Capable asked me if the mask was worth it
Reflections mostly not from this year telling a story that maybe sums up this year
For most of my life, I held myself to a razor-thin margin of error. The only criticism I received came from within. Every deviation I made was my choice. I embraced change, not because I wholeheartedly enjoyed it but because I believed belonging must be in the next place, the next move.
I could mistake own love’s reflection as receiving…for a while.
I remember a moment in my mid-twenties, driving home from my work, I felt something close to multiple consecutive days of belonging. I had never felt that before. I knew it wasn’t “belonging,” but it was close. It was lovely. I wanted more but knew I’d better savor what I had while it lasted.
It’s like feasting your eyes on a burning, broken match you know won’t last long enough to light a candle.
I fidgeted with rage and envy like two hot marbles in my hand as I wondered if others felt this way often, or always. If they did, why weren’t they bursting with gratitude? Why weren’t they including others so they could maybe feel the same way?
A question I like to ask people who aren’t autistic (even my beloved ADHDers) is: how many people knew nothing about you and went out of their way to despise you?
Playing foosball with my partner’s family, I reminisced on my 5th and 6th grade experience where I was bullied. Kids wrote that they hated me in the bathroom stalls.
I was a quiet, shy kid who played piano and took dance classes. I didn’t really talk much. I stayed “in line.” It was inconceivable to me that anyone would hate me, but my logical, literal mind needed it to make sense. I must’ve done something—so I vowed to be so nice that no one could possibly hate me.
These years were tough in ways that were illogical and inexplicable. I would walk up to my “friends” and the circle would close so I was literally standing outside of it. I talked to guy friends and I was reprimanded for flirting.
To add fuel to the fire, that was the year that we had our first mandatory “boy/girl” dance at camp, and the first year of reproductive health (where I became the “girl who almost died” because I fainted, passed out, and fell out of my chair).
One day, my mom picked me up from school and she commented on how all the other kids ran out of the school to their parents or buses. But I slogged along, slowly. I was exhausted. I joked that I didn’t have enough ATP in my mitochondria.
I remember telling my mom that I didn’t like girls because they were mean, and I preferred talking to boys.
Bless my mom and her mom, my Nana, who pushed back on me and reminded me that we were meant to get along with women and girls.
In these years, I gave up on recess. I found another kid, twice my size, who also got bullied, and we played foosball tournaments every lunch hour.
Needless to say, I got really good.
When I shared this context with my partner’s family who have known me since I was 14, they were so surprised that I even got bullied, or struggled socially.I guess you can say I honed the kind of willpower that makes a really, really good mask.
A mask for what, though?
I’m still not sure exactly because sensitivity and honesty are two cherished qualities to me. It won’t ever make sense to me to mask tender or observant, or even obsessed or focused.Deep, sincere effort to belong was met with the most subtly diminishing experiences: suspicion, exclusion, rejection, hatred, gaslighting, and ghosting.
The problem with the mask is that I didn’t know what I was trying to hide. Willpower can’t filter out the unlikable (autistic) traits. Willpower masks me from me. It suppresses my fullness of expression. It repurposes what’s pure and wild in me into something preserved and pre-packaged. Others can feel that denial and they don’t trust it. It tastes suspicious.
That’s what shadow is. It’s not always something that is inherently your fault. It’s not your own personal lack of healing. It’s an accumulation of protective ego, conditioned body, and bone-deep systemic hatred wedged between us.My drive to be a me without flaw exhausted me ways far more damaging that I could ever have any clue. It’s not like I could quantify my effort and compare notes with my peers. I thought this was just life—the act of living. I could only rely on observation, patterns, and reinvention.
At 25, I was wound so tight, I knew everything needed to change. I blew up my life. I started writing (a lot of) poetry, got a divorce, started on my true healing path, and went through the beginning of my spiritual awakening. I dedicated the next several years to de-conditioning perfectionism from my nervous system.
How? I took one intuitive next step for everything I was afraid of until I could handle that thing. I spent two years building my capacity to go off script—to be in the moment and speak from the heart.At 29, right after my Saturn return and a few months before my 30th birthday, I learned I was autistic. For someone who scoured my inner terrain for every last morsel of things I could work on, fix, or heal in order to be a better person, it was such an earth-shattering experience to have not known this fundamental truth that impacts every facet of my existence.
It was a violating truth. Everything made perfect sense while it felt inconceivable that I didn’t know. As I recontextualized my life, every trait seemed so glaringly obvious. For over a year, I felt like a Times Square billboard blinking LOOK HOW AUTISTIC I AM.In the months leading up to my discovery, I worked with an incredible acupuncturist who healed what I will simply call: trauma. This was not necessarily consciously known trauma, or trauma I could pinpoint to a source because I didn’t have the answer yet.
My body shed deep, primordial layers. I shook, I shivered, I sobbed. I felt like the treatments extracted ghosts from my body and skin.
For a brief moment, like the time I tasted belonging, I felt the best I’d ever felt in my body, like I traded mine in for a newer, less terrified model.During this time, the “lights went out” in my brain in a way that scared me. It happened often, and more frequently. Willpower wouldn’t fire. I couldn’t just “push through” and “figure it out.” It was as if my body was running on a backup generator. Essential functions kept me alive, but will and want carried no value here. My work and relationship(s) suffered. Whatever I wanted simply had to wait. I dropped the ball on things. I misspoke. I rescheduled. I cancelled.
I had a migraine most days and I went months without seeing friends or family, not because I wanted to be isolated but because it was too late for me to try to express it. Vocal capacities were limited and reserved for the bare minimum: like client work and job applications.A year after my discovery, earlier this year, I had the opportunity to move back to California—a saving grace for my health and well-being. I returned to a place where the sun shines most days and I have a few friends. I was nervous to return because my health was still poor, but within the first hour of being back, I knew I was meant to be here.
My word of 2024 was capable, which I originally found ironic. I have never struggled with being incapable until my body’s brownout last year.
When I melted down from the nonstop sirens in my apartment this year, this word guided me.
When my intuition asked me to give up coffee and make these health changes, this word guided me.
When I accepted a full time job on top of client work while struggling with my health, this word guided me.
Most of the year, I felt stretched thin. I knew this juggling was both unsustainable and temporary.Through these hard transitions, my health continues to improve. I’m paying off debt. I have friends I get to see in person. I published my book (a six year work-in-progress).
Joy roars in my belly.
Capable asked me if the mask is worth it?
Sometimes I need to turbocharge my willpower, but more often, I don’t.
I don’t think we’re here to live out of the places we worked so hard to hone. I think we’re meant to love and belong out of those places instead.2024 showed me that my body is capable of adapting not to others, but to the shape-shifting map of me.
My heart is capable of loving my body’s variability and seasons.
My mind is capable of pressing the brake when my body doesn’t have the capacity.
To me, these things are huge. These are culminations of things I put in motion to embody in 2021 after years of not getting it.To embody is to go at the pace of your nature.
Boundaries with ourselves are completely different than boundaries with each other and there’s only one person on earth who can hold us accountable.
I didn’t understand how capable I am of saying no to myself. Meaning, I didn’t know I could say no to the version of me who only knew overexertion. Meaning, I didn’t know the difference between overexertion and being alive.I love truth more than anything, so striving to be an accurate communicator just makes sense to me. But that’s just not how most people operate. A wise, younger me made a rule to myself that I wouldn’t explain or prove myself. In my head, explanation = more understanding = more connection/harmony. In reality, the energy doesn’t work which feels like 🤮 and makes me spiral for days.
When my friends or clients want to put themselves out there fear being misconstrued or taken the wrong way, I like to remind them that safe people give the benefit of the doubt.
Safe people ASK and INVITE clarification.
Safe people show up curious and gracious.
Those that want to know, ask. Those who want to judge, judge, no matter how I explain.
I’m so proud when I can say to myself: you don’t owe them anything and do my best to let it go.
I am far less concerned about the image of being capable than I am about believing in my heart that I am capable.Outside looking in, we are judged in moments. Inside looking out, we refract all lifetimes through our one body.
How we pick up the light is our legacy.
When You Falter
From Silent Sound: 44 Poems to Hear Your Soul
Choose any unit
of time. A lifetime, a year,
a day, a minute, a second.
Find one and live.
It is everything
you have.
Year-Ahead Workshop & Readings
Tomorrow (Sunday 12/28 @ 11am PT): Do your own year-ahead reading. Experience how psychic you really are as I guide you through the lay of the land of your 2025. This once-a-year workshop is a community favorite. This event is for members of my community, Shadow Play. Read our story and join what we’re co-creating for just $33/m.
The Presence Scan | 1:1 Psychic Reading (Recorded) A powerful, private reading to ground, center, and renew. In a voice note, I'll speak to an overall theme for your upcoming 3-6 months; the energetic landscape of any transitions or changes you're sensing; how much and where to ease in to support your body's sense of safety and presence; and provide tangible somatic practices based on your physical energy to nourish your well-being from the ground up. $55. Two spots available weekly.
The Trust Fall | 1:1 Tarot Reading (Live) Steady into your truth for the year as we leverage the wisdom of the cards to explore life, love, work, creativity, and purpose. Gentle and full of grace, I bring your inner knowing forward with context, language, images, and themes that affirm your instincts. $99.