There’s a thread that weaves the words of all my friends:

They all say, they’re tired.

They wish things would relent.

They want a break.

Some are disabled - some have known this for a long time…

…while others are discovering new and alarming health problems that seemed to spring out of the perfect blue.

We’re all middle aged, or getting there, reaching this pivotal moment with disillusionment for the life we were meant to have.

Hardly any of my friends are homeowners. Most work until they collapse. No time for a social life, borrowing energy from tomorrow.

Day after day, I listen to them. Their struggles, their exhaustion, their hope.

Not one of them has lost hope - they’re just really bone fucking tired.

They’re really missing community.

All of us are.

We are interdependent creatures - not independent.

Don’t forget that you’re being sold a lie.

What other time in human history, or the history of all life on earth, was individualism the way forward?

I walk through the forest and see an ailing tree being held, supported and lifted by another. Over time, they grow in a spiral upwards together - eventually becoming indecipherable.

I walk into my bedroom and see my cats cleaning each other’s soft fur.

On clear days in early October, I watch hundreds upon hundreds of turkey vultures gliding in tandem high above the city, making their way south together.

Nestled within flower petals I see bees snuggling.

Yesterday, a vibrant, fuzzy butterfly got stuck in between two window panes. I patiently waited an hour for her to calm down enough to be held, and taken outside.

You are being sold a lie.

If you are also tired (I know you are), if you are also overwhelmed (I know you are), if you are also deep in grief (I know, I know) then also know this:

The way life has been currently imagined for the masses is just that: an imagining. It is twisted, it is heinous, it only serves a select few, and it is a destroyer.

But it is not the only imagination we can have.

Many of us imagine differently. We see a different world that is softer, kinder, where community is robust and thriving.

Where we’re not siloed, a cog in the machine. Where instead, we’re a vital part of each other’s lives. Sharing the burdens. Making the load lighter.

Most of us are so tired and overwhelmed that we assume others are too, and so we don’t reach out. A friend of mine said this to me just two days ago. She doesn’t feel she can ask for help, because she knows others are struggling like she is.

But the rub is that it’s not mutual struggle that prevents us from reaching out - it’s the lie we’re being sold that individualism is the way forward. It’s the shame of needing another person.

When in truth, we need other people all the time.

Chronic illness and disability teach us this. We are forced to drop the pretenses, the guards, the facades. Need flows freely. Dependence becomes undeniable.

But this has always been the case! Interdependence is always there, it is simply under the exoskeleton that capitalism has thrust upon us.

We can imagine things differently.

We can overcome the shame of needing others when we realize we’re not alone in our need.

“Shame is the shadow of love.” PJ Harvey said this. Not shadow in an evil sense, or a strictly negative sense.

Simply, shame is what we don’t embrace with love. But everything is asking to be loved, all the time. All our parts. The whole self. Especially the self that struggles.

To imagine things differently, we have to overcome the notion that we’re failing or bad if we need other people. We must overcome the lie we’re being sold.

It breaks down the facade we’re all carrying, and then the raw throb of humanity is simply revealed.

What do you need help with today?

What can you ask for?

The worst thing that will happen is that you’ll receive a ‘no.’

But for every no there will be countless yeses.

And that is how we imagine differently.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

((Subtitle thanks to stynalane))

Dear faery glen,

As you may have noticed I am less keen on writing about myself these days. I sometimes end up exposed to those whose eyes I’d rather not have cast my way. Some may argue that this is the price of admission to having online platforms — and even though that is ultimately and unfortunately true, I have been on a mission to heavily curate my online experience so that I am not subjected to a term describing random acts of senseless digital violence that (I think?) I coined in 2018: “drive by shoutings.” Or people who believe they know you better than you do, and have all kind of unsolicited advice. I wish not to be polluted by either. I am a delicate yet robust ecosystem. Think of me as holding a tiny megaphone nestled under a faraway mushroom, inches away from the flower I am about to take a nap in. The location is a secret, and it is protected by a hulking, ferocious wolf.

But I have chosen to write about my illness because receiving this diagnosis so very pivotal for me, the same meteoric proportion of my late autism diagnosis - a space rock wrapped in glitter and ache that suddenly bursts through my ceiling (or was it there all along? Yes, the latter.)

Something that has been with you your entire life but remained shrouded in the nebulousness of ouch, crick, crack, bruise, gasp, wobble, cramp, fog, buzz, hunch, haunch, bend, break, rip, tear, wail, bleed, undulate, wither, seize, ripple, no, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t — under capitalism, under ableism, under masking, under the umbrella of ‘function’ — this becomes surprisingly easy to dismiss as phantasmagoria. A string of wicked imaginings that create a garland of so-called ‘disease.’ Receiving a diagnosis takes the illness from the mind’s eye to the canvas, and the vision comes alive. Other people can see it now, too. It has a specific set of shapes and colour palette. The picture is rendered.

This is life saving.

So with this essay I hope to save my own life a little more and perhaps anyone reading who also endures their own unravelling/mystery/glitter and ache/peeling back the spicy layers/looking into the ajna of truth/noticing patterns and trusting in the wisdom of the body.

Here goes. (Deep breath.)

On May 26th, 2026, just as the awareness month of this particular ailment came to a close, I finally received a name for my nebulous constellation of symptoms that have been plaguing my weary body for over a decade:

To be able to put a name to the cornucopia of symptom-Dwarves that bust down the door to my cozy Hobbit hole is something of mythic proportions. Of legend. A veritable Tolkien epic. A holy grail I never thought I’d grasp in my tiny hands that are wrinkled before their time.

For months I’d been lurking in hEDS forums, absorbing the riot of anguished voices from the abyss, matching up my experience with theirs — but despite my spirit’s apparent unbreakable nature (thank you, spirit. No really, thank you) which lured me towards the finish line, I forever and ever will likely hold some degree of isolation to my chest, a sense that I do not belong. A suspicion of being and imposter. A great big fuckin’ faker. That’s what happens when you search for an endless stretch of time with no answers. You begin to deeply doubt your own compass.

In the exhaustion that plagues isolation, I almost did not make it to this threshold. I almost gave up. I almost had no choice but to live in the hollow shell of mystery, my own looping thoughts and queries echoing back to me endlessly within the dark sphere, driving me mad. I almost listened to the voices from friends and family who supposedly had my best interests at heart that said, “Why do you even need a label, anyway?” Or, “Have you ever considered that this may all just be anxiety?”

Almost, almost. But not quite. Cue the Eye of the Tiger guitar riffs — there must have been a fight song playing in a corner of my psyche that I was not quite aware of — as despite it all, I persisted. To quote Buffy The Vampire Slayer, “I commit! I’m committed. I’m a committee.” Truer words (about me) have never been spoken.

However, and I say this with the kind of flat affect that only a sardonic, autistic Capricorn is capable of, I am so fucking over it now. I’m done. From here on out, it better be cartoon-like feasts on white linen then naps in gentle meadows (no ticks! We can’t handle Lyme disease on top of all this!)

Part one: road to ruin (or how I started worrying about the bomb)

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”

―Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“My body turning on me years before it was meant to, and right in synch with the public, might just be the most important story of my life.”

—Lena Dunham, Famesick

Some people are rubber, some are glue. Evidently, I am the latter.

Survival states are powerful, powerful things. Upon reflection, I am always absolutely baffled by the sheer force of mine. Survivalism is the act of preparing for an emergency: natural disaster, societal collapse, or other crises. This is what preppers do (and maybe what we should all be doing? That’s another essay.) Survivalism can also exist in the body — a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance, of knowing that collapse is coming or that emergency is the roiling ocean beneath the dingy of your beating heart. When survival is not guaranteed, and therefore you cannot climb the pyramid of needs into anything more comfortable, all of your nervous system’s resources flood to survival. In youth, there’s likely zero awareness of this and how depleting it really is. But it can, and will, buoy you for an exceptionally long time. In many cases, decades before ultimate collapse.

In ’s Famesick, she discusses a similar arc. Messages of malaise were ferried years before more major breakdowns forced her off the conveyer belt of productivity and into a sick bed — but these messages, like mine, were indistinct, hazy, vague — indicative, perhaps, of a one-off…nothing more. But then one-offs become two, two become four, four become eight — and then suddenly you are mired in diseased cell division. You are Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

But you see, over this harrowing decade, where my body said no, fuck off, absolutely not, no way, but my world remained just as — if not more — demanding than it had ever been, I went down all the wrong rabbit holes.

First I thought it was MS, because I have neurological symptoms. Then I thought candida, celiac, leaky gut and IBS because of all of my GI issues. Then I thought it must be B12 deficiency, because all of the above and more. Then came the (seemingly requisite) fibromyalgia diagnosis — after all, I am a woman in pain. The pain was always there. Then came TMJ and hearing problems. Then came the absolute crushing fatigue — and I truly mean crushing, as though I in particular had ten times the gravity of earth on my bones, my body waded through some kind of thick molasses instead of air, and my brain worked in fits and starts like a breaker panel that continuously shorted out. Eventually for this particular romp I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in 2023. A friend recently reminded me that I sent him a voice note around that time saying, “I believe I am preparing to die.” I was not suicidal, but my body had shut down so badly that there was only a flicker of a flame left in my soul. One hearty gust of wind and I’d be extinguished forever.

Many symptoms have been like the Koolaid man, busting through the living room wall and screaming, “OH YEAH! You want some of this?” while I am cowering in the corner shivering. Others have approached slowly like a ghost train in the far distance, its eerie horn wailing in the mist, my forehead damp with anticipation. Others still have been like the demented Nine Inch Nails-like rave sounds of an MRI, driving me to the point of insanity and then suddenly disappearing forever as if they’d never been. But in no Price is Right game ever invented would I have thought that tingling feet, beeping ears, crowded teeth, crushing fatigue, thoracic outlet syndrome, astigmatism, migraines, a body that feels and sounds like Rice Crispies, horrible gastritis attacks, being sensitive to medications, blood pooling and chronic pain would all be connected. (These are not all my symptoms whatsoever. It’s a small sampling of what is a pretty impressive platter.)

However, about a month before diagnosis I heard this little catchphrase which sums it all up perfectly:

If you can’t connect the issues, think connective tissues.

This makes sense if you consider the body as a whole. But many people — myself included, and all but one of the medical professionals I’d seen over my harrowing decade of searching — don’t think holistically. In diagnosing hEDS, they don’t consider what they can’t see, what’s on the inside. They think: is this person extremely bendy? Could they audition for Cirque Du Soleil? Did they impress their peers by doing ‘party tricks’ of contortion when they were young? Are they like Gumby?

And that’s the thing — many are. But some of us are only a little bendy. Some of us are like Gumby in the sense that we are shapeshifers, but mostly within the perfect inky darkness of our organs, muscles, fascia, viscera. It wasn’t until I’d almost given up hope of ever finding the true label that I discovered being bendy wasn’t the same thing as being hypermobile. That being said, the Beighton Scale still does matter for diagnostic criteria and I squeaked by — but it’s not even remotely the end of the story. If it were, we’d not be sick. We’d just be siiiiick in the rad way, shreddin’ the gnar with the bros, hangin’ ten.

(This is, and always will be, my favourite interview of all time.)

Part two: a hypermobile heart

Unlike many of my autistic peers, I’ve not really suffered from inflexible thinking or feeling. That’s not to say I don’t experience intense preferences, or feel the floor drop from beneath me when a sudden change occurs, but I’ve always been deeply understanding and empathetic which I believe requires a lot of inner flexibility. The mould of your mind and heart must be able to take on new and unfamiliar shapes, hugging the pain and suffering of another, understanding it even without necessarily having experienced it. To be empathetic is to be fluid, a body of moving water — in stagnant pools is where judgement and resentment fester. A fluid state is a shapeshifting state and a shapeshifting state is hypermobile. It is not fixed.

Empathy is a driver for love, and of course in and of itself is not a bad thing. Love is the reason for the universe, after all — for life itself. But my good friend reminded me the other day that part of what makes us sick is overextension — especially toward those who are inflexible in themselves. Using the diseased cell division metaphor above, it is not a singular experience of overextension that causes collapse, but when two become four, four become eight, eight become sixteen…and on it goes.

In her Famesick memoir, Lena Dunham talks at length about people-pleasing: something she’d always done, but upon becoming famous felt like a requirement. The sudden and ceaseless influx of requests and favours seemed mandatory. I, too, experienced this when my art career became stratospheric. The word no was ignored like an invasive species until it utterly obliterated the landscape. ‘No’ inevitably became the only word I could say when my health pulverized and, as my friend says, turned into a compost heap. I’d unfurled my hypermobile heart to all others except myself.

The so-called ‘faulty’ connective tissue of those of us with hEDS has allowed for some extraordinary feats of capacity. It is almost as though, due to this deeply porous and pliant inner webbing, that we are far more able to feel immense amounts of empathy, compassion, the desire to heal and enfold others, to enfold it all under our ever-expanding ribcage. This elastic vehicle of consciousness houses so much, arguably too much — because on the flip side, our skin is so very tender and we easily bruise, split, bleed…bearing the wounds of our love.

What happens to us does not bounce off like rubber, it sticks to us like glue. It becomes part of the cosmic webbing forevermore. This, in part, is why I believe we hit a wall and collapse. Why we can seem healthy for a long time and then tumble down the rabbit hole. Our hypermobile hearts are like stars gathering heat and mass until the supernova. The vibration, the desperation for survival, it all culminates. It is entropy.

It is inevitable. It is deeply, painfully, human.

There is no part three to this yet, because that is what I am living now. I reached the threshold deeply scathed, with exhaustion I cannot begin to describe. To be gaslit and dismissed endlessly, to go down all the wrong rabbit holes, to find nothing but dead-ends, to go to sleep night after night encircled in somatic mystery, to work so tirelessly on cultivating higher and higher levels of self-compassion in a system that does not offer it to you — oh yes, that is exhausting. Survivalism is just that. But it brought me to the finish line. My spirit is unbreakable, my hypermobile heart is infinite and a brand new chapter has just been ushered in. One of absolute tenderness, feasts and naps with beasts.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. My latest and most beautiful creation is still up for grabs:

The Fertile Void Tarot ~ a 72 card tarot deck and 300 page illuminated magazine. I am so proud of her and we are halfway through production! Jump in while you still can (and also receive a beautiful velvet tapestry).

In many ways this piece is a follow up to my recent piece, your illness is not your fault. If you haven’t already, give it a read for a little more context.

I’m 42, and my capacity to handle my life is not the same as it used to be. I’m deep in the trenches of perimenopause, and according to various sources (naturopaths, forums, google) I could (oh, fingers all the way crossed) be a little more than halfway through this absolutely nail-biting rite of passage. Many of you who are in these trenches with me will probably be familiar with Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a menopause specialist. It was through her I learned that women undergoing this phase of life can distill their first ‘symptom’ down to one (nebulous, disconcerting) thing:

“I just don’t feel like myself.”

Of course, this isn’t a symptom like a rash is a symptom. But it heralds The Change nonetheless, because perimenopause is a neurological shift as much as it is a hormonal shift. Wherever you believe the centre of ‘the self’ lives, since perimenopause is systemic, it’s going to affect our notion of identity - especially as it connects to our capacity to handle our lives.

In her recent memoir Famesick, Lena Dunham speaks about her relationship with anxiety. She says that all her life, her nervous system has felt intense, on edge and frenetic. This was - as it always is - pathologized as purely mental and dismissed as being a weakness, or inability to cope. She later discovered that she has Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and the physiological landscape of hEDS itself causes anxiety - meaning that, due to dysfunction having to do with connective tissues and the autonomic nervous system, her body was often in some manner of fight, flight or freeze and thus, anxiety. She wasn’t manifesting it, nor was it all in her head. Her own body was sending messages to her brain of alarm, and her brain was simply responding. Y’know, like anyone’s would.

This body-to-brain pathway is heinously dismissed by medical professionals and society at large when it comes to women. I’m not saying anything new when I’m pointing out that our experiences are deemed purely mental, somehow manifested and ‘hysterical.’ We’ve all likely experienced this gaslighting to some degree. It is an inherently ableist framework to assume that all of one’s problems are entirely located within the skull - as of course, in ableism, the celebration is of the healthy, perfectly functioning body. One that does not have monthly fluctuations like a woman’s does. One that does not experience health problems. We are expected to work like dogs then die behind the shed, never showing weakness or illness.

