What do I get paid? 

Back in December I facilitated a conversation with a bunch of small businesses and freelancers from the Agencies for Good network to talk about the tension we experience making money while working on social justice issues. I’ve written before about why people should pay DEI practitioners, but with a few more years under my belt as a freelancer working to address social justice issues, power dynamics and extractive economic systems, I thought I’d share something about how I think about pay within my work. 

To be fully transparent and up front, my standard day rate is £650. In my experience, with the amount of business admin and relationship-building required that isn't chargeable to anyone in particular, a typical full-time freelance facilitator could manage about 3 days of chargeable time a week if they had a constant stream of work (which is almost impossible for any freelancer that isn’t a fixed-term contractor, and even then contractors have big periods of time where they’ve not got their next gig). In my context where I’m doing at least 1 day of work a week on our housing co-op, regular work at the community farm and on other community organising, and picking up kids from school at 3pm most days I end up with only 1-2 days of chargeable time per week even if I work in the evenings and weekends to make up for it (again assuming that I have a steady flow of clients which most freelancers do not). On average on this day rate after all my business costs, I end up paying myself around £2,500 a month before income tax (equivalent to a £30,000 salary).

Some people (likely those that have never freelanced) will see this salary and be surprised it’s so much lower than expected when they consider £650 to be a high day rate. Some people (likely those who know how hard it is to sustain self-employment) will look at this and wonder how I manage to have such a high income. I only started feeling confident to charge this amount when I started working with my partner who was on this rate, I was scraping by on much less before he encouraged me to value myself.

So below are just some of the reflections on how I got to this place and what makes earning this level of income feel okay for me - both in practical and moral sense. 

What are my needs?

A basic need that I used to ignore previously was the fact I can get sick and be entirely unable to work. I am also autistic and am frequently disabled by meltdowns. If I was employed I’d have access to paid sick leave and holiday leave, as a self-employed person I have to earn enough to cover those myself.

My salary also has to support raising 2 kids full-time. Plus it subsidises the time I make to care for my wider community - whether that’s supporting the people I live with emotionally or physically, cooking regular dinners for the local lgbt+ group, supporting our co-op and other housing co-ops with DIY, finances, legal issues or emotional work, hosting gatherings in our community space for refugees and asylum seekers - the list is endless.

I believe in creating a world where all forms of labour are valued, and therefore I try my best to account for that in how I think about my own income, even if clients are more reductive about it. However this unpaid labour is not just something that has to be subsidised by my paid work, it is intrinsically linked to the value I deliver as a freelancer but we will come back to that later. 

I live comfortably on this salary because I have been able to divest from the status quo. I pay £660 towards rent and bills for me and my kids at our housing co-op. We collectivise food purchasing as much as possible but this forms another substantial monthly cost, as does the running of a car which is required for living rurally. 

What I consider ‘chargeable’?

When I first started out as a freelance facilitator I only had my designer friends’ contracting rates to go by. My first paid client was the British Medical Journal and I only charged them £300 for a full day workshop with 40+ people!! At the time I thought £200 was a decent day rate and thought a day and half was enough to cover my time. Past me would never have dreamt of one day charging 6 times that amount for the same thing.

These days I try to ensure I include plenty of prep time and travel time in the cost for an in person workshops, and for some clients I consider the ongoing emotional toll of the work, although 9 times out of 10 working in the social justice space means I go far beyond my contracted hours because very few people value the depth of thinking and relating that is truly required to create meaningful change.

In addition many individuals I work with want to keep ongoing relationships with me long after any paid engagements, which I absolutely love in a lot of ways, but as someone that already has a large extended community and chosen family it’s incredibly hard to juggle the multiple voice notes and emails I receive from past and potential clients and workshop participants each week. For me I actually struggle with the concept of day rates for most of the work I do because you can never predict what transformations might occur and what cans of worms might be opened, and even when most clients don’t have endless budget to keep resourcing that I still feel a deep responsibility to show up in some capacity for people who are ready to create real shifts in practice and power. 

One thing that people don't fully grasp is that the value I bring to my paid work is often substantially higher as a result of what I embody in the rest of my life. As a community organiser for instance I am deeply connected to a lot of people with different life experiences, which makes it easier for me to design inclusive spaces in different contexts and to draw upon my networks for useful insight. As someone doing collectivised budgeting in more intimate settings, holding space for funders to do that with beneficiaries doesn't feel as daunting as it might if I wasn’t constantly practicing this in my own life. When my brain processes and composts alongside my fellow volunteers at the community farm, I am also learning new modes for reflecting on myself and the system that I can share with my clients.

When do I charge less?

Many people choose to do a charity or not-for-profit discount on their rate but having been employed at a questionable charity in the past that logic has never made sense to me. There are a lot of not-for-profit organisations where CEOs are still paying themselves 6-figure salaries. There are charities that perpetuate the exact thing they are supposedly trying to dismantle. There are dysfunctional non-profits where the emotional labour of the work I’m doing is going to be higher than in a corporate setting. But there are many scenarios where I offer my time for much less than my standard day rate including:

  • Lower rates for individuals that want to access my work but can’t either due to a lack of disposable income or due to the constraints or barriers they face in their organisation. For instance on my holding space series it’s a ‘pay-what-you-can’ offer, and about 50% of each cohort join for free as a result.

  • Lower rates or pro-bono time for individuals facing real challenges in doing social change work within a toxic environment, for instance through transformational relationships coaching . I believe in those individuals' capacity to create change with the right support and I don’t want them to give up simply due to a lack of internal buy-in. 

  • On longer-term projects that really matters to me, and where the group or organisation have really clear standards around pay. For example I was recently invited to work with a prison abolition group with really consistent pay principles. I both want to further my facilitation work within restorative and transformative justice, and I can see that they have clear commitments to one another when it comes to what they spend so I’ve offered to reduce my day rate to the same as theirs which is about £200. 

When do I struggle?

After 7 years of being self-employed this is the first year I’ve paid myself the same every month and not burnt myself out with the anxiety of where the next gig is coming from. But I’ve only got to this place due to two things that most other self-employed people don’t have access to: 1. I’ve worked with one of my partners for the last few years and we’ve shared income equally even if one of us is delivering or winning more work 2. I received an unrestricted grant from Thirty Percy as part of their changemaker programme.

Both of these things have made it possible for me to steady out the ebbs and flows that are usually present in freelancing, and in turn this enabled me to make more thoughtful decisions about where I invest my time and energy, rather than jumping at opportunities simply because they can afford to pay me now. It has also made me more open to non-chargeable relationship building - which previously used to fill me with resentment towards those who didn’t seem to value me, or on the flip side made me feel a bit gross in the relationships where I really did care about the people and their work and wanted those relationships to be mutual rather than transactional. 

It’s helped me to really lean into deep and never-ending work of building community and organising people towards change. So much of this is often unseen and undervalued and now I can throw myself wholeheartedly into creating the glue that holds everything together, rather than cutting corners because I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford to pay my bills next month. 

Another thing that’s been hard to navigate as a freelancer is consistently finding the funds to pay other people and investing in our own development. I have strong principles around what I deserve to earn and I want to ensure that I’m valuing everyone else with the same mindset. But for most of us investing in other people requires us to take that out of our earning capacity. The grant I received has enabled me to more easily pay co-facilitators, get design support, and access training opportunities that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford. In addition I’ve been able to invest in starting up a Queer Care Collective which has paid multiple facilitators, a photographer, a printing co-op and provided the queer community with a £500 co-budgeting pot for shared resources. 

I’ve been able to share resources in a way that aligns with my values partly because of this funding, but it was also present in the way I approached this work even before I had any disposable income. Collaborative Future for example was founded on the belief that moving resources rapidly into the hands of undervalued individuals could be transformational and we operated on the principle that no-one should be doing unpaid labour. Even as someone with no savings and no access to family wealth, I was still able to use my privilege to take out a £20k personal loan to fund this work (I wrote this before about the barriers this created for us to then access grant funding).  For me taking financial risks in order to create meaningful and urgent change is worth it. When I commit to mobilising the relatively small amount of resource I have - whether that’s money, housing, energy or connections - I am reminded that we all have the power to change things even if we are reliant on the capitalist systems we are trying to dismantle. 

Sense-making with shapes

The first time someone used drawing to explain something to me was in my early days of product management. I was 21, without a university education, working at an Edtech company. I thought I’d never be able to navigate the work because I had none of the academic or technical jargon. But one of the developers sat me down and drew a diagram of how the product worked and I instantly felt at ease. Never in my entire education or work could I remember anyone else drawing what they were trying to explain - it was eye opening.

As I transitioned into facilitation work a few years later I naturally started to use drawing techniques as a way for people to articulate complex ideas in strategy and vision sessions. It was clear to me that a lot of the senior leaders I worked with raced to use big words that they did not fully comprehend, and nodded along to each other without understanding what was going on under the hood, which ultimately led to confusion further down the line. But if I’m honest I also just enjoyed the discomfort it created for people that were used to being able to communicate verbally. This was prior to my work within the Equity and Inclusion space and prior to my autism diagnosis but I knew that there was something inherently biased about the way the professionalised world operated that meant people that could articulate themselves with a certain tone and language dominated the conversations and decision-making. 

But it wasn’t until quite a few years later that I got to experience a facilitator using drawing techniques with me and it clicked as to why that approach was so profound. Working at Collaborative Future alongside my co-founders Prisca and Sonia, we’d been struggling to make sense of tensions that were present for us on a youth programme we’d been running.  Imani Clough asked us all to draw our experiences of the programme using shapes only, and then to talk each other through what we’d drawn. As soon as she set the task my brain lit up, stars and lines and squiggles filled my page. I hadn’t been able to order my thoughts to my team in words because every time they came out of my mouth they didn’t quite speak to what I felt in my body, and they caused responses that I wasn’t expecting. In return as my teammates talked me through their drawings I got to see the patterns that their brains honed in on. The differences in what we felt most viscerally and the layers that we each noticed in the work were clearer. Even the way we each structured our thoughts were different - and it made me realise that through trying to communicate in a shared language we’d each been missing each others nuances. 

On the surface we all already knew all this. We’d each grown up in different cultures. We each had very different people and values in our lives. We each had very different brains and rhythms and needs. But this was the first time I truly felt its presence so clearly in our work. And through witnessing those differences in this way we could finally pinpoint the specific things that were causing conflict for us. All of that in a 20-minute exercise. 

From that point onwards I became obsessed with drawing and shapes as a way of communicating for any layer of the work. When I’m mediating a conflict I’ll get each person to first draw their experience of that conflict before jumping into unpacking it verbally. People have remarked that this approach also allows them to de-personalise things. Comparing shapes on a page together is more connecting and grounding than speaking directly to another person or worse pointing fingers at them. When I want a team to explore the role they or their team play within the work they do I get them to draw their ideal day or draw how their work flows into the wider ecosystem and then to compare and contrast with other people’s drawings. Quite often verbal processing centres similarities, we seek to assimilate towards the dominant voice. But when we can visually see the differences in what we’ve noticed we can identify the exciting nuances between us and make more conscious choices around what to move towards. When I’m asking people to imagine possibilities for how their work could transform society I get them to use visual metaphors to expand their thinking and to express what doesn’t yet exist. Language can be quite constricting. It is also so shaped by patriarchal and colonial powers. As described by Minna Salami in Sensuous Knowledge “The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation”.

When I introduce people to drawing exercises as part of the holding space series a lot of retinence I hear from people about using this type of thing in the spaces they are part of is the discomfort it might create for people. Often what I say in response is that 9 times out of 10 the people that are uncomfortable with communicating in this way tend to be able to navigate the systems with some ease because they can speak the right words in the right way. It is okay to make them feel uncomfortable for a little while so that others can have a moment to communicate in a way that makes more sense to them. And even if people struggle to communicate their ideas visually, the act of slowing down with a pen and sitting with your thoughts for a moment generally means that what follows out of their mouth is more considered than it might’ve been otherwise. 

Of course it is also worth remembering that some people might not have the dexterity or limbs required for drawing, or there might people that have perhaps been shamed in the past around their creative skills. For these people I’d suggest adaptations. Maybe you could bring glue and colourful shapes and pictures to collage with. Maybe you could ask people to work in pairs and play to their strengths. Or maybe just some people draw but it sparks new thinking for those who look at that drawing and see a new layer or pattern.

If you’d like to learn more about drawing and collaging as a facilitation technique, sign up to the next Holding Space programme kicking off on 9th September.

This is an excerpt from a new book I’m writing about facilitation, if you enjoyed reading this and would like to be part of the process of reviewing the content please email me on ray@and-breathe.org

The most liberating "liberating structure"

I’ve been running an accessible programme to provide more people with experience of different facilitation methods and techniques, including many liberating structures. This week a participant remarked in response to Troika consulting “I noticed that it was really hard not being able to rely on people’s facial expressions and was really conscious that I might not know if I’ve offended the listener” and I joked “Welcome to the brain of an autistic person”.

As an autistic person who struggles to read people, I find troika consulting is incredibly neuroinclusive because it does away with the unwritten rules of what is socially acceptable and creates clear boundaries between the roles people are playing. There are 3 core aspects to it: 

  • One person (person A) shares a challenge or problem they have for 1-2 minutes

  • Person A then turns of their mic and camera (or turns their back if in person) and the other two people discuss the challenge or problem together for 5-7 minutes

  • Person A then returns to the pair to share what was useful about what they heard

But that small set of instructions are hugely powerful. Here’s what it enables in my experience:

Self-awareness

When we can no longer rely on cues from others around how they are responding to our suggestions or ideas, I believe it actually encourages us to be more aware and thoughtful of what we are saying. In my experience people say much more flippant things when they know the other person can say something back to them. 

In addition the listener can really tune into what they are feeling in response to what they are hearing from the others, rather than using their capacity on responding, affirming, or correcting other people’s thinking which is what most people would be doing when in a dialogue. One participant said the other day that they felt really reactionary to something someone had suggested, but even though it was not the answer they were looking for, noticing that response in their body is still wisdom that’s useful for them as they think about the next steps with their challenge. 

Space to venture beyond parameters

What’s more is when the recipient of the advice or ideas can’t respond it forces them to really listen to the places the other two go with the challenge. And it gives space to the people exploring the challenge to ask questions and propose things they might not have otherwise. All too often an affirming ‘yes exactly’ will make someone want to lean into a particular idea more,  or a ‘no you’ve misunderstood’ will make someone retreat from the place their ideas where heading. Without that feedback it allows people’s brains to wander and to venture into perspectives that a more active participation from the recipient might have otherwise shut down.

Disruption of potential power dynamics

In addition, the desire to say what someone wants to hear or expects to hear is stronger when there’s a power dynamic present. I still remember when I was involved in a recruitment as a junior product manager and when I learned that my boss had scored a candidate very differently to me I assumed I must’ve been missing something and adjusted my scores to be in more alignment to him. But later on in my career I realised I’d simply assimilated into homogenous thought due to the power dynamics at play and wanting to not be perceived as ‘wrong’ or ‘ignorant’ for holding certain beliefs and perspectives. We lack diversity of thought in so many situations because of this same fear. This is perpetuated by the fact many leaders speak as if their idea or perspective is the ultimate truth, so getting those leaders to enter into a troika consulting dynamic where they are asking others for input on a challenge and sitting back to really listen disrupts this pattern of behaviour. 

If you want an opportunity to try out Troika consulting in a welcoming environment sign up to my next holding space series or join this workshop on Power and positionality.

If you stand for justice, you cannot be above it

After a decade of working in the diversity, equity and inclusion field and being part of many social justice movements I am more aware than ever of the co-opting of these movements by people who are not deeply living and breathing decolonial practices. Back in 2020, after George Floyd's murder, I was concerned this was me and I tried to step away from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work, because I didn’t want to be another white person making money off of the struggle. But my friend Janice, a black woman who has been doing this work for far longer than me, said to me “There’s no way we are letting you step away now - we’ve gotta use you and your identity to speak to the people that won’t listen to people like me”. She worked with me to explore why I’d rather be surrounded by people of colour and my deep discomfort in white spaces. She made me see that I had a responsibility to hold space for white people with compassion, even when I wanted to run away from our shameful colonial history and the white supremacy culture still present. She taught me that oppression is the water we swim in, the complexities of our conditioning and the slow and consistent chipping away that requires. She helped me unpack all the ways the system was suffocating and harming me and let me be vulnerable in my pain, while still holding me to account over the things that give me ease or entitlement. 

As I’ve deepened my roots and my practice, I’ve learnt how to move through this work authentically, even when both myself and the wider field is feeling deeply conflicted. I want to share a few questions that consistently keep me grounded in this work and why I struggle to trust anyone that says they stand for equity and justice but isn’t asking themselves these questions. As Cole Arthur Riley describes in This Here Flesh, “Liberation is not a finality or an end point; it is an unending awakening”.

