Transcript
The test, test. It looks like the link is working. The last voice recording was 40 minutes long, and then I discovered the mic was not working.
What is it today? What is the date?
It is the 19th of March, 2026. It is a new moon in the air.
It is Nyepi here in Bali, which is a day of silence. Essentially, this is supposed to use as little power as possible. Sometimes, at home, in families, there is a curfew and you cannot go outside in the streets. There are no cars, there is no sound, it is dark and quiet. This is my dream. This is what I think I have been so desperate for, silence. It is so beautiful.
My father’s neighbors are not around. I have a space here where my windows point out to my garden, but the garden has a path. People go in the room to do their prayers at the temple, to give their offerings. I lose words sometimes. I think they are offering three times a day, so there are a lot of people passing through my space. For me, with PTSD and being perceived, I find that hard. Little things like that, a lot of people do not understand. But it is super important for me to feel like I am in a private space where I cannot be seen, where my energy cannot be connected with by anyone, where I am safe from the outside world.
When I know that anyone could appear at any time, my nervous system remains hypervigilant and remains very aware of what I am doing, because my system has been taught to always be aware of how I am coming across. If I do something a certain way, I could get in trouble. Or what if I am doing something wrong? Or what if it is perceived a certain way? It is incredible how my system is absolutely wired to be aware.
Today is the first day I have been here where they are not doing offerings. They are not cleaning the walkway. They are not passing through and looking in. Culturally, it does not seem to be a problem for them to look in the window. They are looking in the way all the time. To me, that is such a privacy thing. Very different culture.
I like that because I am realizing, I guess I have known, but I am sort of putting the pieces together, that I am the kind of person who can just record on the fly. There are things moving through me. That is where this whole concept of “what’s passing through the channel” came from. It is what passes through in moments where I have these bursts of ideas or the ability to describe something or tell a story. It just moves through me in such an eloquent way sometimes. When I experience it passing through, I am like, wow, that was really capturable. That was well said, or the angle at which I perceived that was really interesting.
Then I try to hold on to it because I am like, oh, I have got to make that into content, or I have got to try and use that. So then my brain tries to hold on to all these little pieces. But they are so fleeting, and they do pass through. They are not gone forever, but I also cannot just hold on to them like that.
What I am realizing is I have had visions of myself creating lots of content. I can just see myself sharing my thoughts and opinions. I think the key to that for me, and this is the thing, I am trying to find the way that I express myself, because the way that currently exists does not work for me. What I am realizing is that I have just got to mic up in the moment. When I notice that something is alive within me, I have got to throw on the mic. I think throughout the day there will be multiple moments where I can just mic up.
My commitment today is not to work in the traditional ways that I work, where I sit in front of my computer for long hours, but just to free flow, which is actually really hard for me. I am always so routine-based, got to get on track, got to follow the schedule. I need that. Part of me needs that, because if I do not do that for a little bit I can get way off. But on a day like today, it is nice to just allow myself to free flow.
I say that is hard because I get pulled in so many different directions and get really overwhelmed sometimes. So I have to be very mindful to meditate and regulate and notice when I am feeling like fleeing, or when I am fighting in my head, or spiraling, or thinking too much. I have to be very present with myself and call myself out in the moments. Is what I am doing really serving me right now? What are you doing?
Because I am realizing as I heal and as I integrate that I have never known how to just be, how to just be me. I really have been imitating everything around me to make sense of my world and to fit in. That is such a strong realization. I have talked to Joan about this, my friend Joan, who is in her early sixties and is now awakening in such similar ways to me. It is so interesting that we both have this, where we really have just studied human beings and responded in the ways that we noticed them needing, or matched how they were showing up. It really has been a study that we have been doing.
I am actually studying people. What do they need? How do they need me to respond to this? How am I supposed to show up? How do I talk to this person? How do I emulate who they are so I can be received by them? Because we spend so much time emulating others and studying others and witnessing what is happening outside of ourselves, while being told that what is inside of ourselves is wrong and bad and too much and not appropriate and that we will never get by in life if we depend on what is inside. I have never really gotten to know my identity.
I was just going to say develop my identity, but we already have so much identity before we even develop the experience of identity. That only becomes a sense of self when all of this starts to be covered by defense mechanisms.
Now that I am able to access myself and just be with myself, it is huge, and I love it. I think the hardest thing that I have noticed of late is that I am just constantly after myself. I am so insanely self-aware that I am forever judging and criticizing everything that I am doing. It is not from a point of self-hatred. It is just how I learned to be in the environments that I was in, because I was in an environment where I had to watch every move and make sure I did not set something off and make sure I did not trigger anything in my environment. I had to be super aware of everything that I was doing, all my movements, all my thoughts.
