(This post was available a week early to Patreon supporters.)
The picture is my sister and me, on my birthday. I’m holding a little replica of Brambles, the name we gave the giant bush in the alley that we used as a secret hideout, where we cut out two rooms and a little hallway between. Domini made the replica for me, and I love it.
I turned 40 on August 11.
40 feels significant.
The word quarantine comes from the Italian quaranta, referencing the 40 days that ships were isolated during the bubonic plague. I turned forty in this time of quarantine.
In Christian mythology, a big part of my own cultural background, 40 is also significant. 40 days and 40 nights of flooding. 40 days fasting in the desert. 40 years wandering. There is often something significant on the other side of 40. Some new beginning. Possibility.
And, too, I’m reading Astrid the Unstoppable to Astrid at bedtime, and the book makes the point regularly that round-number birthdays are a big deal!
I approached 40 with exhaustion and more than a little despair.
Everything has been feeling impossible.
I know that’s dramatic, but it’s also true.
It’s been hard to see value in my work.
Earlier in the season, I had to significantly cut back my narrative practice, and pause working with new community members because I was having so many panic attacks and my health was so unpredictable. What is the good of an unreliable narrative therapist?
In my community organizing, I have felt ineffective and unreliable. Important projects, projects that really matter to me, have been indefinitely postponed. Group conversations went in difficult directions, and it felt like my fault – I didn’t anticipate the direction and I fumbled my responses. What is the good of an underprepared facilitator?
In my contract work, time has slipped past with little progress being made. The same is true in my day job, and in my own personal projects.
I haven’t been writing – not in my journal, not on my blog, not for any of my many started-and-stalled collective documents.
I haven’t even been doing tarot, for months!, with only a handful of exceptions.
Everywhere, failure. False starts. Fumbles.
Everywhere, disappointment.
That’s what I brought to the day I turned 40.
But despite what I brought to it, the day was full of joy and hope and light, and in the last couple weeks I’ve been trying to figure out how to invite more of that into my life. How to turn towards what sustains me. How to find my way back to a sense of myself as possible, a sense of myself as worthy.
On my birthday, Joe and I spent the day together, went for a long walk along the river and drank good coffee. His card to me reminded me of the connection we share, our friendship and love. (And it included stick figures! My favourite!)
I connected with some of my favourite people. (And Nathan told me a bit about the stars on that day, and in my natal chart. Venus and Pluto, helping me get through this dark time.)
And then my mom and sister picked me up for a secret birthday dinner, which turned out to be entirely magical.
We had a lovely charcuterie picnic dinner (including a rice krispie square cake), and then… the gifts.
I arrived in this year feeling so disconnected from the good things about myself.
Mom and Domini tethered me back to myself. To the parts of me that I have chosen and cultivated over time, to the things I care about and the actions I’ve taken to invite those things into my life. And to the self that has been here for 40 years, loving things and doing things and being loved.
All of the gifts came with a note and were connected to a memory.
One gift was a copy of Beethoven Lives Upstairs, with a note that reads, I remember you listened to this a lot when you were little. One night your dad asked what you wanted to listen to. (You were only 3!) You told him but he put on different music. Your little voice called out, “Daddy that’s not the right music!”
Another was an envelope containing black lipstick and liquid eyeliner. The note – When you were a teenager, these were 2 items that were staples in your wardrobe department!
A travel journal, and the note – This reminds me of how you have wanted to travel! Like going to Europe; seeing things, planning the trip, expanding who you were becoming. Going to Australia for school! Another trip that built on your development as a person. Going to Jasper by bus! That, for me, would have taken a lot of courage. So proud of where you have been; it helped you become YOU!
A paper doll, a tin of Earl Grey tea, a jar of garlic and pesto. A telescope for watching the stars. All with notes and memories.
And letters from family – cousins and aunts and uncles sharing memories (and telling me I’ve made a difference in their lives).
And pictures.
Quite a few pictures, but this one especially. Me and Dad and Tasha, with the note, I found this picture and remember how much you put into working with Tasha to make her as good a dog as she could be, and the work you put into your relationship with your dad.
In Retelling the Stories of Our Lives, David Denborough describes degrading rituals as “rituals that make us feel unimportant, useless, or worse.” In contrast, re-grading rituals are “alternative rituals… that honor survival and all that is important to us.”
Existing within this current context often feels like an endless loop of degrading rituals. Capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, climate emergency all impact me directly. Colonialism, racism, fatphobia, classism, and so many others impact people that I love. I often feel powerless against any of these oppressive systems, and I feel exhausted and overwhelmed.
