A sensory seeker’s awkward yet fascinating journey in dance improvisation. Features funny aspie moments, touch, pressure and interoception.

A somewhat questionable post on dance improvisation, body awareness (feeling the internal states and thoughts of the body), proprioception, interoception, and (perhaps) specifically autistic movement needs (from my personal perspective; no general rules). Includes embarrassing dance club stories and a theory on craving movement, weight and resistance as desperately needed proprioceptive grounding when your proprioception is by nature foggy / hypo-sensitive.

Vague variations on the ten bulls. A Zen parable on taming the mind in solitude.

. Whenever life confined me to solitude (with loneliness and feelings of abandonment being my most frequent tormentor), I tried to turn it around and remember that at age 10 ... or 8 ... I don't remember ... I wanted to be a monk. I try to tell myself, Look, this is the Himalaya you've …

Late autism (self)diagnosis: Can you be relieved to consider yourself disabled?

Personal narrative about emotionally traveling between disability and diffability models of autism, after realising that autism applies to me – a person who was considered more "able" than average for most of their life. Some ego crashes, juicy details, and reflections on the precariousness of privilege.

Using giftedness to mask autism. Ever noticed gifted autistic girls?

This is another bookish post, based on having read Roeper (1982) How the gifted cope with their emotions yesterday. Having been 99% sure that everything points to me being an aspie, I wanted to check the last other possibility that seemed open, namely that most of my social unusualness and permanent feelings of isolation (or there …

Is it wise to think of mental health crises as shamanic awakenings? Features positive disintegration, post-traumatic growth, and self-delusion.

Bookish and theory (but also exhibitionist personal) post on whether what's called "mental health crises" in contemporary parlance is equally well – or better – conceptualised as either the necessary growth pains of personality development (Dąbrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration; post-traumatic growth theorists) or the breakthrough moments in spiritual development (Brogan, McLaren, and lots of others including New Age shamanism). Includes bibliographical and Pink Floyd references. 

Is there strength and resilience in constant disintegration?

I haven't been doing justice to this blog's title lately – in fact, it's made me feel somewhat guilty and ashamed. Reaching too high. This is because the last weeks have been another "zero point" phase – and these phases are so frequent in my life. (Sometimes I'm thinking of reading Dabrowski's Theory of Positive …

Does suppressing your sensitive intensity suck the juices out of your life?

I knew I had a lot of quirks – even as a very young child I was vaguely aware that there seemed to be something special about my perception that others didn't share. I could look at the structure of tiny things like leaves, grass or beetles for a long time. I could observe ants …

Your soul has left this house. (Loss poetry.)

Your soul has left this house. I see this. I felt it a few days or weeks ago. It just suddenly became obvious, like a blatant and self-understood fact. * I don't know where it went. But the plaster has started falling off the walls in a few secret spots; the paint has started peeling …

How neurodivergent traits blend in a family. Inheriting the highly sensitive, the autistic, both, or neither.

This is the second part of an article on the differences and overlaps between being highly sensitive and autistic (which I see as two types of being neurodivergent). The first part of this article – my journey figuring out that my quirks and sensitivities are not just high sensitivity – is here. And this one …