I grew up as that type of being that is just always watching every choice, every decision, every movement. There has become this constant narrative of maybe I should have been doing that, not in the sense of why did I do that, that was stupid, but just this ongoing narrative of how I should be living and something dictating what is wrong and what could be better. It is insane. It is insane how exhausting it is and how I have never noticed that it was there. It has just always been present. This is part of the awakening, to become aware of these things.
Through the process of realizing this, it makes it so clear to me that I feel like a prisoner in my own life, because everything is regimented and everything is thought through. I am just so aware of everything that I am doing and how I am doing it and when and why and for who and who is going to be affected and how people will react and what I will say. My brain is so capable of complex layered thinking like that in everything that I do. It is no wonder it is exhausting. No wonder I feel like a prisoner too. Everything is under watch all the time, by me. It used to be someone else that was over me, that felt like they were watching me and making the rules, and now I am not even in that situation anymore and I have retained that within myself, which is so sad and hard to recognize within myself. But it is truth.
The reason I share this is because so many of us are living asleep, not aware that we are so hard on ourselves all the time. You did not have to grow up with someone who was strict and abusive. You may have grown up just in an environment where your emotions were neglected because somebody did not have capacity or know how to respond to them.
A lot of us neurodivergent beings who were not responding in typical ways were told that there was something wrong with us or that we could not be as we are, or that something was going to happen, the energy would shift, or you might be rejected, or you could feel people’s responses because of your heightened sensitivity. So we just adapted this way.
I want to call it out because it is really hard living this way. When I say it feels so good to just free flow through the day, I literally cannot remember an experience in my life of just allowing myself to be, to just not have plans and not watch myself and be like, you should be productive, and you should make a video, and you should do this. Everything is so micromanaged. I have had enough. I need a break from myself, from this brain.
I am speaking from a place of being someone who identifies as autistic and ADHD and who has PTSD. The biggest discovery that has come to me in this recent period of my life is that I have been reacting and struggling so much with my sensitivities, because my hearing and hearing frequencies, and feeling sound in my body, it is really hard. I do not understand what is happening or where this came from or why it started. But I automatically assumed that it was my autism that became amplified for whatever reason.
Now what I am realizing is it is actually that my sensory system got amplified, which is one of my autistic qualities, but what is happening is that my PTSD is amplified because my senses are so alert. All this fear and sensitivity and not being able to be outside and having panic attacks and feeling deeply uncomfortable around people, in connection, in energy exchange, in being perceived, in being touched, and being hypersensitive to my environment, and my hypervigilance going on and becoming aware and tracking everything in my environment and not being able to rest and being stuck in a state of dysregulation for a long period of time, because my body is hypervigilantly watching that at any moment a sound could come out of nowhere and invade my body. This is PTSD. That is not my autism. My autism is exacerbating it, but this thing that I am really struggling with, I only just realized, is PTSD, not autism. It is triggered by my autistic qualities.
Now I am standing in this place of owning and naming my truth, which is that I have really severe PTSD. That is super fucked up to say at 42 years old when you did not know that you had PTSD your whole life. This is such a strange place of awakening and recognizing who I am and acknowledging what I am carrying and what I am moving through and what is present for me and what my truth is. It is so powerful and it is such a good thing. It is a beautiful thing, but it is so big too. It is so heavy. It never really ends. There is so much processing happening all the time because there is all this new information coming to light, and all of it is connected to such big parts of me and my identity and how I experience the world and how I am going to survive this.
I think these revelations are helping me now too, to recognize, oh, I am just in a transition period right now. This is a time and place where I have quite recently come into my body. I have been trying to make sense of what happened to me. Why all of a sudden was I vibrating and feeling energy differently and hearing frequencies and everything amplified and my sensory system so sensitive? What happened? I think the thing that resonates most for me is that in doing a lot of the work of coming back into my body, I really had dissociated from my body my whole life. I went through a lot of physical, sexual, and emotional trauma. My body was not a safe place at all, especially emotionally, because I am such a deep feeling person and made that way and designed that way.
Even as a child I am sure I was feeling these deep intense emotions in good and difficult ways, in terms of fear and all kinds of difficult feelings. The body was not a safe place, so I dissociated from my body a long time ago. Then I numbed out and I used drugs and I used alcohol and I checked out for so long. I was on autopilot, and many of us are, and it is not our fault at all.