In abelism, the body doesn’t exist if it is ailing to any degree because it is no longer the ideal body. Ableism, at its root, is fear of death and rot. So therefore an ailing body is ignored, made invisible. This is why the brain becomes the culprit for women - this is why they tell us it’s all in our heads.

Just like with Ehlers-Danlos or any other illness that affects the nervous system, the physiological landscape of perimenopause creates instability in the ANS, especially for anyone who is sensitive to any degree, neurodivergent, or has experienced trauma (ok, so, all women then?)

Think about it - throughout your pre-menopausal years (from your first bleed to peri) estrogen and progesterone are abundant, and your cycle - no matter what your normal was - is at least somewhat predictable and reliable. It is not only the abundance of hormones that creates capacity in the nervous system, it is the agreement your body has with its own cycle. Predictability = safety.

Unpredictable hormones and an ever-shifting landscape creates instability which lowers capacity and increases anxiety. It truly is that simple but we do not honour it.

Midlife is a major challenge for women because of this. We arrive in this phase depleted and in desperate need of a cocoon, but that is not what we’re afforded. In the not-too-distant past, women in perimenopause were institutionalized, and even as recently as the early 1990s when the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) launched a study on the safety and efficacy of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The results were deliberately skewed to make way for the newest ‘revolution’ in medical science: antidepressants. Women were fear-mongered out of taking the HRT (which was actually helping them) due to over-inflated claims about cancer risk, and encouraged instead to take the antidepressants.

Again, it’s all in her head.

When the female body does not perform as well as a man’s there are systemic, social, and existential consequences. A healthy woman’s body may be, in her own way, on par with a man’s for decades due to the relentless pressures of the patriarchy and her abundant hormones. But once she enters this phase, she is not given the break she so sorely needs and deserves. Most women crash-land into perimenopause and become furious with themselves and their sudden inability to cope with their lives. They’re told by sources everywhere to simply ‘deal’ with their anxiety and move on. There is nothing out there, save for the following list that I came across, which actually suggests we slow down and take things off our plates.

In their book Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging, authors Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer outline their Menopause Ground Rules:

“During menopause, you’re out of the pace of normal life. You’re in an emotionally loaded, somewhat less resourced, physically demanding place. You’re likely to have less physical energy, feel more sensitive, and have way less capacity for dealing with things. You aren’t equipped for worldly stuff.

But this state is part and parcel for the ingredients necessary for you to evolve into your new self.

1. Strip back your life to the essentials. Seek cover, hang low, so you can tend to yourself.

2. Slow right down. Do less. And do whatever you do more slowly. Take your time with things.

3. Stop. Rest. Have periods of doing nothing.

4. Carve out pockets of time alone. Be quiet with yourself.

5. Create simple routines that nourish and hold you. Focus on the most straightforward daily tasks and keep the basic rhythm going. Having some daily work that you turn to can hold you. But you can’t be pushing yourself or driving new plans.

6. Gather with likeminded folk. Be with people who are going through menopause, or who get what you’re experiencing.

7. Cut yourself as much slack as possible. Drop perfectionism and let yourself be “below par.” You can always return to your high standards later.

8. Don’t make ambitious plans. Drop your goals for a while. The old “set a goal and push yourself towards it” won’t work now.

9. Be flexible with yourself. Give yourself permission to change your plans at anytime.

10. Engage in pleasurable activities. Find what brings you comfort, joy or satisfaction and do it.

11. Never underestimate the power of small, or tiny acts of self-care.”

I’ve shared this list before and I will periodically because I feel it is a life-line - a potent reminder that it is absolutely NORMAL to have less capacity in perimenopause. Your brilliant, miraculous body is doing so much behind the scenes. It’s not like you have one hundred buckets of capacity to draw from - you have one. The bucket of the body, mind and spirit. When resources are being used to try and balance, internally, a myriad of physiological processes that you’re not even consciously aware of - of course the bucket is going to be depleted. Of course there are going to be difficulties. Of course there are going to be symptoms such as ‘not feeling like yourself’ or anxiety. Whatever is left over, resource-wise, is what gets applied to life, and it’s less than we’re used to.

Again, and as always, this is a systemic problem not an individual one. If we lived in a matriarchy you could damn well bet that so, so, so many things would be different - and better, and healthier - for not only women but the entire world (permit me to go on a small side-quest for a moment):

• The earth would be taken care of, and stewarded. We would embody this stewardship role without question, tending to all flora and fauna, bodies of water and the air we breathe with precision and grace

• We would NOT have capitalism as our dominant system

• The work we did engage in would be set to the natural rhythms of the earth and the body, making lots of space for ebbs, lulls, inner wintering, illness, aging

• Aging women would be CELEBRATED and REVERED, not made to feel irrelevant, disgusting and useless

• Young women entering their menstrual years would be guided by crones, and there would be red tents (menstrual huts) everywhere. (Side note, I read a post by one of my favourite astrologers Rob Brezsny, who shared a letter he once wrote to Oprah - imploring her to use part of her immense wealth to buy up all of the abandoned fast food buildings around the United States and turn them into red tents. Oprah won’t do this, but I promise you, that if I ever amass a lot of wealth, I will).

• Community would be thriving, and when a woman entered perimenopause she would be allowed to leave society for her cocoon phase, embodying only a truncated and humble set of responsibilities (as much as she wanted, essentially).

There are more bullet points to this list, but I was attempting to arrive back at the main thrust about this being a systemic issue, not an individual one. The fact that we crash-land into perimenopause and find ourselves flailing in the life we created whilst more resourced is not our fault. The fact that our system is so inflexible when we need to downsize is not our fault. The fact that our bodies are struggling to keep up is not our fault.

Nor is it all in our heads - not even a little bit.

I know a lot of you who read this column of mine are not yet in peri - but my hope is that once you do arrive there, you’re able to give yourself all of the grace, permission and unconditional love that you require to walk, crawl, hobble or slither across this bridge.

I’m considering creating an online course that does a deep dive into women’s cycles and working with our inner seasons - especially during this phase of life, and for those who are neurodivergent.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. If you are keen to support my work in other ways, I make internationally bestselling tarot and oracle decks that have been featured in Vogue, Cosmo, InStyle and more!

A while back I created a survey that covered many questions having to do with the general life arc of fellow autistics, especially those who are late diagnosed or self-identified. I received hundreds of responses and was fascinated - but not surprised - to learn that the majority of us experienced an arc that was essentially the same in many crucial ways. Of course the finer details will always be different because we’re dealing with individual life experience, but there was a basic framework - and the following is that framework.

If you are looking for more insight into your autistic experience - including how to step into autistic joy, check out my 56 module course on Navigating Autism Late In Life.

Early life

We begin with the sense that we are, in a word, different. Something is off yet we can’t quite put our finger on it. Due to the nebulous nature of this difference, there’s no way to solve the problem - we just know there is one. There’s a tangible yet ineffable dissonance between ourselves and our peers.

Some of us may be able to ‘fit in’ but there’s a certain amount of anguished effort that constantly goes into it, and even with our very young and nascent minds we understand that this is not as much of a problem for anyone else. This isn’t to say that other kids don’t struggle socially or academically, it’s more that ours is a unique and hazy set of challenges that aren’t necessarily so obvious that they warrant a great deal of attention. Much, if not all, of the struggle is internal and internalized. This is how The Autistic Mask develops - and it usually does so at a very early age (especially for females).

By the time we are in school up until pre-teen years, we’ve begun repressing who we really are so that we can avoid being bullied and ostracized. Chances are, however - we’ve been singled out on numerous occasions anyway despite our immense efforts. Again, we never really understand why - there are numerous occasions from my own childhood / teenage experience where I was bullied and I had no idea what it was about me that made me stick out like a sore thumb. I looked the same as everyone else, dressed the same - but there was something about my personhood that attracted unwanted attention. I did all I could to blend in as best as possible - even down to mimicking others’ hair styles or hand gestures, so I could get by.

Bit by bit, the authentic self in any social realm goes by the wayside and The Mask is what takes hold. We aren’t even necessarily conscious of The Mask, because we’re not old enough to have developed a strong sense of self that could be covered up / splintered by such a facade, so it is typically an entirely unconscious endeavor that takes us away from ourselves.

This usually means there is person A who is present at school, and person B who collapses at home. Many autistics in the survey noted that when they got home they’d either meltdown, or collapse - aka shutdown. I have always been more of a shutdown type, and gratefully being an only child I could do this - I’d shut myself in my room and tend to all of my special interests, or zone out watching TV. Unbeknownst to me, this was a coping skill, a way to bounce back. Some children are not afforded this crucial time ‘off’ and this tends to be when meltdowns ensue.

In school, we likely have what’s known as a ‘spiky skillset’ - gifted in some subjects, but experiencing learning disabilities in others. Responders to the survey reported all kinds of different subject strengths and interests, but it seemed the more they excelled at one subject, the more another would suffer. In terms of energy output, this makes sense of course. But it doesn’t explain the learning disabilities - in some subjects, we just seem to lack the ability to learn - it just doesn’t compute. This obviously can lead to a great deal of frustration and embarrassment for us, especially when our peers are much more evenly spread in their abilities. We may be seen as ‘lazy’, ‘bored’ or ‘restless’ - we may have dyscalculia (difficulty with math), dyslexia (difficulties with accurate and fluent word recognition) or dyspraxia (difficulty with physical coordination).

Teen Years

Elementary school is difficult, but high school tends to be much worse. This has to do with the social demands that become much more complex and nuanced, which means that in turn The Mask must adapt to endure these additional challenges. This, plus the increased difficulty in balancing multiple school subjects, a job (in some cases), puberty and sexuality - it all starts becoming too much to handle. Hiding who we really are whilst juggling all of the above begins taking its toll. Many responders to the survey said they experienced their first autistic burnout at this time (though of course they didn’t know it to be autistic in nature then). Some said they dropped out of school as a result. This also happened to me. Others said they developed eating disorders as a way to control something in their lives which felt increasingly untenable. Many were diagnosed with anxiety and depression - which aren’t totally inaccurate - as heightened anxiety and depression are unfortunately concurrent with the general autistic experience - but it is not the complete picture. Some said they were misdiagnosed with borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder.

Common rites of passage such as physical intimacy might be delayed, non-existent or forced to due to pressures of assimilation.

Early Adulthood

It’s no surprise that given our unrecognized support needs, burnout and high levels of stress, the transition into adulthood is often traumatic for undiagnosed autistics. So many challenging variables are suddenly thrust into our worlds: roommates, scheduling, juggling college or university with work and relationships, as well as social obligations - not having our safe nest at home to return to, not having the predictability of our home life. Many responders (including myself) turned to alcohol and drugs to help deal with the chaos and maintain our masks, which are now in their peak performance years.

For autistic women especially, we tend to move around a lot, have numerous jobs and romantic partners and / or social circles, as we are acutely aware of how we do not fit in anywhere and our anxieties in many environments are at an all-time high. No amount of exposure therapy, pep-talks (or brutal, self-critical inner dialogues) make it any easier. We turn the dagger inwards and blame ourselves for the difficulty. Our masks on the outside may appear bubbly, flexible, fun - but the way we are speaking to ourselves on the inside is anything but. We have known for many years at this point that we struggle immensely in ways that others do not, but instead of being able to blame a neurotypically-centered, ableist society for our suffering, we see ourselves as the odd one out and take it out on our sensitivities. Instead of listening to the inner compass that tells us to stop, say no, take a break etc we push through because other people seem to be doing this with ease, so why can’t we?

In our adult years we’re also likely struggling nebulously in our relationships - platonic and romantic. Something about the communication is off - we ask too many questions, are too literal, too direct - we put people off with our raw honesty, we find that we accidentally trigger people a lot without trying, we feel the full immensity of emotions and it scares others, our need for lots of alone time puts them off too - sometimes we have long delays in our processing which feels passive aggressive - the list goes on. And of course, over time, our authentic self shines through The Mask as we grow more comfortable with the people we’re with - and many seem unprepared for this. Who we presented ourselves as unconsciously (we were simply chameleoning to fit the current situation, as always) slips and someone else emerges. Often the two people are not totally dissimilar, but the change is enough to cause confusion and conflict. This leads to more breaks in relationships, and we continue to blame ourselves.

Approaching Midlife

By the time we are in our thirties, forties or even later, if we haven’t been diagnosed as autistic already, we’re bone fucking tired. That doesn’t even begin to describe the weariness. A lifetime of masking, hiding the true, authentic self, bypassing the body’s signals and limitations time and again, taking on way too much, not having our sensory issues or needs met for decades, and berating ourselves for not being able to handle what others do - it all comes crashing down. Many who took the survey said that another major autistic burnout ensued, which led them to either self-identify as autistic and / or pursue an official diagnosis. Often there was some kind of tip-off, be it a social media post, a TV show or movie character who is autistically-coded, a book, meeting an autistic person etc - and an AH HA! moment ensued. The dominoes fall, and it suddenly all becomes so clear. Perimenopause was noted as another major revealing factor.

The realization is at once relieving and devastating. And of course it is - our entire idea of who we are in the world is shattered and replaced by what is commonly deemed a disability. Some come to accept themselves as disabled, others do not. As I’ve outlined in many writings on this, I do agree with the definition of autism as a disability in the sense that we are being ‘dis-abled’ by the neurotypical, ableist world at large, as it wasn’t built for people with our neurotype and particular needs. If it had been, we wouldn’t be disabled by it. But it is precisely the reason why we struggle the way we do. And this struggle, post realization, becomes illuminated completely - we finally understand why we’ve suffered through our lives the way we have.

We undergo a gamut of undulating emotions - big mourning, big anger, big resentment, big shock. We relive all of our painful (and even beautiful!) memories with this new context: insert autism here. We may find that regret crops up, wishing that we were diagnosed sooner so that we could have avoided much grief. The undoing process of masking and being hard on ourselves, as well as integrating into the new identity takes a different amount of time for everyone, but the general consensus is - we’re looking at years. And of course, this makes sense. We spent decades erecting certain identities and habits, it takes as long as it takes to undo them and make new ones.

But many responders reported feeling that their lives improved after self-identifying or receiving a diagnosis. They were able to begin unmasking, being kinder to themselves, and creating a life that better suited their needs. In my opinion it is far better to know than to not know, knowledge is power, and power in this case is softness, grace and tenderness.

Until next time, love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. If you are keen to support my work in other ways, I make internationally bestselling tarot and oracle decks that have been featured in Vogue, Cosmo, InStyle and more!

When your health collapses, or your illness flares, you are reminded of the age-old wisdom of, when you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. Health quite literally is the foundation of all we do in life. Quality is a grand spectrum, from a minor twinge to total incapacitation.

When illness takes hold, especially chronically, not only are our bodies steeped in troubling symptoms that are hard to ignore, but our inner protector comes to the fore and starts managing everything. We see life through the lens of, am I well enough for this task, activity or stressor? Do I have the capacity? Will I pay for this later, and how much is the toll?

I remember being well. I remember health. I remember the ease of it. I remember how little I regarded - and needed to regard - the fate of my body because it simply worked fluidly. None of the above questions ever really crossed my mind. Sure, perhaps if I was out for another night of binge drinking in my twenties I probably considered my hangover a little. But truly, that’s on the minor twinge end of the spectrum (and I’ve had some raucous hangovers).

What a joy a healthy body is. The power, the pleasure, the resilience, the stamina, the calm. It just is. It’s not loud. It’s not trying desperately to get your attention. It hums along in the background and allows your mind and ego to take the driver’s seat. There are obvious trappings in this leadership, namely that the mind and ego are fragments and illusions of a much greater and more spiritual whole, but only people who become ill before their time know this with such intimacy. Most with healthy bodies never question their arrangement. The body simply operates and the mind conjures life as it sees fit. The body then usually cooperates.

Until it doesn’t.

Each time my illness subsides and I have more energy, stamina, resilience and access to pleasure, I notice that I wish to scrub times of deeper sickness from my memory. I wish only to be in the healthier body, relish in its abilities and not worry too much about a hellish return of symptoms or debilitation. The inner protector goes a little dormant but never sleeps, however. One eye open, always - scanning for signs of collapse.

During these more healthful times I am able to nearly return to pre-illness capacity. Never full capacity, mind you - no. But something resembling this. I am therefore able to take on more of the burdens that capitalism foists upon all of us - namely, more work. I am proud of myself when I can do more of this, because this is what capitalism champions and congratulates. I also usually have some hole to dig myself out of that was created when the health was not so good. A pendulum swings back and forth within me.

In the swell of energy and pride there is a shadow of fear and shame. Fear that it will be taken away from me, and shame at the inability to keep several plates spinning above my head at once like others can. Shame that I am unable to just ‘figure this health thing out.’ Shame that I can’t seem to outthink it, outwit it, buy it back, sleep more or better, relax more or better - shame that I am never able to find the shiny key that would ultimately unlock the secrets to this enigma.

I can’t tell you the number of times some well-meaning (but ultimately thoughtless) person has suggested to me that I am somehow manifesting this situation. Friends, family, medical professionals. That if only I thought more positively, managed my stress and anxiety, didn’t worry so much, or learned how to be ‘chill’ (different head, same beast) then this would somehow magically resolve.

The thing about the body is that it is the mind and vice-versa - there is no true differentiation - so of course one’s thoughts are going to impact the somatic self. I am a proponent of ‘words are spells’ - if we are constantly negative, constantly telling ourselves that we’re horrible or we have endless limitations then yes, this is going to influence our wellness. It has now been studied that how we speak to ourselves matters. If we wish to make a positive change, for example, we cannot bully ourselves into that change because a critical inner voice acts as an antagonist to our own nervous and immune system. The only way to actually enact positive change is to be nice. So it follows that in any scenario we should endeavour to be nice, yes? But in the big picture of health, it’s not that simple.

Epigenetics tells us that our environments affect our health. Even a perfectly healthy person may have tendencies towards certain types of illness that are triggered by stress, trauma, toxins, viruses, and more. It is almost as though you are walking in a meadow and step on a mine. Then another, then another. Nothing is the same after. Your condition has changed. Your makeup has changed. It is hardly ever the case that one’s own (negative) internal narrative alone is the ‘culprit’ for triggering the cascade of ill health, and besides - it is almost always a variety of external antagonism that births a negative internal narrative anyhow. Peers, teachers, parents - anyone meaningful to us in our formative years has the ability to spark a deeply-seeded question of worth and lovability that begins a habit. But again it is often more than this: the external antagonists in our lives often come with stress and trauma - a package deal. Perhaps even toxins, if they are addicts.

Survival instincts kick in, and it’s absolutely phenomenal how long we can hold on in this braced somatic state until the body says no.

I look to my own history: burnout/inability to graduate high school/homelessness/moving 46 times/undiagnosed neurodivergence/addiction/toxic relationships/being a starving artist - this 1.5 decades-long phase of non-stop intensity and inputs, in a seemingly healthy body - and then boom, as soon as my business started taking off and I became a success, my body said nope fuck you I’m out.

It carried me as far as it could possibly go in survival mode - truly longer than, had I known it was doing this, I would have expected. A champ. A soldier. A true sisyphus. Of course I wish it had hung on a little longer so that I could have, y’know, fully enjoyed the fruits of my labours but hey. I am not going to complain anymore. Nothing but respect.

Or perhaps for some of us, there’s a virus or two that truly knock us sideways and things are never quite right after. Whatever our story, we must remember that everything - quite literally everything - is happening in the realm of an unforgiving society which also serves as an antagonist to anyone who does not fit its unrealistic mould. From an early age we are told to assimilate or be relegated to the losers and lowlives. If for any reason we do not, our path automatically becomes rife with challenges that this society simply isn’t equipped to support. Most neurodivergent people are going through life not receiving the support and care they truly need, and of course that wears on a person over time.

But here’s the rub:

All of this holds profound truth and real weight, yet we blame ourselves nonetheless.

Why?

Here’s a different spin on the same meme:

Patriarchy, ableism and capitalism cannot be separated. They are simply different parts of the same tapestry.

Patriarchy deems that men are superior beings and that society should be governed based on the rhythms of the male body - regulated through reward and accomplishment (dopamine), hormonally level throughout each moon cycle, no major adjustments needed.

Ableism’s ideal body is based on healthy male productivity. Anyone else who does not fit this mould is cast out of ableism’s favour. Ableism, at its root, is fear of mortality.

Capitalism is structured based on patriarchal, ableist ideologies. This system would cease to exist as it is if not for the above two factors. Capitalism then feeds back into patriarchy and ableism, and on the cycle goes.

None of this bears any flexibility or support for what is outside of it. As seen in the (incomplete, I just threw this together) graphic below - the trifecta sits within the ‘coveted’ zone, whilst everything and everyone else does not.

So you can see that if you have more than one distinction outside the circle (like Pokemon, collect ‘em all) then you’re relegated two, three, five times over.

Capitalism is constantly selling us a more glamorous, high-class, optimized life. The American Dream tells all of us, even those who do not live in the USA, that if you can imagine it, you can (and should) do it. Systemic roadblocks only happen to those who lack ambition. This is where the gaslighting begins.

Ambition, or lack thereof, becomes the foundation from which our success or failure happens. Put a different way: if you cannot overcome your disability and/or illness, it means that you simply are not ambitious enough. Ambition is the antithesis to torpor, illness and morality. Ambition is available to anyone who dreams it into being.

We don’t often understand that this very mentality, which to one degree or another we all possess, is the sickness - but it is. This isn’t to say that facing one’s own mortality before their time is not frightening, or at least unsettling - or that experiencing an aversion to death and illness is unnatural. But this aversion, under ableist, patriarchal capitalism, takes fear one step further into finger-pointing.

We blame those who are ‘weaker links’ within the chain because we’re all being sold the same busted, false narrative. It just so happens that able-bodied, ego-lead people are more able to buy into this narrative as the sheer crushing weight of it has not yet pulverized them.

So instead of it being a case of systemic discrimination, favouritism, idealism and thereby eugenics, it’s the individual’s fault for not stepping up to the plate.

And we, the chronically ill, the disabled, the neurodivergent, and on - we absorb that blame.

But can you see now that it was never yours to begin with?

You may be a canary in the coal mine, dear one.

You’ve held onto so much for so long.

Your body finally said no, no more.

It didn’t fail you.

It’s a body living under extreme, adverse circumstances.

It’s not your fault.

You didn’t choose this.

You have probably done so many things to try and get well.

Perhaps your precious body doesn’t need fixing -

It needs understanding, embracing, unconditional love.

Fuck everyone else.

Fuck their ‘well-intentioned’ (but brainwashed) comments.

Have they tried shutting the fuck up?

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. My latest and most beautiful creation is still up for grabs:

The Fertile Void Tarot ~ a 72 card tarot deck and 300 page illuminated magazine. I am so proud of her and we are halfway through production! Jump in while you still can (and also receive a beautiful velvet tapestry).

I’ve waffled about sharing this story as I’ve had some people over the years try and dissuade me - concerned, perhaps that in shedding light I may be shooting myself in the foot, barring myself from future opportunities. I’ve come to realize, however, that through the lens of disability I may never be able to participate in these systems anyway - so fuck it.

A couple of days ago I logged into the Substack app after a long hiatus to see an article from The Guardian discussing an author, Helen DeWitt, who had no choice but to turn down a $175,000 literary grant due to extensive promotional demands. Helen, an American novelist, suffers from chronic health issues. The grant, intended to give authors time and space to work independently of financial concerns, evidently had other fiery hoops to jump through - thereby nullifying the sigh of relief the money was supposed to provide.

For an able-bodied author, the promotional demands DeWitt needed to met in order to receive the prize might be naught more than a hassle or inconvenience. Others may even find it fun. But for Helen, it barred the way. There were no accommodations for her illness. This got me thinking about disability in the realm of art and my own journey with it - something I’ve not yet discussed in full.

As many of you who have followed me will know, I have self-published all of my tarot and oracle decks. I will continue to do this - and I’m assuming the same will go for my future books. I’ve always coveted the notion of being taken under the wing of a big pub house like so many of my peers and idols have. As my career began taking off in 2017 I did get courted a few times - Random House, Hay House, and others - but at that time, despite them courting me, the verdict was that my online social network was not robust enough. A flimsy reason, I thought - but I decided to let it be fuel to grow my numbers. Even though my count got to be over six figures all told, I never heard from them again. I remained in my lane and went the self-publishing route, being as prolific as possible.

Fast-forward to 2024. My business had taken a nose-dive. I hadn’t been healthy enough to create a new tarot or oracle project in years. I’d accrued dozens of nebulous, sometimes debilitating symptoms. The old projects were sadly becoming dusty due to capitalism’s hyperfixation upon what’s shiny. To try and save my business and maintain the roof over my head, I hired an agent who shopped my back catalog - decks that had been featured in numerous magazines and had raked in millions - out to any publisher or imprint, big or small, who would potentially bite. They all said no, one after the other. No, no, no, no, no, no. Below is some of their feedback.

Running Press’s feedback:

There were six rejections in total and they all said essentially the same thing. Devany and/or her decks are not new and exciting enough, and we’d want to change the living shit out of them to make them marketable and we don’t think we can do that. And, of course, numbers - always at the forefront of a publisher’s hivemind.

These rejections did hit my RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria - something a lot of AuDHD people experience) pretty hard. But deep down I did know that I was not old, nor was I unexciting - I could prove them wrong, and I would. I just needed to recuperate and pull myself as far away from the public eye as possible. So this is what I did: I took myself off socials, I gathered back as many of the tendrils I’d slithered into the universe as possible and (slowly, tediously) reclaimed my power.

This is when The Fertile Void Tarot and Illuminated Magazine idea came to me, and not only was I back in the creative throne that had whisked me into this business in the first place, it was next level. I was so excited. I had every assumption that I’d self-publish this one like all the rest - but when the project was near completion a lightbulb went off above my head: what if I pitch this one to publishers? The Fertile Void isn’t old, it’s not dusty - it’s a brand new project from a well-loved, seasoned, successful tarot author. Not only that, but the deck + magazine themselves are stunning, fascinating and can teach you everything you could possibly want to know about esoterica. I figured my chances were pretty high and that I had nothing to lose - if they said no, I’d just proceed the way I always had.

I excitedly emailed my agent about the new deck and put together a proposal. She told me that many pub houses post-pandemic were not as keen on tarot anymore as it, for them, was more of a passing ‘fad’ than a true interest. But one publisher - Weiser - would likely be a done deal. I have many, many books by Weiser on my shelves at home…esoterica volumes about Thoth tarot, Qabalah, witchcraft. Weiser has been the OG occult publisher for decades and I was absolutely thrilled by the notion of being one of their authors. Weiser felt like being handed a golden key to a stuffy old wizard’s library inside a gnarled old oak tree. Yes, of course I wanted to be a part of that legacy.

Once the proposal was sent in, I actually began feeling a lot more keen on this than I had expected. As someone who has had to be singularly autonomous and independent throughout her life - unable, for the most part, to rely upon her body/mind to partake in regular society and careers, therefore out of reach of many built-in structures of support, not to mention lack of family care, knowledgeable doctors and other buttresses - I have been acclimated to DIY. I’d learned over decades of personal and professional rejection that asking for help wasn’t really the move. But this particular novel idea of having someone else do some of the heavy lifting for me - instead of having to use my own janky mule to carry all of my business-related affairs up the mountain yet again (sorry, mule - I truly do love you) - was actually kind of a godsend. Because oh my, is it ever a lot. For those who aren’t in the know, here is a list of my roles:

1. Concept artist

2. Illustrator

3. Image sourcing and organizing

4. Graphic Designer

5. Writer

6. Editor

7. Brand coordinator

8. Social media “influencer”

9. Marketing manager

10. Web designer/coder

11. Customer service representative

12. Literary Agent

13. Crowdfunding Campaign Manager

14. Merchandiser

15. Packer/shipper

    …and likely more that I simply cannot think of right now.

I mean, no wonder I burn the fuck out. It’s a lot. It’s more than a single person should do. My agent gave Weiser was given six weeks to come back with a verdict. Each day I awoke with a flush of adrenaline and, before my eyes were even fully peeled, flicked to the Gmail app on my phone. Finally, on the seventh day of the sixth week, this was awaiting me in my inbox. (Feedback from Weiser in italics, message from agent in regular).

I let out a sob and then a full-scale meltdown ensued. One so large that hadn’t been seen in years. I was beside myself with grief for reasons I did not fully understand at that time. In retrospect it was abandonment - I’d built up such profound hope in their ability to support me (a neurodivergent, chronically ill, perimenopausal woman which may as well be triple disabled if you ask me…yes, I think perimenopause should be deemed a disability, fight me in the comments if you like). When they said no, I felt once again like a child who’d been left alone with strangers at a brand new school after crying my eyes out and screaming, “I don’t want to go!!!!!” Tired of being tired, tired of having to do this insane amount of plate-spinning, tired of juggling over a dozen roles, the rejection was devastating, not to mention their reasoning for it.

I was unable to conjure a reply without it sounding overly emotional so I waited until my body allowed me balance and peace. A month later, this is what I sent to my agent:

Apologies for my delayed response. The news was devastating to me, and I needed to take some time to regroup, recoup, and re-envision (and all of the other ‘re’ words that one must do during a Mercury retrograde).

Upon reflection, I’ve realized it’s clear that Weiser’s feedback has nothing to do with my work but everything to do with the culture we are now living in. Guidebooks are meant to be referred back to - that’s why they exist. The fact that she’s concerned about this speaks volumes about how dumbed down / fast food everything has become. Even the Rider Waite Smith and Thoth decks require guidebooks - no one is going to glean the meanings of the tarot cards by simply gazing upon them once or twice! It’s simply ludicrous. The magazine guidebook I’ve created for The Fertile Void deck is a masterpiece - but it seems that, given the nature of publishing needing to cater to the lowest possible standard of attention and consumerism (aka, no one wants to learn or read anything anymore, people want things fed to them, as little effort as possible) something as rich and layered as TFV is incompatible.

So I think I’m done trying to appeal to the publishing world as the feedback I’ve received on the whole has done nothing but make me (albeit temporarily) doubt myself when there is simply nothing to doubt. I’ve broken through glass ceilings on my own - and I will continue to - it’s just really too bad that they are unable to see that. That alone was my devastation - doing all of this by myself for so long, as I said in our meeting, has its glories but also many burnouts and I was looking forward to having external support for once. But maybe what I am gleaning is that there is more to learn on this path. Time will tell.

I’m sorry, for my part, that I wasn’t able to be a successful client for your agency. If someday I have a book idea that I think will be palatable to the masses I’ll circle back. Until then, thanks again for everything and I hope you have a beautiful and cozy rest of 2025.

I never received a response from my agent. It has been crickets ever since. For my part, I thought my response was pretty good - my agent had also done much to set herself up as a confidante. So I thought I was in a safe space…alas.

Listen: I know publishers have a bottom line of selling as many copies as possible. I know my work is a tad more riotous and niche than what typically counts as mainstream. I know talented people get rejected all the time. Apparently Frank Herbert’s Dune was rejected twenty times before being picked up, of all places, by a publisher named Chilton - known for printing car service manuals.

I also know I am not in any way widely palatable. I had tried to be during the first phase of my career and all the people-pleasing sent me careening into the abyss of burnout. I have since stopped trying. When I picked up my bruised heart and proceeded to get The Fertile Void going via Kickstarter, I resigned myself to the lone wolf path once again.

And look what happened:

I made more than double my ask, and counting. Nearly 400 people have thus far supported the project, and it was fully funded in 2 1/2 days - a personal record!

But this is also what happened:

My chronic illness flared due to the immense pressure and stress of the launch and I’ve been in that flare ever since. I have not truly been able to enjoy the fruits of my labours. Of course there has been unbridled gratitude - being able to make a living wage as an artist (after decades of starving) is a true gift that I do not, for a moment, take for granted. But my body has demanded truncations of celebrations and promotions. Launching this project was like yanking my janky mule up a sizeable mountain - but if I had’ve been able-bodied, that mountain would be Everest. I’d have gone on multiple podcasts to promote, perhaps self-funded a tour, attended talks, interviews and conventions. I’d have done it all.

Which brings me to my point.

My story is not the same as DeWitt’s in that I was never offered a grant or a publishing deal. My realization is that even if I had been, I wouldn’t have been able to handle the demands. The grief I experienced from my multiple rejections is only one side of the coin. It is compounded by realizing that had the door been open, I’d still ultimately be rejected by virtue of the fact that I’m disabled. These ‘opportunities’ are highly selective. They do discriminate. Even in the realm of the arts, where many disabled people find themselves, there are few gentle and accommodating routes. Under modern capitalism, one must embody several roles. One must specialize in specializing.

It’s a strange emotional landscape to embody. I am incredibly proud of the success that self-publishing has brought me. Random House, Urban Outfitters, Free People, Hay House and a slew of smaller imprints - they all wanted to mould my work into something they deemed profitable. Who knows if I’d even recognize it by the time they were finished with their edits. She Wolfe Tarot in particular was coveted by many, but the main change everyone wanted to make was to remove the nudity. The nudity IS WHAT MAKES SHE WOLFE WHAT IT IS! I scoff, I laugh, I balk!

However, the immense pride I feel when I regard my body of self-published work (and dream up what I will create in the future) is tempered by disenfranchised grief. I crane my neck up at my mountain whose peak I have summited many times over, carving out my own path to the sky whilst I watch other people take an elevator. The real twisted dagger is that those people don’t need the elevator as much as I do. They are not disabled. Privilege begets privilege. Disability begets disability. We are both in spirals - but one is up, the other is down.

Gratefully self-publishing has become more viable for countless people whose frustrations with gatekeeping lead them to find another route. As traditional publishing becomes increasingly obsolete these companies may be forced to relinquish their ableism. But we will remember that it was never elective - and never for the right reasons.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

~ I am still nursing a bad flare, so am likely going to be a little sparse here. However, I’m working on a new project and I am so excited to figure out how to share it with the world when it’s ready (and when my body feels ready).

~ In case you missed it - I recently released a brand new TAROT DECK called The Fertile Void (a lot of the principles of this project are outlined here, and in many of my recent shares). Late Pledges are enabled on Kickstarter and pre-orders are also open!

Where I live, winter has been holding on for dear life.

It’s almost as if the contraction of the cold, the barrenness of the trees, the frozen ground preventing the flowers from blooming - all of it is within a tense, unrelenting grip, bracing against the warmth and what it will inevitably generate in all of us.

Spring is like a dam breaking, setting forth torrents of formidable momentum in all directions. To be in its path is to be swept away. Spring is like the awakening after the illness. A return to abundance, to full health and strength. Except - the earth itself is not fully healthy or strong. It is being siphoned from, extracted from, to ravaging degrees each and every day. No wonder it may be holding on to the last tendrils of winter for as long as it can. It may be anxious for what the deluge might bring.

Within my own body, winter has been holding on for dear life.

It’s almost as if my chronic illness, my fatigue, my heat intolerance, my pain - all of it is bracing against the internal spring and what it may inevitably generate inside of me.

The internal spring and summer are capitalism’s favourite seasons - the only ones that matter. My body may have once kept the score from past tensions, traumas and stressful periods. I have done the work to heal those hurts and I’m still not healthy. I know why.

I think my body is really smart. It knows what my narrative has been over the years. It knows that my internalized ableism has been loud. It knows that in the past, I’ve fretted and worried so much that, as a disabled, chronically ill person, I’d never be ‘normal’ - able to produce a ‘normal’ amount of things, do a ‘normal’ amount of activities - to assimilate, to be a part of the deluge. I sought doctor’s appointment after specialist appointment not just to know what was wrong, but more importantly how to fix it. Fix it. Fix it now. Fix it so I can get back to living a normal life - to be more productive, to be more impressive.

My somatic self knows that motivation and it’s not falling for it. It’s not going to get better for the wrong reasons. It’s not going on a healing journey to draw venom from the wound only to get bitten again. In many ways I believe chronic illness is the body’s way of protesting against the ills of capitalism and all it breeds in society. Yes, it is also the body balking at the weight of the world, carrying it, somatizing it - but it knows if it’s simply trying to be fixed. It’s trying to say - bitch, I am not broken. How can I be healthy if the world isn’t? Don’t force me back into that mould. I was not made for this. If you’re going to heal me, do it for the right reasons. Do it because you love me.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

Greetings dear fae and beastly realm,

I have two announcements to make:

One: this will be my last share for quite some time. I’m heading back underground like the cicada nymph to recuperate and rejuvenate. One can only scream in the trees for so long.

And on that note, my second announcement is this:

TODAY is the FINAL DAY of the Kickstarter for The Fertile Void Tarot and Illuminated Magazine! If you’ve been on the fence about supporting this vision, today is your absolute last chance to do so.

My gratitude knows no bounds. This is an artist’s dream come true. To create something from deep within the heart and have it be well-received is something quite special beyond articulation.

To each and every one of you who believed in The Fertile Void enough to help make it real, THANK YOU. I can sense the excitement and that inspires me - it truly is about following your creative instincts time and again. When you follow them, magical things transpire. You are the evidence of this. It makes me want to howl! And so I may!

Now to wrap up the final details and send this off to the printers!

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Okay - onto what has been swirling within my mind and heart.

I’m writing this on the notes app on my phone because I physically cannot sit at my computer or my laptop. My body has, in no uncertain terms, told me it is done. It is probably done with my phone too, but at least for now I can hold it and send this final transmission to you.

The moment I released The Fertile Void out into the world on Valentine’s Day, my body broke down. A vital part of my system. A part that I took for granted. This isn’t something you really want to announce publicly. To be basically a ghost for an entire year, secretly working on a special project, only to deliver it to the world and subsequently fall apart? Not sexy. Not professional. But unfortunately…quite human.

I keep trying to tell myself that it’s okay, that this kind of thing happens - but the truth is, I did take it for granted and I did ignore some of the warning signs. I was caught in an all-consuming hyperfocus on this project’s creation and launch and as many neurodivergent people do, I forgot my body in the process. I wasn’t tuned into what it was trying to tell me. I have been working for years in my daily life and in therapy to overcome the various ways in which my autistic mask drowned out the call from within to stop, slow down, re-focus, say no. While I’ve come a long way, there’s still a big journey ahead of me. This recent breakdown has illuminated this.

I’m sure it has even happened to you at some point - maybe you worked a stressful job and then the day you go on vacation you get walloped by a bad flu. Or perhaps you’ve heard stories of folks finally retiring from all-consuming roles only to die not long after. The body holds a lot. It does not “keep the score” - another term I have grown to despise - it is far too clinical, patriarchal and punitive. But it can, and does, hold. Brace. Galvanize. Unless we learn to let go - something that we, en masse, have no idea how to do.

I’m not going to divulge what my condition is because that’s not important. What’s important is understanding what causes us to hold so much in the first place. TL;DR: yes, you may need to (like I do) learn how to metabolize and let go of stress a bit more - but ultimately what causes you to hold so much is NOT YOUR FAULT.

I was having a lovely chat about this with my fiancé this morning. He’s heavily invested in Taoism and has been for a decade. The Taoists have incredibly complex and nuanced systems for understanding Qi (chi, prana, life force energy) and how it affects the breath, the fascia, the organs, the muscles, the skin, the joints and the bones. The Taoists practice Qi Gong, which is an ancient practice of harnessing this life force to end stagnation, create spaciousness and promote healing in the body. Most of these practices, or any others that promote this same journey to holistic health, have not wormed their way into the western collective consciousness - and for good reason: they are deliberately shunned to maintain a certain narrative about the body’s “usefulness.” A spacious, regulated body cannot be indoctrinated into the patriarchal rhythms of capitalism.

Humans, for better or for worse, are creatures of habit. Our habits form based on our environments and our perception of ourselves. Who we think we are, what we believe ourselves to be capable of, and how our experiences shape us. We don’t necessarily choose these habits or shapes. The ones that are created by dangers or traumas, for example, nestle themselves within us rather impulsively - shallow breathing, tense muscles, limbic system on high alert, nervous system in fight or flight, fast-twitch muscle fibres ready to react, and a mind that switches into survival mode. This is simply built into us. This is millions of years of evolution. This is sheltering within caves with predators lurking around. This is an instinctual somatic process. But if we live in a world that acts, essentially, as a traumatic predator on our bodies like modernity does - this instinctual somatic process becomes an engrained habit that slowly decreases the internal flow of Qi until blocked pathways become pain, pain becomes injury and injury becomes chronic, sometimes even leading to illness.

Whether you’re neurodivergent or not, this late-stage capitalist-turned technofeudalist dystopian society we live in forces us into constant survival mode. Even if we are lucky enough to have some financial stability in this lifetime (which most of us don’t) the informational onslaught from day to day - the sheer volume of what we take in - coupled with our chronic disconnection from other (in person, not online) humans and the natural rhythms of sky, sea, forest and field create endless minor jolts to our system which increasingly becomes inflexible over time. Constantly flipped into the parasympathetic branch of the central nervous system, various strangulations take place, tensions become second nature, and we don’t even realize it.

We’re born into bodies that are radically intelligent and miraculous. Like, how the fuck does it all work so synchronously, so perfectly, so generously? Do you ever stop to really think about it or appreciate it? It’s magic, it’s unbelievable. Yet capitalism thinks of this body as a machine to be used, exploited, manipulated, beaten into submission- so that progress, process and product can be churned out in endless cycles. The soma is both the product and the conduit for the product. It’s a crime against the poetic nature of this miraculous creation. A body whose creation was never a guarantee in the grand scheme of the unfathomable universe but somehow manifested into you, into me - so gravely under appreciated, so cruelly used and abused by the dystopian fantasy.

Our collective dream of consciousness could be amazing - it could be as wild and as beautiful as the earth itself and all of the ways it has imagined life into being - but a small handful of men and their tech companies, governments and corporations are deciding that THIS is the dream (er, nightmare) that our miraculous bodies and magical consciousness must endure. The body as a machine and nothing more. This message, which we all receive in countless ways, are bombs going off in the body all the time - leaving their shrapnel everywhere, cutting off vital flow, sending us into the sympathetic branch. The message doesn’t stop there: if you happen to have difficulty handling the immense burden, you’re told that you’re weak and useless - and to top it all off, you believe it. So you toil and you push yourself in ways that feel inorganic to you. You learn to ignore the aches and pains and other signs from the body that it’s too much. That becomes habit. And then the body breaks down in a bigger way.

This happens all the time to sensitive people, neurodivergent people, and disabled people - but as the demands for survival increase, this happens to more and more able-bodied people as well because guess what - the body is indeed not a machine, it is an animal with myriad needs, desires and joys which have to be tended to in balance.

To be clear, I don’t think what happened to me during the launch of this project was as a direct result of the project itself. I have LOVED creating every moment of The Fertile Void. This project is pure adoration and pure joy on every level of my being. I don’t want to suggest that I in any way was pushing myself too hard to make this come alive. I believe that what happened to me was building for many, many years, if not decades. The final straw in a long-established pattern of holding too much and internalizing the rhetoric of our society. The stakes are also just a lot higher. To be an artist is to be vulnerable, sensitive, porous, open. The world pours into you and you alchemize it. Sometimes, that alchemical process seems to overwhelm the delicate system. The fact that it happened now tells me that there is more to peel back, more to look at, more to address, more to heal. It is yet another onion layer.

During my year-long hiatus from my public-facing career I learned a lot about boundaries - something I never really possessed as a young autistic woman. I tend to trust too easily and overshare because I despise small talk. The whole soul needs airing out or else things do not feel real. It feels like life is a phantasm. Plumbing the depths of the psyche with others is like scratching a really deep itch. But being a public figure has taught me that boundaries - especially with strangers - are wholly necessary and vital to preserving what’s sacred. So I worked on this - and found that my nervous system began to settle as a result of not participating in the realm of social media, where dystopia and cancel culture and everyone’s hot take and disturbing imagery and people performing happiness and abundance swirl together in some kind of nauseating, appalling soup. Sending my sensitive tendrils out into that universe felt like offering my entrails to a million tiny hungry mouths. I learned that lesson. But it has become obvious to me that I still haven’t purged the tension that living in this technofeudalist world creates, and I’m not even sure if it’s possible.

However, here are some ways I believe it can be more achievable, and this is what I plan to do.

1. I plan on taking myself off of socials again, including this platform. I will likely be back here to share some thoughts and things over time - but even having a small paid subscribership makes me feel like I must scramble to find the words even when I don’t have them, which feeds into the “body as machine” dichotomy that I am so desperate to do away with. As a conduit for the universe’s messages (all of my projects are the final result of this portal dance) these messages come when they come and cannot be forced. I am also reminded, time and again, that when you saturate your consciousness with other people’s media, minds, words, takes - you cannot hear your own. It bemuses me to no end that the new “luxury” is offline and the new “life goal” is to be bored. We come back full circle to simplicity. Through boredom, revelations come. Through boredom, ideas come. Through boredom, we can hear ourselves. And this simply cannot be achieved through doom scrolling. This is the addiction of our lifetime.

2. I plan on relearning inner spaciousness and relaxation. Actual relaxation that does not need to be “earned” or placed on the back burner until the body breaks down and demands it. To re-engage the Qi. To actually notice where tensions are and pay attention to them. Gently love them. This provides the capacity to send that calm outward into others and back into the ailments of the natural world. She suffers, we suffer. But much of our suffering is due to how we’re being told we need to live our lives. The sheer volume of unnecessary products we’re told we need to improve our experience - most of which are a distraction from The Horrors. Disconnecting from the rhetoric and the pollutive demand for attention turns this sacred lens back onto places that we’ve neglected: inward. And then finally, we can hear the birds chirping in the trees. Hmm, maybe I’ll go make them a feeder.

3. I wish to be seen, not perceived. So much of what we suffer from now is disconnection, despite being plugged into the 5G digital neural network. Time and again we pick up our phones to see what humanity is up to, and we crave the exchanges that make us social creatures, but it doesn’t fulfill us. All we are doing is perceiving others and having others perceive us - there are no eyes landing upon the terrain of our imperfectly magnificent faces, our greying hair, our dimpled skin, our fading tattoos, taking in with all senses the multidimensionality of our magical consciousness, the miraculousness of even existing at all.

Each and every time my body stops me in its tracks this is what I am forced to reawaken to. The miracle of even existing at all. Despite all of the inner work I’ve done to divorce myself from cruel, ableist, internalized capitalist narratives about my role in the world, my contribution to society, my legacy, my worth - as I said, there are more layers to peel back. The layers are somatic. They go beyond the intellect. They will not fully be soothed by (even very well intentioned) narratives of, “You’re worthy no matter what. You don’t need to prove yourself.” I’m not suggesting that the body does not respond to mental kindness because it certainly does and there are studies to back this up! But sometimes it is beyond verbal language - and learning to speak the truth of the body with breath, pure warmth, touching trees, communing with moss, gently placing a hand on the part of the body that won’t let go - this is the path.

It is one thing to marvel at the body while it is performing capitalism with flying colours. It is easy to think that we’re doing well when we’re measuring up. But this is no actual way to determine health - because, as we’ve seen, the body will enter survival mode and perform capitalism even while the gas tank is empty for a very long time. In that way alone, the soma is an incredible machine.

It is another thing entirely to marvel at the body when it has loudly announced its rebellion and simply will not perform for anything or anyone. This is not what we’re taught and it feels foreign and unfamiliar. The celebration of the body in rebellion against society is in and of itself a rebellion since we are told to despise ourselves if we do not measure up.

As the onion layers peel back, I grieve to learn just how much of my own healing is an internal riot against the dystopian dream this small handful of men have conjured for us all. This is not what I signed up for. But I will not let this system strangulate my miraculous body. I will find ways to drop what I’ve been carrying, and I hope you do too - as none of us were meant to hold it all.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. Thank you all for being here. I have certainly had a complex relationship with online spaces such at this, but I have very rarely received an unkind word on Substack and I appreciate that very much. I’ll return when I have something worth saying. Until then, this is my lasting offering to the world.

I had a really sad thought just over a week ago - one of those thoughts that immediately sends peptides of dread racing to your gut, diaphragm, the back of your head, and your heart.

“What the fuck am I doing?” it said with feverish, sickening urgency.

It was talking about releasing the Kickstarter on February 14th for my latest project - The Fertile Void Tarot Deck and Illuminated Magazine. A project I’d spent an entire year creating, nurturing, loving into fruition. In other words, giving birth.

Granted, as someone who has done the whole project launch rigamarole before and who has been an artist for decades, having sudden stomach-plummeting-to-through-the-earth shocks of doubt and fear are par for the course. Imposter syndrome also loves to come hang out for a while. In fact, all the horsemen of the creative inner apocalypse come galloping up at one time or another.

But this one - it was different. It had an extra flavour of urgency because the feeling also was, what the fuck am I doing…being an artist at my age.

The thought stopped me in my tracks. It felt like it had come straight from some kind of pragmatic higher-up in my brain, wielding a ruler and threatening to slap my hand.

I don’t think anyone in my life would ever, ever deign to call me pragmatic or practical. Whimsical? Yes. Psychedelic? Sure. Grounded in the hooves of the Capricornian goat? Yes, at times. But also swimming in the deepest existential trenches of the Capricornian fish.

I do know some fairly practical artists - meaning those who can tap into the wormhole of pure chaotic creative delight and still keep one limb grasping onto sensibilities that are widely recognized as pragmatic. Sometimes I envy them. But I’ll go ahead and say it - the best artists I know are mostly or fully in the wormhole, downloading the living fuck out of the universe’s wild messages. You need to fully immerse yourself in order to really, well, embody it.

It’s a crazy thing to do with your life. You may think it’s woo-woo but after decades of experience being an artist you realize that you’re a conduit for the universe. Visions just - come through you. And they are fucking persistent. If you ignore them for long enough, not only do you become miserable and spiritually sick, but the idea will be passed onto some other human artist conduit and be expressed through them. Every idea has its time and it demands to come through.

For those who experience artistry as a calling - this is what it’s like. You create works, projects, bodies of art, offerings that are guided - no, possessed - by the utter need to do so. The reward for being in the wormhole is bliss - physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual. There is nothing quite like it. It’s the world’s most powerful drug - and the result is the creation itself, which is its own bliss.

However, once it leaves the psyche/body and becomes visible, tangible or consumable by the public, it becomes deeply vulnerable. It is, after all, a baby. The postpartum creator is vulnerable, too. Suddenly all of the thoughts rush in of, will this work? Is it good enough? Is it worthy? Am I talented? Am I a hack?

As children, we’re all artists and we think not of such things. Art also seems a fine pursuit for those who are youthful, countercultural, renegade, rebellious, punk at heart who have little to lose. And the people who are my age and older who have managed to hold onto the very pure spirit of the artist I admire and respect immensely.

So why did that thought come thundering in, paralyzing me where I stood? Why was this voice of crushing whimsy and deep-sea diving suddenly so loud in my ear?

Because of the uncertainty of it all.

I turned 42 in December. In late 2024 I had to (digitally) shutter my business due to a severe dip in sales. I thought then, as I did a number of times throughout 2025, that I needed to pivot into something ‘more practical.’ I had some ideas as to what, but none sparked joy. None gave me that wormhole rush.

But as I stood on the threshold of launching my Kickstarter for The Fertile Void, the fear was deafening. “This is insane. Why am I doing this to myself? What if it doesn’t get funded? I will be publicly humiliated. I will never want to make art again. This feel’s like child’s play.”

That was the fleshed out fear. To this voice in my head, the idea of putting it all on the line was crazy, and felt like something that a younger version of me would have permission to do because she didn’t know any better, and your 20s and 30s were for ‘fucking around and finding out.’ Your 40s on the other hand? You better have your shit together (or at least that’s the prevailing narrative.) You better not have any kind of pendulation - just even Steven s’il vous plait.

I mean, that’s a fine goal to have. Ideally, I’d like to not have such high highs and such abysmal lows in my career or my finances. Ideally, like apparently they do in Ireland, artists would have a basic income. They’re really onto something there - because being a starving artist (despite the aforementioned romantic lens that is cast upon it) is really fucking terrible and doesn’t produce good art. The hierarchy of human needs states that survivalism is always and forever dealt with first, so the channel of creativity will inevitably be strangled by worrying over paying rent.

So yes - financial stability and career stability are a big thumbs up for me…and I think that’s where the thunderous fears were arising from. But it presented itself as a criticism - as though I was foolish for pursuing this path at this juncture in my life. As though I should have heretofore smartened up, cut my hair and gotten a real job.

However - the thing I realized about this artist’s path is this:

All life is uncertain. There are no guarantees for anyone.

You could decide to become a doctor or a plumber or a banker and still get hit by a bus. Still get cancer. Still lose all of your money in a bad divorce or bad investment.

Being an artist not only affords you VIP access to the wormhole of creative bliss, but it also has you trodding side-by-side with life’s uncertainties, without any veil, without illusion of control. You and uncertainty become besties, holding hands and skipping through The Void with no fantasies that life is any different than this. You exist that close to the bone, un-shrouded and un-muddied. And from that place, you can really fucking do it because you have no fear of falling from this imagined heightened place. You’re already in The Void. You always have been and you always will be.

Of course, as it turned out I was right to trust my calling and the wormhole-delivered message that is The Fertile Void Tarot - it got funded in 3 days on Kickstarter and is going strong. In fact, I’m beginning to announce secret stretch goals if we reach certain numbers, and that’s incredible.

Despite its sickening quality, I actually appreciate that voice who told me I was too old to do this anymore. It was a reminder that while, yes, being practical is inevitably a part of this extremely expensive capitalist game we’re all locked into, I never want to lose my whimsy and childlike play. All children are artists because they live exclusively in the wormhole of creativity. Their whole essence is a technicolour riot of it. Squashing that channel is a tragedy.

The universe calls and I, as the conduit, will always be here to pick up that phone.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. The Kickstarter has 22 days to go! I have decided to keep the early bird tiers up for the entire duration of the campaign for more financial accessibility. So if you’ve had your eye on this project but are considering waiting until after the campaign to purchase, it will be more expensive then. Now is the time!

This essay will be featured in the “Manifestos” section The Fertile Void Illuminated Magazine! The KICKSTARTER crowdfunding campaign is now LIVE to bring this project into the world. It has been my labour of love, joy, hope and tenderness over this last year. Support the campaign here!

I wrote this note a while back:

…and the idea behind it is still on my mind.

I’ve often felt like a canary in a coal mine. My neurodivergent pattern recognition skills, which have received countless shrugs, eye-rolls and scoffs from my neurotypical counterparts have always anticipated outcomes long before they happen, long before other people take notice. I don’t think I’m more intelligent than anyone else - I just can’t help but see themes, sequences, motifs. It takes a good deal of technical logic, a healthy dash of understanding psychology and a sprinkle of emotional tumult to see how things will likely unfold. Sometimes, of course, I’m wrong. But a lot of the time, I’m right on the money. Perhaps most psychics are just really, really, really observant neurodivergent people. We don’t receive our info from some mystical, nebulous source - we just see how it all intersects like a giant technicolour game of chess.

It’s true - more and more people are waking up. It seems kind of impossible not to, given the current circumstances, yes? Fascism comes right for the throat, after dancing around the knees for quite some time. You may think, “Well, I don’t love this pain in my knees, but I can get by.” So you do, and you walk around limping, wincing. But your throat is a whole other story. If throttled, you choke and die.

Many issues are becoming real, present and near for many who were previously impervious. So indeed, there has been a more broad and stark wake up call. But it’s something myself and others with keen observation have been agonizing about for a long time.

This isn’t to brag. The opposite, in fact. The saying goes, ignorance is bliss - and my guess is that those who are finally feeling the heat have had some measure of blissful ignorance about them for all, or most, of their lives. Of course, being ignorant would have lumped me in a place I’d ultimately prefer not to be - being cognizant and perceptive is, in my opinion, for the better…as painful as it is. But damn, it would have been nice to be in some kind of cozy bubble. But oh, the sharp pain of when that bubble bursts! No, no - ultimately I do not envy the ignorant.

What has been interesting is witnessing what people are doing with this (now unavoidable) overload of information. Those with stable, yet unburnt nervous systems are doing most of the yelling (which makes sense - they have the energy and inner resources) and then there are the other half of us (myself included) who are stepping off the hamster wheel of productivity.

Tricia Hersey, author of Rest is Resistance, talks at length about the principle behind rest as protest against systems that are designed to oppress and abuse (primarily people of colour as well as disabled folks). As the pandemic raged on and we all collectively took note of how capitalism was trying to rage even harder despite an obvious need to slow the fuck down, this was the necessary revolution. Especially for we who are canaries in that deep, dark mine.

Those who are stepping off the wheel of productivity right now may partially be doing so because they’re balking at the absurdity of late-stage capitalist life. Perhaps they still have energy, but they’re simply choosing to go a different direction because working, for example, as a slave to a corporation until they die no longer sounds appealing. But my estimate is that the majority of folks who are stepping off the wheel have no choice. All of us whose sensitive, neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill or have had racism/homophobia/transphobia levelled at us for decades have run out of steam to protest in the more socially acceptable, visible and aggressive ways. The fight’s all gone. If the abyss is a feather bed like Terence McKenna once said - fantastic. Let me fall endlessly and go pooooof on that oh-so-cozy bed forever. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

I know, this isn’t what the performative activists on social media want to hear. Let me get in my duck and cover stance.

My brilliant friend Sophie Strand, who I’m sure many of you read, spoke about this in a recent podcast episode. She said, “There is something macrocosmic happening, I think, about people becoming unable to work, unable to be a part of this ecocidal, appetitive culture that wants to digest everything and turn everything into a product. That when your body won’t let you become marketable, it’s something like a protest. It’s a somatic protest.” She went on to reference several types of chronic illnesses like chronic fatigue and autoimmunity as avenues of somatic protest.

It’s an interesting idea, and I’ve no doubt it is true - but there is something deeply sad about this. To realize that bodies (which were once the perfect picture of health) have been ravaged by the relentlessness of capitalism and are now protesting by way of chronic illness and disability…not only does it feel appropriate (as we’re all connected, essentially a single-organism tapestry) but it feels like the last-ditch effort of the body which is desperately searching for harmony. I know this by witnessing it epidemically but also in my own life: when fight and flight are no longer a viable option, the body goes into dorsal vagal shutdown. DVS has many, many manifestations.

Burnout and illness are obviously epidemic in our society, but not so much (yet…yet) that vast swaths of people have been rendered ‘non-functioning’ and ‘obsolete’, and therefore big dents in The Machine of capitalism are obvious. Dents are happening, but they’re not fatal. So in this sense, it feels like those of us who are deeply sensitive (and viscerally feel Mother Earth’s pain) end up being the aforementioned canaries in the coal mine. The protest our bodies are engaging in, while perfectly intersected with the throes of the chaotic human world, feels, well…ineffectual.

You’d think the way to eat the heart of the fascist uprising would be to become a homogenous, writing, rageful mob - a wrathful hivemind. You’d think that the body would know this, and would remain healthy in order to perform such acts of anarchy. But what I’m realizing is that nature…and I mean true, unbridled, deeply interwoven, delicate nature, in all of its simplistic complexity, is not a fighter. I’ve watched countless documentaries on the origins of life on earth and all of the mass extinction events, all of the ice ages. What a billion-years long harrowing saga it has been. As Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcom) said in Jurassic Park: “Life, uh, finds a way” - but it does not rage and war with itself to do so. It finds a way, it does not force a way. There is an intricate dance at play, one that it seems all organisms on this earth have figured out how to be in symbiosis with except for us. We are the only ones that force.

When a canary is introduced to a coal mine it does not emerge from this underground hell with a sign and a slogan, rounding up the other canaries to march at dawn. It simply dies. Its form of protest is to expire. It is the tragedy and delicacy of life, and in its death performs the very nature of symbiosis. If something is too toxic, the only appropriate response is to wither. We are withering.

I don’t hope that burnout and illness become more prevalent - goodness no. I don’t wish for this to be the way we finally see real change. But it does seem inevitable, doesn’t it? The way we’re going? Perhaps down the road, with the majority of the population rendered unable to ‘function’ due to somatic protest, we will see a tipping point.

So here’s where I deviate somewhat from the notion that one who is less ambitious is more ‘healed.’ In one respect, I do agree with this idea. Waking up fully to the ills of capitalism is akin to having a spiritual awakening - as, using the above example of working for an evil corporation until death, an acknowledgement of mortality and finitude is required to awaken to deeper purpose and meaning. These moments in time present often as crises but they are absolutely opportunities to see more clearly as to the soul’s purpose. Is the soul’s purpose to work like a zombie forever? I think not. So, yes - in one very profound respect, this is a form of healing. Healing away from mindless productivity, away from absurd notions of infinite growth and potential.

However, this is happening out of sheer necessity. It is happening due to the somatic protest. It is happening because we’re in a healing crisis - we are no closer to personal symbiosis and harmony than the world is to her own. And of course not - we are of the earth, after all. Like mother, like child.

This is also why I wish not to be in the camp of ignoramuses, for whom only recently the bell has begun to toll. Whilst they may have a great deal more energy, zest and pep to express their rage, they have missed something quite vital all along: empathy and connection with our Mother. Her pain has been our pain. We have been the guardians of her heart, feeling the anguish of her loss. It is the harder path, but it has been the most true. I don’t expect to be as healthy or as vital as possible if she can’t be. I don’t even know how that would work at this point. My ambition, unless it is to be of service to her in some way, feels absurd.

My productivity will never be the same blind desire for growth it once was, because that very flavour of blindness has dragged us to where we now sit - in a dystopia. But I, just like the droves and droves of other (mostly female) bodies who have lost all of their steam, are languishing in a liminal space of suspense. We may be in the process of healing, and this is why our ambition has gone south - but we must remember that nothing happens in isolation. We must remember that while the body doesn’t keep the score (fuck that book) it does say no - forcefully, if necessary. One of the first ways our bodies try to get our attention is through some kind of dys-regulation or dis-ease. This is a firm ‘no’ should we decide to listen (we should). The earth falls out of balance similarly. The disease is the healing crisis - it must be put to rights. We are minuscule manifestations of the larger organism which is the earth. Those of us who are canaries in the coal mine are like the leaves on a tree that first become affected by a fungal infection. If the tree cannot heal, all of the leaves will become diseased and die, and so too will the tree - eventually. It comes for all of us - nothing happens in isolation. Healing must occur for all, or else it will remain a crisis, and it will forever be incomplete.

From a place of slow ambition, I’ve begun to feel much like Truman from The Truman Show when he finally exits the stage. The entire world he ever knew would be left behind, but he realized in full that this world was a total sham - a fabrication, a lie. Exiting the door into the void he bows and says, “In case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening and goodnight.”

Whether we have any fight left in us or not, that’s what we all should be doing. All of us on our respective hamster wheels, fuelling the Big Machine - we need to get off: for the sake of the soma (body) of human, animal and earth.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

This essay will be featured in the “Manifestos” section The Fertile Void Illuminated Magazine! The KICKSTARTER crowdfunding campaign is now LIVE to bring this project into the world. It has been my labour of love, joy, hope and tenderness over this last year. Support the campaign here!

Some fantastic news on that front: we were FULLY FUNDED in 3 days!

That means 25k in three days!

That means 500 copies of The Fertile Void can be printed!

That means I can continue making decks and other projects (I have so many ideas) in the future!

I AM SO HAPPY, GRATEFUL AND PROUD!!

If you have been waiting to see if the project would be funded in order to support the project, now is your time to hop aboard xx

The plot thins.

Or so said my very first facebook status (remember when we did that?) back in 2012 after I made a brand new account, scrapping the old one. I’ve always been super down for a tabula rasa moment - in fact, with this ‘unbranding’ I’m doing now, I’m in one again and I’m relishing every moment. I know I’m a broken record, but wiping the slate clean and having a phoenix experience is essential now and again to clear the psychic plumbing of grit, gobs of congealed hair, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a viral song, and whatever else gets caught in these pipes.

A good tabula rasa lets loose creatures within that have hibernated, gotten stuck in the freeze response, given up the notion of feasting, spun in endless circles in captivity, or have growled viciously to try and assert boundaries, to no avail. All of these soft, palpable animals finally can move how they need to, unconstrained by the limitations that sameness and rigid identity place on their bodies.

Someone once told their IG audience that we consume more information in one single day in our modern world than we did in an entire lifetime in the middle ages. I don’t know how you can quantify such a thing, or if that piece of info is true, but in rural communities I don’t disbelieve that gossip or ‘world news’ would reach one’s ears once ever few weeks, if that.

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher who discussed the physical implications of technology by saying that, “All technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” As examples: the wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice, television extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and electronic media, in general, extends our central nervous system.

When I came across this perspective just before the pandemic, in the rapid growth of my online audience and marriage to social media, it resonated to my core. Yes, I thought, electronic media and computers are extensions of our nervous systems. The whole shebang, from twitchy toe to fluttering eyelid. It reflected what I was feeling at the time - as I discussed in my two-parter series on parasociality - an enduring rattle in my nerves that wouldn’t go away and seemed to be tethered almost entirely to goddamn app.

In my parasociality articles (pt 1, pt 2) I touched upon how an online audience isn’t invited into the creator’s living room, and so they should stop behaving as if they have been. But what I didn’t mention there and is important to discuss now, is that for the creator / influencer / public figure, their body has a tough time differentiating between tens of thousands of people being at a great distance or right smack dab in the middle of their sofa. The body knows no difference. If technology is an extension of the nervous system, one may imagine tendrils of nerve ropes - both thick and thin - like vines pushing past the limits of the skin and out into the ether. And the larger and more diverse our network is, the longer the tendrils, and the more intertwined they become with what they touch.

The internet is nothing but tendrils - invisible ones - that invade every mote of dust floating in space. We do not have to be technically cyborg - human and machine hybrid - in order to find our nervous systems entangled with the tendrils of the digital. The internet has become as passively insidious as inhaling a pathogen, or a spore, on your morning walk. Smell is actually minute particles of matter entering the nose. Tiny particles of the internet are always in us. That, and microplastics, these days.

The very nature of being a living, breathing animal is to constantly seek out one’s surroundings and curiously poke into unknown spaces. The realm of the digital holds a new kind of curiosity for us as a species, one that allows us to behold all of the glory and hideousness of the world simultaneously, with no warning on either end of the spectrum. But this communion is not strictly physical, so we may feel that it bypasses a vital alarm system. For example, if we were to physically be in a war zone, rubble all around us, bombs going off - we’d be severely traumatized, afraid and deep in survival mode. However, when we view this same zone on a screen, it affects our limbic system and nervous system in a similar way, but it is ‘once removed’ from our present reality, so therefore the flight mode it provokes gets internalized and does not serve the same purpose as it would if we were actually there.

Before I go on, I must dally at ‘serve a purpose’ because this, in my opinion, is the crux of the nervous system / tech issue that is making us all sick.

I’m not a full nervous system + somatics expert, but I do know quite a bit. And I know from doing somatics work that the body wishes to express itself in full, all the time. It knows how to do this - it is us who get in the way of that expression. Sometimes this is because we’re actually stuck in the freeze response, sometimes it is due to trauma, and other times we just don’t trust our body’s natural movements or we find them socially unacceptable.

The body is always attempting to fully express the emotional waves that undulate. An emotion has a spark, a pathway and a dissolution. In cruder, less poetic terms, a beginning, middle and end. When trauma gets ‘stuck’ in the body, and ‘the body keeps the score’ it is because the middle keeps happening on a loop. It may not be as simple as shaking it out one time, but there’s something missing from the full expression.

Our tendril-y intertwinement with the internet, all the exposure and inundation that occurs there, and the way that it bypasses the alarm system that would tell us to punt our phone into the ocean - all of this leads to tons of tension gumming up the works. The body ends up holding far too much information, far too much trauma from perfect strangers, far too many opinions, far too many random acts of senseless vitriol, and really - just far too many voices, period. It ends up feeling much like this:

And is this healthy? I think not.

Thinning the plot…shrinking oneself

It is yet to be seen if the internet / social media has done irrevocable damage to our brains and bodies and the way that we seek information, connection and entertainment. Even when taking stock of the harm it has caused me, I obviously have a hard time getting away from it. I see those of us who have been burned by places like Instagram migrating to much more sensitive, soft feeling platforms such as this - but even Substack is becoming more like social media all the time and its focus is on readership growth, not necessarily readership quality.

The questions I have been asking myself a lot lately:

1. Is it possible to be a well-known artist / writer, but not have my nervous system extend to all corners of the earth?

2. Is it possible to go back to the days pre-internet, where information overload and a sea of voices are not constant bedfellows that one has to deliberately build a shelter away from?

3. Is it possible to decolonize my mind and body from the capitalist urge to grow ever more?

I believe all are possible, but one thing must be championed above and beyond everything else: the body, the nervous system. So no matter the consequences: whether this means not ever having a massive platform and the opportunities that come with it, saying ‘no’ in abundance, moving at the pace of the body, not the algorithm - this must be first priority. I have to admit, there’s a bit of grief here, and FOMO. These uncomfortable emotions are, of course, why we push ourselves into the spotlight time and again.

But I think we have to really ask ourselves, what sort of garden do we wish to grow within? Do we want to be colonized by tech and by the push to be and do more ad infinitum, more for the sake of more, more to no avail, more to the point of breakdown, ill health, insanity? Or do we wish to grow only what we can eat, tending to each and every bit of nourishment mindfully and with gratitude?

Until next time, love and wolves.

D xx

SUPPORT THE FERTILE VOID HERE!

Marshall McLuhan – extensions and amputations

Hello dear fae and wolfe kin,

WOW.

We’re SO CLOSE! Can you believe that this project is nearly funded and it has only been two days???? I can’t! This fulsome and vivacious chockablock has me positively bombilating! (To quote the late great Catherine O’Hara as Moira Rose).

In other words, I am grateful. I am chuffed. I am squealing. This project is ALMOST a reality for all of us.

Can we tip it over the edge today?

To see you believe in it has officially soothed all of my fears that it wasn’t a good idea to release this now - which was certainly something that I waffled about a great deal pre-launch, in quiet internal moments of self-doubt, despair and insecurity.

So if you can on your busy Monday, please share the campaign link with people in your network and spread the word! And if you have been considering backing this project but have felt uncertain, this is you time to say yes and help us get it over that 25k mark into FULLY FUNDED!

More updates (and regularly scheduled topic articles) to come! EEEEEEE!

Love and wolves,

D xx

I am finally able to announce what I’ve been secretly working on ever since early January, 2025 - an entire year!

It is… (drumroll please!)

The Fertile Void Tarot Deck and Illuminated Magazine - out NOW on Kickstarter!

Support the Kickstarter

So now you know why I’ve been quiet around these parts - and all of social media - this entire time ~ this project has taken all of my focus, and I have to say…

I am more proud of this deck - and magazine! - than I’ve ever been of any of my other releases. This is next level. And I’ll tell you why!

If you read my previous piece, there is a great deal of philosophy behind the concept of this project - having to do with many of the themes I write about here on this very Substack: anti-capitalism, finding our own organic and sustainable rhythms in life, cocooning and undergoing personal wintering phases, honouring the body and the nervous system, and so much more. Check it out if you haven’t already. But in short, The Fertile Void is a realm we all find ourselves in now and again. If you’ve ever been through a big transition, felt lost, confused or uncertain - you’ve entered this liminal space. Some call it The Void, some The Abyss, others simply The Unknown - whatever name we ascribe to it, this realm welcomes us all equally in times of, change, bewilderment and disorientation. It’s a beautiful and non-judgemental place.

However, the rub is that in our modern society, we’re told that feeling lost and uncertain is bad and that we should always have all the answers. This leads us to fearing The Void and any uncomfortable emotions we may be experiencing. We’re encouraged to jump from one thing to another, to distract ourselves - to do anything to avoid feeling an existential twinge.

However - the longer we remain in The Void, the more we realize we can relax and that there’s nothing to fear in liminal spaces. In fact, a liminal space is downright FERTILE. It is:

This deck helps you find your way through The Void, and every other challenge, lesson, transition or question you may face. Because let's be real, we're living through unprecedented times. Many of us are facing uncertain futures. The role of esoterica and mysticism is to help us ground ourselves through awakening the spiritual self. Tarot is a tether to both the ether and the roots of the earth.

Support the Kickstarter

So - let’s dive into more visuals and details of what this deck and magazine have to offer.

Part One: The Deck - what makes it unique:

• There are no human figures, apart from one anatomy illustration, in the richly detailed collage artwork - I wanted this deck to be fully accessible to folks from all walks of life. The issue I see with tarot + oracle decks is that the archetypes are often depicted as people who many - if not most - of us will not identify with. I find that this makes it harder to relate to the messages of the tarot. With The Fertile Void, the artwork is all flora, fauna, ancient symbolism, landscapes and the cosmos. It’s an absolute RIOT of colour, texture, and narrative - fully inclusive of all humans!

• Because this deck de-centres human figures in favour of inclusivity, the court cards have been omitted. The descriptions of both the Major and Minor Arcana cards (as well as the Secret Arcana!) are so potent and cover every single emotional, existential, spiritual and archetypal theme you could ever imagine. This particular deck is complete without them.

• This magnetic book box opens to reveal two stacks of cards instead of one, making for a box that is larger, allowing for gorgeous artwork to grace both the inside and outside covers.

• 64 cards - 22 Major Arcana, 40 Minor Arcana (10 Cups, 10 Swords, 10 Wands, 10 Pentacles) and 2 Secret Arcana

• Cards are edged in a hypnotic rainbow foil that shimmers in the light

• Card backs feature a new take on the classical Kabbalistic Tree of Life including astrological (planetary) associations

• Cards have a rainbow border that looks vibrant as you fan them out

• Cards come in two stacks side by side in a magnetic book box with rainbow foil inlaid into the inner poem text and other text

• Card meanings are described thoroughly in the accompanying Illuminated Magazine

• Size: 8 x 5.25 x 1 inches OR 20 x 15.3 x 2.5 centimetres

• Each suit (including the Majors) has its own gradient border colour

See more photos on the Kickstarter page!

Support the Kickstarter

Part two: The Illuminated Magazine

When I was creating this tarot deck I initially wrote the guidebook as a regular black-and-white companion to go in the tarot box as I’ve always done. But then a lightbulb went off in my head - what if the guidebook could be SO MUCH MORE? What if I could fully express, in vivid technicolour, every facet of this amazing form of esoterica and why I love it so much? What if it could be a collectible magazine that is as beautiful as it is timeless?

What if it could be as epic as possible?

Well, as soon as I asked myself those questions, the project took a turn and the Illuminated Magazine came to life.

There is truly nothing like it!

• 300 pages

• Thick 128GSM high quality paper

• Sections include: Manifestos (Substack articles!), an in-depth exploration of the tarot archetypes from three perspectives: The Fool’s Journey, The Hero’s Journey, and The Solar and Lunar Phases of Life (Jung) as well as the history of Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Modern Occultism and Esoterica, Qabalistic Tarot, Astrology, Numerology, Gemstones and more. And of course, last but certainly not least, detailed descriptions of The Fertile Void tarot cards and their meanings.

• Each card description for the Major Arcana includes: Artwork Insight, Upright and Reversed (Shadow) meanings, Questions, Suggestions, Mantras, Hero’s Journey, Fool’s Journey, Hebrew Alphabet insight, Tree of Life insight, and Astrological correspondences

• Size: 11 x 8.5 x 0.5 inches OR 30 x 20 x 1.25 centimetres (think Vogue, Cosmo)

Below is the Table of Contents:

And for those who would like to read a little Fertile Void on-the-go, I’ve created an e-book that will come free with purchase of the deck and magazine. It will not be all 300 pages - it will only include the following sections:

• Reading Spreads

• Qabalistic Tarot

• Astrology

• Gemstones + Minerals

• Numerology

• Major, Minor and Secret Arcana Descriptions

...which is all you’ll need for an at-a-glance reading!

There is also really cute limited edition MERCH and lined hardcover journals to go along with this project which you can purchase through the Kickstarter!

Support the Kickstarter

And finally - two more offerings because I absolutely adore creating whole ecosystems around my projects.

The Website

I’ve created an entire fun late 90’s/early 2000’s themed website to go along with this launch - a place where you can learn all about The Fertile Void, see previews of the cards and their meanings, learn about astrological, Qabalistic and numerological associations with the tarot. It was such a joy to create and I hope you enjoy browsing it!

The Playlist

As a tarot lover, have you ever wondered which songs might encapsulate the archetypes of the Major Arcana, or am I the only one who is that nerdy? Deepen your relationship with The Fertile Void universe by exploring the 22 Majors via the joy of music.

This is not even the full extent of it - if you follow me on Instagram (@fae._.wolfe) I have a massive rollout of videos, unboxings and other media planned over the next month.

SO, YEAH, I HAVE BEEN BUSY! :)

If you feel like it, check out my cute unhinged unboxing video that I recorded the day I received my sample (December 23, 2025). And below is a thank-you video.

Support the Kickstarter

The Kickstarter is only on for 30 days! It’s all or nothing - so if it doesn’t get funded, this project will not get out into the world. Let’s make sure it gets into the hands of everyone who will need this beaut.

Thank you so much from the bottom of my Underworldian heart!

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

Support the Kickstarter

I’ve been doing Parts Work therapy for a couple of years now - otherwise known as Internal Family Systems (IFC). The basic premise behind it is that we all have different parts - or selves - that make up the whole. Each part plays a different role. Some parts are young (like our inner eternal child), some arise as a result of trauma, some are quiet, some are loud. The goal of Parts Work is to identify, acknowledge and create dialogue/connection with the different parts, and eventually get everybody on the same page.

It’s been a fascinating journey for me to learn this and get a sense of my parts, as some certainly have come about as a result of difficult moments in life, and some have been starved for attention. Giving them all space to exist and speak has been liberating, to say the least.

I’ve talked a lot here about being in an ebb. Between autistic burnout and perimenopause, my need to cocoon has been strong. The part of me that I’d buried beneath my autistic mask became louder and louder and louder until I couldn’t avoid listening to her anymore. I’d tried muffling and plugging my ears to that voice, conflating her needs with disability, and disability with shame. Thankfully that internalized ableist part of me is now quieter, but it certainly ruled the megaphone for a long time. I’d been so proud of my prolific productivity, of my ambition, of how much praise I received for my endless streams of creativity.

In solely feeding that part, others were becoming parched and ravenous - but I was so terrified of ‘giving in’ to a part of myself I’d grown such shame around that I feared listening to it would throw me right off my intended path of continued ambition and prolificacy. I never stopped to think that this part - and the world she was inviting me into - might have so much wisdom to share.

We often don’t see the ‘lulls’ in our journey as vital parts, making the highlights possible. Lull isn’t even the correct term in many cases - it’s a label with a negative connotation. Really, these lulls, cocoons, ebbs - they are wondrously prismatic, psychedelic eras full of depth, texture, and insight. If we’re always skipping upon the surface of the pond at high speeds, we’ll never see what lies beneath. Too afraid to dive down, those fantastic coral reefs of the psyche will never get explored - and what a shame.

Life is not a video game for which there is a set plot, and a set of boundaries in the environment where you can play. In a video game, if you are thrown off the intended path, your character gets stuck and there’s nowhere to go except back through to the programmed checkpoint. Whether you believe in fate or not, real life is not this way. If you are ‘thrown off’ course, there are always a series of decisions to make, and new channels are made all the time. In this respect, the obstacle is the path. If there is illness, tragedy, death, unexpected roadblocks, upheaval, change, burnout, a shift in capacity - this is the path. It’s like that saying goes, life happens while you’re making other plans.

And this concept is the central thesis and drive behind my new project that will be released in 3 short days.

Sometimes course-corrections take place because we’ve been denying parts of ourselves for too long, or other parts have been in the driver’s seat for too long. In the below example graphic, the inner protector has been allowed to run the show, preventing the inner child from experiencing joy, whimsy and spontaneity. Other pie charts may show that the inner critic may be guiding things too much, and a part of us that is nurturing or needs to be nurtured becomes ignored. As you can see, all of these parts make up the whole (as we are whole) but the fundamental nature of parts is that they are, well…parts. In some ways they’re like characters in a play, only able to fulfill their role. So if one has the most booming voice on stage, it’s where the attention will inevitably go.

In order to integrate, these parts all need to be heard, seen, acknowledged, loved and understood. They all matter. They all exist - or arose - for good reason. We are all multidimensional humans with the full spectrum of colour within us. One wonderful way to begin the integration/balancing process (and to quiet some voices which are antiquated, harmful or berating) is to speak to each part directly. Have a dialogue.

Yesterday, I had an eighteen minute long conversation with my inner child, because I could sense that she was restless and anxious. I pressed record on my voice note app, and just…started talking. What’s surprising about dialoguing with parts is that they really do want to be heard - so when you ask them questions, they will answer. Sometimes the answer is quiet - almost on the edge of thought and hearing - but it’s there. This takes a bit of trusting the process, but the result is always astonishing.

The goal isn’t to admonish or strangulate any part, even if it’s unwanted. The point is to give them all a voice and then use the regulated adult part to reason with those other parts which are usually dysregulated in some way - so that the pie chart looks more like this:

(…or some variation therein of your unique parts).

These inner course-corrections may lead you to a very different place than you intended - but as I mentioned earlier, there is no set plot of your life. There is simply a push-pull dance with the inner selves and the outer world. In your lifetime you will enter many Fertile Voids - and it is what you do with them that really counts.

See you on LAUNCH DAY!

Love and wolves,

D xx

Dearest fae and beastly kin,

Now that my secret is out, I’m going to begin unfolding some of the mental origami behind this project that has taken me the last twelve months of total devotion to complete. I can’t wait to tell you more about it - I have a post scheduled for launch day that goes into the finer details and why this all means so much to me.

But I can also tell you some of it here, now.

Because the wonderful thing about being an artist is that your whole life informs your art. So everything I’ve been sharing with you here on this Substack over the last couple of years - all of the themes - have informed this project. In many ways, the project is all of me. But it is also all of us - The Fertile Void is an homage to the cocoons we all build, the ebbs we all enter, the contractions we all experience in life. And it is a reminder that these cocoons, ebbs and contractions are instrumental to our growth.

So this piece is about just that. One of the many iterations of the ebb.

Carl Jung likened aging the celestial bodies that are most influential to us: the sun and the moon. The sun being our nascence, our youth, our rapid outward growth. The moon being our descent into old age and death, our internal gaze. The time between the sun setting and the moon rising is middle age. I know not all of you reading this are experiencing this epoch yet - but read on, because if you’re lucky enough to experience it, there is a surreal yet beautiful world that opens up in the gloaming.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how time changes people. I’ve reached an age where I’ve known some folks for a few decades, and I’ve watched how their story arc has taken shape in ways that I could not have expected or imagined. In many cases, there is grief attached to this observation, the kind of grief that comes with knowing there’s nothing you can do - you must sit back and witness it all unfold as it will.

I’ve seen how some people who had all of the promise in the world of talent and fame turn into forlorn, bitter addicts. I’ve seen others emerge out of addiction into humble stability. Others, still, I’ve seen stay safe within a narrow, comfortable set of accomplishments, remaining stable and out of the realm of gossip. I’ve seen people try on many different personas and relationships, dissatisfied with them all. I’ve seen folks go to therapy and really work on themselves, becoming unrecognizable from who they were when we first met. Others have become quiet and hermetically sealed from the world. I’ve witnessed several of my female friends realize they’re neurodivergent. I’ve watched them undergo the same shift in identity as I did. I’m beginning to notice what a lot of my friends will look like when they’re very old - I see traces of their future selves in the current map of their faces.

Middle age is so strange. It’s the most surreal passage I’ve yet encountered. I’ve never known what to expect out of life - I mean, who does? We’re just thrown right into the gaping maw with no handbook or compass - but I feel like I was told, via sources like media and the general blueprint of capitalism, that my 40s would be a time where I was a real adult. Our 20s were for fucking around and finding out, 30s ditto but with a dash more wisdom and more stable income - but 40s — 40s were supposed to be a time of having done all the ‘finding out.’ There was supposed to be this feeling of accomplishment and self-mastery. When I was young, adults in their 40s seemed really, really old. I knew they had the potential to be flawed but not to the point that they ever really fucked up. By your 4th decade, all of your big mistakes were supposed to be behind you.

Yes - midlife crises happen but they are only ever described as happening to men who are desperately trying to reclaim their youth through chasing young women and partying like they did when they were 20. These are often very loud expressions of the insecurity that comes with middle age. Women tend to go through it more quietly. We feel out of control. We watch our bodies and our faces change. We watch our priorities shift. We watch our tolerance for all kinds of things turn to dust. We witness ourselves being deeply humbled by the fact that we never really had much control in the first place. The 4th decade really gets this message across, by any means necessary.

Whether we like it or not, middle age pulls us into shapeshifting. It feels like a longer and more visceral version of the undoing that occurs during one’s Saturn Return (when Saturn comes all the way back around to the place it was at the time of your birth, which happens every 29.5 years). Around age 28-31, most people undergo a major set of metamorphoses which separates the child from the adult, the parental/familial karma from the individual karma. In other words, we more fully become ourselves, shedding the skin of who we thought we should be according to our parents, our lineage, academic structures, etc. But in our 30s we are still in our solar years. The sun shines ever brighter. We are still seeking identity from external validation. We are still looking to the outside world for who we should be.

So when middle age comes and we sit in the surreality of the gloaming, and even the fullest dark before the moonrise, it can be so bewildering to see nothing external around us. We can find ourselves grasping in the dark. That is why some midlife crises are so loud and so visible - we are literally shouting in the blackness, trying to be found. But ultimately the call is inward, the candle within must be lit, and we must grow accustomed to the moonlight softly illuminating the path forward. It is The Fertile Void.

In this liminal space, so much grief comes up. The gregarious and at times obnoxiousness of youth - chasing our personalities through myriad colourful life experiences, the pure radiance of the sun blazing all possible trails in front of us - turns into a much quieter, much more contemplative life. Not all of the lunar phase of life is a contraction - but I would say much of my experience of middle age has been, thus far. It is the metamorphosis of the caterpillar becoming primordial goo. In the goo there remains a semblance of the former self - but something else is there too. Something beyond transitory, ultimately meaningless forms of identity. It’s deeper than that, more cosmic, more rooted - infinite. The lunar self.

The imaginal cells in the cocoon do just that: they imagine. New forms await. Letting go is a bitch. But the truth that I am continuously reminded of is that, just like my friend’s aging faces, the story isn’t over. In fact, what I see developing there in the deep lines around their eyes and mouths is the rest of the story - and I can’t wait to live it out with them.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

I’m curious about something.

If I say the words ‘the void’ to you, what do they conjure?

Do you think of outer space, a vast expanse of nothingness, a free fall into the abyss, total peace and quiet, a liminal space, a chasm between two worlds? Or something else?

The concept of The Void has been with me for ages. It has been a part of my creations for as long as I can remember. It was even the ‘slogan’ for my original business name, Serpentfire (as seen in this hand-drawn sign I made for it in 2013, which still hangs in my home). I mean, I’ve even named my advice column Dear Void! But that was also a subtle hint of what’s to come. I’ve been doing a little seeding which you’ll understand if you keep reading.

To me, The Void means all of the above, but over the last year it has taken on a richer and more fruitful meaning, as I’ve been more or less forced to sit in this liminal space for an extended period of time due to several factors: menopause, middle age, having to close my small business, and the general uncertainty we all are dealing with in this late stage capitalist, on the verge of collapse society. It has all contributed to one big Void with a capital V.

Sometimes The Voids we experience are fleeting - minor discomforts, minor change. But sometimes they are gargantuan. Sometimes the change is so huge, so swift and so enduring that we’re not whatsoever the same as we were before we tumbled down the rabbit hole.

I used to fear this. I just learned that I am an Enneagram 4, which has my identity (or sometimes lack thereof) front-row-centre in my passage through life. I am also autistic, so change is difficult for me. In the past, instead of fully entering The Void and allowing myself to exist in the unknown, I’d clamour and flail, trying to grasp onto anything that would make me feel less lost.

But this time, I didn’t do that. Instead, I slowly sank into it like a warm bath. I was still fearful and uncomfortable, and I still had no idea what - if anything - would come next. Away from the roles with which I had grown so accustomed, an existential crisis presented an opportunity. As I sat in the discomfort of this void, I came to a stunning and not-so-subtle realization:

The Void is Fertile. This is the tender place from which all things spring.

The liminal realm I was inhabiting was not some vast, dark expanse or endless plummet into a chasm. It was a life thrown into question. I allowed The Void - and the questions - to simply be. I didn’t try to rush through them. I didn’t try to look more ‘together’ than I actually was. I fully dropped the mask, even with myself. And as a result, an immense amount of personal growth was allowed to unfold.

For a long time, there were no answers. But in this slow, tender, open-hearted space, I was able to access wisdom that I wouldn’t be privy to had I been in a hurry. It guided me towards several points of light.

And from that, a project idea began germinating.

~She whispers~

So now that my secret’s out (if you clicked the above link, and you totally should, cause it’s everything I’ve been working on over this last year and it would be so cool if you signed up to be notified!) I want to talk a little bit about how I came to the wisdom of The Void, which is essentially the philosophy of being lost, and how to be ok with that.

Let’s give it that name. Why not.

The Wisdom of The Void, AKA the Philosophy of Being Lost, and How to Be Okay with That

Part One: The Abyss is a Feather Bed

I am forever coming back to this quote by Terence McKenna, one of the pioneers in psychedelic research and experimentation.

Nature loves courage.

You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.

Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.

This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.

This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.

This is how magic is done -

By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.

​​The abyss is a feather bed.

So yes - there is sometimes a free fall, and things feel massively scary and uncertain for a while. But this act of magic - of sheer trust and surrender - is precisely what a certain protagonist of a certain system of self-inquiry and divination: aka tarot, aka The Fool - does. Wink, nudge. They are often depicted as standing at the edge of a tall cliff ready to jump off. They hurl themself into the abyss, The Void, the portal, to discover that not only do they not die upon impact - oh no! - they find that they meet The Magician, master manifestor and creator of all things - the alchemist. And from there they begin their journey - it does not end.

​Trust is the magic ingredient.

Trusting in The Void.

Trusting that it is Fertile.

Trusting that the free fall is the prelude to a different adventure. It may be an ending, but it is not THE end.

Part Two: Be Like a Flower, Already!

Have you ever watched a time-lapse video of a flower blooming? One rather radical thing that you’ll notice is that it contracts as it expands. The act of expansion is not all in one triumphant go - it’s a process that includes moments of ponderous stillness.

The same is true for our myriad processes. Whenever you are in a contraction phase, it is crucial that you honour and tend to it, exactly as you would a delicate flower in its magnificent unfolding.

The contraction phase is absolutely necessary. When we expand too much too quickly, we are not fully embodied. There is simply no way to process all that’s happened in such a short amount of time. Contraction allows us to come back to ourselves and check in. We can ask ourselves, how was that last little phase of expansion and growth? What do I need to process and metabolize from that? Do I need more rest? More nourishment, for the next phase? There is also no need to rush the next phase! We are all on our own timelines. When it is the right time, it will feel right. It will flow easily.

The Fertile Void finds its philosophy in this practice. The Void becomes Fertile when we allow ourselves to step into the unknown, off the beaten path, away from external pressures. When we allow ourselves to feel lost and confused, directionless and unmoored. In this liminal space, flowers of potential bloom - but never all at once. They begin gently, slowly, tentatively.

Whether we’re recovering from burnout, a misaligned relationship or career, going through a significant shift in identity, a challenging time with our health, or any other epoch in life that feels bewildering, scary, uncertain or dubious - we step into The Void to suss out its vibration, its texture, its message.

The society we live in tells us that we must have all the answers all the time, we must always have the next few steps well mapped out, we must have plans A through Z ready and waiting. But the truth is, we’re all lost, we’re all uncertain, we’re all confused by life. We just so happen to be a little closer to the unknown during more challenging moments. This, dear reader, is a contraction. We are getting closer to the core of existence, and what it means to be human, to possess consciousness without all of the fancy labels we ascribe to ourselves. In The Void, we can simply be. And from here, we can choose to expand in ways that feel more aligned with who we truly are - not who we have been told we should be.

So while entering The Void can certainly be frightening because it is not what we’re used to facing, it is a critical act for our soul to endure. The more we surrender to the unknown of The Void, the more Fertile we will understand it to be.

Part Three: A Season for Everything

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late

​~ Turn, Turn, Turn! The Byrds

​This past summer I had the privilege of raising and releasing a monarch butterfly. It was the first time I’d ever done anything like this. Realizing that the milkweed clipping I’d brought home had a little monarch caterpillar hitchhiker was special, indeed. I gave her all of the milkweed she could ever want, and watched her feast day in, day out until one morning I found that she’d made herself a chrysalis. She must have been working tirelessly overnight as the chrysalis form was complete and ready to house her miraculous transformation.

Over the next few days, her caterpillar body turned to primordial goo. Magical cells called ‘imaginal cells’ - as what they do is imagine a new form, a new life - were the agents of change swirling within the sacred space she had woven herself. I witnessed her chrysalis turn from bright green with astonishing flecks of gold, as if a fairy had come along and blown her shiny dust, to a deeper shade of green mixed with red and black - her new wings had grown. On the ninth day, she was suddenly, and without warning, a butterfly - holding onto her chrysalis with delicate legs. I took her outside and let the sweet summer breeze dry off her paper-thin wings. She let them unfold and touch the air, remaining there for about an hour. She then began to flap them, feeling the strength of her new body, full of possibility. The next thing I knew she flew up, up, up into the trees and was gone.

The symbolism of the chrysalis - or, if you’re a moth, a cocoon - is easily applied to our lives from time to time. The chrysalis is The Fertile Void. The butterfly trusts completely in its process of total, unrecognizable transformation. It essentially dies and is reborn. It hurls itself into the abyss and discovers that it is a feather bed - but instead of feathers, gauzy wings that carry her to faraway lands.

If she did not have trust in the process of her undoing and ultimate becoming, she would forever try to remain a caterpillar. We, too, resist change and the unknown due to fear. But what we sometimes don’t realize is that our resistance to what is naturally calling us is far more a frightening prospect than the change itself. Resistance becomes fear and tension, stagnation and festering. We become rigid, brittle, dried up, resentful.

However, unlike the caterpillar who only takes a couple of weeks to become a brand new being, we undergo metamorphoses a lot more slowly - ultimately requiring a lot more trust. If we were able to see the fruits of our descent into the unknown overnight, we could simply go to sleep and wake up radically changed. But this is not how the human life works. Coming undone and building oneself back up are often months to years (even decades)-long processes that we are bound to. We can think of them as larger contractions and expansions of the flower of the self.

A chrysalis is a contraction - but it is not in any way idle! There is much that happens, and this is pivotal, yet it is all behind the scenes. It occurs via the internal landscape. This landscape we don’t often champion or celebrate because it is not the ‘result’ or the ‘success’ or, again, the ‘fruit’ of this toil - and in this society, the product is prioritized, idealized. This is why the chrysalis can feel so foreign and frightening - not only do we not know how long we will be in it, but it is a contraction away from the self we once knew, and we don’t know if we will be a good enough ‘product’ on the other side!

But can you see how unkind this narrative is?

Do you think, for a moment, that the primordial goo that was once a caterpillar worries that it won’t be a perfect product? I don’t believe that this is how imaginal cells work, not for one minute. The imaginal cells are the Fertility of The Void of the chrysalis. The cells know that The Void is a crucial womb-like space of potential and holds them for their directive. They trust. And they unfold as they are meant to.

This is the same for you, in your chrysalis. Transformation takes as long as it takes and it takes you where you need to go. Let your cells imagine what they may yet become.

Part Four: You’re Always Where You’re Meant to Be

If you’ve ever watched any of the following movies (just some examples!) you’ve watched the archetypal Hero’s Journey unfold:

• Interstellar

• Spiderman

• Moana

• The Hobbit

• The Lord of the Rings

• Avatar

• Shrek

• Interview with the Vampire

• Breaking Bad

• Star Wars

• The Matrix

• The Lion King

• The Green Knight

The Hero’s (or Heroine’s) Journey is essentially a set of events/rites of passage/spiritual and emotional hurtles/roadblocks/adventures that everyone experiences in life. This is what we mean when we say it is archetypal - it is universally applied. The stages of the journey are outlined as follows.

• Departure

• the ordinary world

• call to adventure

• refusing the call to adventure

• meeting a mentor

• crossing the threshold

2. Initiation

• tests, allies, enemies

• approach to the inmost cave / heart of darkness

• the ordeal

• the reward

3. Return

• the road back

• resurrection

• return with elixir

The thing about the ‘formulaic’ nature of this journey (and how modern capitalism causes us to adhere rigidly to set notions of success and identity) is that when we veer off in an unexpected direction, we not only feel lost, but we feel that we’ve actually exited our hero’s journey. We feel that something has gone gravely awry, and we clamour to get back on the beaten path. We forget that sometimes getting stuck in the weeds is actually our path forward!

There is also something to parse out with the notion of being a ‘hero’ - we must remember that we are the hero, at all stages of our journey, not just the moment we defeat our (inner or outer) demons.

This is the holistic view: one, that we are always the hero of our own journey no matter what. And two, that we are never ‘off’ of our hero’s journey, we are absolutely always on it - it just may look different from what we imagined. But truly, that is always going to be the case in life. Rarely do things match up exactly to what we’ve envisioned. Our strength lies in adaptability, and trusting that the abyss is a feather bed. Think about all of the times that you headed in an unexpected direction in life, only to find some person, lesson or opportunity awaiting you that you could have never anticipated. This is precisely why The Void is Fertile. Step off the beaten path and you may find exactly what you were seeking.

Final Thoughts

The weaving of this thought tapestry is that you are never actually lost, you are always exactly where you’re meant to be at any given time (be it in a cocoon or chrysalis, in a moment of contraction, in the throes of change and uncertainty, or off the beaten ‘hero’s journey’ path). With this wisdom you can relax into The Void and you will find that it is Fertile, and you may finally be at peace with the natural process of all things.

I will see you in two weeks for LAUNCH DAY. EEK! (For more info, you can check out this super cute late 90’s/early 2000’s website I created that goes into much more detail!)

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

Hello all.

It’s been a while.

I’ve lost a lot of you to the sands of time.

That’s ok.

I’ve had to go further and further inward - some journeys demand such devotion. That is where I’ve been. I’ve been in 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓕𝓮𝓻𝓽𝓲𝓵𝓮 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓭.

That term has meant everything to me over 2025 and in a few short weeks I’ll reveal to you why - and why I’ve been so quiet around these parts.

To those who have remained, thank you.

I find it so hard as a neuroqueer, highly sensitive artist, to be two people at once:

1. The Creator - who requires quietude, solitude, privacy, long stretches of time in a hyperfocus, being constantly fed snacks and inspiration, eating, sleeping and bleeding the projects I’m conjuring.

2. The Public Figure - who is required to show up regularly for various algorithms lest she lose subscribers, followers, interest, relevancy. Showing up often equals siphoning from herself (and the main vein that should be totally and utterly focused on her projects).

For many years I tried being both simultaneously and it dragged me straight into burnout. Now I must choose one or the other. Most of the time these days that means choosing #1, because she is the most fulfilled and happy. However, it means I lose momentum on these capitalist platforms - which is actually unfortunate, because you truly don’t need to step away long to lose it. But that is exactly what they’re built to do, and why they keep people so addicted. Le sigh.

However, all of that said, I will soon be dropping a couple of announcements here that will (hopefully!) make your jaw hit the floor. I’m so proud of them. And I’m so nervous to share. But I know you will receive me with open arms. You always do.

I hope you all have been doing well. I just celebrated my 42nd birthday before the new year, which truly feels like some kind of achievement. It also seems as though time is passing more quickly now - something my father certainly warned me about. I remember being a child and time passing like molasses - I believe this is because when we’re young we are in awe of the world around us, taking it all in for the first time. As adults we’ve ‘been there done that’ - and in our spectrum of jadedness, time speeds up. The antidote to this is to be more present, pulsate with gratitude, shimmer with awe, and appreciate it all.

And that, my friends, is what I plan on doing. How about you?

Until I return with my announcement - be well.

Love and wolves,

xx

D

Dearest community,

I know I have been fairly MIA and behind many curtains these days - I am brewing something epic behind the scenes which is going to be launched next month. It is taking all of my energy and focus, which simply has not been available for Substack.

So much gratitude for those of you who have chosen to stick around while I have slipped into the shadows, no longer showing up as vulnerably in these online spaces. I dearly hope this has served as inspiration for your own authentic journeys.

However - I am popping in to announce that I’m offering - for a limited time - voice-recorded year ahead tarot readings with astrological insights!

These readings tend to be quite popular so if you’re interested in gleaning what’s to come in 2026, and how to navigate it, grab your reading:

HERE!

…and for more info on this offering, keep scrolling.

Lots of love and I’ll be back with another Dear Void column soon!

xx

D

P.S. If you’re looking for an astrology-only year ahead reading, I just had an amazing, wonderful session with Aubrey Houdeshell - she’s an incredibly gifted astrologer and funny to boot! Book with her here.

𝒟ℯ𝒶𝓇 𝒱ℴ𝒾𝒹 is an advice column for for neuroqueer, neurocurious existentialist philosophers. Once or twice a month I will be answering your questions on any of the following themes: ☾𖤓 Late-diagnosed autism + ADHD ☾𖤓 Being highly-sensitive in a overwhelming world ☾𖤓 Menopause & perimenopause ☾𖤓 Middle age, the ‘midlife crisis’, cronehood ☾𖤓 Navigating late-stage capitalism ☾𖤓 Overcoming addiction ☾𖤓 Reclaiming our bodies (as an antidote to the patriarchy + capitalism) ☾𖤓 The healing power of nature ☾𖤓 Animal familiars ☾𖤓 Sitting with difficult emotions ☾𖤓 Nervous system regulation ☾𖤓 Navigating relationships ☾𖤓 Shadow work.

If you wish to send me a question, you can do so via ye olde Tumblr ask box. See this post for rules and guidelines.

This column is currently free but will be behind a paywall in a few months protect the energy of myself and the people who are sending their inquiries.

Dear Void,

I’m perimenopausal and I have ZERO TOLERANCE for people’s BS anymore. Especially people who aren’t working on themselves in any meaningful way, or people who take from my precious energy (of which I have little to begin with, IYKYK...) I guess my question is: how do you deal with how this affects relationships, when you’ve been a people-pleaser all your life? Thanks!

~ Anonymous

Dear Anon,

Someday I’ll write a whole book about this. I really feel you, truly. This is the ‘villain era’ that people have been talking about on socials for years. Of course, it only feels like we’re being the villain because of the stark contrast between the assertive, boundaried, no-nonsense person we’ve become and the fawning people-pleaser of yore. When you’re erecting boundaries for the first time it can feel scary, and like you’re going to lose people left, right and centre. As helpful as it may be to remember this truth: people who are upset about your boundaries were benefitting from you having none - it is still a big leap to make. And the threat of loss is still very real, and very visceral to the body, mind and soul.

We often people-please and fawn due to survivalism. We’re simply trying to remain safe, loved, housed and fed. Women are far more likely to have to fawn in order to remain safe than men - our smaller stature and the inescapable nature of the patriarchy ensures that dynamic. This, plus the fact that one of estrogen’s main biological and psychological roles is to help us tolerate the male species, creates an unspoken resignation to defer (or ultimately give away) our power.

So - it’s no wonder, that in perimenopause, (or simply as we age and gain wisdom and autonomy) - we find ourselves suddenly at the end of our rope. Our tolerance has jumped the fucking ship and is nowhere to be found.

At once this is empowering and devastating. Empowering because it acts as a deep awakening, like Pippin’s tomfoolery creating a chain of events that awakens the Balrog in the Mines of Moria. The Balrog represents our sacred rage and our long-overdue boundaries that are suddenly ready and willing to lash offenders with its fiery whip.

This pivotal moment is simultaneously devastating because, as mentioned, it means the death of one life and the beginning of another. Dear gentle reader, I don’t care how positive a change is - how ultimately for the better it is. All change is a petite mort, a little death, and there is some measure of grief and shedding of skin involved. Many things can be true at once - the grief and the loss comes with the empowerment and joy.

Something I’ve learned from being so staunchly adherent to my integrity, my principles and - ultimately - my soul, is that it is a little lonely. Certainly lonelier than the fawning, people-pleasing younger self once was. When you feel that you can be for everyone, when you can mask and camouflage and mould and shape and contort yourself into being everyone’s friend, desire, idol, goal, inspiration, support - it really is quite astonishing just how flexible the self can be. And because it is rewarded (even praised!) by society at large and patriarchal, colonialist notions of selflessness you definitely do feel quite good, actually - for a long time - behaving this way. It’s reinforced and reinforced and reinforced time and time again. It’s a feedback loop that starts young and ends in extreme burnout. When we hit our people-pleasing limit - whether it be our hormones going bye-bye, or through some other means - often we’ve HIT OUR FUCKING LIMIT. Meaning, we actually surpassed it long ago and have been running on fumes.

There seems to be a lot of guilt that arises when we reach this point of no return. We think, “Oh my god, why am I like this? Why am I being so selfish? What’s wrong with me?” Yet again, the society we live in has successfully brainwashed us into thinking we, as the individual, are the problem and it is somehow our responsibility to keep up these dynamics, these pretenses, in order to keep the peace. In no way could it ever be systemic, intergenerational, no no. And boy, is it ever tempting to try and keep the old dynamics going - especially because this is uncharted territory and wouldn’t it be easier to just go back to the way things were?

A friend recently told me that her brother blames their mother for the failure of her marriage to their father. He said that he believed menopause was the culprit. “When mom went into menopause, it ruined everything.” he said. My eyes rolled all the way back into my head, and made a cartoonish ‘boioioioioiiiing’ noise as they found their way back forward. What happened between their parents simply was that their mother awakened to the programming she had been imbued with as a woman growing up in the 60s, 70s 80s and beyond. The roles, the silence, the assumed dynamics, the deference to men, plural. She began healing, sought solace in her art, and found empowerment on her own. The husband simply could not handle the ways that she was changing. And this is so often how things shake out - but who is actually blamed for these fractures? The woman, of course. No wonder we fear this change so much. It ends up feeling like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. And sometimes you must choose between a familiar damnation or a novel one.

However…evolution is evolution. We may certainly try to arrest it if our fear is the strongest force - but contorting ourselves back into a shape that is no longer existentially tolerable will (sooner rather than later) create even more rage, more resentment, and ill health. We must go into the uncharted territory.

Anon - really, the only way forward is to understand that there may be loss, and to be prepared to deal with it. Perhaps it tempers things a little to remember that if there is loss with this newfound empowerment, the connection(s) weren’t as genuine as we thought they were. That, too, comes with its own grief and disillusionment - but so be it. The space that is no longer being suffocated by siphoning relationships will now be open either to new ones, or simply to tend to yourself. Perimenopause requires a lot of this inner space in order to navigate the uncertain, sometimes stormy seas of change. It makes sense that you no longer have this room to field the rest - your body and mind are undergoing many metamorphoses, and they, my gentle reader, are sacred. Evolution should not be denied. The only person you should be pleasing is yourself.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. If you’ve found this piece illuminating, helpful, or interesting - please consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee. I love writing, and I love being of service - but alas, my fae creaturehood is bound inextricably to paying bills ˊᴖˋ so it’s important for me to be paid for my work.

P.P.S. Other ways to support me ~ shopfaewolfe.com

𝒟ℯ𝒶𝓇 𝒱ℴ𝒾𝒹 is an advice column for for neuroqueer, neurocurious existentialist philosophers. Once or twice a month I will be answering your questions on any of the following themes: ☾𖤓 Late-diagnosed autism + ADHD ☾𖤓 Being highly-sensitive in a overwhelming world ☾𖤓 Menopause & perimenopause ☾𖤓 Middle age, the ‘midlife crisis’, cronehood ☾𖤓 Navigating late-stage capitalism ☾𖤓 Overcoming addiction ☾𖤓 Reclaiming our bodies (as an antidote to the patriarchy + capitalism) ☾𖤓 The healing power of nature ☾𖤓 Animal familiars ☾𖤓 Sitting with difficult emotions ☾𖤓 Nervous system regulation ☾𖤓 Navigating relationships ☾𖤓 Shadow work.

If you wish to send me a question, you can do so via ye olde Tumblr ask box. See this post for rules and guidelines.

This column is currently free but will be behind a paywall in a few months protect the energy of myself and the people who are sending their inquiries.

SALE ANNOUNCEMENT!

From now until December 1st! 22% off everything in store. Things have been quiet for my small biz this year while I work behind the scenes on a new project - so your support means everything right now. ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

SHOP HERE

If you missed PART ONE please read it here!

How to cultivate energetic boundaries - a step by step process:

*ੈ❀ Call your energy back. Part of being permeable is not having all of yourself in one place. Think of a puzzle that is missing pieces. There are many ways that you can do this.

1. Withdrawing support from people who give nothing back and/or are toxic.
   

2. Withdrawing from online spaces or physical spaces that are siphoning from you.
   

3. Prayer, meditation or visualization techniques.
   

4. Spellwork. (If you’d like a spell for this, let me know in the comments and I’ll share my go-to).
   

*ੈ❀ Learn how to identify bodily sensations and increase interoception. From Neurodivergent Counselling:

• Body scanning: Start from the top of your head and notice any sensations you may feel there, then slowly move your awareness down through your body to your toes, continuing to pay attention to any physical sensations you notice along the way. This practice can help you become more attuned to subtle changes in your body. You can also experiment with targeted body awareness, tuning in to just one part of your body (such as, your hands) and experimenting with changing how that body part feels (e.g., clenching your fist, then opening it, or running your hand under cold water).
  

• Interoceptive activities: Participate in activities that promote interoceptive awareness, such as yoga, tai chi, or body-focused meditation. These practices often emphasize bodily sensations, breath awareness, and mindful movement, helping you cultivate a deeper connection to your body and its signals. You may have to experiment to find the right type of activity since not all interoceptive activities work for all neurodivergent people.
  

• Label and describe sensations: Practice labeling and describing the sensations you experience in your body. When you notice a sensation, such as warmth, tension, or tingling, try to put it into words and describe it in detail. This process of verbalizing your bodily experiences can enhance your awareness and understanding of internal sensations over time. And remember, your experience of bodily sensations may be different than others’ and that is okay! Use describing words that make sense to you.
  

*ੈ❀ As an expansion of the last bullet point above, once you’ve become adept at labelling and describing your own internal sensations while you’re alone, become aware of sensations, tensions, emotions and any other phenomena that arise when you’re physically around other people, or you’re online. If you can, make a mental note or write them down.

If you’re able to write them down, create columns A), B) and C) - A) can be described as ‘sensations I was feeling before x activity’, B) ‘sensations I felt during’ and C) ‘sensations I felt after.’ You can also note how long it took you, upon being alone, to shed those feelings from the B) column.

Once you learn how to properly identify what’s yours and what isn’t, you can practice various boundary-strengthening techniques that maintain your empathy and compassion without compromising your structure and health. They are as follows.

*ੈ❀ Learn to say no to things you know will be unduly taxing, draining or downright bad for you.

*ੈ❀ Befriend only those who respect emotional boundaries and don’t simply ‘dump’ on you. Yes, there will be times when someone you love goes through something really hard - but you can enter into those situations with awareness of the difficulty. People who lack emotional boundaries will always take more than they give, and will hit you sideways with all kinds of somatic debris that they themselves have not processed. By virtue of your sensitivity and compassion and their total lack of self-awareness, they end up forcing you to process their stuff.

*ੈ❀ Tread carefully into challenging territory, especially if you find a topic triggering. Even if you love that person, sometimes it is healthier for both parties for you to take a step back.

*ੈ❀ Spend time in nature and ground your energy. Go barefoot whenever possible.

*ੈ❀ Continue practicing differentiating between what’s yours and what belongs elsewhere. Find a somatic practice, be it breathwork, shaking out energy, dancing, stimming or anything that helps you to dispel what isn’t yours. Alone time is crucial.

*ੈ❀ Build up your energetic body. Qi Gong, Tai Chi and meditation are all excellent ways to make your nervous system and energetic body more robust, able to experience the undulations of the human/animal/cosmic world without being knocked around too much.

From here, you are likely to encounter people for whom The Big Questions also tickle, but what is shared will feel expansive, and more joyful. These portals (as you call them) are available to everyone - but as I mentioned before, the permeability we experience causes us to see beyond the veils that we, in our modern world, are forced to live in. Much is taken at face-value. The trees we encounter - they are conscious beings, but how often is that thought of? The meat people consume - this comes from sentient, conscious beings as well who experience all of the fear and pain that we do, yet McDonald’s is advertised to us on the TV all the time and it’s ‘normal.’ We live in an incomprehensibly vast and magical universe, and are lucky enough to be alive on this spinning rock hurtling through space yet most of us have our noses buried in our phones, seething angrily at some comment that a stranger made on facebook. Our minds are capable of understanding the true nature of consciousness and life itself, yet most have no idea how to access this. Much of what we autistics experience as deeper realms is simply the vibrant, pulsating, immense, wondrous TRUTH of existence, and all of the unseen forces which are as real as anything, yet are overlooked by those who take everything at face value.

Many are essentially sleepwalking through life, insensitive and blasé towards the utter enchantment of all things. It is a gift to be so sensitive and aware. As long as we do not get too damaged by our immense empathy, we can celebrate these gifts and dance in the pure joy of awakening to our full spiritual selves.

Until next time,

Love and wolves.

D xx

P.S. If you’ve found this piece illuminating, helpful, or interesting - please consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee. I love writing, and I love being of service - but alas, my fae creaturehood is bound inextricably to paying bills ˊᴖˋ so it’s important for me to be paid for my work.

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