neurodivergence

  • UnLucky in Limerence

    …and Other MisAdventures in Attachment Injury and Trauma Response. Tristan and Isolde with the Potion (1916) by John William Waterhouse  Public Domain. Cropped from original via Wikimedia Commons Content note: This essay discusses trauma, childhood neglect & abuse, fawning, dissociation, neurodivergence, sex, and—gasp—Pre-Raphaelite art. Have you ever heard of limerence? I hadn’t until very recently.…

  • From Addiction to Acceptance

    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…

  • F-A-W-N

    Or how many times can I use the word “fuck” in a single of writing? I tend to think about my nervous system only when I am feeling fucking nuts: the escalation of flight, the shutdown of freeze.  I know this kind of dysregulation all too well. These are my steadfast, vigilant companions, and…

  • What I mean when I say…

    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…

  • Neurotypical Failure

    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…

  • Here Goes Nothin

    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…

  • Dys-issues

    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…