What I am getting at is that I finally started doing the work and understanding that, oh, I have trauma, and I have all this unresolved stuff that I have never looked at, but suppressed my whole life and pretended was not there and pretended was not the truth. I told myself I grew up in a strict home and that I was a bad kid and I got punished because I was out of line. That was the story I was told and that is what I believed, and that is not what it was.
Now I am realizing all these years later that I was a very different type of child, in that I was autistic and a deep-feeling, highly expressive, emotional, intense being with lots of energy and a desire to see and to know and to understand and curiosity and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. That was just too much. But I was not going to be that person. I was going to be the type of person that fits into society and that is successful and that is going to get ahead of everyone else. I was put in my place to make sure that I would become something that I was not.
Now all these years later I am doing the work and recognizing the truth, which is that who I am, my identity, how I am naturally wired, and how I naturally show up in the world is very different from how I have been living. I am only really finding out who I am right now. I am meeting myself for the first time and coming to understand and align and feel into and express.
It is allowing me to come back into my body. My body is now becoming a safe space because of the work that I have been doing and integrating all these parts of myself. I have all these inner children, seven of them that I am very aware of and that I check in with, and they are all different ages and they all have different things that really rile them up and they come front and center and they fight or they flee. I have been paying attention to all these things and being present because I am now in my body and I can feel these things and notice what is happening in my body, in my being, in my present moment. I was never in my body before.
Doing the work allowed me to come back into the body. This is the embodying work. I think what happened when I came back into my body is that I became aware that I had PTSD, because all of a sudden everything became amplified. All of a sudden I was able to experience things from a totally different embodied perspective. That is the only way I can make sense of a lot of this.
How is it that at 42 years old all of a sudden I have just realized that I have PTSD and everywhere I go it affects me, but it did not affect me before? I think that is what it is. I was just not in my body. I was on autopilot, and I had turned off all the truth and all the stories that allowed me to access that reality, or that protected me from being able to see or feel or sense or be a part of my own experience of the world. I do not know. It is just a theory, and I am here to observe and make sense of things. I am not claiming to know the truth or that there is just one truth. It is all very subjective. But this is where I am at, recognizing that I have severe PTSD.
Yesterday was Ogoh-Ogoh Parade here in Bali, and it is a huge festivity with tons of tourists and crowd management, and it is my worst nightmare. It is incredible to witness, because I am somebody who worked at music festivals. I have loved festivals and people and gatherings and music and dance and being part of something, being together in numbers. This is something so valuable and appreciated in my world and my life. Now I cannot go. It is so insane what that experience is like for me and my body now.
There are so many people and they all have different moods and energies and they are all carrying different things and projecting different things. Some people are wearing a mask and pretending to be a certain way, and some people are just straight up being exactly who they are, and that is not pretty for a lot of people. I do not know, I just see so much truth in everything now, and I see through everything. Because I am such a deep feeler, I also feel what people are carrying. That sets off my triggers, my hypervigilance, and I am so aware of everything going on around me that I am tracking everything and it trips up my whole system.
I get super overwhelmed. I lose track of direction. Depending on who I am with, I cannot even keep up with someone if they are talking to me while I am trying to navigate. If there is no sense of direction and I do not know where I am going, it is really interesting to witness how lost I become. It is like my radar goes off. I do not know where I am. I do not know what I am doing. People are yapping at me and asking too many questions and asking what I need and asking me to make decisions, and that just overwhelms my system. I have no idea. I do not know what to say. I do not know what I want. I am just like, where are we going and how are we getting there? My brain just gets so overwhelmed. It needs to understand what is happening and where we are going and what the plan is, because it is spiraling out of control from all the sensory data all around.
It is so strange. I had a moment yesterday, and I am so grateful that I was with a neurodivergent friend who was able to meet me with such kindness, but I had to stop and just be like, I am so sorry, I need to take a break. I am overwhelmed. We got stuck in this huge mud patch and I was wearing flip-flops, so my feet were wet and slipping around in the mud, and mud is sensory and it was squishing and feeling so weird. I became obsessed with not being able to walk and feeling that feeling and knowing there was no way I could go on.
Then Jonah was like, do you want to go here, do you want to go there, do you want to do this, do you want to do that, how do we solve your problem? She was trying to help, but I was just so overwhelmed by all the questions and I did not know where we were and I did not know what direction to go. I did not feel comfortable asking someone if I could use their bathroom to wash my feet. I got so overwhelmed in that moment and I had to sit down and just say, I am so sorry, I just need to express that I am really overwhelmed and you are not doing anything wrong, but because there are so many questions and because I have to make decisions and my system cannot compute right now, I really need a minute to sit and gather myself.
She was so cool and chill and I am so grateful for that. That is why I want to spread awareness like this, because we need people to be able to understand, it is okay. It is okay to be overwhelmed. Our brains are just managing so much complex data and sometimes we need to take a moment and ground. That is what I did.
To be honest with you, it was raining and there were so many factors and people and noises and again the hypervigilance, alarms going off, and motorbikes, and I could feel all of this in my body, and then there were people yelling and fighting, and all these couples everywhere. I was just processing so much around me, and I cannot turn that off.
This is what my autistic experience of going out into the world, being at a festival or a parade or any environment with that many people and that much energy around, is like. It is so overwhelming. I managed to stick it through, but to be honest there was not much honoring of my needs. I was fully trapped. The crowd management was a huge issue. Honestly, it was super dangerous. They had so many people in a space where that many people could not move to get out.
I am not going to get into it, but I was just watching from afar. We found a safe place where I could perch and nobody would bump into me, because that physical thing of being touched or bumped into, even energetically, I cannot do it. It is so disturbing to my energy field. It really disrupts my ability to feel safe and not feel triggered over and over again.
I found a safe space and then I could people-watch. As long as I was safe from people’s energy and knew that I could just watch and not be interfered with, I was able to stand on this little perch and watch the crowd, which was crazy because there were thousands and thousands of people. They just kept yelling over and over on the microphone, please go behind the barricade, please go behind the barricade. They must have said it a million times, I am not joking. It just went on and on, and not a single person moved. The cops were not doing anything and the security was not doing anything. They are very passive and it was just so strange to me, this human experiment. What happens when you put all these people in this space and try to bring order and structure with people from all over the world, and so much entitlement and so many people checked out, lots of drunk people.
I just stood there and watched people and hid for as long as I possibly could. As soon as the first one came through, for me my big, big trigger is getting trapped, so I knew I had to be careful not to get myself in a place where I could become convinced or feel like I could not get out. There were many traps like that there, where they just had too many people and you cannot move a crowd like that very fast when there are thousands and thousands of people pushed up against each other. I could not get back to my bike. I had to walk 30 minutes home because there were literally no other options. I am lucky that I live right in the central area anyway.
That story came out because it is absolutely wild. I have another story that fits this topic, which is Songkran. Songkran is a three to nine day festival depending where you go, and what they do is, I guess it is about clearing, I do not know, but it is the water festival. For three days you are allowed to dump water on anyone outside all day, every day. It is the strangest premise in the world to me, but people have a ball. It is the most exciting thing in the world for people, tourists, locals, children especially, everyone. There is not a single person that does not jump in and play along. They have buckets of water everywhere and water guns and hoses and anything that can possibly contain water is used to attack people. Anyone. If you are rolling down the street with your suitcase and you just arrived, it does not matter. Welcome to Songkran. This is how it works. They are dumping water all over you.
As someone with PTSD, this is my worst nightmare in the world. Again, I had never known that I had PTSD. When I was in Thailand the last time I was there for Songkran, I got so triggered so many times that I went into rage. One of my trauma responses is anger and rage, and if I am defied, if people do not listen to my consent, if people do not care when I say no, and I make it very clear, please do not, no thank you, I am carrying my laptop, I am carrying my camera, I do not want water dumped on me. I have a right to say please do not do that. I do not like water on me. I am a sensory being. Having water on me creates textures and makes it cold and wet and that makes me really, really uncomfortable.
Unlike you, you are not having the same lived experience. You do not understand that it is just really uncomfortable. Please do not dump water on me. But I cannot say that to all the 30 people in my surrounding environment who are all looking at me waiting to attack me. So no matter where I went, I would just get so enraged that my consent was being broken and people were violating my space and dumping water on me and chasing after me. It was so strange to have people running at me. Children were laughing gleefully and I just wanted to murder. I was like, what the fuck, do not chase me and attack me.
My hypervigilance system saw it as a form of attack, because I was saying no and it was being ignored and I was being attacked with water. When this was happening to me and I did not know that I had PTSD, I was really upset with myself. I felt like something was seriously wrong with me, that I was becoming so angry and enraged and looking at people with a look on my face, because I am a very expressive being, that was like, do not fucking touch me, what have you done? I was genuinely so angry, and people would be like, what? They just did not understand how I could be so upset about something so fun and playful and like, what is the big deal? But I was having a very different experience than them, because I have PTSD. All my alarms were going off. I was ready to have a panic attack. There was this anger and rage, one of these inner children inside of me, saying, you cannot defy my consent, my rules. I do not want to be violated. I do not want water on me. I do not want to be run after. I do not want to feel unsafe leaving my house. I do not want to be in this space right now where I feel so unsafe.
All of this to say, it is very strange at this point in my life recognizing, oh, obviously I have PTSD. Obviously all this stuff that is happening is because of my brain and my nervous system and how it is wired. My whole life I have just been so hard on myself, so hard on myself, not understanding why I was reacting these ways and blaming myself and trying to make sense and trying to justify and validate. Now I know. Now that I know, it is something that I want to express to others so that they might be able to recognize it in themselves, because when we make sense of these things then we know how to respond.
Where I am at now is nervous system regulation, because that is how to respond to being in a body that is easily dysregulated, that has a small window of tolerance that needs to be grown and widened, that needs to feel safe and understand a baseline for safety, and a system that is going from high highs to low lows and jumping around all the time. I need to develop a baseline of just calm and just being slow. This conversation started with just allowing every moment to come, even if some of those moments include really difficult stuff that moves through, alarms that go off, feelings that come up, triggers that happen, desires to run, desires to flee, desires to criticize myself and micromanage. Just notice. Just notice all the stuff that is passing through and how it is affecting me, and just allow it to be without identifying with it and holding on and losing myself in it. That is the practice.
I feel really strange right now because I just had a bath and I put on a mud mask and it is finally starting to dry, and it is doing that thing where it is pulling my face, which feels so cool but also so weird while I am recording myself. I feel like I am walking around the room with a facelift. See, that just passed through me so naturally because that is what was alive in me while I was lying in the bath allowing myself to just witness what is present.
I think this is what I want to do, just notice the moments where there is something passing through that I want to capture. I think there will be different ways. Sometimes it will be a voice note like this, sometimes I will turn the camera on and talk to the camera.
I can see how this is all coming together. My 30-day challenge has really helped me to witness how jumping in front of a camera after spending a few minutes thinking about what I want to say actually comes really naturally. As soon as I am done with the three minutes I am like, let us go, I have so much more to say. I realize now that I could make lots and lots of content. I really have a lot to say. Now the practice is just becoming comfortable sharing what I have to say and knowing, of course, that by sharing what I have to say there is going to be reaction, and this is my work. My work is not to react to what comes back.
I do not mean to say that I ignore everything. I do think that there is probably constructive feedback to learn from and there is always the opportunity to see how people respond, and that is what I want to do. I want to be a journalist, to be honest with you. I want to observe and to express and to have conversations and bring things to light and bring things forward.
I have been obsessed with Louis Theroux, and he just came back with this manosphere documentary, which I am not ready to talk about because I get really riled up. This is actually relevant to what I am talking about now. In doing these three-minute videos I started realizing that I have more to say and that I can just turn on the camera and speak for three minutes or five minutes or whatever it is about a variety of different things. There are so many things happening in my life. I watch a lot of content and that content affects me. I want to be able to just grab the camera and feel comfortable saying, here is my thought piece on what I just experienced. I want to be able to do that.
After I had that 30-day challenge revelation around, oh wow, I can really start to share a lot more, I realized that I have a knack for this. Then I started thinking, well, I have got to get used to sharing my opinions, because that is the thing that feels hard, sharing what I think. When I shared what I thought as a child it was punished and I was silenced. My body, my being, my psyche remembers what it is like to share opinions. I am here to do that work. I was silenced in the way that I was silenced so that I could learn to walk the path of reclaiming and regaining my voice that was taken away.
That fear that I feel is fucking real. It is so real and it stops me from speaking and it stops me from making videos and it creates visibility issues and it creates all this freeze and avoidance. Subconsciously there is just so much going on because of my lived experience and my trauma around speaking my truth, using my voice, saying how I feel and what I think. I am here to fight that fight. That is so alive in me right now, that I am here to do that work, to reclaim my voice and fucking say what I think. Because when I am here by myself in my own little world, I am thinking and processing a lot of things that make sense to me and that I am proud of even and that I would like to share with others. I would like to find other people who feel that way too. I would like to associate with those people, and I would like to speak to the people who do not agree and hear them out if they can express themselves in respectful, intelligible ways that are not projecting anger and nonsense, because I am not opening myself up to projections of anger and nonsense. That is not what I am here for.
