•
Regarding the Stories and Language we have for Love and Attachment. I am tired of being ruled by pressures, insecurities, fears, and the long, self-imposed limitations created by the neglect and abuse of my childhood. Likewise, I no longer wish to rely on self-isolation as a form of protection. I’ve processed, embodied, and healed…
•
An Open Letter to The American Psychiatric Association’s Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders Work Group. Figure 1. Page 290 from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, showing the criteria for “Unspecified Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorder.” Included under fair use for academic analysis. Dear APA Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders Work Group, This communication is…
•
Reconsidering a Life Misunderstood & Misremembered. Over the past few years, I’ve found several small caches of report cards my mother squirreled away in various boxes, drawers, and under the eaves in the attic. A few are missing, but together these documents form a chronological record spanning my entire academic career, from nursery school…
•
The Burdensome Impact of Undiagnosed Learning Disabilities on Girls and Women “It Must Be Me” Generated by Mars Parker using ChatGPT Pro. 27 Oct. 2025 School was hard for me. So hard. For a seemingly bright, earnest kid, it was more challenging and spirit-crushing than it had any right to be. Without any clear…
•
ENG 100, Paper 1. Tech Reflection. Oct, 2025 How Changing My Relationship with Social Media Made Everything Better. I was addicted to social media. Fully addicted, and I hated it. For more than a decade—from installing the apps on my first smartphone until just after my 50th birthday—checking Facebook and Instagram was the first…
•
Happy St Jude’s day to you all! Today I registered for spring classes here at DCCC, and I am over the moon about how much I love school and how good it feels to flex in this way. I am killin it. I am writing all the time. I am taking good care of…
•
The 10 of Swords from Tarot of the Mystical Moments by Catrin Welz-Stein The title of this essay comes from Annie Kotowicz’s short and sweet memoir, What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic. Consider this a set of CliffNotes to my experience of neurodivergence and related subjects. In each section, I will share…
•
The Moon from Mystical Moments Tarot by Catrin Welz-Stein For most of my life, I’ve felt like a failure. A rather fair-to-middling one, I grant you—I did have loads of privilege and a cussed determination to fall back on—but a failure nonetheless. Let’s get right to it. I started struggling—and failing—young. My entire academic…
•
Last week, in a revelation that may surprise many—but perhaps make good sense to a few—I received an autism diagnosis. This would have come as quite a shock to me two years ago, but in the year and a half since my ADHD reveal and bombshell dys-agnoses, so much neurodivergent sand has shifted beneath…
•
Hoo Nelly. So, for reasons I’ll go into later, I have been trying to learn some stuff A few weeks ago, I took a deep dive into relearning some rules about sentence structure and punctuation. It was challenging. It took loads of repetition and practice to lock in some of the grammar rules that…