I want to make a difference, but I don’t see the way forward. Nothing I do will ever, could ever, be enough. And the creeping intrusions of individualism and productivity culture have me convinced that because I can’t, personally, individually, ‘make the difference’, then anything I do is meaningless. What good am I, with my failures and my pain and my trauma and my exhaustion and my day job and my despair? It all feels like so much. Too much.
But my birthday was a profound re-grading ritual.
My life hasn’t magically turned around in the last week and a half, but I feel more solidly grounded, and I feel more confident about moving in the direction of what gives me life and makes me feel possible.
I came up with a plan for structuring my year, inspired partly by the reminders in birthday.
I’ve been thinking about how I want to feel, and what helps me feel alive and connected to hope and joy and possibility.
I want to focus on projects that have a beginning, middle, and end. When I’m in a good place, ongoing commitments feel sustaining and meaningful. But right now, when everything feels endless, I want to focus on smaller bites. (That’s one reason I’m wrapping up Possibilities.)
I am going to focus most of my energy on ’40 small projects’. My intention for these projects is that they will:
connect me to community
feel creative and energizing
support a sense of agency and skillfulness
be completed in less than 10 hours and/or less than 10 pages, and represent approximately one week of work
I have lots of ideas for what these projects might be, but I am not allowing myself to make a ‘to do list’ of these ideas. This post will be the first project on the page, and then we’ll see what comes next! I hope that I will complete some of the collective documents that have been languishing for months (or years), and that I will find ways to make projects smaller – to not always be working towards something massive, which often ends up being counterproductive.
I am also going to work on ‘4 big projects’.
My hope for these is that they will:
connect me to possibility
feel exciting and challenging
support a sense of growth and resourcefulness
create more financial sustainability
be completed in less than 50 hours, and represent about one season of work
I know what two of these projects will be – working with community to create something that commemorates and documents the work we did together in 11 years of Possibilities, and re-working and running another cohort of An Unexpected Light.
I have some ideas about what the other two big projects could be, but I’m definitely not going to commit to them yet. There’s only two spots left!
The constraint of limiting how many projects I can do, and putting some boundaries around how much time they can take, feels really generative. I feel less like I’m floundering around uselessly, and more like I have some structure within which to test things out.
And the final type of project is ‘ongoing’. These are meant to:
connect me to myself and my life
feel grounding and nourishing
support a sense of integration and calm
take as much time as they need
These projects are:
Journaling. The last time I journaled was May 16, after a month of not writing, and I wrote, “I don’t know where to start. It has been a pretty terrible month and I have not done well in documenting it. I want to write about it but how? It’s all this weird, sad, overwhelming, overlapping tangle.” I know that regular journaling helps me feel connected to myself and my life, so this project is one I want to come back to, even though I still feel the way I did on May 16.
Magic. Similar to journaling, I haven’t been doing anything with my tarot cards or the moon cycles. I’ve just felt so disconnected and sad. But I know that these things help me feel more hopeful and grounded, so it’s on the list, too!
Movement. The one thing I have been doing is going for walks, and I’m going to keep up with that. Or try, anyway.
Relationship care. I’ve been disconnected from many of my friendships for a long time, even pre-dating the pandemic. And I’ve made some pretty significant realizations about myself within my partnerships. I want to work on being intentional in my relationships, because being connected to myself and my life is also about being connected to my community.
So, that’s how I’m trying to find my way forward!
It feels hopeful.
I still woke up sad and tired today, as I have so many days for so many years.
But, as mom reminded me, the Gloom Fairy has been part of my way of being for a long, long time. Turning my own struggle into fuel for my work is part of my history, part of who I am and how I want to be in the world. There’s value in that. It doesn’t make me a ‘lesser’ therapist or facilitator or community member, even if it does make me imperfect and sometimes unreliable. It was good to be reminded of that.
And, as a last little note, I am slowly restarting my narrative practice now that the headaches and panic attacks are more reliably under control. So if you’ve been hoping for a session but waiting while I waded through the swamp of this summer, send me a message! I’m not booking as many sessions per week as I used to, but I am working again in my narrative practice, which feels pretty great.
(Also, puppies exist. Magical! I got to snuggle this pup on my birthday.)
I put together a small online course for those of us who might have a hard time with Father’s Day.
It’s a 3-day, at your own pace, online course starting June 19 and ending June 21. For folks experiencing grief, disconnection, and/or distance, I hope it offers a little bit of comfort and community.
There’s a discord space for sharing and we’ll have one optional video chat during the course, but it is mostly just at your own pace.
