For the Birds: and now I'm 37.

this year, I'm going feelings first. Here's some party favors + BIRD SEED.

“I really value getting to read FtB...spending a little time in your space where creative endeavor and intuition are first-class citizens is a balm and an inspiration.”

~Recent comment from a long-term reader (!!!)

My Autism Awareness & Poetry Month discount expires in three days! Paid subscriptions include all essays, all writing prompts, all investigations, and monthly access to The Resiliency Circle.

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Dear friends,

Does the earnestness of my address bounce through my keyboard and out of your screen like I imagine it to?

I do not know many of you—not in the way we usually think of knowing—and yet I mean the words that I say.

Friend.

How can I be friends with someone I’ve never met in person or interacted with directly in real time? Someone I’ve never exchanged private letters with, or texted one of my long rambly voice notes to, the ones where you can sometimes hear Neko, our little black cat, meowing in the background, demanding my attention back toward her?

This is the kind of stuff that sends my highly sensitive, neurodivergent brain a-spinning anytime I consider what it means to “show up” in the digital world, or when I try to think about marketing through an earnest lens, or when I take something I’ve made and hold it out in front of me, arms long, for anyone to see.

Who is anyone? What does it mean (what does it require) to call them in?

All I know is that somewhere in my body, very much below the neck, it feels truthful to say that you, dear reader, are someone I feel friendship toward. Here, I’m using “friendship” as a gathering verb.

~~gathering~~

I want to be a person who turns strict nouns into irrational verbs; who listens closely to all the somewheres in my body; who feels truthful things and then says them out loud with minimal masking.

I want to be a person who views creativity as the foundation of any worthwhile relationship.

I want to be a person who believes that people in many different places can care about the same things in the same general span of time and, by doing so, enter into a kind of friendship together.

It’s relationships I’m talking about here. And no, I don’t mean mingling or networking; I mean something bigger and slower and stranger, with deeper and more immediate roots. I mean something accessible to those of us who can’t bear the surface level stuff, those of us who are not being difficult, just honest. I run out of words for what I’m trying to describe here, partly because what I’m trying to describe is connected to something I’m just beginning to understand, and partly because what I’m trying to describe is bigger than language.

That latter part is especially disorienting for me, given that my sense of truth and truthfulness has always revolved around what I can perceive and express and understand through language, on the page.

I don’t plan to leave this place anytime soon. I live here.

But I do mean to renovate, and about a week ago I came to a decision: I am entering my 37th year feelings first.

~~feelings first~~

I will not require my feelings to have language in order to trust their accuracy.

I will not demand to understand the feelings first.

I will not treat the languageless feelings and indescribable internal experiences as less real than the ones I can sum up.

I will not force those parts of me to jump over the hurdle of articulation before I am willing to believe what they’re telling me.

What I’m trying to say is that for 36 years, I did not give my internal world the benefit of the doubt.

I was an iceberg trying to bend the bulk of me around the teeny tiny bit I knew other people could see.

I was a mirror trying to look like the person looking back at me.

I was an inside comparing all of me to the outside of everything else.

I am entering my 37th year through a different door.

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Do you know about this door? Do you give your unexplainable feelings the benefit of the doubt? Or, my gawd, assume that if something is happening inside of you, it probably has its reasons?

Do you consider how reasonable you and your feelings are first?

Today is my birthday, and I am considering internal veracity first, and I am celebrating beyond reason.

In addition to my friends & family (all definitions of both words), here’s what I’m entering my 37th year caring about the most:

writing, poetic thinking, neurodivergence, Autism. The diversity of communication—communication not relegated to oral speech or neurotypical sense. The more-than-human world. How I (and we humans) spend time, and how I (and we humans) spend attention; how I might ensure that the good things I value and believe in are not just theoretical north stars I’ve gotten good at describing, but three-dimensional realities that I am creating and contributing to with my actions and through my choices. Reciprocity. Authenticity. Mentorship & collaboration. Inspiration as something that lives in the quality of one’s attention, in the relational space between you and anything you engage with. (Or don’t). Birds. Bugs. Stewardship. A sense of creativity that stretches across both sides of the veil.

Maybe you’ll join me, friend? In the big unreasonable caring about all these things.

Unreasonable because we can worry about logistics later.

Unreasonable because the caring comes first.

~~with friendship, without reason~~

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Party favors!

Do you remember getting those little plastic bags of toys and trinkets after attending someone else’s birthday party as a kid?

Assuming your care overlaps with mine, here are three things that I hope will enrich your weekend [hands you a bag full of small treasures & souvenirs]:

1. “There’s so much that can happen between the space of question and answer”

I’ve done quite a bit of writing about my recent Autism diagnosis, but talking about this stuff out loud, through speech, is something I’m still figuring out how to do.

Which made me extra excited (nervous / grateful / some other thing ) when Kat HoSoo Lee lovingly insisted that I join her on The Rooted Business Podcast and do just that:

Listen to Episode 139 to hear me talk—and talk and talk and talk—with Kat about the following:

• The importance of bringing curiosity into diagnostic spaces

• The rootbound intersections of neurodiversity and trauma, and the disastrous effect of misreading the former as the latter

• Divergent timeframes & Autistic joy

• Academic wounds, neurotypicality, and how we’re taught to demonstrate our intelligence

• The true role of a good coach: To be wildly curious about our clients’ realities and generously observant of what they share with us—and to never assume that we know better or are seeing the full picture

& more. A little over halfway through, you’ll hear me claim (quite truthfully in that moment!) that I don’t fully understand where all my celebratory energy is coming from…and then power walk my way toward a very clear, very emphatic answer.

If neurodivergence intersects with your world in any way, I encourage you to listen!

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2. BIRD SEED: A new monthly music feature!

My partner—an incredible editor / poet / librarian with a vast knowledge of books, film, and music—has been making stellar playlists for as long as I can remember. Despite my own preference for listening to the same handful of songs on repeat (#actuallyautistic), I so admire the way Mo can take in and synthesis new music each month, and then braid together a bundle of songs that create a distinct musical experience attuned to this moment in time.

Enter: BIRD SEED.

From Mo:

Hello fellow Birders! Welcome to BIRD SEED, a monthly mix of mostly new but some old/eclectic/classic tunes curated by me: Mo! Poet, reader, hiker, librarian. I've been making mixes since I got my first CD-R burner and have been sharing music with my pals ever since. It means the world to me to share what I'm listening to with the people in my life--and I'm ecstatic to now be sharing these gems with you. I think these songs rule and I hope you dig them too. 

Moving forward, readers will get a new—and *expertly crafted*—playlist from Mo every. single. month!

And if you’re wondering, yes: He is genuinely one of the greatest people. I hope you get to meet him someday.

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3. A new poem

  
The times have never been worse or better


It’s okay to have nothing to say
It’s okay to not have money for a while
It’s okay to like and not like the same people
It’s okay to need to say what you mean in a poem


It’s okay to say what you mean to need in a poem
It’s okay to mean what you need to say in a poem
It’s okay to be mean and needy and broke in a poem
It’s okay to be a sentimental bitch for a while


It’s okay, poetry is where you go, your body being
a stanza and all, pretty patterns breaking, breaking 
like breathing; breaking because some of us want
to look like something someone could’ve sung

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4. BONUS: Reminders & Affirmations (a downloadable gift)

I’m so grateful to the curious folks who attended my latest workshop, “Partnering with your Creativity,” and who made it such a wise, vulnerable, and deeply useful space. (“Like a counseling session for you and your Creativity,” two people exclaimed! Well gosh.)

If you’re bummed to have missed it, or you’re someone who struggles to relate to your creative efforts through anything other than judgment, I have good news: The replay is available for purchase! It’s two hours of nourishing conversation & writing prompts, and you’ll come away having generated some incredibly useful personal data.

I was so inspired by the group’s wisdom that I ended up pulling some of the language from our chat and turning it into a list of Creative Reminders & Affirmations.

As part workshop preview + part gift, I’m making the list available for download here:

Creative Reminders & Affirmations

88.9KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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May all these goodies carry you through the weekend with a little more focus and a little less solitude.

Thanks for coming to my party,

xoxo, S