I am here for observations. I am here for rapport. I am here for emotionally mature, emotionally regulated conversations. I am here for it and so open to it. I want to hear how people are living and what they are experiencing and where they are coming from. That is a reason why I want to share, because I am interested in the discourse. I am just not interested in the bullying and the attacking and the criticizing and the one-sided bullshit.
As I was realizing this, that I need to get used to putting my opinions out there without having a fucking heart attack, because it is true, even the slightest thing that I have put on the internet where I have an opinion that might not be everyone’s, or everyone might not agree with what I am saying or the way that I say it, I feel that when I put it out in the world. It subconsciously sits with me when I go on the internet and I am kind of afraid to open my Facebook. I feel that fear. It is resonant. It is there. That is the work that I am doing, not hiding or pretending that fear is not there, but acknowledging it and being able to redirect and remind myself that I do not need to fear these things. I do not need to allow other people’s opinions to create these feelings in me. It is me who is creating those feelings in response to them, and I need to be aware when I create that fear, because there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Those people are not making me feel that way. I am feeling that way because of my conditioning. Still, I am the one conjuring up those feelings. I need to do the work to recognize when I go to fear like that and to remember there is nothing to fear. I am allowed to speak. No one is going to come and attack me.
The reality is that I am allowed to have opinions and people are going to disagree, and that is okay. I accept that. I just do not want to live with fear anymore. This is the work. This is the practice.
As soon as I was thinking about all this, I watched Louis Theroux’s manosphere film and I had such an emotional response to every moment of that film. I literally had my hands on my face in shock and awe. There are so many things I do not even want to talk about right now, but what I noticed was that these people are sharing polarizing opinions, and polarization is what gets people’s attention. This fear that I have of sharing my opinions, which may be polarizing because they have not been heard or because people have been too afraid to speak them, these are the things that I actually want to talk about. These are the things I want to call into the light. These are the things I want to say. These are the truths I want to speak.
That is fucking terrifying, because when you start to speak truths, people attack, people respond, people come at you. It just made me realize that that is what I am here to do. I am here to be that person, and that feels so real for me. My clear cognizance is just like, yes, this is true. You are here to speak truth. I have been in training my whole life to gain this skill, this ability to let myself speak the truth without being in fear of what will come back in response, because what comes back in response is legitimate. Those are people’s feelings and observations. They may or may not be right, but people are going to have them regardless, and I do not need to take that on. That is not mine. I do not have to create feelings about that. I know where I stand. I stand in my integrity. I know what I think, and that will change based on the data I have to work with, based on my lived experience, based on the questions I ask people, the perspectives I hear, based on being open and curious. I will be able to learn more, and that is why I am having these discourses and that is why I am speaking truth and that is why I want to put that out there.
I cannot live in fear if that is the person I am, to be the one who asks the questions, the one who speaks the truth, and is able to have the difficult conversations, the emotionally mature conversation. That is what I am here for. That feels so real in me. Watching that documentary, I realized I want this for myself. I would love to be a journalist. I would love to be an interviewer. I would love to have a talk show. I want to speak with people and I want to live from a place where there is no fear expressing my lived experience, because my lived experience is so different from the average person and we need to have more perspectives of different experiences, because we are all living out here together. We have to share the space and we have to have loving energy in the space. We cannot just project anger and fear everywhere we go. We cannot divide everything. We cannot separate. We cannot dog-eat-dog each other out of the way. It does not work.
Maybe in some ways it does work, but it makes a really shitty life for a lot of us. I can tell you from the perspective of someone who has been poor and who has had disadvantages while also having a lot of privilege, that life can be really hard. It is hard to get out from underneath in this system, in this place where everyone is unkind and fucking each other over just to get ahead. You do not have to fuck people over to get ahead. You do not have to get ahead. We can all just exist and coexist. I know it is not that simple, but let us look at different ways of living, because the way we are living now, we are in trouble. It is just not a nice place to live. Everyone feels persecuted. Everyone is living in fear.
Sometimes I feel so lonely in my little bubble and I wonder how I got to this place where I have no connections and I have just been surviving for so long. Then I realize what a blessing. What a truly privileged, lucky person I am to live in my own little bubble. I am safe here. I am away from noise. I may not have many things. I have no clothes. I have no belongings. I am living such a minimal life, and I am on my own and I have been for a long time and I do not have a support system. It is really easy to be like, why? It is also easy to be like, wow, I am the luckiest person in the world. There is so much pain and suffering and hatred out there. There are so many traps. There are so many ways to get stuck in places that we cannot get out of and that we do not want to be in and that are totally dysregulating and not favorable, joyful, even manageable ways of living.
I am just so grateful for everything that I have and for everything that I am building and becoming, because there is so, so much available to me and I am only just waking up to that now. It is up to me to claim it and to own it.
That was one of the things in the manosphere piece that I was really listening to. No one is going to fucking give you this. No one is just going to come around and make your life easier. You have to go out there and get it. I believe that. I really do. A lot of what they were saying really is grounded in reality. This system has fucked us. It fucked them. They did not have proper parenting. They had emotional neglect. They had abuse, like me. I can relate to so many of the people in that movie who are out to survive the best they can, and in the world they are living in, that translates to fucking other people over to get your way, scamming them. That is where they have got it wrong.
I believe that we can go out there and make a living aligned with who we truly are. We have got to access ourselves and deal with our shit and let ourselves lead from a place of love and not fear. That is what I am here to do, spread this message. We can make a living aligned with our skills and our abilities. We all have a purpose and things that we are good at. We do not have to fuck each other over and try to dominate in all these different areas and force ourselves to be what the system wants us to chase after.
We all have our own unique paths that we can tend to, and we can support one another and we can accept one another and just let one another be whoever the fuck we are, stop judging and criticizing. What if we could just live and let live? I know these are all really big ideologies, sure, but that is what I am living for. That is how I am showing up in the world. I am dealing with my shit. I am accountable. I am standing in my integrity. I believe that is how others can live too. I think we can share this planet and live in it together and support one another no matter how different we all are, because we are all different. It is not neurotypical and neurodivergent, it is every single human being having a vastly different experience of life. We are all here to experience things.
My goodness, 57 minutes.
Grateful, grateful for moments we can capture of what is passing through, because if it is still alive in me, it means so much to me. I am such a passionate being. I always have been. This stuff is just inside and brewing, and now I am ready to express it and live it and honor it and capture it and put it out there so that those that align with it can come forward and we can connect and build this movement of people who believe in what is possible, believe that the world does not have to be the way it is today. We can do better. Bear with me. Let us connect. Let us build a network. I am grateful.
Threads
Privacy as Nervous System Safety
Summary
I am recognizing how deeply my nervous system depends on privacy and protection from being perceived. When people can pass by my space, look in, or appear at any moment, my body cannot fully settle. Silence and enclosure are not luxuries for me, they are conditions that allow my system to come out of vigilance.
Lesson / Teaching
What looks minor from the outside, like someone walking past a window or glancing into a room, can be profoundly dysregulating for a body shaped by trauma and hypervigilance. Safety is often far more environmental and sensory than other people realize.
Tags: being-perceived, privacy-needs, hypervigilance, nervous-system-safety, trauma-triggers
Capturing What Passes Through
Summary
I am seeing that my ideas do not arrive in a linear, scheduled way. They move through me in bursts, and when I try to hold them mentally for later, I lose the aliveness of them. What works is catching them in the moment, mic on, voice on, before my mind tries to organize them into something performative.
Lesson / Teaching
My creative process is not built for stockpiling insights and packaging them later. It is built for live capture, trusting the moment, and honoring expression while it is still embodied and true.
Tags: creative-process, content-as-documentation, voice-notes, what-passes-through-the-channel, authentic-expression
Free Flow Versus Internal Regimentation
Summary
I am noticing how hard it is for me to simply free flow through a day without structure, self-monitoring, or pressure. Part of me needs routine because it helps me stay resourced, but another part of me is desperate for relief from constant management. I am trying to learn when structure serves me and when it becomes another form of captivity.
Lesson / Teaching
Healing is not about rejecting structure altogether. It is about distinguishing between supportive structure and trauma-driven self-control that keeps me in a state of internal surveillance.
Tags: structure-and-flow, self-monitoring, regulation-practices, internal-pressure, healing-practice
Masking Through Studying Others
Summary
I am realizing that I have spent so much of my life studying people, learning how to respond, how to match them, and how to be received. I was not simply socializing, I was analyzing and emulating in order to survive. That has made it harder to know who I am underneath adaptation.
Lesson / Teaching
When identity is built through survival-based attunement to others, authentic selfhood can remain buried for decades. Reclaiming identity requires noticing the difference between natural relating and strategic self-erasure.
Tags: masking, identity-reclamation, neurodivergence, social-adaptation, selfhood
Internalized Surveillance Becomes Self-Prison
Summary
I am becoming aware that the watcher who used to live outside me now lives inside me. I track myself constantly, monitor every movement and choice, and carry a running sense of what should be better. It is exhausting, and I can see now how this has made me feel like a prisoner in my own life.