How does the oppressor show up in me?

When a person or an organisation tells me they are good at DEI it’s an immediate red flag for me. Even though I’ve spent the last 10 years doing some form of DEI work every single day as well as the lived experience I have as a queer autistic person from a working class background, I still have a mountain of things to dismantle and redesign within myself.  The oppressor lives inside all of us, and as described in this article, “Coloniality is a shape we are born into and entrained to continue perpetuating through all the  educational, administrative, cultural and structural systems that we navigate”

If you truly believe in change, particularly if you espouse social justice rhetoric within your work, you should be engaging in a constant cycle of self-consciousness. Paying attention to the ways you police people, the decisions you make about financial income and what you spend money on, the way you respond to pressure, what intentions sit behind your relationship building, what space you take up or give to others. 

Do the people around me call me out?

Self-criticism isn’t enough. We need to be engaging with the people around us to understand what we need to change in order to embody our values. If you and your friends or colleagues aren’t regularly calling out and questioning each other, you are likely perpetuating the problem. The teams that are the best at DEI are those where everyone can challenge each other to do and be better, regardless of where the organisation is on the ‘progressive’ scale. We are likely to make even more mistakes and unearth deeper wounds the more we push into unchartered territory, which means that those working within the social justice space should expect to be called out even more. 

If you have a particular positionality within a space you are both less likely to receive criticism and more likely to need it. As a white person within DEI I expect to be held to a higher standard, it’s valid that I should have to prove myself. But sadly all too often people who consider themselves ‘good people’ avoid being called out through defensiveness, martyrdom, or centring of their own pain. 

Is this charity or solidarity?

Which brings me to the question of ‘doing good’ versus deeply understanding that this work is necessary for our collective liberation. No matter how much people share the ‘First they came’ poem or quote Lilla Watson about how ‘your liberation is bound up with mine’, so many people operating in social justice spaces still act as if they deserve some kind of medal for doing what is fundamental for us all to resist the continued threat of fascism. 

In spite of being deeply connected with how our struggles are interwoven, I still find myself thinking I need to engage in certain spaces or do certain acts from a place of sympathy or guilt. When I feel these within me I interrogate how I might move to feeling the implications of this social issue in connection to my own humanity, whether the act I wish to pursue will actually help the situation, and whether my desires come from a place of deep care or just through wanting to be perceived a certain way?

Am I distancing myself for the sake of my reputation?

On the flip side of aligning ourselves to causes out of wanting to improve people’s perceptions of us, many of us also make the mistake of distancing ourselves from the things, acts or people we feel are unfavourable. We rush to jump on movement bandwagons before we have formulated our own authentic beliefs about it, and we rush to disassociate from people with harmful or ignorant views. It is valid for a trans person to distance themselves quickly from a transphobe to avoid being exposed to harm, but all too often a trans ally will distance themselves from a transphobe before they’ve done any work to connect with, understand and educate that person. What’s more is a lot of phobic behaviour stems from disconnection and lack of exposure - so our choices to protect our reputation within the social justice space actually leads to making space for people’s harmful views and behaviours to continue perpetuating. 

I have not yet had the joy of reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s book “Loving Corrections” but when I heard her speak to it on this podcast it reminded me that it is imperative I continue to make space to be with people that make me feel uncomfortable and to provide experiences to people that are rooted in compassion rather than confrontation. 

Is this new pain, or is someone just giving it back to me? 

When I think about the various discomforts we feel when we do this work, I am reminded of all the times that people have responded to it with intense reactions that seem unreasonable. What I realised when I used to deliver DEI training is that quite often it is the first time (or one of the few times) that people with certain privileges have had to experience discomfort or pain around that aspect of their identity. And in those moments it offers an embodied opportunity for them to reconnect with the pain that they have been avoiding for so long. When a white person experiences intense shame, pain, anger or grief in response to being asked to engage with racist aggressions I tend to conceptualise it as either a moment where their body has invited them to access just some of the pain that the victim has been carrying, or that in order to enact ignorant and harmful behaviours towards other humans they have been previously existing in numbed state. Perhaps also the experience of acknowledging other people's pain has re-awoken them from the disembodied place they’ve been having to exist within due to other forms of oppression they experience within the system they are perpetuating. 

So when I feel pain course through my body when I’m faced with something someone thinks I’ve done wrong or been complicit with, before reacting I ask myself what is the universe giving back to me right now? Is there something I’ve been avoiding and how can I see this pain as a gift to allow me to move closer to who I am? How am I being called to rebalance the scales and how can I carry and process what’s moving through my body? And is it just reminding me to come back down to earth to be in this work, rather than floating around above it? We desperately need to be in it and present, rather than performing, because as Andrea J Ritchie describes in Practicing New Worlds “The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in a moment at the end of the process” and we need to be ready to shape those new worlds together.

A grave with no name

Today I sat on a grave so old that no trace of their name can be seen. I play here often with my children and think about how much I’d love it if when I’m dead and buried it is a place that people want to sit and love and be. Today however, sat out on my own on my lunchbreak, I worried that people might perceive me choosing to sit there as a mark of disrespect. I thought of the body that laid beneath, of the person that once was and what their spirit might be feeling to have me present. I also thought about the nature that surrounded us, how if I chose to sit on the grass perhaps I might squish an ant or spider, and wondered why we have more attachment to some beliefs and not others in our society. I thought about the conversations me and the dead might have - had they chosen their bench like tomb on purpose or was that a choice that had been made on their behalf? How did they feel about nature, about kids, about love? How did they feel about the societal norms around death and dying? I’d shown them respect and consideration with my mind and my soul while considering both of our relationships with living creatures that surrounded us both above and below the ground. I concluded I’d done more than most people do to consider the dead and the living, so I continued to sit on the tomb because it felt connecting and I felt confident in my choices. 

As I sat there I also considered what I’d do if someone came past and reacted to me sitting there. I thought about the nuanced conversation we might have about what respect for the dead looks like. I went on thinking about other forms of respect and appreciation, about all the things that sit between the dead and living. About what we choose to eat and consume as a society, and how little thought so many of us put into that. I opened up my book about disability justice and the phrase to ‘exist is to resist’ ran through me as I thought about every single moment my simple existence as a queer autistic person, let alone an explicit choice to go against the grain, offends someone. I thought about how I’d almost not come out in the sunshine for an hour because growing up in a working class household within an ableist society I still felt like I had to be productive to be worthy - even though I speak of anticapitalist values all the time and remind everyone that rest is resistance, that the daily grind is a construct, that we could all live abundant lives if wealth and land was better distributed. 

The grave I sat on. Later that day a young girl was climbing on it, making daisy chains and playing with the spiders she found underneath it. Let’s hope she’s not shamed for exploring so beautifully and joyfully.

Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by an  angry man storming past and shouting repeatedly: ‘‘You entitled cunt, how dare you disrespect the dead. Get off that grave. Show some respect to the dead”. I went to jump in to say something, but I knew he wasn’t going to engage in the same nuanced debate me and the dead body beneath me had been having together. I sputtered out “actually I have a lot of respect for the dead..” And was about to point out that I’d even trained as a death doula to be able to support people in the process of dying, and studied many different rituals and rites. But he ignored me and continued with his aggressive barrage “You entitled leftie woke” (Lucky I didn't say anything about my death doula  training)...”You want to make everything LGBT.” (Sudden panic that this was a targeted hate crime, that he knew me from somewhere else. Or maybe he really was worried I was making the grave gay by sitting on it) “You’ve never had to work for what you’ve got.” (So confused. Literally everything I’ve got is a result of working - even my kids were a result of a relationship that started at work.. Not sure how that comment would have gone down though!)   “You fucking cunt. You entitled leftie cunt” etc etc for a good few minutes.

About 10 people stood by and watched as I silently took the abuse and left, because I continue to have compassion for a man so broken by the world that he needs to make all of these assumptions about who I am and what I represent in order to make himself feel like he has some sort of purpose. The bystanders made the whole experience even more traumatic - it legitimised his policing of me and humiliated me further. No-one that witnessed it followed up with me, and they could’ve done because most people in the town know where I live (which makes these sorts of incidents even more scary). But luckily I have a beautiful supportive queer community who were ready to process the experience with me.

His mention of identity also reminded me of the conversation I’d been having that morning with a researcher that was interested in my experiences of raising kids in a queer polyamorous and gender-affirming household. I told the researcher that we didn’t face too much discrimination (although as I described the way some of my kids' friends won’t come for playdates I realised perhaps I was just accustomed to it). But I explained that was partly because we worked so hard to make sure that there could never be any doubt that our kids are loved and safe and happy. I explained to him how tiring it was to feel like you can never fuck up - the anxiety it brings when you are constantly assessing how safe it is to be yourself in case someone uses that as a way to harm you and your family. 

Today I don’t think I even fucked up, but that’s not how others that want an excuse to harm and harass queer and trans people will see it. Ultimately, I had shown exponentially more care, consideration and kindness to both an unnamed body buried 6 feet under ground, and to an aggressive stranger hauling shit at me than that stranger had shown a living being standing right in front of him. But none of this is about love, care or respect for the dead or the living, for people like this man, it’s about dominating and oppressing people to feel more powerful.

If you’d like to explore your own relationship with the dead and dying I’ll be hosting a few online and in-person death cafes this summer. Find out more. 

Relationship anarchy and transformational governance

Originally this blog post was going to be about how teams navigate risk together. Then it was going to be about complex decisions and the role of trust and relationships. And then I realised that a lot of my own relationship to risk, complexity and trust stems from my personal life as a queer relationship anarchist, and a lot of people might not have those experiences to draw upon. It got me wondering about the role of intimacy if we truly want to transform governance practices, and how the conditioning within our hierarchical romantic lives impacts our capacity to be fluid and responsive in our communities or within our working lives. So, inspired by Louise Armstrongs post about a polyamorous relationship to work and leadership I wondered if there is something here that runs deeper than a metaphor when it comes to the ways we love and how that influences the way we work.

A relationship anarchist as “someone that rejects traditional relationship structures like monogamy and hierarchy, instead prioritizing individual autonomy and treating all relationships (romantic, platonic, etc.) with equal importance and flexibility, without rigid rules or labels” feels like it could be describing many of the beliefs and principles that underpin the work of those involved in shifting organisations towards more collective forms of leading, organising and decision-making in response to our increasingly complex societies and systems. But in my experience the deep personal work required to make this shift within organisations is often repeatedly overlooked in favour of tools and processes. 

There are five things that being a relationship anarchist has forced me to practice day in day out within my most intimate relationships, and it is these experiences that I believe make me more ready to create deeper changes within the work I do. 

Understanding the complex interplay of desires, needs and norms

Having no labels, and the freedom to design and redesign relationships in a way that works for you, might seem liberating but it actually reveals how easy it is to fall back into patterns of thinking that are shaped by societal conditioning. In addition, everyone else you are relating to in this space is also engaging with this complex interplay to varying degrees, with varying levels of self-knowledge and varying levels of understanding about the forms of oppression that are still present in the system regardless of whether you have the freedom to choose a different relationship style. The same could be said for when a group embarks on more fluid forms of organising or non-hierarchical decision-making. Every single person in that group needs the knowledge, confidence, and space/time to be able to engage with the complex interplay of the historical system and the new system you are trying to build together.

I can’t tell you how many times a week I have to sit with my insecurities in response to a partner expressing their love in ways that don’t fit my narrative. Or how many times I feel frustrated at all the ways the systems outside of my relationships, from housing to healthcare, force me to deprioritise the people I love and centre in my life. Or the time that I have to commit in order to nurture the intimate connections that I value with very few blue prints for how to do that. How do those of us working in transformational governance make the same space and grace for when insecurity shows up (likely again and again in spite of what you thought you’d committed to as a group)? How do we acknowledge that a decision-making process might feel one way to those of us who have designed it but will be entirely disregarded by other dominant forces outside of it? How do we commit time to create a new system while existing in a time poor late capitalist society?

In addition, when we lose hierarchy we lose the clear route through which we prioritise and advocate for needs. Invisible hierarchies might form as a result of those who have more confidence to advocate for themselves, or due to past dismissive experiences other people might assume their needs are whims or desires rather than core to their being. And within a networked system it’s also very hard to design processes which truly take account of the knock on effect of whose needs are or aren’t being met. It requires individuals to be able to meet each other where they are at and advocate on one another’s behalf. 

Learning and reforming your boundaries

Alongside understanding to more deeply connect to your needs and desires beyond the societal norms and narratives, the spiky moments in an anarchist approach to relating repeatedly offer me an opportunity to really feel into what my boundaries are. This is particularly important for me as an autistic person who generally finds a lot of things in life overwhelming but can discard that feeling because everyone else seems to be okay with it. 

For example, knowing that I have complete freedom to define my relationships in a way that feels good to me means I’ve become attuned to the different kinds of boundaries that are important to me personally. The message we are taught in society is that sex and desire is at its best when it’s heated and spontaneous, and yet even when I have entire freedom to have sex with anyone without consulting others I learnt that that scenario still doesn’t feel good to me. As an autistic person lots of upfront communication is required for me to feel turned on. So even though I have no external restrictions relating to who I can sleep with, I have learnt new restrictions based on the feelings in my body, and developing my own edges backed up by my own reasons feels good. 

In a traditional governance setting we don’t generally get taught how to feel into our own boundaries. Governing is a role that is historically steeped in the shepherding of other people’s work, making decisions that affect other people’s lives, and creating structures that we think will make things make sense/ be more streamlined/ solve more problems on behalf of a wider audience than those in the room. And in the worst case scenarios there are those in power who believe they are navigating all of that objectively and taking their own feelings out of it. 

But what we need is everyone to have the capacity to bring their own feelings into it in a constructive way. And for more space to be made for people to express their red lines, and to be able to re-articulate those as we learn where our edges our. Alongside that we also need to make conscious choices to let those go when we realise that edge or rule is no longer required in this particular scenario. 


Informal, consistent and caring feedback loops

All too often, even in supposedly non-hierarchical organisations, there are fears about honest and direct communication between people, combined with fears of manipulation. In addition in lower stakes environments or within bigger networks it can be easier for people to allow things to go unnoticed and unaddressed. While relationship anarchy hasn’t given me a fool proof system for encouraging consistent and caring feedback loops between everyone, it has created more impetus for it, because the risks of not doing that feel more immediate.

I often get my needs met more frequently in my polyamorous relationship style than I did in a monogamous set up, not because I have more people that care about me but because there are more people providing me with feedback about what they are witnessing within me, as well as my partners and friends giving feedback to each other about what I appreciate or need even if I can’t put words to it myself. 

There is a level of trust between everyone I am connected to intimately which means they can also have a direct connection to one another should it be needed. I also have the freedom and trust to form a direct connection with people that are intimate with my partners too. This open flow of communication and belief that we all have one another’s best interests at heart means that we learn rapidly about how to be in relationship with one another, and how to protect one another from toxic forces that might be at play.

It takes time to make yourself open to connecting to people you don’t have to speak to, and to do that in a way that clearly centres the things you collectively care about, knowing that the system is stronger if each individual relationship is stronger. 

Assuming abundance

We live in a system built on a scarcity mindset. Which means that at any moment someone could be harboring fears about losing something. Being a relationship anarchist has shown me that when you assume that love is abundant, it allows you to flex in response to your partners and friends needs in ways I might’ve been more rigid about before. It has also allowed me to be braver in my asks of others, because I know that if it goes awry I will find the love and care I need in others. The same goes for time and energy. I’ve had some people argue that love might be abundant, but that time is a finite resource… but as I’ve invested more time in others, they invest more time in me, I discover more about myself, I learn to flex time in ways that work better, and the cycle continues until time feels just as expansive as love. 

Working in the equity and inclusion space I get a lot of push back around change due to a lack of time, or around investing money due to a lack of funds. It doesn’t matter what size an organisation is and how many months or years worth of reserves they have there will always be the ‘we are too small’ or ‘we don’t have much funding’ retort to challenges to go bigger with their commitments. And yet if these respective organisations spoke to each other they’d see that actually an organisation double their size with quadruple their funding is still saying the exact same excuse.

The reality is there is abundance in everything if we know how to tune into the energy that drives us, and to allow it to flow through the systems we are trying to create. But many of us are stuck in a space of fear and doubt because the capitalist system thrives on making us feel trapped and incapable of making big change happen, and the cycle continues. And until we get an opportunity to experience abundance for ourselves we cannot replicate that feeling in the spaces we are part of. 

Being present

In Practicing New Worlds, Andrea J Ritchie says “The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in the moment at the end of the process”. Which is why I often talk about doing the work as you do the work. But we can only really notice the opportunities within this meta-state if we are being truly present with the process.

There are many monogamous and non-monogamous people alike that struggle with the concept of relationship anarchy because they don’t like having to constantly re-negotiate the terms of their relationships, or don’t like having to feel their feelings in moments of uncertainty. But for me, doing that with my partners is precisely what brings us more deeply together, and brings me closer to the type of connection and vulnerability I desire to share with others. We learn through these moments together, and being present in those moments is what strengthens our relationships.

The best decision-making I’ve ever been part of has never been due to the ultimate decision, or because of a specific method for getting there, but instead because everyone has actively engaged in the process, witnessed each other, understood the tensions and boldly committed to something together even when there are reservations present. And quite often those groups do that because they trust each other’s intentions and they trust that whatever arises they will have each other’s backs. Relationship anarchy is messy, but in some ways it’s really simple and clear. We love and trust each other to make the right choices for ourselves and the people we love, and when doubts or barriers arise we trust each other to work through that together. 

Breaking up with social media

As someone born in the 90s my formative years were shaped by the rise of social media. My Facebook still contains photos from when I was 14, and I recently dug out the early years of online blogging on live journal, where my 13-year old self seemed to pour out unfiltered poetry, love letters and weirdly specific tales about perverted teachers. 

In more recent years it became a tool to grow the network that supported Collaborative Future, with many of the young people on our programmes discovering our work through instagram. And my continued capacity and desire to share openly and authentically about my work and my personal life through what I post has not only inspired people from afar but it has also connected me with so many of the people I consider as friends and collaborators now. 

What’s more is social media offered me a route into discovering who I am. Both in terms of providing me with access to queer, trans and autistic experiences that resonated with my own, and also in connecting me with viewpoints and perspectives on global issues that are not covered in mainstream media. 

Social media has been a life line for me at times. It has helped me stay connected to friends lives when I’ve moved to different cities, it has shaped my practices and views, it has helped me find recipes, events and loop earplugs, and very occasionally helped me to pay my bills.

But at the same time it is also firmly an addiction. There is a churn on every platform I’m on - getting sucked into friends instagram stories about the event they just attended, wondering what to post on linkedin to make the ethos of my work clear to potential clients, annoying myself with reading the comments people have made on my neighbours post in the facebook group, feeling the pressure to be writing consistently on my brand new (and now retired) substack. In addition I’ve conditioned myself to consume and share opinions at a pace which I don’t think is sustainable if I want to develop a deeper understanding of the world around me. 

So I’m taking a year long break (at least) from every single social media platform (and dating app too btw so do make sure to offer me some old school match making!). And I’m going cold turkey from 1st Feb so I won’t be responding to messages on Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook or Substack after that. I’m so scared of taking this step that it makes me more certain than ever that it’s needed. I’ve got a reading list almost as long as my friend list on Facebook and I’m excited to see how dropping social media entirely will allow me to consume knowledge and ideas in a slower way that allows me to integrate it into my practice and work. I feel deeply connected to movements that I feel I can play an active part in, and while I'm worried about losing touch with online social justice movements I'm more confident than ever in my approach to organising for social change. I’m also so lucky to have a vibrant and thriving community around me in my personal life and work life - and I’m excited to see how those relationships deepen as I invite people to commit to being with me in real-time more often.

There are lots of people that I would love to continue to share my work with and vice versa so if you feel the same I’ve set up a ‘connect with me’ page where you can find my contact details, see where you might be able to cross paths with me at in person or online events this year, and sign up to a monthly newsletter from me (which I’m hoping will contain lots of juicy writing, fun workshops and photographs that I take with my new DSLR camera).

Doing community research when the system doesn’t want to hear the answer

For the first time in a long time it’s been a relief to get to use my equity and inclusion knowledge and facilitation skills for something that feels joyful. I’ve been supporting the British Science Association and UKRI to convene a diverse range of essays on what good community-led research looks like. My role has been to support the 13 contributors to produce a powerful output which will further possibilities for them and their work in this space. Not only has it been healing to facilitate a brilliant and committed group of people who really understand the tensions and opportunities in this work, the team I’m working with at British Science Association have demonstrated an openness to learn and adapt continuously as we go in order to hold a process which truly centres our contributors.

But as any good facilitator does, along the way I’ve been noticing my reactions to what is being shared in the spaces I’ve held. And a question I’ve had to keep on asking myself: why are you so damn triggered? And I realise now, because I was traumatised by my first experience of community-led research back in 2021. As part of the youth programmes we ran at Collaborative Future, we were invited to be youth partners on a £5million consortium of academics, design agencies and community organisations all investigating the underlying causes of poor adolescent mental health. We were excited to hear that the team was wanting to engage our young people, on a paid basis, to help inform the research hypotheses. And given the diverse cohort of young people we were working with at the time and the fact that every single one of us had experiences of navigating mental health issues and systems it felt like the perfect fit.

But three months into the relationship we found ourselves being managed off the project. Why? According to the lead academic, the consortium wasn’t seeking to hear the realities and ideas of “those kind of young people”. Our cohort included black and brown people, trans and non-binary people, people from immigrant families, autistic people, people living in social housing, people navigating multiple mental health issues, people who had experience sexual assault, people who were badly treated by the health system. These same young people were also articulate, intelligent and able to understand and meet the researchers where they were at.

From day one our team had always known the power of young people. We invested in our youth programmes as a route to disrupting the oppressive system because we knew young people saw the status quo with fresh eyes, and brought a unique and nuanced perspective on how to create change. The fact that this creative, passionate and thoughtful bunch were being actively ignored by the institutions involved in this project demonstrated a deep-seated fear of the truth, and how those academics could consider their research as a vehicle for change when they were dismissing the very people that mattered was eye-opening.

But in many ways I also played a role in perpetuating the wilful ignorance. I should have been faster to spot and respond to the red flags. In the first group meeting with 30 white middle-class academics the academic lead was allowed to make claims that “the real problem is black on black violence”. We should’ve walked straight out of that project as soon as the group had no answer for what they meant by “communities” and whether it was being used as a euphemism for racially minoritised people. As a trans autistic person who had little academic legitimacy at the time it felt impossible to speak up in such an environment, but over the past few years I’ve honed my capacity to step into the protection my whiteness provides me in these spaces and to call out the profound harm that this rhetoric reproduces

But even if I didn’t act in all the ways I wished I had, my body knew the score. I sobbed all night following this first meeting. Not only was I angry at the audacity and ignorance of the people working in this space, I was also grieving for myself. I never got to go to university for reasons I now believe are connected to being autistic, working class and a rape survivor, while this room of men in their 50s and 60s were paid 6-figure salaries to study a topic I likely knew more about when I was less than half their age.

We took a long-time healing from that experience. It was my team who had to hold our young people through the re-traumatising nature of the work, even though we ourselves were also struggling with it. What I am proud of is that as a result of our learnings we ran our own peer research into youth unemployment and loneliness - not for the eyes of any academic or government department or health service - but for our community of young people. Led by Prisca, together we held inclusive spaces where people gained knowledge from each other, we paid the young people from our programmes to be facilitators or speakers at the event, and everyone left with something of value from the space. It felt like a truly mutual approach to research.

Which brings me to the question: what do we do when the system doesn’t want to hear the answer? We make it so that knowledge serves us. There are many self-organising communities that have been curating and collating extensive knowledge for one another long before ‘community research’ became something that would be funded. Whether it’s consciousness raising groups that have been part of black liberation and women’s liberation movements since the 60’s, or practical knowledge production such as this Neurodiversity Support Centre - a collection of resources created by and for neurodivergent people.

While community research has become better funded, there are still very few funders that are willing to take communities’ lead in how research should be done and who it should serve. When me, Nick and Alvin ran an evaluation of The Ideas Fund I was energised by the fact that while many groups wanted to be able to use their research to advocate for change in the system, they also generated knowledge that was solely for the benefit of the community that led the research. Many of the researchers I spoke to wanted to create something the community could use, not just a research paper that sat on the shelf. While their research into grief among autistic people and people with learning disabilities was being contested by the university ethics committee (for calling autistic people what they requested to be called as part of the research), Informing Choices NI had already taken their findings and turned it into resources for service providers and hired people with lived experience to deliver training based on the research too.

And while many of the contributors to this essay series deserve to have their research taken seriously by academics, service providers, funders and policy makers alike, community-led research is already doing so much more. It is supporting marginalised people to put a shared language to their experiences, so that the system can no longer gaslight them. It is connecting people with a wide variety of skills, who truly care about the issues they are involved in researching to design their own interventions and support. And when equitable practices are adopted it is delivering change through the process itself - providing resources to communities that are currently under-resourced, offering skills and networks to individuals who have been overlooked, and centring issues that we have ignored for too long.

So while the system might not yet be ready for community-led research, those of us who know its power and potential must continue to develop the practices and learnings, and hold each other to account to ensure research is truly for the benefit of society. As bell hooks argues “education is the practice of freedom” and so even if community-led research is not yet getting the traction or recognition it deserves, we must continue to invest in knowledge that is generated by and for the communities it affects.

Acts of love

With partners I often talk about the way love moves through space and time. Love is an energy to me, and the people I feel it with feel it deeply regardless of whether we are ‘together’ in the physical or relationship status sense of the word. Love is also a doing word for me - to generate love we need to build, create, care, hold, move, travel, see, touch, feel.

And yet, even though I know all of this deep in my soul, sometimes I feel an urge to trap myself and others on the relationship escalator because the anxiety of feeling like an outsider in this world causes us to clutch at more normative, static indicators for relationships. I want my partners’ friends to see me as a certain type of valid, I want friends to label me as a certain type of important, I accidentally default to forms of hierarchy with my nesting partner when he’s dating. But the reality is the depth of love shared between me and my community is stronger than any form of cis heteronormative social approval could amount to.

And reflecting on this made me realise that there are so many acts of love that I’ve experienced over the past few years that for me demonstrate far deeper love than the socially accepted or expected forms of commitment, but could be misinterpreted as the complete opposite by those who live in a different paradigm to me.

Here are just some of my favourite non-normative acts of love:

1.Cancelling plans

In our society consistency is deemed as a key indicator of commitment to a relationship. Those who want to spend more physical time together are seen as “more in love”. But I’ve felt more love and connection these last few weeks when I’ve had to cancel plans in favour of alone time or to respond to chaos in my life because it reminds me that I have nothing to prove to the people that care about me and understand me. The other day I was talking to a close friend about worrying about not being there for them or my partner recently and they said “What is two weeks in a lifetime?”. The love they have for me isn’t expectant, it isn’t seeking anything from me, it just wants me to exist.

When I cancel plans, I do so because I want to be able to be fully present with someone when I spend time with them or because I need to give myself what I need in order to continue providing the people I love with care and consistency in the future. This isn’t always the place people are coming from when they cancel on you, but imagine if we started with that assumption more often? How could it change the ways we understand love and relating?

2. Reminding someone of their boundaries

It might be partly due to being autistic and not always understanding my own limits, but there is nothing sexier than someone reminding me of a potential boundary. I’ve had so many people cross my boundaries in the past that I often take it as a given that my boundaries are invalid or a sign that I don’t love people enough. I’ve dated and been friends with many people who try to tempt you to cross your own boundaries, but more recently I’ve seen how much love and care there is from friends who help you keep your boundaries firm.

I was dating someone new earlier this year and out of a desire to be fun and easy and sexy had said I’d meet them after a workshop and was happy to come back to theirs. But they said ‘I know you can find workshops draining so why don’t you see how you feel at the end of the day and if you need to go back to yours that’s absolutely fine’. Sexy AF.

Of course this wouldn’t make for as an exciting TV script as when the date you’ve just met urgently shoves you up against the wall outside the restaurant without asking first but that’s not the type of desire that I want in my life, and I think most people only see that as hot because the media tells them it is.

3. Planning a holiday without you

I still remember what a massive turn on it was when my nesting partner sent me a list of potential Airbnbs for me and my girlfriend at the time to go stay at. Me and my nesting partner don’t get anywhere near as much time together as we’d like, and if we could we’d holiday together multiple times a year, but we also know how important and valuable that sort of time away is for all sorts of relationships.

When my partner looked after my kids so that I could go visit a friend in Vienna I felt just as connected to him through that journey as I would if we’d travelled together, because it is his love and care that is making that trip possible. In relationships we don’t always have to be experiencing the world together in order to experience the world together. If you are connected all that you experience alone flows back into your relationship in a multitude of ways. And by making space for our partners to have adventures with other people we’re allowing other forms of love to deepen and grow.

4. Not having sex

I’m very sexual, but I also have a complicated relationship with it due to gender, sexuality and past trauma. Plus I’ve been raised to believe that my value is in the sex I provide to my partners. I love the fact that even though I’m still massively turned on by my nesting partner we have ongoing conversations about how we incorporate other forms of intimacy into our relationship and continue to think about ways of connecting deeply in case there are any times in the future where sex isn’t as present. The other day we were planning to have a sexy afternoon but instead ending up having a super indulgent picnic in bed and just holding each other in the most mindblowing way.

A friend of mine who I’ve had a sexy summer with also suggested we do a little experiment next time we see each other to see how it feels to be in a platonic space again so that we both feel confident we can sustain and value our relationship if either one of us ever want to change the dynamic. This level of commitment and care has only made me want to experience even more sexual intimacy with them mind!

5. Fighting

Being surrounded by british middle class politeness and repression meant for a long time I’d fear conflict in a relationship. If it surfaced with a partner or friend it meant something was wrong, and the love we shared would only last a handful of fall outs before we decided to distance ourselves from one another. But with my nesting partner, who wrestles with me on all sorts of things and in all sorts of ways, I’ve realised that fighting can be a sign of deep safety, care and connection.

Fighting doesn’t have to mean being mean to each other. But being able to express our passion, discomfort, anger or confusion is so important if we want to be able to deepen our understanding of one another. And each time me and my friends and partners move through friction or conflict together, my love for them deepens and grows.

6. Having an abortion

I’ve written before about how my abortion in the early days of falling in love with my nesting partner was a demonstration of our love, and our desire to breathe more life into the world. As a society we prize those who raise children together and pay very little attention to the other things that partners and friends create together. For me the experience of choosing to have an abortion was perhaps even more of sign of commitment to my partner and the life we wanted to build than when I did have my children…which was ultimately born out of a misplaced commitment to societal norms and expectations rather than to myself or the people I loved.

Society and the media are constantly barraging us with a narrow idea of what counts as love and commitment. I’m forever grateful that I found a different compass to love by.

Understanding autistic burn out

Last weekend I was having erratic outbursts, sobbing uncontrollably while driving, self-harming, and having repetitive suicidal ideation. Someone on the outside might have perceived me as having a mental breakdown. In many ways I was, but not due to depression or recognisably traumatic experiences.

I’ve written before about autistic meltdowns, and after a good few weeks of them I think it’s safe to say I’m actually experiencing autistic burn out. Where an autistic meltdown might be akin to a pressure valve being released, autistic burn out is like a sinking ship where no amount of frantic offloading of water is going to stop the inevitable.

In retrospect I’ve experienced autistic burn out about 6 times in my life, with half of those times being in the last couple of years. The reason for this is not because my life has become harder necessarily, but because I have decades worth of masking that I’m unravelling from being a late-diagnosed autistic. The prevalence has also increased due to having young children. Autistic burn out can be a result of persistent exposure to overstimulation without time for recuperation, and while many parents experience this with young children it’s my hunch that autistic people’s threshold gets hit faster and needs longer to tail off.

How autistic burn out affects me
On reflection I can now see the warning signs for this round of burn out way back in the summer. I’d started needing to numb myself because the world was becoming too intense - my rejection sensivity was in overdrive; any noise out of the ordinary was piercing through my brain; I had less visual and touch tolerance when saying good morning to my nesting partner.

I had multiple meltdowns at Legoland with my kids until I eventually microdosed some mushrooms to act as a blanket to my brain. That should’ve been the moment to cancel plans and rest. But it’s hard to do that when you work, care for others, have commitments to friends and family, or have deadlines that affect your living situation.

By the time the kids returned to school I’d become manic in my thought patterns, and had entered self-destruct mode. I rushed into decisions like getting my wisdom tooth removed, which in turn sent my whole body and brain into a spiral. The pain became all consuming, I was hyper-fixating on my bodily experience of the world, and there was no way to escape the sensory overload of it.

All of this culminated in me becoming increasingly clumsy and unco-ordinated (making it hard to do activities that usually regulate my brain like boxing and causing me to hyperfixate on questions about the extent of my dysphoria and possible dyspraxia), my memory began to fail me (to the point where the only thing that ever existed was the pain I was experiencing in that present moment), and it became difficult for me to think about cooking and eating (which in turn reduced my ability to focus and led to exhaustion).

