It’s spring, which means beautiful blossoms and allergies and inflammation and fascism and warehouse fires and quiet revolutions. I haven’t known what to write here these days, so I have mostly been silent. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy -- but most of what I have been up to isn’t really fit for public consumption. I have been in the wilds of parenting and partnering, trying to keep my house somewhat functional while becoming immersed in creative projects that most likely will go nowhere . . . and writing and re-writing this post, which has been weirdly hard for me to put out into the world.

But here goes: the word for 2026 for me is divest. I am trying to divest from all the awful billionaire pedophiles in whatever ways I can, without letting it consume my every waking thought. As a family we finally quit Amazon, we are boycotting Target and Starbucks and Spotify, we are slowly building up our physical media collection of autistic favorites and unsubscribing from streaming platforms.

We are saying no to investing in toxic systems wherever we might find them slowly sucking the life out of us.

Substack is on the list, too. For years now I have known how problematic this platform is, but I didn’t want it to be true and I didn’t have the capacity to fully engage with the issue. For a good rundown, you can read this post by David Farrier (and while you are at it, subscribe to his excellent newsletter). I originally moved here when Mailchimp decided it was going to charge a lot of money to host newsletters with a certain number of subscribers. So I switched to Substack and was able to turn my hyperfixations into a way to make a little bit of money and write about topics I felt needed more attention (late-diagnosed autism, creative writing by and for autistic people, and healing from high-control religion). Substack was here for me when I came out as ex-Christian and I lost a lot of community support and financial opportunities in the process. I was able to pay and publish dozens and dozens of autistic writers. I also really enjoyed the community vibes -- for years Substack (at least my little corner of it) was full of readers. And boy howdy, do I love people who read a lot of books/newsletters.

All of this is to say that I haven’t wanted to write about my glaring problems with Substack for multiple reasons. One is that I don’t want to degrade the people who love it here or who are not able to leave this platform (especially marginalized authors). I myself have gotten a lot of pressure to leave but it isn’t easy at all to just pack up and go somewhere else. I got ensnared into this platform like a lot of other authors before I truly realized that this is all it is -- a platform designed to make awful and unscrupulous people a lot of money. While it allowed me (a non-binary autistic ex-Christian) to publish my own content on my own terms, it also gladly and gleefully promotes and monetizes literal Nazis. Then came the partnership with polymarket, and just this week Substack was boasting that Andrew Tate was a rising star on this platform and they were investing in problematic people like Clavicular.

(screenshot from David Farrier’s most recent post, highlighting who Substack is currently promoting).

This is not just a Substack issue, it’s an everywhere issue. As an anarchist leaning middle-aged leftist with ethical OCD, it’s been a real shit show inside my brain for awhile now. Almost every day I see some kind of notification that reminds me that I have been writing, posting, filming, editing, and sharing on Al Gore’s internet since 2010 and the costs and benefits of this work. As a freelancer, being on social media platforms and communicating with readers has been my bread and butter, the way I get eyes on my work and (sometimes) convince a small portion of readers to financially support me. Most of what I do is for free and accessible to all because that is important to me. I make content because I am interested in the topic, I believe in what I am saying, and I truly want to help others. But at some point I also have to reckon with how my content has enriched some of the worst people in the world.

Like the Ellisons, who now own Tik Tok. I have 20,000 followers over there and have posted pretty consistently on that platform since 2020. I have not made any money from it and mostly just shit-talk Dr. James Dobson and try to make other people raised like me feel less alone. But inadvertently I have contributed to the advertising money the Ellisons make and the 11 billion bribe they just paid Trump so they could control Tik Tok and make it even more right-wing (and suppress content like mine). The Ellisons also own Paramount, and if they are successful in buying Warner Brothers then they will control the largest media empire in the world. Just typing out that sentence makes me want to scream. The baddies are getting all the money and the control of the media and they are using the free labor of folks like me to do it!

It’s not really conspiratorial, it just is the truth: Trump is a mob boss and so are the people who own and run the majority of social media platforms in the US, and I have unfortunately been a part of enriching these bastards. But the flipside of this reality is that . . . this has always been the way it is. Traditional publishing is no better (unless it’s the truly independent presses). I find it odd that strangers will scream at me to stop publishing on Substack when their favorite authors no doubt publish books for companies that also publish awful fascist right-wing books. Maybe just because it is easier to see how awful it is here? I’m not sure, but I do hope everyone understands that this is complicated ON PURPOSE. I got sucked into the ease in which Substack enabled people to financially support my work -- not caring that they got 10% of the money -- and it’s hard to walk away from that,

But when I’m in a good place mental-health wise, this is the pep talk I give myself: I’ve divested from toxic spaces before and I will do it again. If I can set boundaries with my own parents then I can certainly do that with companies, right?

So 2026 is the year to divest from Substack for me. For the past few months, we have worked hard (with the help of wonderful author/podcaster/person Rohadi Nagassar) to transition STRONGWILLED from Substack to Ghost. That transition is almost complete and . . . it was a lot more work than I thought it would be. I’m an elder millennial, and I am tired. Tired of learning one more system. Tired or having to be nimble and think on my feet and pivot to another platform. Tired of sinking my time and energy and money into platforms and companies that are then overtaken by fascists (remember Twitter? Yeah, me too). Tired of having to do all of this while I can’t even afford healthcare. But even though I am tired, I know I have done this before and I can do it again. And so can you!

So here’s where you can help me:

For the foreseeable future the majority of my public writing will be directed at the STRONGWILLED project. I will be continuing to write and research on the topics of recovering from high control religion, queerness, and autonomy - while also podcasting about pop culture, politics, and parenting. If you believe in my work and want to keep connecting with me I urge you to head on over to Ghost and subscribe to STRONGWILLED. On your end, it won’t be any more work than that. You will continue to get newsletters (and podcasts) from me delivered to your email inbox. PLUS we have a lot of fun stuff in the works for the rest of 2026, including webinars and workshops and some more interactive stuff, and I’d love to see you over there. Even if you didn’t grow up in white evangelicalism, we ALL live under religious authoritarianism right now, so learning to develop autonomy and find solidarity is essential for, well, everyone!

Another way you can support me is by joining our Patreon! I am my most unhinged and unvarnished self on our monthly patreon-only podcasts episodes, so if you want a weird little gremlin like me in your ear commiserating through these tough times, you can do that here and ensure that I am able to keep writing/podcasting for the foreseeable future.

On the theme of divesting, in a month or so I will be turning off paid subscriptions for Healing is My Special Interest. I am not ending HIMSI entirely, but now that I know how costly and time consuming it was to transfer STRONGWILLED to another platform, I just don’t have it in me to do that for this newsletter at the moment nor does it make financial sense. I am not deleting Healing is My Special Interest, but it will mostly just exist as an email list for occasional updates about my writing until I can transfer those emails somewhere else (I’m back in the same position I started in with leaving mailchimp for financial reasons!).

And this is just for the small percentage of paid subscribers reading this but if you financially support me here, I would love it if you would consider switching your support to Ghost or Patreon. And if you have never supported my work before but it has been helpful for you, now is a good time to start! To thank you for all of this (and to sweeten the deal of being, you know, tired) here’s a 25% off coupon (for life!) for Ghost.

And if you want to support us on Patreon in the next few weeks we are also offering 25% off over there -- and it’s already incredibly reasonably priced. Just click here and use the discount code of E566B.

You can also just subscribe to both for free and that also helps me out! And, of course, so too does sharing our content with friends and people you think might benefit from it.

OK now that I have gotten all the money stuff out of the way, I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who has emotionally and/or financially supported me here. I hope you know that every penny I received I have tried to sink back into other autistic writers and creatives when possible (and then used the rest to pay for my therapy bills). I am also SO grateful especially for the early years of this platform where it seemed like everyone was recommending each other’s work and we all shared essays and readers and it was such a wonderful communal experience. I still really really love readers, and you all give me hope for the world.

If 2026 is about divesting, then the future beyond that is about investing. Even though we are in the thick of the Bad Times right now, I am working on long-term creative projects for the first time in a long while. A screenplay. A possible novel. Long-form video essays. And I hope to encourage others to do the same. But to do this we all have the hard work of learning to divest now from toxic systems so we can invest in the authors, creatives, and media you would like to see in the future. While everything is objectively terrible, it’s also a pretty cool time to be someone with a vision for a better world and for telling the unheard stories of growing up in religious authoritarianism.

Being a freelance writer, creative and online gremlin continues to be a wild ride, and 2026 is no exception to that. But we made it thus far and we will keep finding each other in the margins of this collapsing empire. Thanks for being here, and for all of your support!

For the past few decades I have been building up the skills to pivot and change shit up if it’s not working for the good of us all. And I bet you have too. So let’s remember the good -- the community, growth, exploration, creativity, and learning -- and keep those vibes rolling forward.

And in order to do that we all need to find better places to invest in. It’s scary to face even more change, but that’s our work these days, isn’t it? We divest from the toxic systems we find ourselves in so we can start to invest in the world we actually want to see. Starting today, in whatever smalls ways we can.

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When I can get my act together I hope to put together a round-up of some of the incredible work published here at HIMSI but I don’t have the capacity for that right now. Also sorry for any typos, I seem to be one of the few writers left in the world who doesn’t use AI for anything including grammar and editing :) But if you support my work on ghost/patreon, hopefully I can hire a real-life human to do that for me!

(Comments are open to everyone on this post for once, so feel free to say hi and how long you have been lurking and maybe what you have enjoyed about HIMSI . . . but be nice!)

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Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. It’s been a week, and here are my very brief thoughts on some of it. If you appreciate my work, consider subscribing or becoming a supporter.

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I didn’t want to read the Epstein files. Any of it. I didn’t want to think about these horrible people in power, what they get away with, and how proud they feel about shaping culture to suit their horrible, insatiable needs. But when I heard that you could search for names in the files, of course I had to. I had to see if James Dobson was in there.

He was, which surprised me. I have long thought that evangelicals like Dobson didn’t need Epstein island when they had their own churches, organizations, summer camps, mission trips, and families where they could abuse children. They didn’t have enough power or money or intellect to tempt people like Epstein, but they replicated his methods in their own circles and communities. But in the files I discovered that Jeffrey Epstein shared a James Dobson article on forgiving your abusive father with a young girl he was most likely abusing/grooming.

There has been enough chatter about this on the internet for the past week, but I highly recommend this article (especially if you are a Christian or have Christian friends and family members and want to share this with them). I will just say that since I have been publishing articles for months now about how James Dobson made materials that appealed in particular to pedophiles, I am not surprised that Epstein shared his work in order to control a young girl.

It was the logical conclusion I had already come to. Predators share their victims, materials, and their beliefs with each other. But it has been interesting to see a lot of other people come to this same conclusion. All of the sudden, the work I have been trying to get in front of people is being seen. Ideas I have been obsessed with are now being talked about and engaged with. I am -- unfortunately -- being proven right about how purity culture is pedophile culture. But what is there to celebrate? The veil is being lifted behind how so much of our culture -- including the culture wars -- has been manufactured by literal pedophiles so they can get richer and have more money and keep getting away with it.

//

I tried not to look at the files. What’s the point? I desperately do not want to see any images of children (illegal). I don’t want to see the unredacted names of the victims (illegal) while looking at all the black boxes protecting the names of the powerful perpetrators (also illegal). But I am someone interested in the truth. And for a long time now I have wondered about the men who control so much of the world and think they are invincible. And like everyone else, I am looking for pathways into understanding the enormity of what is in the Epstein files, and how my little life might be connected to it.

A content creator named Connie Chen posted a video of her unpacking an exchange between Steven Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein from 2018. In it, Epstein texted about how he was reading about god not using consent with Mary and Bannon replies “Yaweh is a honor badge.”

This alone makes me feel ill, since both of these men are obviously drawn to the abusive patriarchal nature of this “god” that so many people claim to serve. But later on in that exchange something else stood out to me. Both Bannon and Epstein really thought of themselves as people who were orchestrating the world, and here is what Bannon wrote:

In 2018 I was still in the thick of trying to convince white evangelicals to love their immigrant and refugee neighbors. I was writing and speaking about this on college campuses and at Christian churches. I was desperately trying to get people to take their faith seriously, and in the process I found myself being bullied, screamed at, harassed and threatened (both online and IRL) by Christians. I had all of my verses about loving the foreigner and the stranger, but these folks had years if not decades of anti-immigrant propaganda they had willingly swallowed that was bought and paid for by people like Epstein and Bannon. I was never going to win, but nobody told me that. I thought I was on the side of Jesus, and that all things would work out for the good of those who love God.

When I saw that text exchange -- “the right now has the working class behind them on immigration” -- something in me broke. I felt so much grief for the person I was in 2018 and all of those years leading up to it. I was trying so hard to change the rising tides of authoritarianism and fascism but who was I against all of these forces? A nobody, a nothing. A true believer with a terrible anxiety disorder out on the front lines of trying to get white evangelicals to care about their neighbors.

I grieve for my naive beliefs. I grieve for all the immigrant and refugee lives lost to the violence of these men and those who swallowed their propaganda. I grieve for the damage ICE has done and will continue to do in our cities unless we stop them. I grieve for the ways it is always the children who pay for the culture wars these men manufacture -- from Dobson, to Bannon, to Epstein, to Trump -- and it never seems to be the men themselves who bleed and scream as the boot crushes their neck.

You don’t have to read the files to understand that Epstein, Trump, and Dobson used the exact same playbook: stoking fears of immigrants, queer people, and trans people in particular to shore up populist support for right-wing politicians and to hide their own sins. They also used the same playbook when it came to abusing children, and someday very soon I hope we can have that conversation at a wider level.

For now, I will end with the last Epstein exchange that I cannot stop thinking about (and all the Trigger Warnings for this one -- including religious language and the implied sexual abuse of a child).

It appears that Epstein and someone else were joking about dressing up as Jesus and referencing Jesus while sexually assaulting a young girl who was a Christian and found comfort in her faith. (“Whoops” is also something Epstein apparently texted and emailed a lot, often in the context of someone being found dead. So there is that as well). I don’t think my body and my brain has quite been able to comprehend the level of evil these men engaged with gleefully. I don’t know how our culture is ever going to recover from this without holding people accountable. I am so filled with rage and anger I don’t know what to do. It feels consuming. It feels older than me. It feels holy, in a way, after decades of trying to hope it wasn’t really this bad.

That maybe I was just making it all up.

//

I feel sick when I think of every child who has been abused at the hands of men, and I wish everyone else felt the same way. Unfortunately for all of us, there are a lot of people in our society who are either predators themselves or are enablers of the predators. If you are struggling with the reality that people in your life are revealing themselves to be unsafe -- because they still support Trump or refuse to take the Epstein files seriously -- then you aren’t alone. The worst silver lining of all of this being slowly brought into the open is that people are being forced to reveal the depths of delusion they live in. And nobody clings as tightly to their delusions quite like evangelical Christians.

It’s been a really difficult and busy week for me as I am balancing having a lot more attention on my work while also acknowledging that my nervous system really can’t handle too much right now. Every interview I have done leaves me exhausted. Every time I see a new revelation I want to scream and cry. But life still goes on, in the midst of it all, and I cook and clean and care for my kids and I have to believe that somehow that work really truly matters more than anything.

If we just stopped abusing kids, and if we prosecuted and punished those who hurt kids, I think we might have a chance at building something better. So I do what I can to make my home and myself safe for kids, and I know that so many others out there are like me. We care. We care so much it gives us ulcers and hives and OCD and headaches and back spasms and eye twitches. We care so much because we were once children ourselves, ignored and unheard, abused in the name of god or love or whatever else. And we don’t want this to happen to anyone else, not on our watch.

If this is you, I hope you are being gentle with yourselves. The tower of the patriarchy is collapsing, but it is ugly and scary and overwhelming.

I also want to say to anyone who experienced sexual abuse at the hands of anyone -- a family member, pastor, coach, whatever -- that you deserve all the care and comfort in the world. Right now, but also every day hereafter. I also wanted to say that it is worth looking into what the statute of limitations are in your state. Many states are slowly changing their laws so that child sexual abuse can be reported and investigated no matter how much time has passed. It’s never too late to disclose abuse to trusted people, find care and support, and partner with people holding predators accountable. I also believe that the tides are turning culturally as well (albeit slowly). It is time to hold abusers accountable, wherever we might find them.

Someone commented on my instagram that I wasn’t wrong about James Dobson and pedophilia, I was just early. That really stuck with me, and I can’t help but think about all the autistic pattern-finders out there who have been trying to tell us the rot at the core of the patriarchy all around the world. I love you all, and want you to take care of yourselves. We will need your keen sense of justice as we rebuild a new world in the ashes of the old.

Thanks to everyone who has shared my work at STRONGWILLED over the last few days and weeks, it really means a lot. I am in the trenches trying to finish up the purity culture series but more information keeps being revealed and I can barely keep up.

We are in this together, like we always have been.

Much love,

DL

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. I, like so many Americans right now, am reeling from how fast events are unfolding in the US. While this newsletter is centered around the concept of healing, I do not believe that means the absence of grief, terror, anger, or hopelessness. In fact, I think it means allowing for and getting curious about those emotions instead of struggling to remain regulated 100% of the time. As always, if you appreciate my work please consider supporting it in whatever ways make sense for you.

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A month or so ago I had a dream. In the dream, someone told me they used to love my writing. “You used to write so powerfully — so raw, so full of emotion. And then you changed.” When I woke up from my dream, I knew my poor brain was just trying to process one of the many seismic shifts my life has undergone in the past 10 years or so. The one where for a period of time my writing was very popular among a certain sect of people, and how that is no longer the case. Before, I could write about terrible evangelical men and horrible things happening in the world, but if I made sure to mention the Jesus was amazing and God would work all things out for the good then people would read and share my work. They called it honest, until one day I was a little too honest. Until the day I said I no longer believed that Christianity was good.

Now I no longer have any hope in god or institutions to save any of us, which means the subjects I write about have no convenient pressure release for the mind. No spiritual bypassing, no toxic Christian positivity. I am writing about terrible men, terrible theologies, abusive systems, and the long slow work of diving deep and connecting to our autonomy and true selves. To me that last part is the gospel, the only true good news there is for our present and also our future. But for people trained to interrogate or even hate themselves as soon as they could think and pray, connecting to yourself doesn’t feel good. It feels scary. For so many people raised evangelical or in some other high control group, getting in touch with your true self is dangerous. It leads to the loss of love and care and attachment to your caregivers, your community, your worldview, and sometimes your livelihood.