Lesson / Teaching
Trauma does not always leave when the environment changes. Often it becomes internalized as self-surveillance, making freedom impossible until the pattern itself is named and interrupted.
Tags: internalized-control, self-surveillance, trauma-patterns, hyper-awareness, awakening
PTSD Beneath Sensory Overload
Summary
I am recognizing that what I thought was only amplified autism is also severe PTSD moving through an already sensitive system. My sensory experiences are real, but what is making them unbearable is the trauma state beneath them: the vigilance, the threat response, the inability to settle. This distinction changes everything for me.
Lesson / Teaching
The same sensory event can have very different meanings depending on whether a person is simply sensitive or actively living in threat detection. Understanding the role of PTSD creates a more precise and compassionate path to regulation.
Tags: ptsd-realization, sensory-overload, autism-and-trauma, nervous-system-regulation, embodied-awareness
Coming Back Into the Body
Summary
I think part of why everything feels amplified now is because I am finally in my body. I dissociated long ago to survive trauma, numbed out, and lived on autopilot. Now that I am doing the work of embodiment and integrating parts of myself, I can feel what was always there.
Lesson / Teaching
Embodiment can initially feel worse before it feels better, because returning to the body also means returning to sensations, memories, and truth that dissociation once muted. Feeling more is not always regression, sometimes it is contact.
Tags: embodiment, dissociation, trauma-recovery, inner-children, healing-integration
Overwhelm Needs Witness Not Fixing
Summary
At the parade, I hit a point where my system could not process more input, decisions, or questions. What helped was not problem-solving, but being allowed to pause, gather myself, and be understood without pressure. That moment showed me how meaningful co-regulation can be.
Lesson / Teaching
When someone is overwhelmed, more questions can become more stimuli. Often the most supportive response is spaciousness, reduced demand, and calm companionship rather than immediate solutions.
Tags: overwhelm, co-regulation, support-needs, autistic-experience, decision-fatigue
Consent Violations as Trauma Activation
Summary
My memories of festivals like Songkran make more sense now through the lens of PTSD. What looked to others like fun and play felt to my body like invasion, violation, and attack, especially when my no was ignored. The rage I felt was not random, it was a trauma response to broken consent.
Lesson / Teaching
A body shaped by trauma does not experience forced contact as harmless, even when it is culturally normalized or socially framed as playful. Consent is not a minor preference, it is often a nervous system boundary.
Tags: consent, trauma-activation, rage-response, sensory-boundaries, festival-overwhelm
Reclaiming Voice Through Public Expression
Summary
I am seeing that my work is not only to heal privately, but to speak publicly. Sharing my opinions, truths, and observations brings up fear because my voice was punished early on. Still, I know that reclaiming voice is part of my path, and that I am being called toward expression, discourse, and visible truth-telling.
Lesson / Teaching
Visibility work is often trauma work. The fear of speaking is not evidence that I should stay silent, it may be the exact territory where healing, purpose, and contribution converge.
Tags: reclaiming-voice, visibility-healing, truth-telling, public-expression, creative-courage
Journalism as Purposeful Witnessing
Summary
I feel drawn toward journalism, interviewing, and emotionally mature discourse. I want to observe, ask questions, and bring truth to light without collapsing into reactivity. This feels less like a random ambition and more like a deeper naming of what I have always been practicing.
Lesson / Teaching
Sometimes purpose reveals itself through the patterns that have always been present. A lifetime of observing, tracking, and making meaning can become a vocation when it is reclaimed consciously.
Tags: journalistic-instinct, interviewer-identity, meaning-making, discourse, life-purpose
Building a Different Way of Living
Summary
I keep arriving at the same conviction, that we do not have to build lives through domination, fear, or harming each other to survive. I believe we can make a living aligned with our nature, deal with our wounds, and coexist with more integrity. This feels idealistic, but it also feels like the deepest truth I know.
Lesson / Teaching
Visionary thinking is not naive simply because it challenges dominant survival systems. Sometimes the most practical work is refusing to normalize the forms of living that are making everyone sick.
Tags: collective-healing, alternative-systems, integrity, embodied-leadership, worldview
Quotes
“This is my dream. This is what I think I have been so desperate for, silence.”
“I have never known how to just be, how to just be me.”
“I feel like a prisoner in my own life because everything is regimented and everything is thought through.”
“This is PTSD. That is not my autism.”
“I was only really finding out who I am right now. I am meeting myself for the first time.”
“I was silenced in the way that I was silenced so that I could learn to walk the path of reclaiming and regaining my voice.”