How to manage it
While I haven’t yet discovered the magic button that stops the ship from sinking, I am lucky to have a a whole load of life boats that help me to stem the situation. My nesting partner often spots these spirals much earlier than me, and will start to respond by ensuring I centre eating and sleeping. I have friends who understand my suicidal tendencies and who rally around me with easy socialising, voice notes and check-ins. Due to my work in the Equity and Inclusion space my clients are generally more understanding and flexible than people working in different environments. And I’ve put in place consistent routines that I know are good for my brain and body like working at our local community farm on Mondays and Fridays.

But I’m still learning how to communicate my needs during these times. This time round it was a big step for me to say to friends and my kids' dad that my mental health was in a bad place - and as a result I started accepting offers of help with school runs and other daily chores. It is also the first time in a long time that I’ve actively cancelled plans on people and told them why - and their continued commitment to our connection through that has been so healing.

How to recover from it
I finally hit the point of recovery when one of my partners, in spite of having been barraged by traumatic outbursts all weekend, put me on an early train to London to spend time out of the house. I spent all day with a friend who centred my special interests, and then spent two nights cocooning with my partner in a cosy airbnb. It might seem counterintuitive to travel to a overstimulating place like London when you are burnt out but doing that alongside people who are centring my needs was just the right combination of stimulating and safe.

More often than not I find that employers or partners or friends can misunderstand your inability to function in one regard, as an inability to function full stop. And I feel like this is what has caused burn out to turn into depression for me in the past. What I need in order to recover is a rearticulation of my needs, and potentially exposure to the types of activities and spaces that my brain has been lacking during the build up to burn out.

Reducing likelihood of burnout in the future

The reality is my burnout isn’t to do with a straightforward type of stress, or through overdoing it in any particular area of my life. It is to do with exposure to situations that are basically unavoidable. Even activities I love can contribute to the potential of meltdowns or longer term burn out - such as going dancing with friends. But there are things I can keep a closer eye on to ensure the overstimulation doesn’t build up over time. Whether that’s paying attention to how much alone time I’m factoring in after a big day of socialising or travelling, or creating more routines around exercise, eating and sleep. And more people in my life understanding autistic meltdowns and burnout also helps because those people can help me pay attention to my limits and boundaries - and provide ideas to me around regulation. I absolutely love the ways friends share fidget toys, encourage me to stim or offer me other options for connecting when I’m overcommitting myself.

If you’ve benefited from reading this blog please consider donating to support our housing co-operative - a space that I hope will help more people like me to avoid burn out in the future!

When life is hard work: the problem with 'economic inactivity'

I haven’t written much in a while because life became hard work. Not in any significant way to ‘write home about’ but enough to make it hard to find the energy and time for writing. One positive thing that’s been consuming my energy is trying to build a housing co-op, the existence of which should make it easier for everyone that’s housed there to have the space and capacity to truly live. With our commitment to making the monthly rent as closely aligned to Local Housing Allowance as possible, and the substantial reduction in mental load that sharing responsibilities for cooking, cleaning and caring would create, I’m excited to see what living actually looks like for those involved and what choices we each make when we aren’t so alone in sustaining that life. 

Already there have been mentions of running different community spaces - from a community laundrette to a community garden to a community printing press! As a relationship anarchist I’ve been getting excited about having more people involved in my childrens’ and partners’ lives, as well as space to invest more care in the relationships outside of the housing co-op too. It being a predominantly queer space gets me excited about working together to campaign around lgbt+ rights, especially in the face of growing hate towards the trans community. And having experienced the toll that autistic meltdowns or mental health issues can take, as well as the way that physical ailments can knock you sideways unexpectedly, working collectively to cushion those kinds of reverberations for multiple people feels like a very productive use of time. 

Interestingly though, if any of us actually claimed benefits such as the housing allowance in order to pay for our rent we’d likely be classed as ‘economically inactive’ by the state. Which is kind of funny given the word ‘economy’ derives from the greek word meaning “household management”, and we’d be building a more sustainable and resilient household than most people will have the opportunity to experience in their lifetime. 

As part of my work at Collaborative Future I spent quite some time thinking about how to make work more accessible and equitable. Armed with the belief that everyone had something to contribute to the workplace, and deserved an opportunity to do work they loved, I have worked tirelessly with organisations to make them more flexible, open and less biassed and oppressive. The programmes we ran focussed on people who were unemployed and underemployed, and while it was much better than employment support that comes from a deficit based view of unemployed people, I’m beginning to wonder why I fight so hard to get employers to change their practices and beliefs when the real problem is society’s relationship with labour, and who should be expected to those forms of labour. 

The reality is that if you have a chronic condition that can flare up at any time there is no amount of flexibility from an employer or understanding from your team that is going to enable you to do your work in the ways that you want or need to (and don’t forget the grief processing time needed when you are reminded daily that your wants and needs aren’t the same thing). If you have to face microaggressions in most environments whether it’s going to the gym, visiting the GP or travelling on the bus, you’re going to be on edge in your work regardless of how much work your teammates do to dismantle their white supremacy or transmisogyny. If you are raising kids in an abusive relationship, no amount of money or education is going to get you out of that situation, it takes love and care from a community that you likely don’t have. 

For some of us, living is hard work in itself and we still fail to recognise that as a society. Partly because it requires us to entirely dismantle our capitalistic systems of labour, which those in power profit from and all of us depend upon regardless of how active or inactive we are within it. While I’ve got endless advice and guidance for organisations wishing to be a better employer, I haven’t yet got a big bright vision for a society where no-one is considered ‘economically inactive’ and where our economic freedom isn’t tied to our capacity to ‘earn a living’. Sure I’ve spent a lot of time in discussions about Universal Basic Income, but I fear the generic nature of it and our hangups about treating everyone ‘equally’ (without treating them equitably) will hold back the possibilities of it.  So here’s five things I’m trying to embed within my own life to help me decouple my economy and activity from our Economy. 

1. Rest (and pleasure) is resistance

“Bodies are not machines… rest, sleep, daydreaming and slowing down can help us all wake up to the truth of ourselves” - Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hershey (Founder of Nap Ministry)

After a decade of presuming that success was tied to how fast and how much I worked, only to repeatedly find myself simultaneously scrambling out and slipping back in to debt, I finally burnt out and faced a somewhat suicidal and occasionally psychotic state of affairs. Luckily I met a partner at this point in time who wasn't phased by my mental health challenges, and who showed me that one of the ways to overcome my demons was to allow myself to be consumed by lust and pleasure and post-sex naps. I remember how healing it was the times we sacked off work for an afternoon in bed, proudly declaring that the answer to all of the world's ills was more orgasms.

What I experienced for the first time was many things: being deeply loved, being in control of my body, feeling present, and enjoying extended space to rest my body and mind. As an occasional insomniac this same partner is also sleep obsessed, and spent a lot of time discussing the effects of my interrupted sleep from having small children. I would never have accessed this kind of support and knowledge from the healthcare system if I'd approached them for support with my mental health. 

And part of that is because if the answer to much of our problems is simply rest, how does capitalism continue to function? 

2. Knowing what is earned and what is a gift

It is a gift that I can choose to rest. And I also earn that rest. It is a gift because you exchange one or two details of my life and I might be in wildly different circumstances right now. It is a gift because it relies upon the people around me doing work on themselves to not be resentful of me resting when they can’t. But it is also earned, not because I work hard to “earn a living”, but because I work hard on thinking about how I want to and should exist in the world when so much of the world is set up to stop me from having to work on that. I could’ve made the choice to remain on a high london salary back in 2019 when I got pregnant with my second child - and that would’ve been the easiest choice to make in our society right now because I’d have something to prove my worth, and because I’d have no fear about where my income was coming from. I could’ve made the choice to stay in a marriage that wasn’t right for me and I would be told that I’d ‘worked hard’ at that relationship, but in many ways it’s been harder work to leave and exist outside of that normative structure. But it’s also a gift that I could make that choice, because it is impossible for many people to have agency over their own lives for reasons beyond their control. 

Being able to unpack for myself what has been gifted to me and what I have earned has enabled me to be more humble about where I am at and what I expect of others. And reminds me to make use of the power I have in the moments I have it, because that power can disappear just as rapidly as it appeared.

