writing
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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,…
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Truthful, with my pen as guide! A full-hearted, soul-sent storm chaser, crashing through this world with poetry in my veins and vulnerability as my sword. I don’t come gently. I come with the trinity of myth. I come with longing. I come with the kind of truth that makes people look away, “who knows, they…
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It’s been six weeks now that I’m back on the Orkney Islands, and I feel the troubled waters of settling in all over again. I’ve had some wins but also a few losses that ripple quietly as if the peace I brought with me was only a tentative guest slipping away too soon. I tell myself…
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Just a few days ago, I set foot again on the Orkney Islands, and this time, something feels different. There’s a lightness in simply going with the flow, a new rhythm that I’ve come to trust as I learn to live with this new version of myself, the one who smiles again, who dances quietly…
Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens 