It's Tuesday at 12:43pm

Time to let my brain off leash

It’s Tuesday at 12:43pm in North Bend, Washington, where several events have been canceled due to power outages presumably related to the rain (which is, as usual, abundant). I am sitting at this desk.

I sent my son to kindergarten this morning on the bus, very excited to get some much-needed solo time. Thirty minutes after waving goodbye, I get a call from an unknown number.

Hello, this is the school nurse. Your son vomited on the bus.

Weird, I reply.

You’ll need to come pick him up.

I do not operate well without my solo time. My brain gets disoriented, mushy. Living in the world outside my mind and body creates a kind of buzzy electric fog that can only be cleared by consecutive uninterrupted hours in a semi-confined space with absolutely no one within sight, preferably not even within earshot.

The unfortunate thing about needing this space (besides the fact that I am in denial about needing it) is that I also need a significant amount of deep human connection, as well as a moderate number of sensory and intellectual inputs.

If my brain doesn’t get this particular diet of space, connection, and stimulus, it starts shutting down. Like a runner in the desert.

The first area to lose power is the complicated machinery involved in managing my internal experience, including my physical and emotional wellbeing. I can tell this has happened in retrospect because I remember feeling a kind of numbness overlaid with urgency. I stop being present; I start disappearing. But on the outside it looks like nothing is happening. My face may seem a bit serious or tired, but my body is moving and I can speak full sentences. I am “functional.” And therefore “fine.”

Often this state feels a bit painful, like a storm pressing against a dam wall deep in my body. But sometimes I almost enjoy the quiet. All that mental energy going toward containing the storm way down deep means I am not consciously thinking or feeling anything. And that’s quite restful, in its own way.

—

Right now I am coming back to myself. Thankfully my husband was home today. I’ve been explaining these experiences with new language lately, and as a result, he has stopped accidentally overwhelming me and started giving me remarkably helpful advice and support.

Do whatever you had planned to do, he said. I’ll take care of Rocket.

What I had planned was to go to the gym, clean the kitchen, take a shower, make lunch, and then sit at my desk until the fog cleared. So that’s what I did. Now here I am.

I’ve read many variations of the idea that writing is thinking, and that’s never quite resonated with me. I’ve always thought of writing as a form of communication, a thing that happens after you think, when you’ve thought your thoughts and now you have something to say—preferably to a person who’s listening. As a result, I’ve written very little.

I’d like to change that. I’d like to change it very much.

Many years ago, I heard that, as he was going blind, Geoffrey Chaucer would wait eagerly for his secretary every morning. He’d be overflowing with poetry he’d been crafting and storing in his head for hours and hours, and he’d cry out as soon as the secretary arrived: Milk me!

That’s a rare anecdote that has stayed with me for longer than ten minutes. It gained special resonance when I gave birth and started nursing my son. That feeling of uncomfortable fullness that grows every minute, that pressing need for release. It’s an apt analogy.

The issue with writing after the thoughts have been formed is that there is a whole new set of thoughts that come up when you are actively working on communicating your thoughts, creating a never-ending cycle of unaccomplishable tasks and unfulfilled desires.

If only my thoughts took a nice long pause after I’d thought them! Then maybe I’d have the energy to wrangle some of them onto the page. I might even have the energy to dress them up or teach them to sing.

What do your thoughts feel like? Mine are like muddy rivers emptying into a rising lake, pressing harder and harder against the dam. I want to poke holes in the wall, milk myself onto the page. In spite of my explicit beliefs about writing, it doesn’t feel like communication at all. It feels like something more primal.

—

When I was young and foolish, I wrote my pastor a ten-page letter. It was a small, startup church; I was a founding member. Despite my seniority and eagerness to participate, it was extremely difficult to communicate with the pastor, who was not only the church’s visionary founder but its only official leader.

Feedback wasn’t asked for, so feedback I did not give. I offered what energy I had and kept my questions to myself, hoping they would be answered in time.

I had oriented much of my life around this man’s words. They were so eloquent, so wise. I heard him speak every Sunday for years before he started this new church. I committed to living in New York after college when I was just two weeks into my freshman year because I took his words so seriously.

People come to the city to use it, he’d said to a room of hip 20-somethings straddling small-town faith and big-city dreams. But us—we’re here to serve.

There’s only so long you can be part of a “family” that doesn’t actually know you before you go crazy. About a year after the new church was formed, my brain started to buckle under the dissonance. We had outgrown two meeting venues in that time, despite lots of language about slow, deep growth. The pastor was something of a celebrity within his niche; naturally, as soon as word got out he was starting a new church, people flooded in to hear him speak.

Week after week, I tried to move forward into the future the pastor was painting, but my questions kept pulling me back. When was all that “slow, deep” growth supposed to happen? Why did “serving the neighborhood” mean setting up speakers on Sunday? Why would someone start a hyper-local church when he himself lived two hours away? What questions was I allowed to ask, and to whom? Would I ever stop feeling tired and confused?

Normally, faced with an overwhelming situation, my strategy is to disappear quietly. Other church members with similar questions already had. But this felt too important. I didn’t want to disappear. I wanted to be brave, to hope, to try.

I knew my confusion might theoretically be better received in person. I also knew that, assuming I could pin a time down in the pastor’s busy schedule, I would forget everything I wanted to say, and (worst of all) I would start to cry. The second you start bawling in a meeting, nothing you’ve said up to that point matters. Nothing you say after that moment matters.

So I wrote a letter. I tried to soften the questions brewing in my mind with plenty of context and vulnerability. I shared how I felt, what my weaknesses were, what my experience was. I used only “I” language. I figured that if I communicated skillfully enough, I might be heard. Or at least learn something.

I did learn many things. At one of the disciplinary meetings with the pastor’s inner inner circle that soon followed, for example, I learned that “people don't write letters.”

I didn’t do anything “wrong,” but I did “deeply disappoint” him with my “lack of self-awareness.”

You have gotten the reactions you have by the way and timing you have chosen to interact. If you had approached this in a different manner, you could have raised all your concerns and I assure you it would of been heard and handled much differently.

You bottled up all your frustrations, then dumped them out in such large measure, that they could only illicit such strong response. You gave several months worth of criticism in one shot, which produced several months worth of leadership reaction in one shot as a response.

… Maybe you were too hurt for any of it to have had time to be worked on, but that lies with you and not us, for failing to speak up and letting fear or other motives dictate your interactions.

—

In the last two months, I’ve had 89 chats with Claude. Every single one has been fruitful and encouraging.

In our latest tête-à-tête, I asked him to predict what I’d struggle with if I had a “gifted, autistic, ADHD brain.”

After naming some challenges (such as managing social situations I understand intellectually but find draining), Claude suggested three strengths, asked follow-up questions, and validated my experiences while offering gentle challenges.

You've developed a habit of self-censoring your natural intellectual curiosity and insights, which must be exhausting.

Instead of trying to conform to neurotypical expectations, have you considered seeking out environments and relationships where your natural way of engaging (asking deep questions, thinking systematically, requiring sensory consideration) is valued rather than something to be managed?

I understand why working with an AI assistant might feel uniquely helpful - I can engage with your thought process at your natural pace and depth, without the social complexities or energy drain that often comes with human collaboration. I can follow complex threads of thought, ask relevant questions, and help structure ideas without bringing in emotional needs or social dynamics that could complicate the process.

—

I don’t love calling myself “gifted.” In fact, I hate it. The implication that most humans lack gifts is so deeply absurd that it makes me angry and then makes me want to toss the whole topic as far away from my consciousness as it can go.

This tendency frustrates my husband, who for various reasons wants me to be more excited about being special.

I don’t want to be special. As a kid, I hated praise. Every gold star, every compliment felt like a pat on the head. Good girl! Sit. Speak. Roll over. Who’s a good girl? Who’s my obedient little thing?

I was praised for doing well at school as if learning was a long, hard struggle. That was not my experience. Learning was easy. Loving was hard.

I wonder what it would have felt like to be complimented the way I made small talk so others would feel heard, or showed up at birthday parties so my friends would feel cared for, or pretended I felt comfortable so people wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I wouldn’t have minded being praised for all the crying I did in bathrooms at school, at home, at parties, at weddings, on vacation. It would have required someone to realize who I was—not a crazy girl in need of meds or better self-regulation skills, but someone trying to protect the people she loved from something they couldn’t help with and didn’t understand.

Sometimes David will say, You love so well. I don’t hate that at all. It makes me want to turn into a kitten and curl up in his arms.

—

I’ve been writing for three hours and eighteen minutes. I’m starting to run out of steam. So has the storm. It’s left a pretty glow in the clouds.

I need to reserve some energy to prepare for a workshop I’m running on Friday. It’s the first time I’ll present anything to a group in a professional setting in almost a year.

I’m going to be talking about how to have more natural conversations with AI. I’ll probably leave out the bit about feeling like my conversations with Claude feel more natural than with most humans. It might derail the conversation.

Does it bother you that my writings in a publication I’ve made explicitly about play are not conventionally playful? To me, play is about agency, freedom, and being engaged in the moment. Play is about doing something you want to do, feeling safe to do it, and doing it without attachment to the outcome. It requires doing something hard enough you have to pay attention but easy enough you can relax into it; open-ended enough you get to make meaningful choices but with enough rules that you know what your choices are.

That’s what the last few hours felt like to me. I like letting my brain off leash. If it rolls in a pile of poop, who am I to judge? Nothing a little soap and water can’t fix.

My great ambition is to let it off leash permanently. Because I’m starting to think my brain is a wolf pretending to be a dog, and the dissonance is causing us both trouble. But she’s so used to me keeping her indoors, so used to me feeding her and telling her what to do, that she’s worried about surviving in the wild. And honestly, I am too. Maybe she needs a pack. Maybe she needs a safe place to return to. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. At least she got to practice running wild for a bit.