Still. So many of us have done this work and will continue to do it no matter the cost. And that, more than anything, gives me hope for the future.

I lost my readership over the last decade which means I lost getting positive feedback for my work that helped me keep going. In many ways this has been good for me, as I have had to dig deep and create my work out of something beyond public opinion. Despite all the changes I have undergone, I still keep writing. I still keep publishing. I still keep thinking and researching and struggling and connecting. I wouldn’t keep doing this work if I didn’t think there was something beneficial about it, something central to whatever kind of society comes next. And after careful consideration I have decided that the world I want to live in is one that centers children in every regard — including listening to those who have been abused at the hands of the powerful.

Do I want to continue to be obsessed with Dr. James Dobson and other awful religious authoritarian parenting experts?1 Frankly, no. But is my inner child happy to have someone banging the drum about the pain of growing up in a religious authoritarian home? Yes, I think they are. So even though I get less feedback on my work than I ever have, I am in touch with something better. I am making myself proud. I am becoming the grown-up I needed as a child. And it is never too late to do this work.

I keep wishing I had something better to offer everyone right now. Something more pleasant than 10,000 words on serial child predators and how they are continually on the hunt for places where they can and will get away with committing countless crimes against children. But as I keep thinking about the world beyond my special interest of religious authoritarianism, I find myself returning to a similar theme:

We need to continue to do the work of connecting to our emotions, and processing what we are experiencing.

For me writing has always been the main way I do this work — I was trained as an evangelical child to journal daily to god, and now I find a lot of comfort in journaling thoughts that most certainly would make that god mad. Being honest about what I am feeling right at that very moment is incredibly cathartic. Because one thing I know about intense times is that there are a wide range of emotions that will be felt all in the course of a day or even an hour — terror, courage, hope, despair. All of those emotions matter because we experience them. They are not good or bad or moral in any way. They just are. And these emotions have so much to teach us, if we will let them.

What if we took the time to record our emotions in these tumultuous days? As someone who likes to muck around in historical records I have always been a big fan of oral histories2. I love how diverse, unique, and human the stories we tell are. Now more than ever we all have the chance to record our own oral histories — what was it like to live under American Christian fascism — and we all get to choose how to tell our stories. I hope you consider taking the time and space to connect with your emotions and embrace them. Write it down in a journal, or make a collage. Write a piece of music or a poem. During the day scribble your emotions on a piece of paper or onto your notes app on your phone. Keep doing this, and don’t let the messy imperfection of it all stop you from making some kind of record of what it was like to be you right now.

If you need some prompts for starting to record your inner world, start here:

1. What is something that made you feel afraid today?

2. What is something that made you angry today?

3. What is something that made you feel hopeful today?

4. What is something that made you feel gratitude today?

Start there, and see what happens. If you write or send yourself a voice note or scribble some drawings along these prompts often enough, you might start to see some patterns. You might start to connect to yourself a tiny bit more. You might start to see yourself as the author and expert of your own story, one that is not bound to any institution or god or person except yourself.

Record what it is like to be you, and write your own emotional history down in whatever ways make sense for you. You get to decide if you want to share this with other people or keep it just for you. There is no right or wrong here, just you making choices for yourself. Allowing ourselves to be human in these times is one way connect to yourself, but I believe it also paves the way for a better future for us all. And, as a bonus, learning to identify your emotions and express them in ways that do not harm you or others is essential to processing childhood trauma.

At this point I don’t think you can truly center the wellbeing of children in your life and in your society unless you have done the work of connecting to the child you once were, the child that is still a part of you. Which includes allowing space to feel what it was like to be you in this world we were born into — all the pain, fear, wonder, joy, and confusion we experienced. That we are still experiencing to this day.

I think about my dream, about the people in my life I have disappointed with my honesty, especially in recent years. And I think about how shame is used to silence us in so many ways. For me personally, writing, journaling, and expressing my feelings in creative ways just for me —without fear of judgement — has been a lifeline of connection to my true self, and maybe it could be one for you too.

Here’s your permission to take your own inner world seriously these days. Make some kind of record of the mood swings, the big thoughts, the big feelings. And honor your inner child by letting these emotions exist without rushing to tie them up in a neat bow.

And, if enough people are interested, I would be up for hosting some journaling/personal history writing sessions on Zoom if people feel like they need a safe space for some body-doubling to do some of this work. Let me know in the comments or message me here on Substack. I feel very strongly that this is work everyone can do and that it will be beneficial to us all, but I also know people are totally exhausted just trying to survive these times3.

Much love to you all, especially to those in the thick of standing up to fascism. Thank you for standing up against cruelty. Thank you for being a part of a better world that is being born, right this very moment. Thank you for doing this work so that future generations have a chance at living a life connected to their true selves. Just like we all deserve.

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1

Almost two years of research went into my Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture series, which I just released a podcast episode about if you are interested in helping stop predators.

STRONGWILLED

PODCAST: Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture

Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity…

Listen now

5 months ago · 5 likes · D.L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. In 2025 I posted over 60 different Substack posts between HIMSI and STRONGWILLED. That’s a lot of content! If you find my work valuable, please consider supporting this endeavor financially or emotionally or just sharing it with your friends who might like it too. Thank you so much, I cannot do this work without you and I truly am so grateful.

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Happy 26 year anniversary of the Y2K scare to all who celebrate! This post isn’t really going to be about Y2K at all, but it’s been interesting for me to take a moment and reflect on how scared I was on December 31st, 1999. I was a junior in high school and believed that Y2K would usher in a horrendous period of persecution, suffering, global catastrophes and political instability. I didn’t plan for my future as a teenager because I was being told by the adults in my life that there was no need to do so. Now, looking back, I can see how being terrified of the future keeps people under the control of authoritarianism. Now that I am 41, I have lived through my fair share of disasters. But guess what? The end still hasn’t come. And constantly living like the world is going to end tomorrow doesn’t actually make it any easier to survive all the weirdness and sadness and joy that comes from being a human being in these times.

Anyways, happy anniversary to yet another histrionic apocalyptic scam that many evangelicals fell for. I’m always glad to see them proven wrong yet again.

I don’t know about you, but it’s been really hard for me to conceptualize what 2026 is going to be like. This is probably due to the fact that so much happened in 2025, and there was so much change. Political, social, relational, economic. The bad news sometimes seemed to crush my soul and make it hard to breathe — but I also experienced a lot of small, beautiful moments as well. As someone who often thinks about what is coming next, my brain is stuck when it comes to 2026. I (like a lot of other people) accurately predicted the rise of Christian nationalism and how they would take over our country, sending us ever closer to societal collapse. And I was right.

So now what?

2026 appears to be a year where none of us can predict what is coming. I am assuming our president will continue to make horrible headlines every day. I am assuming the cruelty will increase. I am assuming my gender identity will continue to be seen as the biggest threat to the Christian patriarchy and will be treated as such. I am assuming terrible men will continue to get away with abusing children. I am assuming that prices will climb higher and insurance rates will double and that some of us might get some kind of mystery illness that has long-term impacts on our physical health. I am assuming that people who do not care about the future of all of humanity and of the planet will continue to reveal themselves and we will continue to take notes. I am assuming some tragedies will take place, both big and small. I am assuming the moral injuries will pile up as the same six men get ever richer.

But. If 2025 taught me anything, it is that expecting the worst doesn’t actually help you survive it. But you know what does?

Building resilience through joy, pleasure, connection, and autonomy.

I am assuming in 2026 people will come to know on a bone-deep level what their values are. That people will help each other in whatever small ways they can. That we will laugh until we cry, and we will cry until we laugh. I am assuming we will make and also appreciate great art because that is what horrible times do to the human spirit. I am assuming we will develop inside jokes with ourselves and learn how to not let every single headline into our fortress of solitude. We will read books and watch movies and listen to music and gaze at the trees. We will learn how to be in our bodies just a tiny bit more. We will feel some of the feelings we had to bottle up as little children or teenagers or young adults, and we will show up for ourselves in new and better ways. I am assuming some relationships will deepen and grow. I am assuming that some things will die and some things will be reborn. I am assuming most of us want a future that is so much better than the one currently on offer to us all and we will do what we can when we can to work towards it.

Now, if I can go one step farther and I want to tell you what I hope for 2026. This is vulnerable for me to even think about, much less type. I am the sort of person who was raised to believe the end of the world was always imminent. First Christianity and then activism convinced me that life consisted of suffering valiantly until the end so for me hope is a fragile, fleeting emotion. But here are the threads I am pulling on as we enter into another year around the sun:

I hope self-compassion blooms in our hearts and colors everything we do.

I hope our bodies are thanked instead of shamed for the ways they help us survive.

I hope pleasure is found in the smallest of moments.

I hope children are protected from predators instead of trained to obey them.

I hope we stop protecting religion and institutions and billionaires and start protecting people.

I hope we keep processing our pasts in order to not perpetuate the harms we experienced.

I hope we all get to know our true selves just the tiniest bit more.

