In this reflection, I explore how learning to honor my unique capacity is transforming my everyday life. Living in a quiet environment, receiving meaningful sensory accommodations, and developing daily rituals involving water, sunlight, and meditation have given me a level of nervous system safety I’ve never experienced before. I reflect on the emotional significance of being understood, the loneliness of living differently, and my ongoing journey of unmasking and reclaiming the parts of myself I once judged as weird. A developing friendship signals a meaningful shift after years of isolation. Despite having very little financial security, I feel deeply fulfilled by the life I’m creating. As I continue searching for aligned part-time work and developing my creative projects, I’m practicing trust in the process while acknowledging the uncertainty that remains.
THREADS
1. Building a Life Around My Capacity
Status: signature-thread
Summary
I’m recognizing that my capacity is unique to my brain, body, and nervous system, and I’m giving myself permission to organize my life around what I can actually sustain. After spending much of my life burning myself out trying to function according to expectations that didn’t accommodate my needs, I’m learning to make gradual adjustments to how I live. This isn’t something I can figure out overnight. It’s an ongoing process of discovering my needs, recognizing my limits, and building a life that increasingly supports them.
Lesson / Teaching
Living in alignment with my capacity requires ongoing experimentation and incremental adjustments, not a single decision to change my life.
Tags: honoring-capacity, neurodivergent-living, self-accommodation, sustainable-living, burnout-recovery, life-by-design, self-acceptance
Domain Categories: neurodivergence, nervous-system, self-actualization
2. Environmental Safety Changes My Nervous System
Status: signature-thread
Summary
I’m experiencing what it feels like to live in an environment where my nervous system can finally relax. Finding a quiet home in Bali and having a landlord who understands my sensory needs have given me a sense of safety that I don’t remember ever having before. The simple accommodation of receiving advance notice before noisy activities has been profoundly meaningful, especially after years of experiencing distress, meltdowns, and misunderstanding. I’m recognizing how much of my chronic dysregulation has been connected to environments that don’t accommodate my sensory experience.
Lesson / Teaching
Environmental accommodations can fundamentally change my experience of safety and regulation. Sometimes the most meaningful support is simply being understood and given the information needed to care for myself.
Tags: environmental-accommodations, sensory-sensitivity, hyperacusis, nervous-system-safety, sensory-overload, disability-accommodations, feeling-understood
Domain Categories: nervous-system, neurodivergence, trauma-and-healing
3. Regulation Through Water and Daily Rituals
Status: recurring
Summary
I’m developing daily routines that respond directly to what my body needs. Hot baths, cold showers, swimming, sunlight, breathing, and meditation have become essential parts of how I regulate myself. Water is particularly important to me, and I’m noticing how quickly I can reset when I have access to it throughout the day. What might look like luxury or indulgence from the outside is actually part of how I care for my highly sensitive system.
Lesson / Teaching
Self-accommodation can mean making supportive sensory experiences accessible throughout everyday life rather than waiting until I’m overwhelmed to address my needs.
Tags: nervous-system-regulation, water-as-regulation, sensory-regulation, daily-rituals, embodied-self-care, self-accommodation, body-awareness
Domain Categories: nervous-system, personal-experimentation
4. Reclaiming Weirdness Through the Unmasking Process
Status: signature-thread
Summary
I’m reflecting on how much of my life I’ve spent monitoring, controlling, and editing myself to make other people comfortable. I learned to perform connection and friendship while suppressing the spontaneous expressions, movements, sounds, and behaviors that naturally arise in me. Through awakening and unmasking, I’ve become aware of the internal voice that judges and shames these expressions. I’m reaching a place where I can recognize my weirdness as part of who I am rather than something I’m doing wrong, and I’m discovering genuine affection for the person I am when I stop suppressing myself.
Lesson / Teaching
Unmasking involves more than changing outward behavior. It also means recognizing and releasing the internalized judgment that makes authentic expression feel dangerous.
Tags: unmasking, authentic-self-expression, internalized-shame, self-monitoring, identity-reclamation, self-acceptance, neurodivergent-expression, conditioning
Domain Categories: identity-and-becoming, neurodivergence, trauma-and-healing
5. From Social Isolation to Authentic Connection
Status: developing
Summary
I’m noticing a meaningful shift in my relational life as a new friendship becomes part of my everyday experience. After more than a decade of largely living without close relationships, I’ve learned to embrace solitude while also recognizing how my sensitivity and different ways of relating have contributed to isolation. I can see how much energy I previously invested in performing friendship and trying to become what others expected. Having a friend again feels significant, particularly as I’m learning to accept my natural way of relating rather than interpreting it as a lack of relational skills.
Lesson / Teaching
Relating differently does not necessarily mean lacking relational ability. Recognizing the difference allows me to question the expectations I’ve internalized about how connection should look.
Tags: authentic-connection, social-isolation, relational-differences, neurodivergent-relationships, belonging, unmasking, friendship, self-acceptance
Domain Categories: identity-and-becoming, neurodivergence, trauma-and-healing
6. Finding Fulfillment Without Financial Security
Status: developing
Summary
I’m experiencing a striking contradiction between my external circumstances and my internal sense of fulfillment. I have very little money, few possessions, and significant financial uncertainty, yet I feel happier than I have in a long time. My sensory needs are being accommodated, I have a home where I feel safe, I’m developing a friendship, and I’m engaged in meaningful creative work. I’m not denying that financial instability keeps part of me in survival mode, but I’m recognizing that other essential dimensions of my life are finally being fulfilled.
Lesson / Teaching
Financial security matters, but it isn’t the only form of security. Meeting my physical, emotional, relational, and sensory needs has changed my experience of life even while my financial circumstances remain unresolved.
Tags: financial-survival, nonmaterial-fulfillment, nervous-system-safety, life-alignment, personal-values, security-and-belonging, gratitude
Domain Categories: self-actualization, meaning-making, nervous-system
7. Trusting the Process of Finding Aligned Work
Status: recurring
Summary
I’m continuing to look for part-time work that supports my financial needs without consuming the time and energy I want to devote to Making JGB. The repeated rejection and lack of response to applications are frustrating, but I’m experimenting with approaching opportunities from a place of confidence and excitement rather than worry. Applying for a role with an LGBTQ podcast reminded me how good it feels to imagine work that genuinely fits my interests and abilities. I’m trying to trust that I can find work that supports the life I’m building rather than requiring me to abandon it.
Lesson / Teaching
I’m learning to remain engaged in the practical work of finding employment while questioning how much additional suffering I create through anticipation and worry.
Tags: aligned-work, trusting-the-process, financial-survival, sustainable-employment, job-search, creative-autonomy, life-by-design, uncertainty
Domain Categories: business-and-systems, self-actualization, meaning-making
TRANSCRIPT
I’m officially hitting record. I feel so, so good. I’m in my happy place.
I know I’ve mentioned this in another recording, but in case people think this is weird, this space is in the bath. It’s where my body relaxes and feels secure, and all the stresses melt away.
I’ve come to notice that I can express myself so much better when I’m in this place of comfort and ease, when I’m grounded. So I have bath sessions, which feels weird to me, to be honest, but it serves a purpose, and it is what it is.
I have been lying here for, oh my God, I don’t know, at least half an hour in the bath.
This is one of my activities, my daily activities. I have a bath at least once a day, sometimes multiple times a day, often multiple times a day.
It’s like a spa thing for me. It’s the ultimate gift to myself that I can do this.
I have an incredible bathtub, and the tank is like a 1,200 tank that I can fill this thing up with steaming hot, fucking way-too-hot water. It is amazing.
Quite often in Bali, you’ll get this big, beautiful bathtub, and it’s only got like a 30 tank on it. I don’t know what the liters are. That’s why I’m like 30, 1,200.
But I’ve been in many places where you go to fill this gorgeous, huge ceramic tub, and the hot water gets literally up to your ankles, if you’re lucky, and then it’s all cold water. It’s like, what’s the point? It defeats the purpose.
I’m blessed.
Now I have this fucking amazing bath in my half-outdoor, half-indoor bathroom, so I can look out at the sky and I can see all the birds going back and forth.
It’s sunset now, so the light hue of pink starts to appear and deepen, and gosh, I’m so blessed.
And so, yes, I figure this into my day at least once.
Actually, my routine lately. Let’s talk routines, because the only reason I’m able to survive this life is because I’ve learned how to take care of my highly sensitive body.
That’s one of the reasons I’m recording myself and talking about this, because I know there’s so many of you out there struggling.
I’m healing a deeply dysregulated, chronically dysregulated nervous system. And I’ve got all that fun autoimmune stuff, MCAS and POTS and other fun things.
And so I have to learn to live with what my body is capable of.
I have a capacity. It’s my own unique capacity.
And I now give myself permission to live in a way that meets my capacity.
I’ve been burning myself out my whole life trying to live in a way that is not aligned with how my brain works or how my nervous system works.
And look, it’s not easy to just snap your fingers.
I could have snapped it with my hands or what? I don’t know. I lost my train of thought. Welcome to ADHD land.
I snap my fingers, and it just strikes me so much that I can’t remember what I was talking about.
It’ll come back to me.
Yes, living a life aligned with my needs.
It’s not as easy as snapping your fingers. It’s really quite complicated, but it’s possible.
And it’s a work in progress. It doesn’t just get figured out.
You’ve got to slowly, slowly adjust life in ways that incrementally get better, and you learn your capacity along the way.
So, for example, I now live in the middle of a field where it’s absolutely silent, which is apparently very hard to find in Bali.
It took me like seven months, six months at least, to find my place.
But I found it.
And so my nervous system feels so safe here because there’s nothing that just suddenly appears. There’s no motorbikes. There’s no lawnmowers.
And that’s not true. There are lawnmowers.
But get this.
My landlord understands that I have a disability.
And I have to use that language with him, even though I don’t love that mindset. I do have to use that language because people don’t understand.
For me, it creates serious distress to be around sounds and frequencies that dysregulate my body.
And that’s why I’m so chronically dysregulated, because I’ve been living in a world where everything is so loud.
I have a condition called hyperacusis, and I’ve just been burning myself out being around all this noise.
And people don’t understand.
Of course they don’t understand. They’ve never lived this. How could they understand?
But my landlord, I love him to death. He gets it.
He sees how I respond when there’s a motorbike around.
I’m so grateful he gets it.
And so he sends me messages before they’re going to use the lawnmowers.
I’m going to cry because he gets me.
Because I have been living all over the world, and I’ve been getting increasingly more and more sensitive.
And there was nowhere I could go in the world. There’s just no silence, and people don’t understand.
I’ve had genuine meltdowns where my whole system just completely shuts down, and I can’t talk, and I start panicking, and I am visibly not okay.
And people just stand there and stare at me.
Honestly, a lot of the time they laugh because they don’t understand what’s happening, and it’s uncomfortable.
This has happened so many times to me that I’ve had to come to understand that this is like a defense mechanism.
People are not laughing at me, you know, but they just don’t know how to react.
And so it’s been so hard to find a place where people understand that I need some support and I need some accommodations.
Just give me a heads-up.
Just let me know.
I don’t mind leaving. I don’t mind taking care of my needs.
I just need to know when. I need to know, you know?
And so I finally am in this place where my landlord understands, and he tells me before there’s going to be noise.
And I’m blessed.
That’s one accommodation that I’ve been able to afford myself, and I had to work really fucking hard to get it.
I’m saying this because you’re not just going to magically find the perfect place.
I really think that it is a commitment we have to make for ourselves, to show up and show that we want it and make the efforts.
And that doesn’t mean we’re going to find it right away.
It means we’re going to have to discover what we want, and most of the time that is a process of understanding what we don’t want.
And so it’s worth it.
I feel like this is an accommodation that has changed my life.
So I can wake up now. I’m fully regulated all the time.
I sleep deeply because my nervous system knows nothing is going to jump out of nowhere.
I’m literally in a silent field.
So that has given me a baseline that I’ve never had before.
I’m very serious when I say I’ve never had it, and that’s a story for another time.
But I see how having this baseline now is allowing me to start my days in a conscious way.
And so one of the first things I do is get outside in the sun.
I do some breathing and some meditation, and then I get really fucking hot because I’m right in the sun. The sun rises right over my place.
And when I’m super hot, I just jump in the water.
It’s the most regulating shock.
I’m a water baby too. I’m not a water sign, but I am all about shorelines, and water helps me to process a lot.
It’s a beautiful reset.
It’s the same with the bath. I’m just obsessed.
My body is like, give me water.
And that’s another accommodation I make for myself, providing my body with what it screams for.
Water. Jumping in the pool and having cold showers and hot baths.
So these are other accommodations that might look like little luxuries.
Now I get to have a bath in the middle of the day if I feel like it.
I get to jump in the pool, literally just tear my clothes off and jump in the pool and cool off.
I’ve never been able to just do that, you know, and reset like that on the spot.
It’s so invigorating. It’s so good for me. It’s good for my system. I can feel it.
And what else do I do?
I’m careful with my food. I’m relatively careful with my food.
I like to eat whatever I want at lunch, and then I’m very good about everything else.
I need to have some rebellion.
That’s the structure versus “don’t tell me what to do” that are constantly ADHD versus autism.
I think that’s what it is, but who knows?
The constant battle.
Anyway, life is moving forward.
The last time I checked in, I think I probably mentioned that I’ve been spending more time with my friend, Umut.
And it’s actually becoming a thing in my life.
I have a friend.
And I truly, genuinely haven’t had a friend in so long.
I’ve been living through a very long chapter of isolation.
It’s been over 12 years that I’ve been really without a partner, without a strong connection or relationship.
I did have some friends here and there, and they didn’t stand the test of awakening and my whole life changing.
And so I really have adjusted to living a solo life.
I’ve come to learn to love it, and I embrace it.
This is something I’ve accepted about myself, that as a highly sensitive being, I can’t go out in the world like other people.
And I don’t have the same relational… I was going to say skills, but it’s not skills.
It’s just I relate differently. Period.
I’m also energetically very sensitive, and so being around other people’s presence and what they’re carrying or what they’re processing…
I’m such a porous being that I take in a lot of that, and that’s my work, to learn not to do that.
But that is one of the reasons I’ve been so alone.
And I’m sure many people can relate to this.
We’ve been ostracized a lot because we’re weird and we’re different, and people don’t get us.
And when they don’t understand something or something’s uncomfortable, it means that they reject you.
It’s just the way the world works, and it’s fucked.
And we’ve also heard a lot of conditioning that isn’t serving us well at this point in our life.
And now we have to reclaim our way of living.
[Extended repetition and unclear transcription omitted.]
I was monitoring, controlling myself, and masking so highly all the time, and trying to feed people what they wanted to hear and give it to them in a way that they wanted to receive it.
And there was so much going on in terms of performing connection and friendship.
And if I allowed myself to be myself, I came across as weird.
And then I would have these horrible moments afterwards of shame, like, why the fuck did I say that?
I never heard those voices in my head, but once I became aware of them, there was this voice constantly judging and shaming and monitoring.
And becoming aware of that voice is part of this process of awakening and releasing ourselves from this prison of fucking overthinking.
There’s a bat! There’s a bat!
A bat just came in and flew over me twice.
Oh, a little bit of the life of living in nature.
Yeah, visited by a bat in the bath.
See, that part of me just came forward and said that that way.
I don’t fucking know why. I just talk that way.
That’s what I was saying.
I used to be so afraid that I would let those little moments out and I would be acting weird, and people would react to it.
And I would be so hard on myself for being weird.
And now I’ve just gotten to a point in my life where I realize, wait a minute.
I’m not being weird. I’m not acting weird. I am weird. I’m just weird, and that’s totally fucking okay.
I really love who I am.
I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not hurting anyone.
I’m just a funny, strange… I don’t know.
I just say what I think and what passes through me.
I don’t know. I just move through the world very differently.
And all my life that was attacked and dangerous and met with rejection and criticism and judgment.
And I was told how not to be constantly.
And gosh, I just repressed every part of myself.
It’s so sad.
It’s so sad that we’ve done this.
But realizing it is beautiful too, because then that allows us to actually step out of that way of being.
There’s nothing wrong with us.
It’s okay for us to be weird and to think differently and to process and express differently.
Fuck, I make so many weird noises and voices.
I have twitches. Ever since I started unmasking, I have had tics, and they feel so comfortable.
It’s almost like my body is like, oh, I wanted to express that movement of energy.
It’s like I get this, and my whole shoulder goes forward, or I’ll twitch my…
Oh boy.
I’m trying to name my body parts, and I can’t figure out which body part is which.
Language access, please.
I just lost track of whatever that was about.
Okay, it’s getting dark, and I can see the bugs now.
I actually have to hide under the water so they don’t snack on me.
I’m grateful I documented.
I’m excited that I’m working with my prototypes for my client.
I delivered one this week, and that felt really good. Or last week, I guess.
And now I’m working on another one that I’m going to deliver this week.
And I’m working on my podcast with Randy.
We’re going to meet on Wednesday and Thursday, actually on Thursday and Friday, to record a podcast together.
Oh my goodness.
And I have a friend, and I have a social life, and I’m taking care of my body and my being and my capacity and my needs.
And guess what?
I have fucking nothing.
I have no money. I don’t own anything. I desperately need clothes.
I’m eating on a budget.
I have nothing, and I’ve never been happier.
Because the things that need to be fulfilled, the important things, are fulfilled.
The security, the high-sensitivity needs are covered.
I’m no longer just…
Wow, I was going to say I’m no longer surviving.
I am still stuck in survival mode because I don’t have money coming in.
But I’m very confident that I will find a job because I have been applying for jobs.
That’s the other part of this update.
I applied for an LGBTQ podcast that just felt like a hundred bucks when I applied.
It was like, this is my job. This is my job.
And even just having that attitude made me like, wait a minute, why don’t I have this attitude for everything?
Because it feels fucking good to just be like, yes, this is my job. I’m getting this job. I want my job. I want my life to be this job.
I’ve got to bring the positive energy because sometimes the fucking rejection constantly, of interviews and sending out proposal after proposal, and they don’t even fucking look at it.
They don’t even look at it.
It can be very frustrating.
But I’m going to keep showing up, and I’m going to get that job.
And you know what?
I’m going to get the one that suits me the most in the universe.
Well, I figured this out.
I will land exactly what I’m meant to land.
And I know that the lesson here is to just trust in the process and not create all that extra time of worrying.
Just trust.
I am going to find the job that works for me.
I’m looking for 20 hours a week that I can do something that comes naturally, that I’m good at, that I’m interested in, that I can just set aside that time and show up to it and enjoy the work. And then the rest of the time is for me and Making JGB and building my studios and bringing my vision and my story to life.
It’s going to happen. It’s all happening. Okay, great update. Bye!