For the Birds: March nourishment
Oracular collage: a simple, visual journaling exercise. Plus BIRDSEED, The March Resiliency Circle, and celebrating our private relationships with creativity.
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Dear birds,
Late February brought with it my first autism birthday.
I celebrated quietly; spent a long morning at a beloved coffee shop, all my sensory preferences accounted for. I wore a stretchy maroon jumper for the second third day in a row, compression socks, and crystals in my hair. When I grew tired of writing, I ordered soup and watched an episode of Hollywood Squares on my laptop. Walking home afterwards, I looked for bugs and relished the warmth of the sun, criss-crossing Washington and Kelly and 13th in order to stay in its frame. I carried my house key around my neck on a pink My Melody lanyard.
When I stop to consider this landmark moment of my life, I’m filled with a mix of wonder and humility: How quickly I adopted this new, divergent label for myself, not just in the privacy of my home but out loud, here, in these public-facing pages. How I began to think and write about autism with such focus and ferocity that I sometimes can’t remember what I thought & wrote about before.
It all transpired in one very short, very long year.
More than a label, though, autism has given me the first framework in which I finally make some sense to myself. Any embarrassment I feel about my sudden loud adoption of the term is counterbalanced by the firm sense of self that rose to the surface precisely one year ago, when so many details finally clicked into place: details about my needs, my preferences, my energetic capacities, and my emotional limitations. Details about the surface of me, and the way it feels against the noisy, ever-changing surfaces of the world.
In other words, I grabbed onto this sense of self quickly and out loud after 36 years of quiet stumbling. I don’t know if the resulting changes to my life were fast, or ancient.
As the weather thaws, I’ll be sharing insights from the innermost dimensions of this past year’s journey, including a resource list I’ve been building for months; snippets from my pre-diagnosis journal; and excerpts from something I’ve been calling “a comprehensive personal autistic framework”—think creative project meets therapy notebook.
As with everything I publish here, it’s my earnest hope that something in these words will support you in some primal, introspective, potentially yet-to-be-named way.
In case you’re looking for an invitation: It’s okay to not have a name for the thing yet.
And it’s okay, once you do, to shout it.
xo, s
BIRDSEED
~a monthly playlist, curated by M: WHOSE BIRTHDAY IS LITERALLY TODAY! Happy birthday to my lifelong osprey, nest-building co-pilot, and favorite Pisces~
The Resiliency Circle: Spring equinox parallel writing session
The Resiliency Circle is where paid readers of For the Birds gather in order to write, reflect, and nurture our creativity.
This month, we’ll be meeting on the morning of the spring equinox, March 20th, for a parallel writing session. Bring a project you’re in the thick of or trying to nurture. As usual, I’ll bring light ritual in the form of strengths-based encouragement up top, and a supportive exercise to close us out. Expect gentle, quiet community and body doubling.
→ Thursday, March 20th at 9:30am PST / 12:30pm EST. We’ll spend a full hour writing, bringing this gathering closer to 75 minutes.
→ New to this space? Learn more about the Resiliency Circle here. Weirdos, witches, sensitive humans, & neurodivergent folks are especially welcome.
Hope to see you there! Zoom link + RSVP at the bottom of today’s newsletter.
Your own personal, private creativity
“There is a part of your creative world that is yours and yours alone. It is necessarily private and internal. It is necessarily hard to share with others, because trying to share it would turn it into something else.
You are allowed to protect this part—to even feel excitement and enthusiasm for it. It is a rich, dynamic secret you get to carry around inside you, this interesting and healthy and artistic relationship that you, and nobody else, gets to belong to.”
→ Read the full post here.
Oracular collage: a visual journaling exercise
Creating little gifts—and signs—for our future journaling selves
For this month’s creative prompt, I wanted to focus on something visual, magical, and simple. I’ve written before about the oracular power of putting words on paper. Think of this exercise, then, as a visual counterpart.
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