And I hope that we all find ways to be creative, a birthright of being born human.

2025 was a year I really felt the weight of everything that has happened to me. I suspect 2026 will be more of the same, but I am already scheming up different ways of processing that I hope will integrate all the emotions in a way that doesn’t overwhelm me. We shall see how successful I am at that.

In 2025 I took 4 months off of social media and put together a one-day weird immersive art show all about evangelical indoctrination materials. I just felt compelled to do this. Partly because I knew I was gearing up to finally write/record my James Dobson’s Worst Nightmare materials and that I was going to be tackling the subject of pedophiles and purity culture. Doing something creative with all of the horrible books I had collected felt really important, and I am so glad I did that. It’s one of my proudest moments of 2025 for sure.

For 2026 I have been having another weird creative urge. I have tried to write a memoir of growing up with an end-times obsessed mother for years but it never goes well. It feels like a slog, and honestly it triggers me during a time when . . . well, a lot of things are triggering to me. But I have become interested in writing a screenplay loosely based off of my life as an evangelical teen in 1999 who truly believed Y2K was going to usher in the end of the world. So that’s what I have started working on, and my brain is really enjoying the puzzle of writing something that is completely outside of my wheelhouse. It feels like play, which is a really nice feeling to have these days.

I am feeling less and less like being on social media again, partly because I am in the thick of parenting and taking care of other people’s children and cooking and cleaning and all of the unsexy parts of creating a cozy life for my family. The activist part of me needs a break, and my silly, slow, and soft parts need some time and attention. Winter seems like the perfect season for this, so I am going to listen to my body and continue to prioritize my mental health. Because 2025 taught me that crises can and will happen no matter how hard you try to avoid them, so why not be good to yourself in the meantime?

I don’t know what 2026 will bring to any of us, but I do know that if you are here and reading this that means we survived. I honor that survival, and all the work that has gone into us learning more and more every day how to honor the totality of our human bodies and brains.

For today, I am wondering how everyone is feeling about 2026 -- and what you have been processing about 2025. Any reflections, thoughts, and emotions? Or maybe you are like me and feel rather overwhelmed at the task of processing the past year OR thinking about the future -- both extremely valid responses! Either way, I would still love to hear from folks about how they are processing these days and what they are thinking about for next year. Any creative projects on your horizon? Let me know in the comments!

And lastly, for everyone who has supported my work in the past year -- by sharing posts or podcast episodes, supporting me financially, sending me a nice note or interacting here in the comments -- I can’t thank you enough. My work often makes me feel isolated and overwhelmed by the cruelty of religious men, but interacting with real flesh-and-blood people who are just trying to heal and not cause harm to others is so important to me.

The world didn’t end on December 31st, 1999. And it won’t end any time in 2026 either. So here’s to living our lives in the shadow of the apocalypse, and finding ways to connect with each other despite it all.

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Hello everyone. I am staring down the end of a batshit year just like everyone else. I don’t have a gift guide or even a list of things I recommend. I have thought about writing an essay on mushrooms, making a listicle of all the things that have comforted me more than Jesus in 2025, writing an ode to Rian Johnson’s movie Wake Up Dead Man (a Knives Out Mystery), or giving you all some reflections on the 25th anniversary of Y2K.

But every time I sit down to write, nothing comes out. I am stuck in the land of wanting to appear healthy-ish but also being honest about how at times I am pretty sad and overwhelmed by the basics of life. Nothing seems helpful to share these days, because I truly know everyone is in the midst of SO MUCH. And that includes me.

So I just thought I would ask a discussion question, something to think about this week and perhaps the next as we go into some triggering holiday times where the temptation to numb, disassociate, and disappear becomes a little bit louder.

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I know my last post was sad (I am still grieving my precious dog Fern) and I still don’t really have a lot to say. We adopted a cat named Checkers and he is such a delight (and reminds me of Fern in many ways) but I am still feeling sad and slow and overwhelmed by the amount of news I am supposed to be able to process every day.

I have been thinking a lot about how a few days before the 2024 election I pulled a tarot card, and I was specifically thinking about who would win. I pulled the tower card and was immediately plunged into a flashback. I felt like a small child again, being told that the world was going to end very, very soon. I felt dread, fear, anxiety, and terror. I hated this feeling, and I put away my tarot cards until several weeks after the election. Like many people, I woke up at 3AM on November 6th and checked my phone and saw the news:

Trump had won the US presidential election. Again.

And I knew nothing would ever be the same.

Of course, the tower of patriarchy falling down is a good thing, ultimately. Once my nervous system feels safe and secure I can see this. But still: being a witness to all the suffering and all the terror being perpetuated in the US against marginalized people has done something to my soul. Even while it breaks apart it is crushing people left and right.

I truly think the tower is falling. I think the Epstein files will reveal previously unknown levels of evil — and point to how the powerful collude together while the rest of us fight and bicker and struggle to survive. This isn’t about political parties, but rather it is about the 1% against the rest of us. We must be prepared to face the truth about power in the United States, and hold everyone accountable. Starting in your family, your church, your city, your state, your favorite actor or writer — and all the way up to our politicians. They are actually making it very easy for us these days. You can simply ask anyone in your life: do you believe in protecting children from predators? And see how they respond. Take careful note if they use any language to protect the powerful people they vote for or tithe to. They are revealing themselves to be unsafe people, and should be treated as such.

It’s been a tough few years for me, but I am proud of the fact that I have faced these hard questions and decisions head-on. I will never forget when Brett Kavanaugh was being nominated for the supreme court and my mother told me she was terrified of “cancel” culture and what it was doing to our society. “What a young man does in college should not impact him the rest of his life” she told me. Instead of brushing off her remarks I let them settle in my bones. I wondered how many men she knew personally who had abused and exploited others, and how evangelical Christianity gave them a chance to start over without ever being held accountable. I didn’t brush off her remarks but I took them seriously. Deadly seriously, for I had one more piece of information letting me know that she would choose the patriarchy over me, every time.

The people who have chosen the tower of patriarchy are revealing themselves right now, right in this very moment. They are the ones making cases that 15 year olds are different from 5 year olds when it comes to sexual abuse, that ICE agents should be able to terrorize and kidnap non-white people, that trans people should have no rights. They are the ones making excuses for abuse, over and over and over again.

I say let them. Ask them how they feel about the United States government right now, and take careful note of what they say. Because when the tower falls, we will need to know who wants to rebuild the patriarchy, and who wants to live in a better world for us all. We will need to know who we can trust with our children and who we cannot. We will need to know who wants to protect the earth and who wants to exploit it. We will need to know who wants to nurture communities and mutual aid, and who wants to extract resources from the 99%.

Once the tower fully collapses, what will we do? I have no real idea. But for today, I am preparing my body, my nervous system, and my soul for what is coming. For what is revealed will be horrifying, and it will be hard for so many people to face. But once you do, you can move towards building up something better.

For me, I will continue to invest in my STRONGWILLED project, helping folks understand the history and long-term impacts of religious authoritarian parenting methods (both on individuals and society as a whole). I will continue to write and educate people about pedophiles and how they are rampant in Christian spaces. And I will continue the long, slow work of grieving my past and my present while also dreaming and manifesting a better tomorrow. One where children are nurtured instead of hit in the name of god. One where abusers are held accountable. One where the earth and all who live on it are nourished instead of exploited. One where every single person has access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education. Basic human rights for all shouldn’t be such a controversial position. But it is to the patriarchy, and it is this basic desire for all creatures to be treated decently that will eventually bring the tower crashing down.

Take care of yourselves as best you can these days, and let me know: how are you taking care of yourselves during this time of unveiling? How are you nurturing your desires for a better world as we survive the ending of this one? How are you taking care of your physical body these days?

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Thank you so much to everyone who supports my work and my writing. One of the best ways you can support me is by supporting STRONGWILLED on Patreon. Plus, if you sign up now you will get some great bonus podcast episodes (including one being released soon on how to navigate the holidays during these stressful times).

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Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter that used to be about the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments . . . and is now about whatever I want it to be about (mostly autonomy, and reclaiming hope for the future). Today is a personal (and short) post about the grief I am currently swimming through. Thank you to everyone who supports my work and my writing. If you would like to read this post but don’t have financial resources, perhaps consider a way you can support me (sending me a nice email, sharing about my work on social media, donating to your local food bank in my honor) and then reach out to strongwilledproject at gmail and I will hook you up with a one year paid subscription.

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My beautiful, precious little Corgi Fern died last week. I am still figuring out how to process this. One second she was there — always attuned to me, ears perked up, following me around the house — and the next she wasn’t. She died like she lived — not afraid of anyone or anything. She wasn’t like me. She wasn’t anxious and homebound and terrified of the future, her brain puzzling over all the biggest problems in the world and how to solve them. She was on a walk and she saw one of her best doggie buds. She somehow wriggled out of her collar, ran a few happy zoomies across the street, and then a speeding van came careening down the road.

As a family, we have now experienced a profound trauma together. Seeing death, seeing tragedy, and experiencing loss. We are getting through, and we are so happy to have each other: hours of watching movies and coloring and just huddling together. We got her almost four years ago and she was our first dog ever. I always said I was a cat person, and then I got Fern. And after that, I always told people that I still wasn’t a dog person.

Instead, I was a Fern person.

The week Fern died was also the week my parents told Krispin that they were leaving on a two month long road trip across America, where they intended to look for another place to live. Somewhere far away from me, my children, my younger sister and her kids — all the family members my parents are currently estranged from. They framed their decision, as they always do, as them embarking on another adventure with God. When Krispin told me the news I was puzzled at the emotions I felt. Wasn’t this the best case scenario? Them leaving, so I wouldn’t be haunted by their absence in my life? I wouldn’t have to worry about seeing them at the grocery store or at the gym, or stopping by to drop something on my front stoop? Knowing they were so physically near and yet so emotionally absent?

But I wasn’t relieved, I wasn’t happy. I was angry. Here was proof that my parents were running away from their problems instead of facing them, something they had done my entire life. We moved every 2-3 years when I was a child, and my parents always told me it was because God had called them elsewhere. Now that I am older I can see the broken relationships and endless conflicts that my parents either couldn’t or wouldn’t face littering our every move. It was easier to move on, go somewhere new and exciting, and leave as soon as accountability was called for.

In March of this year I sent my parents an email. It was so much more honest than they deserved, but I kept on hearing through the grapevine that they were confused as to why I was still so distant from them. So I cleared up that confusion. I mostly told them how angry I was at them — how I was raised, the fear they instilled in me at the end of the world, the hateful bigotry I heard day in and day out, their Republican politics and the suffering it imposed on so many people. I told them what I would need to be in relationship with them: frank conversations on this hurt, them being a witness to my anger, and taking accountability for the trauma caused by their beliefs and actions.

They never responded.

Which, of course, is a response in of itself.

And now they are running away for good. Or as my dad said, starting the next (and final) stage of their lives on a new adventure.

When Krispin told me, I comforted myself with what I had around me: my little family, my friends, and my dog. I have been learning these past 4 years how to be OK without being loved or seen by my parents. I held Fern’s soft little ears and I kissed her sweet little snout. Despite all the pain and suffering in the world, there was still some good in it. I could still find unconditional love after all, despite spending almost 4 decades of looking for it in the places where it could never love me back.

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Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. I’m glad you are here, and that we are in this together.

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Two years ago I was driving on a sunny October day for a long-awaited break. I had planned out the day meticulously: the new Sufjan album Javelin would release, Krispin would be watching our children, and I would drive 1 hour and 45 minutes along the gorge that separates Washington from Oregon to an art museum in the middle of nowhere. It was my adventure, my big plan to go out into the wider world — the world I am constantly terrified of. I had been talking to my therapist of my fears regarding social collapse, that everywhere I looked I saw the signs of a society coming apart at the seams. The crushing poverty, drug use, racism, and spiritual bypassing I was surrounded with scared me, but everyone in my life kept encouraging me to give humanity another try. Maybe it all wasn’t as bad as it sometimes felt in my bones.

Before I left on my drive I checked the news. I saw the reports of attacks against Israelis, and it sickened me. As I drove towards the art museum, my sadness started to turn into grief, and then fear. How would this act of violence be used by the leaders of Israel against the people of Palestine? I listened to Sufjan sing sadly about his partner who died of cancer, and I started to cry. I drove past ancient scenery caused by the long long centuries of water flowing and all I could think was that this event of 10/7 would set off WWIII. That the cycles of violence would continue expanding outward until every single one of us was touched by it.

I wandered around the art museum, barely able to pay attention. There was religious iconography, the splendor of royals, indigenous artifacts, colonizer memories. A muddle, a mixture, of those who seek to control from above and those who make beauty from their surroundings. I tried to drink a grape soda but couldn’t even swallow. The dread was creeping up. I listened to Javelin again on the drive back, and this time it felt personal. It felt like I had been born into a world riddled with cancer, but covered up with stories, mythologies, makeup and more. An illusion of health, when the decay was right underneath the surface all along. Society was collapsing, war and conflict and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people was immanent, and nobody seemed to see it but me.

I finally made it home, safe and surrounded by my loved ones. In the days to come I felt ashamed of my tears, my sobs, my predictions of an endless cycles of punishing authoritarians taking opportunities to destroy those who cannot or will not comply. I chalked it up to growing up with an end-times obsessed mother, my CPTSD, reading too much news on my phone. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad after all. Perhaps everyone around me was right: there was nothing to worry about.

Maybe the authoritarians wouldn’t do the things they had boasted time and time again that they would do. Perhaps, maybe this time, I would be proven wrong.

The story of Palestine is the story of all of us, and the past two years have shown me this more than ever. Today I am allowing myself to feel it all: the grief, the rage, the despair, the scorn, the almost desperate desire for people to do something to stop it.

I am also allowing myself to feel proud in the ways I have showed up in the world in the past two years. In my own small and weird ways I have kept Palestine close to my heart. I have kept the children of the world who suffer at the hands of violent men close to my soul. I have worshipped at the feet of the moon, the sun, of the fresh herbs in my garden and I have decided to keep living despite it all. The cycles of violence continue ever onward but now I see through the propaganda that props it all up. I refuse to normalize it, or accept it as our only fate. I cry, I walk, I journal, I scream, I rage-post, I snuggle, I stare off into silence for hours, I wake up early and struggle to envision a hopeful future. I allow myself to be as human as I want the rest of the world to view the people of Palestine: as people who deserve the autonomy to choose their own life. People who deserve to have the loudest voices when it comes to their own future, and the future of their children. Just like I do, here in the United States.

Living in a place that is ostensibly home of the free these days feels like I took too many mushrooms and went to the state fair. Surrounded by red white and blue and people who are too terrified to live and think for themselves. People who are too scared to admit when they have made a mistake or that they have been much too compliant to unjust authorities. People who talk a big talk about resisting tyranny and then swarm social media to egg it on. People who only condone political violence when it’s a transphobic racist white Christian man they like who is on the receiving end of it, but who are gleeful when anyone not of their little world is blown to bits by the very guns they fought so hard to be able to hold.

It’s been two years since I spent a day stuck in fear and sobs, envisioning the horrors to come. Two years to that day, and more suffering and violence has happened than I could have even predicted. Every institute of Palestinian life has been eradicated: the hospitals full of small children and the elderly, the museums and mosques and libraries, the streets and cities and homes, the farms and access to any water or food or baby formula. They are being starved as I write this, and the few brave souls trying to reach them with aid are being kidnapped and tortured while the world watches.

In my own city of Portland, my president is mobilizing the military to come and use lethal force if necessary against those protesting the inhumane and illegal kidnapping of people by ICE agents. Men in full riot gear are in my city with their rifles slung around their shoulders while right-wing agitators livestream the small motly crew of protesters dressed in frog costumes and blowing bubbles at ICE agents. Families are being torn apart by ICE, thousands of innocent people are missing from the US concentration camps, trans people have almost zero rights, abortion access has been denied to millions and millions of people, pedophiles are being protected at the highest levels of our government, all of us will be paying double for what little health insurance we have, and soon it will be legal again to place children in gay conversion therapy.

It’s WWIII out here in Portland, and probably in your city too. But the tactics have changed and now we are being surveilled and controlled by our phones, our social media, and our inability to actually live in reality. The one where authoritarianism is on the rise in almost every corner of the globe. Nobody is coming to save us, but the good and bad news is this:

We always have, and we always will, save each other. In the past two years my friends and I started a coven, put on a religious trauma art show, released close to 100 podcast episodes, wrote hundreds of thousands of words, ate delicious treats, read so many good books, listened to gorgeous music, was helped by my friends and family and community, laughed at stupid memes, grieved the loss of my parents in my life, was educated on all sorts of things thanks to TikTok, parented my children, and fell in love with every single act of bravery and courage I came across. And there was so much to see!

I am remembering all of this today, two years after I felt like I was falling into a world split apart at the seams. It has been two years of slowly facing reality, and of building up the kind of life I want to live here and now. Of regulating my nervous system and screaming into the void. Of using the means of control like social media apps to be as weird and as off-putting and intense as I like. To be more creative instead of consumeristic. To grieve one genocide and to grieve them all. To be a perpetual burning heart that I feed with kindness, gentleness, and self-compassion.

I didn’t give up on the world two years ago, even though for a moment I wanted to. I still love it, despite everything. And there are so many brave folks scattered throughout this gigantic mass of land, and they are all up to their weird and wild ways of being ungovernable, creative, and curious. To be alive and awake right now is to experience pain, and fear, and uncertainty. But we also have spent the past few years (and decades even) building up a different way. Our own way. A way that honors all the complexities of who we are and hopes for a better future.

And nobody will ever be able to take that away from us.

Two years ago, I never made it to the end of Sufjan’s album. I just kept playing the sad songs on the beginning over and over again. But today I am listening to the last song, a cover of a song written and performed by Neil Young. It doesn’t fix everything I so desperately want changed right now. But it reminds me that so many of us are waking up to the world right under our fingertips. The one where the wind and the trees and the earth itself is crying out for care instead of exploitation. For mutuality instead of hierarchy. For community instead of supremacy.

Much love to you all from occupied Portland. What will the world look like one year from today? For all of our sakes, I hope it looks very different than the one I woke up to today. Starting with a free and self-determining Palestine.

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Hey if you appreciate my content consider subscribing, liking, sharing, and commenting. If you are interested, I released yesterday part one of my deep-dive into why James Dobson is the literal worst:

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James Dobson's Worst Nightmare Part 1

Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity…

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8 months ago · 26 likes · D.L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield

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When I was a young child, age six or seven, I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up. I liked making my dad laugh. I liked people having a pleasant reaction to me when they remembered I existed. My family perhaps didn’t think I was funny as much as they thought I was odd. They were laughing at me, not with me, but I couldn’t tell the difference.

By the time I was 8, I had no dreams for my future. My mother had entered her stage of religious psychosis where she was convinced God was telling her that the second coming of Christ was just around the corner. She found others who believed the same way in small towns across the western United States. She found people willing to sell her books and conferences eager to sell her tickets, all proclaiming the end was nigh. As a homeschooled pastor’s kid with no other adults in my life, I hung on her every word. She told me she was a prophet, and that I must listen to her carefully. She was full of woe and sadness, but also strangely giddy. Soon, all her troubles would be over. The rapture was coming, and she would be whisked away to heaven where no more tears would ever be shed. She could feel the end coming, feel it in her bones. It had to be soon. Because how much more of this life could she bear?

Last week I had two anxiety attacks. I tried all my tricks: ice pack on the chest, deleted all my social media apps, read Anne of Green Gables, took long walks in the September wind. But still the anxiety thrummed in my veins, made me sick to my stomach, made my mind lose hours and hours on pointless ruminations. Of course some of them centered on how the world was ending, how suffering would always be my companion, on how to keep my children and everyone I love safe in a world that was increasingly targeting them.

Nothing helped, until one day I woke up feeling a little bit better. No miracle cure, no magic prayer, no pill to take or belief to cling to. I just kept surviving, and one day it got slightly easier. Instead of just feeling afraid, I started to feel other emotions: anger, joy, bemusement, scorn. I started to feel like a human. A silly little bag of bones clattering around a world I know way too much about. A survivor of countless apocalypses, most of them only living in my brain. Every night my world ends, and every morning it begins again anew.

And I am grateful, despite everything, to wake up and see that we are all still here.

Evangelical Christians as a whole are a bunch of depressed and anxious and angry people who have no real skills for living through tumultuous times. It is no surprise to me that rapture theology is back on the menu for them, since they hitched their wagons to the white supremacist patriarchal god which becomes ever more unpopular. They know deep down, just like we all do, that there is no going back to normal. There is no forgetting what people have said and the boots they have kissed and licked in order to get cookies from the fascists. Their hatred of queer people, trans people, immigrants, Black people and more will never be erased. They have their anger and they have their guns and they have their martyrs and they have their president and they have their Supreme Court but you know what they don’t have?

Us.

They have lost us, the people who actually care about the future of the planet and the future of humanity. And since their religion doesn’t allow for them to self-reflect, apologize, or take accountability, they have no clue how to fix the mess that they themselves created. The ways they parented their children, the politicians and the policies they voted into office, the houses they can no longer sell, the empty seats at the Christmas dinner. They are lost, so they turn to what they know: the desire to be swept up into the heavens, to escape the life that they themselves created. Their ridiculous beliefs about being raptured into glory bely a terrifying lack of ability to live here, in 2025, and all the very real problems we as a society and globe face. They want all the power and all the glory and none of the responsibility for living together in a world that makes room for everyone.

They are the apocalypse, the locusts, the plagues I grew up hearing about. They are not the antichrist, but they are his minions. Their Bibles and their worship songs the mark of the beast, the signs of the times that we and all the rest of the world can see. They have been branded, they have been claimed. Their world is ending, that much is true. But for the rest of us, it is only beginning.

Here, in the rubble, we rebuild all that they have tried to destroy. While they sit on the outside and gnash their teeth or pray to be delivered, we are the ones who feed and care for each other. Who cherish our children and nurture their strong wills. Who believe in the goodness of humanity instead of our sins. Who believe the earth is precious and must be treated as such. Who are committed to living as if we will wake up tomorrow instead of wishing we would cease to exist.

What is rapture theology except a cry for help? What are evangelicals if not a group of people so totally lost that they would destroy the whole world if it saved their perception of themselves as good and holy?

Today, like every day, is a good time to remember how hollow the words those locked into a death cult truly are. Look at the people the valorize. Look at the funerals they hold. Look at the their relationships with anyone who dares to think differently from them. These are not serious people, nor do they operate in any kind of good faith. There is no point debating them, no point trying to appease them. Whatever empathy you give to them will not be returned to you and yours — it will be hoarded, greedily, and used to silence you further.

They are losing the war they have been waging for so long, and making us all pay. Of course some days it feels like the end of the world, because that is what they want us to feel. But in reality, we are all in the cycle of the seasons shifting again. Something new is coming, something better is already here. So many of us are learning how to love ourselves and love our planet despite billions being poured into indoctrinating us otherwise. So many of us want a better world for ourselves and our children right this very second. And they can’t silence us all, or fire us all, or censor every single social media app, or make us disappear with a snap of their fingers or the sound of the shofar.

We are here, and we aren’t going anywhere. A new world is coming. If the apocalypse is happening then it is the ending of the gods of men. And despite what they might desire, evangelicals will have to live just like everyone else as a new world is birthed right in front of them.

So why not find moments of laughter, of joy, of pleasure while we can? The anxiety attacks might keep coming, but so too will moments of connection and care. We are in this together, and we will make it through as we always have. I have fought too hard to give up now, I have discovered how much I truly enjoy being alive — despite all the pain and fear and suffering. I have so much to live for, and so do you.

Evangelical theology tried to squash my sense of the future, of joy and safety and belonging outside of the narrow confines of their patriarchal white supremacist religion. But I clawed my way out, and here I am with all of you: happy to be alive. Happy to be here. Happy to find things to laugh about, even in the most chaotic of times.

And today, on yet another failed rapture day, is something for me to celebrate.

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Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. We are now at the stage of fascism where one must be careful what they post these days — but I am beyond proud to publish this timely guest post by Reina Lewis. In times like these, it is never a bad idea to go back to the basics of how to be in your body and squeeze out what joy you can in your day to day life. Things continue to look bleak in many areas, but hope (and resistance) is all around as well. Much love to everyone in the thick of it, and thank you to everyone who makes this newsletter possible.

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10 Steps to Finding Joy During the Apocalypse

by Reina Lewis, MOT, OTR/L

Apocalypse

Originating from the Greek word “apokalypsis”

Meaning ‘unveiling’

- Uncovering what was once hidden -

Joy

Originating from the Latin word “gaudia”

Meaning ‘gladness,’ and ‘delight,’

- Pleasure & rejoicing -

Our world as we’ve known it has changed. (Or, the truths of this world are just being revealed?) We are living through the horrors, witnessing tragedies over and over on our ever-present screens, and we are still expected to do our silly little daily tasks and get our asses to work.

Every one of us deserves a medal, but there is no recognition for what each one of us is pushing through. Only you know how hard you are working.

We must celebrate ourselves.

For those of us who are neurodivergent, who are more likely to have C-PTSD, high pattern recognition, and strong senses of justice – celebrating & experiencing joy may feel like the antithesis to what we feel we should be doing during this time.

“Why should I enjoy things when there is SO MUCH suffering?”

Pause — take a deep breath as you look into this photo. See what stands out to you.

A photo of wildflowers in the Pecos wilderness, taken by me.

The question becomes even more complex for those of us who were indoctrinated within evangelical Christianity, which taught us to live in fear – of our bodies, of our desires, and of those unlike us. And, for those of us who have deconstructed from authoritarian religion, it can be difficult to live through this time without the comforting certainty that religion provided many of us. Hopelessness is a perfectly reasonable emotion for us to feel. However, it’s not helpful. Hopelessness is detrimental for our nervous systems, communities, and for the revolution we all hope for.

One of the most important parts of my deconstruction journey has been developing hope. I don’t think it could have been achieved without building my interoception — the capacity to identify, feel, and respond appropriately to my body’s internal cues. My work as an Occupational Therapist in various settings (outpatient mental health, inpatient children’s psych, and now in a skilled nursing facility) has provided me the opportunity to build this capacity within the clients and patients I treat.

The title of this post may seem too good to be true. The truth is that there are no easy 10 step solutions to feeling good when it feels like everything around us is on fire. My aim is not to give easy solutions, but to provide practical, evidence-based strategies that we can implement to build our capacity for joy, hope, and forward thinking. Take what you will, and leave what doesn’t serve you at this moment.

Another deep breath, the deepest breath you’ve taken all day. Notice what you notice, and one sensation in your body.

Shell Beach, CA. Taken by me.

All right. Here we go — 10 strategies for building our capacity for joy when we are completely out of control of the world that requires so much of us. (Not as catchy as the title I went with, right?)

1. Move

I know, I know. I’m sure this is annoying. But movement is so helpful and important. I’m specifically thinking about movement before, during, or after ingesting the insanity that is the news cycle. It should be movement that is achievable, and ideally movement that feeds your soul. Can you walk while you listen to your news podcast? Bounce on a yoga ball while you doom scroll? Shake it out when you see a few TikToks that rock your entire world? Can you incorporate a 1-3 song dance party for you and your kids when they get out of school? Having a hard time getting out of bed? Choose an animal and imagine how they’d move while horizontal — wiggle like a worm, stretch like a cat, squirm around on your back like a bug. *Any* movement is good movement, and brings us back to our bodies and the present moment.

2. Go outside

Sunlight is everything! Changing our environment can help our headspace! Noticing what we are drawn to, whether that be flowers, clouds, or street art can be life-giving.

3. Express gratitude

There is a lot of research to suggest that gratitude practices can help to change our neural pathways to notice the positive. This helps us to be mindful and present. It is a practice. These human animal brains are good at noticing everything that is wrong. Do what works for you and feels good, whether that be a list in your notes app, a daily photo of something you are grateful for, a junk journal page incorporating things you loved that month, or verbalizing out loud something you are grateful for with and without your loved ones present.

4. Address your burnout

One of my favorite resources comes from Dr. Megan Anna Neff from Neurodivergent Insights (find on Substack or insta) — Dr. Neff has this post with amazing visuals. For many neurodivergent people, visuals are beneficial— make it a lock screen or physically write on a piece of paper and put it in a place where you can see everyday to remind you of your plan when burnt out.

5. Pinpoint your sensory preferences

I love this tip a lot, and I think it is integral to understanding ourselves & coming back to our bodies as neurodivergent humans. Think about each sense — taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight, and vestibular. (There are actually more but that’s for another post). Think about your favorite things to experience within each sense. Make a physical or mental list, or a box full of all of your favorite sensory soothers. Think back to what you enjoyed as a kiddo— did you love to spin, click a pen, bite your erasers, or rub a soft blanket on your face? Find replacements for these things and consider doing them often, especially when feeling down.

6. Identify your values

As D.L shared in this post, “…the best indicator of whether or not a person resisted the Nazi party was their level of connection to their true self.” Part of this is identifying our values. One of my favorite resources for this is the Motivational Interviewing Values Card Sort. You can print and cut out the cards to physically sort, or there is this online resource that you can do to grapple with what matters to you. Identify the top ten, order based on level of importance to you, and — once again — make a visual that is accessible to you to remember who you are and what’s important to you. This helps us to not only know ourselves better, but also helps us to narrow down how we’d like to take part in building the world we want.

7. Engage with your special interests

Specifically, the ones that bring joy, gratitude, hope, and light. Remember the things throughout your life that made time disappear. Let your brain notice & follow the patterns of topics that lift up rather than tear down your soul.

8. Boost self-compassion

Another resource from another Dr. Neff! Dr. Kristen Neff has wonderful books and resources on her website to support building self-compassion, which she describes as: “we give ourselves the same kindness and support we’d give a good friend.” Obviously we don’t become proficient at this overnight. But imagine the world we could have if we all spoke to ourselves in a kind way??? You deserve it.

9. Build self-efficacy

This one is much more broad than the rest. All of the tips discussed can help us to build our self-efficacy — the belief that oneself has the ability to succeed. We need this if we want to contribute to our little worlds in the best way we can.

10. Breathe

• Diaphragmatic breathing is the most accessible tool we have for calming our nervous systems. Just a couple of techniques for you—

• 4-7-8 breathing. Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 7 (or however long you are able), and slooowly exhale through pursed lips for 8 seconds. Exhaling longer than inhaling communicates to the body that we are safe.

• Progressive muscle relaxation. This combines movement & breath, another way to signify to the body that we are safe. With this, we are progressively tensing and relaxing our muscles with paired breathing. I like to do this while I lay down, starting with my feet. Inhale, squeeze your toes while you hold your breath, and exhale as you fully relax. Then calves. Inhale, hold and tense, exhale and relax. Go up through each muscle group. On the last one, squeeze every single muscle in your body, including your face, belly, hands, shoulders. Fully fully relax.

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I hope this post gave you a couple of things to incorporate. I’m wishing everyone in this community radical gentleness & joy turned back toward yourselves. Thanks for reading :)

“Our essential task in life is to awaken to the way that the eternal would speak through us, to learn to live out our intended personality and the inner weirdness that makes us a unique torchbearer of the flame of life.” - Michael Meade (found in Neuroqueer Heresies by Nick Walker)

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Reina is a traveling occupational therapist, creative, foodie, neurodivergent sensitive soul from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has worked in various settings as a OT such as mental health, inpatient rehab, transitional housing, school-based, and skilled nursing facilities, promoting wellness in people of all ages. She strives to promote neurodivergent affirming care, self-compassion, and self-efficacy in her clients.

Thank you so much Reina for this timely and helpful love letter to all of us living through tumultuous times.

If you have anything to add to this list in the comments, please let us know as a community what is helping you access some peace, calm, safety, and JOY in the midst of all the horrors!

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It’s a season of change, transition, and starting over again. Today I'm sharing some of the ways my focus has been shifting, and how that might affect the D.L. Mayfield universe of Healing is My Special Interest and STRONGWILLED. We're still in process in many ways, but it felt like a good time to start thinking about what is next, and what might change. Not immediately. Not erratically. Just the slow evolution of beginning again, while retaining all that we are.

I haven’t known what to post here in a hot minute — luckily I have been able to pay amazing people to write guest posts for me — and that’s OK.

My special interest brain has been fully locked in and engaged with my work on the long-term impacts on people and society of religious authoritarianism. I have been hard at work on an investigative project focused on purity culture being linked to pedophile culture (the first post goes up next Monday on STRONGWILLED . . . which I am nervous and excited to share).

I have also been doing a few other creative projects on the side. I love talking about pop culture but have always felt like I needed someone else’s permission to dip my toe into those waters as a podcaster. But what am I waiting for? Society is crumbling, why can’t I record myself yapping about Superman and the hope it can give us for resisting authoritarianism? I’m the boss of my own life so why not put forth the energy I want to see in the world?

I have also been in a long, hot, slow summer filled with taking care of children and teenagers and their needs and fears and joys. It is the hardest, most rewarding work of my life to give children a safe and creative childhood when I was denied both of those things myself. But it also takes up about 75% of my total energy, and I am running on fumes.

I write, I research, I refill endless cups of water, I listen patiently as a child recaps an anime episode to me while I cook a meal and halfheartedly clean it up. I cry on random days thinking about how much I could use a mom right now. I snuggle with my partner and I take my dog on walks and some weeks I don’t even respond to a single text from a friend because I just don’t have the capacity to show up the way I want to show up for the people I love.

And then there is this little newsletter. This beautiful little space filled with thoughtful people on the journey of getting to know their true selves. I love it but I am also in the process of transitioning. A long hot summer and a long road ahead to defeating and resisting authoritarianism means I need to keep thinking about how to best use my energies how I can. Substack was a great fit for me in the beginning as I lost almost all of my freelancer opportunities and publishing contacts due to deconverting from Christianity and experiencing autistic burnout. I will write more soon about how much this community has meant to me, but for today I feel like honoring that reality while also naming that things are slowing down around here a bit.

In the next season of my life I will be writing and podcasting about all the topics we explore here, but shifting it more towards STRONGWILLED content. But don’t freak out. I am not going anywhere — but I am having some fun playing with how I want to show up these days and letting myself consider new possibilities. It’s a delicate balance of being visible, and of protecting and savoring my privacy. Of operating out of my autonomy, and prioritizing taking care of my own nervous system instead of just pushing through.

I am nothing if not adaptable (as these past 15 or so years of being a freelancer have shown me). I’ve pivoted several times between platforms and publishers and I expect I will continue to have to do this. I am also multifaceted — an activist, a creative, a caregiver, a disabled non-binary exvangelical with buttloads of religious trauma, a certified silly billy — and allowing myself my full expression of humanity is essential to my resisting fascism. Doing the work to stay weird, stay honest, and stay earnest? That’s antifa, baby!

As the hot days slowly dip into cooler weather, I’ve been thinking about how for the past few years I used this very newsletter to try and warn people that Christian fascism was coming for us all — and then it did. So what now? Now we are faced with the task of long-term resistance in our own unique spheres. I’m tired from being one of many canaries in the coal mine, but I am also weirdly glad to have everything out in the open finally.

I feel like my writing and activism is shifting, and I am paying attention to my intuition more and more. My work here at Healing is My Special Interest writing about late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high-control environments fits into my wider goal of helping people connect to their true selves in order to resist authoritarianism, and I see people doing this work everywhere. Queer folks, autistic folks, people of color, immigrants and trans people . . . they are leading the way in resisting the boots coming for all of our necks. I honor them and I honor you, if you are doing this deep and heavy grief work laced with joy and pleasure (I know you are!).

For today, I have a few links to share about some projects I have been involved with:

If you want to watch me (or just listen) give a pep talk using Superman as my muse you can go here.

STRONGWILLED

Hopecore Sunday with DL

We’re trying something new this week! We decided to try a video format and to talk about something we enjoy — instead of talking about religion authoritarianism. We took some time for DL to talk about something they love and that is giving them some hope: The 2025 Superman movie that released this summer…

Listen now

10 months ago · 13 likes · D.L. Mayfield

If you want to listen to me and Krispin talk about Dobson with some amazing religious trauma survivors go here.

If you want to support our work financially the best way currently is to support us on Patreon or subscribe to the STRONGWILLED Substack (we will be transferring the emails over to our next platform/landing space in a few months). On Patreon you get access to a bunch of extra podcasts episodes plus our amazing discord server.

And if you are local (or wanna take a short drive), come join us for a book club on September 28 on Suzanne Collins’ newest book, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Talk about themes of resisting authoritarianism! The book club event is free but if you want to purchase a copy of the book just let me know (we have about 4 copies on hand).

Fascism is here in the midst of our chaotic caregiver lives and now we all get to decide how to show up at this moment. For me I am finding that it involves a balance of anger and whimsy and slowing down while also not pulling any punches. I want to be earnest and honest and human while also recognizing that my privacy is becoming increasingly precious to me. I want to yap about Superman and encourage folks to fight for a future where everyone can belong. I want to embrace the energy of the fool card in tarot, of starting over while carrying all that we have learned along the way.

I still have some banger guest essays to post here and I’m excited to share some more of my thoughts soon. But for today, as we transition into the fall season here in the Northern Hemisphere, I wanted to let you know about some upcoming changes and a slowing down of content here at HIMSI. It’s scary and hard to articulate change but it is also a time of reflecting and refining. Of acknowledging our reality while dreaming of a better world for us all.

As always, I am so glad we are in this mess together. And that we get to show up as our actual selves and operate as the wonderfully complex and limited creatures that we are. Much love from me to you — good riddance to Christian girl autumn, and hello to hot anxious-yet-hopeful antifa fall :)

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. We are still going strong on our “summer of deconstructing” series, and this essay is a beautiful reflection on deconstructing the ways we had to suppress our stims (and ourselves) in order to survive. I too am in the midst of a few hard weeks so this post was just what I needed. Thank you to everyone who supports this newsletter and allows me to pay my guest writers for their creativity, beauty, and wisdom.

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What Does Your Thriving Look Like?

A guest post by Jennifer Berney

Over the past three days, I’ve listened to the song “All Night Long” by Lionel Richie at least forty times. I’ve listened to it through my earbuds while doing dishes, or through my phone’s speaker while doing chores in the greenhouse. I’ve danced to it alone; I’ve listened with my eyes closed, sprawled out on the couch. I’m listening obsessively because my nervous system is shot from weeks of managing a family crisis, and this week in particular has been a bad one. I’d felt unbearably raw, until a couple of days ago—moments after a somatic therapy session—when Lionel Richie’s voice unspooled in my head. Why that song? I had no idea. I was a child in the eighties and remember loving that song when it played on the radio, but I hadn’t heard it since. But it came to me like a gift, and so I looked it up, played it, and found that it brought me instant relief. The music seemed to complete whatever healing had begun during the therapy session, to help me settle what I had stirred up by talking.

I wouldn’t have access to this kind of relief if it weren’t my recent learning on neurodivergence. Until recently, I’d spent a lifetime masking not just to the world but to myself. After pursuing autism diagnoses for both of my children, I began to more actively notice how, ever since we’d moved outside of city limits, I was constantly singing and talking to myself. This was an urge I’d long suppressed when we had close neighbors; I didn’t want to be perceived, and so, while outside, I remained nearly silent.

In fact, I had suppressed these urges so effectively that I barely noticed them. But once I moved into a more spacious life, they emerged instantly as if they’d been waiting to be freed. If I had not been learning about neurodivergence, I might have assumed that my verbal stimming was a sign of unwellness, or that my ability to suppress the urge to stim was proof of my sanity.

I was twelve when I’d made the conscious decision to shut up. Throughout childhood I sang to myself and talked about special interests to anyone who would listen. As I hit adolescence it became clear to me that my vocal hyperactivity was alienating me from my peers. Or, to put it another way, I understood that I was annoying. It was easier to shut up completely than to try and moderate my loquaciousness, and so I became, in public at least, a quiet and controlled person. At home I played the radio and sang along; I wore out cassette tapes by playing them over and over. But once I entered adulthood and started living with housemates, I modified that too.

I wonder now, what was the cost of losing that regulation tool? How much stress did I carry that I might have released if I’d found a way to grant myself access to verbal stimming and repetition?

Five years ago, not wanting to appear unhinged even to myself, I would have cut myself off after three or four listens. But today, listening to Lionel Ritchie, I can access a state of feeling both raw and blissed out—the rawness facilitates the bliss. The chorus of “All Night Long” is the perfect, swooning stim, full of repetition and joy:

All night long (all night), All night (all night)

All night long (all night), All night (all night)

All night long (all night), All night (all night)

All night long!

Over ten years ago, I began somatic therapy as a treatment for CPTSD, believing that complex childhood trauma was the sole reason for my chronic anxiety. If you had asked me what symptoms I was trying to treat, I would have described my introversion, my discomfort around authority figures, my urge to disappear at parties. I was hopeful that the right kind of therapy would transform me, that I would more closely resemble the picture I had in my mind of a healthy, thriving person. I understand now that the person I was picturing wasn’t me; they were a neurotypical extrovert.

Somatic therapy didn’t cure me (there was no disease to cure)—but it did help me tune into my body’s actual truth. Somatic therapy taught me to slow down and find my footing in hard moments, and to stay inside my body rather than flee.

Learning about neurodivergence helped me incorporate those lessons more deeply. A breakthrough for me occurred last year when I walked my teenage son down the road to a friend’s party. As we approached the house, I felt dread. At least a dozen cars lined the driveway, and I didn’t see anyone I knew. My son looked at me. “I have no idea why I wanted to come to this,” he said. I didn’t push him to stay for five minutes or give it a try. I honored his clarity, and watched as he turned around to walk home. I didn’t offer myself the same grace immediately. Instead, I laid out my contribution to the pot luck, spotted two friends, and had a brief conversation. But once that conversation ended, I felt a sharp anxiety accompanied by a vast and sinking emptiness. I decided I’d honor my own signals and leave immediately, that I’d leave behind my plate and tote bag, and forego saying goodbye to the host. I embraced my sudden departure as an act of self-care rather that a sign of maladjustment, and I nearly wept with relief. My own permission was a blessing I’d needed for decades.

I used to think that thriving, for me, would look like fitting in. It would look like showing up at a party and making new friends, or never feeling self-conscious, or being able to speak in front of a crowd without feeling like I might float away. But learning about neurodivergence has helped me identify the joy I experience in solitude, in making art and writing.

It’s helped me to see and validate the deep sense of connection I feel when sharing special interests with friends—and also the exhaustion I feel in social situations that require me to disconnect from my body’s signals of distress. Understanding my own auDHD has helped me accept that, if I want to, I can speak in front of a crowd, but I will probably never fully vanquish that floaty feeling—that floaty feeling is wired into me and so I must befriend it. And I can! I can wiggle my toes and feel them on the floor. I take a breath and see if my voice has become less thready. I can accept that there is no perfect solution, that part of me will always want to flee. And then, when the event ends, I can count on returning to the safety of my own space and finding refuge in the grounding practices I now have room for.

I can sing along to Lionel Richie, not just once or twice but all night long.

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Jennifer Berney lives on a small farm in Olympia Washington with her partner, two sons, and many animals. She writes a newsletter about creativity at the intersection of joy and grief, The Scrap Heap, with her collaborator Sarah Tavis. Her memoir on queer family building, The Other Mothers, explores the many ways that the fertility industry has sidelined the LGBTQ community. She facilitates workshops on joyful practice, a neuro-affirming approach to art-making, and works as a creative coach and developmental editor.

Thank you so much Jennifer for this wonderful essay. Life feels so overwhelming for so many of us right now — what are the ways you are learning to honor yourself and let yourself find some relief for your nervous system?

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We will start by talking about intuition, chat about the the high priestess tarot card, do some body doubling as we journal/pull cards, and then break up into small groups to chat about the creativity intentions we are setting for the next moon cycle.

Bring a journal, art supplies, a tarot deck or whatever else you want to bring! Plan on it being 1 hour and 15 minutes long and being pretty dang chill. Sometimes you just need some other cool neurodivergent nerds to hang out with while you set some intentions, right?

Here’s the zoom link for our gathering today, I can’t wait to see you!

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I have missed writing to you all but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been enjoying the guest posts I have been publishing! I am astonished at how nice it is to hear from other folks who are deconstructing these systems and beliefs that shape our lives in a million different ways.

But today I thought I would just do a real quick check-in about mental health and getting through these tumultuous times. Anyone who has followed my writing for a hot minute or two probably knows I am uniquely drawn towards obsessing about issues of injustice, religious authoritarianism, Christian zionism, capitalism and more. So it’s been a struggle to not stay locked in my mind all day and to try and be in my body. My body that is caring for multiple smaller humans this summer and who maybe doesn’t want to doomscroll for hours on end? Yeah that body deserves all the care and softness in the world (and so does yours!)

My partner Krispin is a therapist who works with a lot of ADHD folks and he has slowly, slowly converted me to the checklist routine. If someone has a busy little brain it can really help to write down your list of tasks and know that it will be there. You don’t have to keep worrying about it/checking it like a sore tooth in your mouth. When you do the task, you check it off! It’s like outsourcing a bit of your brain space.

So here’s a very quick checklist I made for my own mental health this summer:

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