Join the BPD Superpowers group for a webinar on the topic of Distress Tolerance: Stories, Skills, and Strategies for Hard Times.
You are welcome to attend this webinar whether you identify with the label of borderline personality disorder or not. We all experience distress sometimes, and learning how to navigate moments of distress is important! This webinar is an opportunity for you to learn and benefit from the skills and insider knowledges of this amazing group of people.
This event will take place on May 22, from 1-2:30 pm Mountain time.Please note, this webinar will be rescheduled.
We are also hosting two community conversations on the topic of DBT experiences. These conversations are open to any member of the community who has lived experience accessing DBT either through groups, individual therapy, or self-directed through books and other resources. The goal of these conversations is to begin the work of creating a justice-informed DBT resource. You can find more information here.
The BPD Superpowers group has set our sights on an important new project, and we’re launching it in May for BPD Awareness Month!
We want to create an accessible DBT resource that is informed by our deeply held values of disability justice rather than ableism, decolonization rather than colonialism, collective action rather than individualism, and neurodiversity rather than pathology.
We recognize that DBT has been an incredibly helpful framework and set of skills for so many folks, many of whom identify with borderline personality disorder (and many who don’t!). We also recognize that many of the existing resources and many of the established ways of teaching the skills are ableist, individualist, and expensive, which means it has often been most accessible to white folks with financial privilege. In this project, we hope to honour what is valuable about this set of skills, and stand against what has been harmful.
Does this sound like a project you would like to be involved in?
Have you had experience with DBT resources, either through group or individual therapy, or self-directed using books or other resources?
We would love to hear from you!
Please note: Although this project is going ahead, the scheduled community conversations are going to be postponed. Individual conversations can still be arranged, and community conversations will be rescheduled.
We will be hosting two facilitated community conversations, through Zoom, in May.
If neither of these times work for you and you would like to be involved, email Tiffany to set up an individual conversation.
If you do not have lived experience with accessing DBT resources, but you do want to be involved in our BPD Awareness Month events, you can join us for a webinar on the topic of Distress Tolerance: Stories, Skills, and Strategies for Hard Timeson May 22 from 1-2:30 pm Mountain time. Register for the zoom link, or read more about the webinar here.
It’s Autism Acceptance Month, and this month matters a lot to me! There are a few things happening this month that you might be interested in.
First, to frame my own approach to this month:
I do my best to be actively inclusive of autism in my life and my work, not only because I love autistic people (and am neurodivergent myself), but also because I work in queer and trans community as a queer and trans person, and there is significant overlap between gender and sexuality diversity and neurodiversity, including autism (see this post at Spectrum on the topic).
Being ‘actively inclusive’ means listening to autistic voices. This means using identity-first language, not using the puzzle piece or ‘light it up blue’ images, not linking to or taking any guidance from Autism Speaks, rejecting ABA and all forms of coercive ‘behavioural’ therapy for autistic kids, honouring that the spectrum of autism includes folks who have a wide range of support needs and that people at every point on the spectrum deserve dignity and agency, and really considering how we can challenge ableism and neuronormativity in how we speak about and understand autism and autistic ways of being.
So, with that intro, here’s what’s happening this month!
Maybe the most exciting is that An Unexpected Light will be reading and talking about three pieces of short writing by autistic writer Ada Hoffmann this month. If you’re part of that course, you can join us for the chat on April 18! But I’m also including the study guide here, so that anybody can participate. It’s down below.
Shiny! a speculative writing group continues to meet every month. This offshoot from An Unexpected Light is open to anyone, and is free of charge. This month, our writing prompts will be drawn from the three pieces of writing featured in An Unexpected Light (and later in this post). We’re meeting on April 13 from 6-7:30 pm mountain time. We write together, with the opportunity (but not the obligation) to share and respond to each other’s just written work. It is a lovely time! Register for the zoom link and find more information here.
Possibilities: Bi+ Community Group will be talking about autism and/in the bi+ community on April 15 from 6:30-8 pm mountain time. You can find more information and register for the zoom link here.
And I’ll be talking about autism and narrative therapy with the narrative practitioner peer consultation group tomorrow!
Here’s the study guide, if you’d like to read some excellent pieces of writing along with me.
A small study guide for three pieces of writing by Ada Hoffmann
Before reading, consider these ‘deconstructing discourse’ questions:
What commonly accepted ‘truths’ or ideas about autism have you encountered?
Do these commonly accepted ideas match your own experience with autism, or with community members who are autistic?
Where have these ideas come from? Who determines which stories about autism become accepted and which stories are dismissed? Whose voices are heard, and whose are missing?
Based on these ideas, what kind of person do you think might be autistic? Who might have an easier or harder time accessing a diagnosis? Which autistic experiences might be more or less visible?
Who is impacted by these ideas about autism? Do you think the impact of these ideas might be helpful, harmful, or both?
What do these ideas about autism make possible in terms of available actions, ways of speaking about experience, or understanding ourselves and each other? What might become possible if these ideas changed, or if more nuance was added?
Are these ideas about autism in line with your values, or what you believe about how we should speak about and treat each other?
The goal of these questions is to really examine what we “know” about autism, because for many of us, unless we are autistic or have intentionally sought out autistic voices, so much of what we learn about autism comes through poor representation in media, or through highly pathologized and medicalized models of neurodiversity. Ideas about autistic folks “lacking empathy”, or stereotypes of autism as an issue for young, white, middle-class boys, or stories of autism that centre the experiences and voices of neurotypical parents and professionals rather than centering the voices of autistic folks themselves – these are all incredibly common, and cause real harm.
‘Deconstructing discourse’ questions is a practice I learned from both queer, trans, and feminist spaces, and also from narrative practice spaces. These specific questions were adapted from the series of questions offered in the BPD Superpowers document.
While reading the essay and twitter thread, consider:
What stands out to you in Ada Hoffmann’s essay or twitter thread about who might populate a neurodiverse world, and what their lives might be like?
Is there anything that surprises you in the essay or the twitter thread, or that you hadn’t thought of previously?
In the essay, she writes, “I also know the peculiar pain of stories that seem to betray an author’s contempt for autistic people, their belief that we’re emotionless or wretchedly irritating or just not quite human.” To me, this is the most critical reason we must examine what we’ve been taught and what we think we know about people who are pushed to the margins and subjected to medicalizing and pathologizing discourses (including ourselves, in some instances!) But particularly for neurotypical writers of autistic characters, there is the risk that in an effort to write someone unlike us in ways that will be legible, sometimes we write in ways that are incredibly painful and harmful – leaning on stereotypes that we don’t realize are wrong, or representing people in ways that are hurtful.
In the twitter thread, Hoffmann talks about how to include high-support people in an autistic world while maintaining their dignity and agency. This seems so important to me, because writing a truly neurodiverse world means more than just highlighting the easy and pleasant aspects of neurodivergence. Acknowledging challenges with executive function, and including people who have higher support needs, but doing this in dignifying and honouring ways feels like one of the most important aspects of writing visionary fiction.
In the essay, she writes about autistic villains. I love this part! I appreciate the care she brings to this, recognizing how autistic villains can work in harmful ways and align with stereotypes that vilify autistic people, but also recognizing that well-written autistic villains can work really well. What is your initial reaction to this idea? (My own reaction was that I would love to see more of these characters written by autistic authors, but not by neurotypical authors. When I examine this reaction, it’s related to how I don’t want to see queer or trans villains written by cis or straight authors because that aligns too easily with the ways in which trans and queer folks are vilified in dominant culture. And, of course, this desire to see only #ownvoices villains is problematic, because it demands that authors always be ‘out’. Layers and layers!)
While reading the short story, consider:
What stands out to you in this story? What particular images or phrases stick with you?
What do you think of the three possible futures?
How does Hoffmann maintain hope in this story, if you think that she does?
Is there anything about this story that changes how you think about your own life?
For me, the idea of respecting when someone says no to help was really powerful, and deepened my thinking about autonomy.
In a recent training with Vikki Reynolds, she said something like, “autonomy and paternalism are always in conflict, and many helping agencies are deeply paternalistic.” During Autism Acceptance Month especially, questioning whether the help we are offering or the help being offered to the autistic folks in our lives, aligns with autonomy or paternalism feels critically important.
In the story, Hoffmann writes, “When he says “don’t,” you must stop. That sounds obvious, but it will not be. It is such a small step from helping someone to hurting them, against their will, for what you think is their good. You have been hurt like that before. Take that step even once and he will be lost to you.”
I read this, and thought about ABA, and about all of the coercive therapies offered to autistic kids. “It is such a small step from helping someone to hurting them, against their will, for what you think is their good.”
I want to scream this from the rooftops all through Autism Acceptance Month. All through every month. Until every person who holds the power to help and forgets that it is also the power to hurt hears it, knows it, acts on it.
What are you doing to celebrate Autism Acceptance Month? Who are you listening to, learning from, and being influenced by?
