writing
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(A Heroin(e)’s Journey in a Neurodivergent Body) Burnout did not ask for permission. It arrived like a storm that had been forecasting itself.Through years of quiet weather reports, the world refused to read. It was not a noble quest, or a choice or a calling I accepted with grace. It was my body saying: No…
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What if “disorder” was only the world’s narrow word for evolution? What is magic in a world bound by the laws of the ordinary mind?It is the colour hidden beneath the black-and-white veil, the secret song smothered by the fear of the unknown. They silence the flowering ones, for they mistake bloom for danger, and…
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Every age needs a monster to chase. In medieval times, it was witches who were marked and burned, as if fear could be turned to ash. In the twentieth century, it was communists, with lists and sweeps that promised safety and delivered suspicion. And now, in the twenty-first century, the sweep is for autism. Presidents…
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The seasons pass as they do, and it flows as time moves. Not in a straight line, though we try to force it into one. Time is not singular; and some days move like a train through space, and it does so, with or without us. Only a year ago, on the equinox in September…
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When A specific burnout hits, the version of me I’ve tried to keep hidden becomes the version people see. The dark side, the bitterness, the self-pity, the sharpness of my words, escape. It isn’t who I am, but it’s what exhaustion distils me into. All the quiet work of editing myself, smoothing the edges, softening…
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And we are now faced with complacency; we don’t have to fight to survive, we can live, and we are freer than ever. Life has never been better. Yes, there are still wars, there is still hunger, and there are still pandemics in the world, but life quality and expectancy have never been as high…
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I’m 45, and in some ways, my emotional growth feels decades behind.Not because I didn’t want to grow, but because I had to survive. My neurodevelopment (in the family of neurodivergences), for me, has been a long apprenticeship in hiding. Masking. Suppressing. Twisting myself into shapes that fit a world that never wanted to see…
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by AwenyddionSeer of the rupture, child of freak occurrence, cartographer of the sacred in-between I do not walk a straight path. I walk the trail of freak occurrences, the things no one could have predicted, the moments that shatter meaning and give birth to new shapes. I do not collect things. I collect events, thresholds,…
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At Island games in Orkney 2025! After years — maybe decades — of surviving life through masking and disconnection, I find myself learning how to feel again. Not in the abstract emotional sense, but physically, viscerally. My nervous system is no longer numbed. It’s awake now. Sometimes too awake. The other day, after an appointment,…
Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens 