Writing in a Loud World
It took me years to realize that no matter where I lived, there would always be noise. That is the nature of sharing this world with other people. Short of living in a soundproof dome there was no way I could escape it. It baffled me that my friends and family weren’t as overwhelmed by the noise. They never understood why I couldn’t adapt to it. They seemed to just brush it off as if it wasn’t that big of a deal.
While they could adapt, I would become overstimulated and extremely angry at the evasive noises of life that interrupted my ability to concentrate, feel calm, or sleep at night.
It wasn’t until after I learned I was autistic that I understood my inability to adapt to the unavoidable noises of everyday life resulting from sensory processing challenges.
Lessons on the Journey to Publishing My First Novel
Three lessons learned on the journey to becoming a published independent romance author…
A Spoonie-hard Day for an Autistic Writer
I am constantly budgeting my energy. Deciding where to allocate my spoons (disability term to describe a unit of energy) for the day so that I can hopefully give my attention to the things that matter most to me, like writing. On a good day, it feels like I’ve mastered this energy equation and the blog post gets written, a scene revised, and maybe even a social media post or two is scheduled. At the end of the day, I’m abuzz with all that I’ve accomplished.
But some days no matter how much energy allocation I’ve done it will never be enough. Some days I wake up and I just know that it’s a spoonie-hard day. I can tell because the coffee grinder is too loud and reverberates through my head even though I’m wearing my loops and I open the shades in my loft but then close them again because the light is just too much. And I’m just an hour into the start of my day and I can feel the signs that my body is going to be flooded with stress hormones in the next hour and the more I try to push through the less I will have to give to my work
Alexithymia and Finding Refuge in Romance
I mostly operate in this very even, neutral space of mind. But under the surface I know that there’s lots going on. That perhaps things are building up until they reach a tipping point and come spilling over. I’m in that place today. The tipping over place. Where emotions come crashing over me like a broken dam. But it’s not just one predominate emotion, it’s a confluence of many disconnected from a specific context or moment. There’s no making sense of it or finding meaning in this flood emotion, it just demands to be felt all at once.
Reading My Way Through Autistic Burnout
Early in the process of being diagnosed with autism, I learned about autistic burnout. I first came across it on the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network website. Seeing the list of symptoms of burnout laid out so clearly in a graphic made me realize that there were several times in my life when I suffered from burnout beginning when I was only 12 years old.
Why Romance?
For as long as I can remember, reading has been part of that process of recovery. On really tough days, when I’m just fully burnt out, recovery looks like closing the window shades, laying under my weighted blanket and reading for 12-13 hours straight often only moving to use the bathroom or eat a snack. My genre of choice has always been romance. It stimulates my neurodivergent brain in the best possible way.
An AuDHDer’s Writing Essentials
Writing used to be so hard because I was repressing my stims, masking heavily, and struggling with auditory processing in busy social settings. No wonder I had little energy left to be creative. Since being diagnosed with autism and ADHD, I’ve developed a toolbox of essential aids and systems that support my creative process. Here are some of my favorites.
Writing the Happily Ever After Autistic Women Deserve
The storylines written about autistic people in TV and film turn us into flat one-dimensional stereotypes. If those characters have a central role in the story, they are almost always white men. Women and particularly women of color are left out of the storyline or reduced to a minor supporting role.
But then there are novels.
How an autism + ADHD diagnosis helped me reclaim my love of writing
I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer. What I didn’t understand is that all the traditional advice about how to discipline yourself to write consistently and produce new work would never work for me. So, for years I struggled to finish even a short piece of work. I could not understand how I could have moments of hyperfocus when I completed a project usually when there was an external deadline involved and yet when it came to other projects I would start with a burst of excitement and inspiration and then my motivation would take dive off a steep cliff into a bottomless pit never to be seen again.