand extended, reaching out but waiting calmly for response, compared to a hand that is grabbing, clutching, and grasping.

I’m not sitting here shaking my finger at anyone about unhealthy relating; I have plenty of it in my own life still, and I think most of us will always be on a journey toward healthier relating.

Besides, it’s not like we just woke up and said, “I think I’ll choose unhealthy relating today.” Those patterns of relating are wired into us from childhood, when we learned from our parents and our culture that we had to resort to various control tactics in order to survive, in a world of not getting the separate-but-secure connection that we needed.

I’m just trying to sort all this out to help myself along in my journey of healing my own patterns of relating. I want relationships of side-by-side journeying with mutual respect and wellbeing, not icky entanglements of fear and confusion.

River Roundup

Section posts since last time

🖋️Writer’s Waters

“Here’s one thing that has helped: rebranding my writing sessions so that the goal is not ‘to write,’ but ‘to do a try.’”

🌀Divergence Deeps

I am just now figuring this out…

🪷Serenity Splashes

a poem for my friend

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You see yourself the way they treated you--
bothersome, worthless as dust, perverse--
but you shine far above them in my view--
a unique light in this dark universe.

     You had to drink their disgust.
     Now they can eat your stardust.

an ode

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Downtime--when the toil halts--
I need it like a song needs
a downbeat. All the day's assaults
otherwise will flatten me.

(I lived like that, just flat, so long,
not knowing how to rest so I 
could rise.) Return to home, my song--
recover and reset my mind.

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I'm creaky like an old door,
   croaky like a frog;
my energy's down on the floor;
   my brain is filled with fog.

     Here I'll be
        with my tea
     till my wind
        blows again.

on the disturbance of unmasking

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I always tried intensely 
to seem on top of things
and able to take care of others,
so they'd be at ease--

and I truly did care
about them, and I still do--
but now I'm coming down to earth
where I have needs, too.

Who am I if I'm not the one
who's competent and stout?
What happens if I'm just...me?
I don't know...but let's find out. 

reflections on anxiety as self-fulfilling prophecy

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We can't know the future,
but my worry-shaped brain
keeps bracing for trouble--
and keeps me in pain.

We can't know the future,
so it might be great--
if I don't let anxiety
curse my fate.

(or like a doormat, for others to wipe their feelings on)

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I flattened myself like a tray,
balancing with skill
other's fragile cups of feelings,
so they wouldn't spill.

The strain of that life broke me.
Now I'm trying to realign
my pieces as a sturdy mug
for feelings that are mine.

I flattened myself like a tray,
balancing with skill
other's fragile cups of feelings,
so they wouldn't spill.

The strain of that life broke me.
Now I'm trying to realign
my pieces as a sturdy mug
for feelings that are mine.

I used a variation of that photo on a recent “Writer’s Waters” post, so here’s another photo of sleepy Papaya (under my desk at my office):

In the notebook

We can't know the future,
but my worry-shaped brain
keeps bracing for trouble--
and keeps me in pain.

We can't know the future,
so it might be great--
if I don't let anxiety
curse my fate.

In the notebook

I always tried intensely 
to seem on top of things
and able to take care of others,
so they'd be at ease--

and I truly did care
about them, and I still do--
but now I'm coming down to earth
where I have needs, too.

Who am I if I'm not the one
who's competent and stout?
What happens if I'm just...me?
I don't know...but let's find out. 

In the notebook

I'm creaky like an old door,
   croaky like a frog;
my energy's down on the floor;
   my brain is filled with fog.

     Here I'll be
        with my tea
     till my wind
        blows again.

In the notebook

I’ve been newly coming to understand that I need a lot of downtime in order to be well.

By “downtime” I mean solitary time without external pressures when I can gather my wits, move about freely, tend to my body’s needs, get my essential belongings organized, and generally see how I’m feeling, see what I need and want, and so on.

I’m coming to see “downtime” like this as an essential, basic human need. Perhaps that is obvious to you...but I didn’t realize it until recently!

I feel like I spent the majority of my growing up years, especially my adolescence, in acute survival mode just from not getting enough downtime. I thought that was just normal, what life was like for everyone.

I don’t know about everyone else, but increasingly I gather that neurodivergent people need a lot more downtime than neurotypical people.

That model helps to explain my experience—why I have been so slow to understand that 1) I need a lot of downtime in order to feel well, and 2) it’s okay and essential to avail myself of downtime as much as I can.

Without enough downtime, I live in burnout, frustration, stress, strain, and survival mode/sense of crisis.

But when I get some solid downtime, I can return to a sense of true inner choosing, of being able to capably consent or not consent to things, and to being truly present—with myself and with others, most crucially my kids.

Downtime is thus critical for my mental health, physical health, and relational health.

May I get some soon—and may you get some too!

Downtime--when the toil halts--
I need it like a song needs
a downbeat. All the day's assaults
otherwise will flatten me.

(I lived like that, just flat, so long,
not knowing how to rest so I 
could rise.) Return to home, my song--
recover and reset my mind.

In the notebook

You see yourself the way they treated you--
bothersome, worthless as dust, perverse--
but you shine far above them in my view--
a unique light in this dark universe.

     You had to drink their disgust.
     Now they can eat your stardust.

In the notebook

As a working mother, a chronic struggle I have with writing is finding time and space in which I’m not vulnerable to interruption. Occasionally I’m able to get up early or stay up late, but usually I’m just too tired. So, what writing I get tends to happen in brief spurts when things are relatively quiet at home or at work.

This situation can further compound on itself in times of burnout, when my nervous system is too fragile to try writing when there’s a risk of interruption.

Obviously, I need to keep trying to get myself some solid, reliable, interruption-free writing time.

But in the meantime, here’s one thing that has helped: rebranding my writing sessions so that the goal is not “to write,” but “to do a try.”

(I know, I could just say “try,” but the quirky, ungrammatical sound of “do a try” helps my brain to remember/pay attention to the concept.)

Just “do a try”—that way, even if I get interrupted, I will have still met my goal! That in and of itself is soothing to my nervous system during burnout.

And if I don’t get interrupted, then I get writing—a.k.a. food for my starving inner child (“Writer”)!

Thanks for reading. May you get some food for your inner child today, too!