3. Community is strength

Since having kids I’ve heard far too many people talking about how they have no-one to help them with childcare, and as a result it feels like the next generation is being raised on fumes! Some of this is a Political issue - we don’t invest in affordable childcare within this country. Some of it is cost of living issue - many people have had to move away from family in order to afford rent or mortgage. But some of it is an issue of what we value and invest in as individuals. The support network for my kids grew exponentially when I chose expansive forms of love. Living an openly polyamorous life has meant I now have two partners and an ex who I co-parent with. As a result there’s more than two adults involved in daily life with the kids, and I get the love and care that keeps me steady as a main carer. But as a relationship anarchist, my ability to build intimate connections with many people regardless of levels of commitments also means that I have more friends and chosen family than I used to that want to show care for me and my family regardless of their ‘status’ within my life. 

But it hasn’t just been polyamory that enables me to create a stable support system. Running community events, hosting regular gatherings for friends, buying locally, supporting people with their ideas, being authentically me with those I work with and talking about my life openly has all led to an increase in the deep profound connections that shape my world. And as a result I no longer fear being ‘alone’ with most of the common questions we all face - “how do I do everything I need to do” and “how do I respond when shit hits the fan.

4. Rallying around those most affected / those best positioned to respond in crisis

With the genocide in Gaza it’s been hard to know as someone so removed how best to show solidarity. When we ate a palestinian restaurant we decided to leave a big tip because many of the staff would be sending money back home right now. This aprroach to solidarity feels more meaningful than a random donation on a charity website or angry letters to MPs who might then raise concerns in parliament just to be overridden by others. And it got me thinking about how as a society we rarely think about supporting those who are closest to those affected by a crisis. 

Some of us (me) have a saviour complex, which isn’t always helpful. When our local community farm flooded I felt great that I had the existing relationship with them to be able to jump right in and start clearing the debris, but if I’d rocked up to volunteer without being part of the farm before that point I would likely have just caused extra work for the team. So if I wasn’t affected by flooding, and I didn’t have any direct relationship with those who were, perhaps the most important thing I can do is pay attention to those who are able to offer direct support and fund them to take time off work to be able to respond / look after their kids /  fill their cup when they are exhausted and worn down. 

On the flipside some people believe that other people’s problems have nothing to do with them (unless of course it’s a pandemic and everyone is scared shitless that they could be next). If we were to build our society based on the knowledge that everyone is ’not yet disabled’, ‘not yet homeless’, and only one fascist leader away from violent forms of oppression - would we do more to care for those who are already subject to these things?

5. Working in a life-affirming way

When life is hard work, many people have to settle with soul-destroying forms of labour. Things that sap us further of any point of existence. But it feels like the opposite should be true. When life is hard, any labour we engage in needs to feel life-affirming. 

When I set up Collaborative Future I was tired of unnecessary bullshit. While it was partly created out of necessity, as the only form of employment I could access, it was also created out of a fierce desire for young people to be able to access their fullness as human beings, not solely as cogs in a machine, and in turn it allowed me to access my truth too. The mutual care we had throughout all of our work, and the decisions to always breathe more life into each other was profoundly important. Honestly one of my favourite moments during Collaborative Future was encouraging my co-founder to sack off work to go on a date - they fell madly in love and are living a beautiful life with that partner now. I'm not sure how to share things like this as career achievements but they mean more than anything you’ll see on my Linkedin profile.

For the past few years I’ve been doing what felt like a bit of a random mush of stuff, and it’s sometimes hard to know how to explain myself. I work with a bunch of health economists and health funders to be more thoughtful about how they address health inequalities. I organise workshops and gatherings about food, relationships, creativity etc. I facilitate team away days. I write about energy genitals. I facilitate community researchers to share practices with one another. I go to sex parties and dream of running my own. I interview people for reports about power dynamics. I write about autism. I raise two kids, and want to help more people raise theirs. I design more human HR policies. I train people to be better at holding space. I DJ when I can. I dream about being a boxing coach one day. Sometimes I pick and pack vegetables for veg boxes. I study to become a death doula. I run playfighting events. And there’s so many more spaces I want to venture into and feel the mutual expansion of myself and others as we explore possibilities.

When I listened to “Embodied Entanglements” episode on For the Wild where they talked about funghi, and “behaving in a way that likes life” I realised that’s the common thread through everything I do.  Because when life is hard enough work as it is, we don’t need to work in ways that make it harder.

How to make sexting inclusive (including asexual people!)

I often find it hard enough to read someone on a in-person date, so sexting has always felt a little nerve-wracking for me. Plus I also struggle to feel my boundaries during sex and often need my partners to check-in with me lots, and this type of thing can often feel forgotten when someone’s getting carried away over text.

At the same time I love to know the specifics of what someone enjoys in sex… someone that gives me good details of what it is that turns them on is one of my biggest turns ons.

So when I had a mindblowing experience with someone in Amsterdam I wanted to find a way to keep the sexual chemistry alive for a little longer, and created a little sexting game for us to play together. I’ve played it multiple times with multiple people now and it feels like it creates a wonderfully safe container while encouraging expansive possibilities that push people to engage beyond the basics. So I thought I’d share it for more people to enjoy together:

How it works

The aim of the game is to explore fantasies and understand one anothers boundaries and preferences and reach a mutually fulfilling conclusion - this is open to interpretation.

Decide who is going to be the story teller. The story teller sets the scene and follows it with a question such as "We had a wild night last night and you are still fast asleep. How would I wake you up?"

They then give their partner 3 options to choose how they would respond.

  • A. Wrapping my arms round you from behind and kissing you on the back of the neck

  • B. Bringing you the best coffee you’ve ever had

  • C. Climbing on top of you

The story teller must then continue the story based on what the reader has chosen. Offering more choices as you go.

If your partner doesn’t like any choices offered they can suggest a 4th choice or pass and the story teller has to redirect the story. If there is two passes its game over.

The reader also has one switch card they can play where they become the storyteller.

You each get points along the way if you make the other person smile 😊 / laugh😂 / feel seen 💯 or turned on 😜 . You can use emojis to signal this. You get double points for excellent details or attention 👌Each emoji counts as one point.

Some examples of how it’s worked for me

Some of my games have become intensely hot, some have been ridiculously detailed and hilarious, others have gone down the cute platonic route (hence why I think it could work in an asexual relationship also). I’ve even combined the game with a bit of domination to get my partner to tick things off their to-do list (they don’t get another part of the story until they finish a task).

Relatively vanilla example from early on in a game

The nice thing about it is it allows you to learn more about each other, and adapt your sexting approach based on what you learn from someone’s response - rather than assuming you know what they’d enjoy right now.

It can also offer a space to explore things that are perhaps hard to prioritise and explore when together. There’s often kinky things I want to try with my partners that need lots of time to work out the logistics of - exploring how those things might play out through a game like this first can give the other person permission to bring that into the bedroom.

I’d also love to see more people experimenting with this type of game in long term relationships where intimacy has perhaps fizzled out. I feel like the joint fantasising in a way where one person can express many different desires, and the other person can feel safe to choose what feels best for them, would give people the structure they need to unpack some things that have perhaps been tricky to bring up in other settings.

Understanding autistic meltdowns


Before I understood myself as autistic I experienced overwhelming reactions to many layers of life on a regular basis. But because I’d been socialised in a world that taught me these were out of proportion / weird / dramatic, I learnt to hold my meltdowns in until I was in private. Internalising that energy slowly destroyed my body - to the point where I had bowel and fatigue issues so severe that I relentlessly pushed through my trauma around the medical profession in order to try to understand it. I truly believe that if I hadn’t learnt about my autism I’d be severely ill or no longer alive right now.

Learning to accept myself as autistic has meant learning to accept that my brain processes the world differently. In doing so, it has created space and safety for my body to do what it needs to do at times of overwhelm - and while meltdowns are painful and scary in their own ways (especially when I get repetitive meltdowns that affect me every day for a whole week) at least now I can begin to look at them for what they are and shape my life in ways that accommodates my processing needs.

Two of the most important things on my journey have been a) understanding that meltdowns aren’t necessarily a sign of something ‘bad’ and b) having partners and friends who are not afraid to move with me through meltdowns and reflect and learn about them together. So I thought I’d share more about what causes meltdowns for me, and tactics we’ve explored to help us manage/embrace meltdowns as part of normal life.

What does a meltdown look/feel like?

Every autistic person is unique. And not everyone will experience meltdowns. But for me meltdowns are very intense outbursts of physical and emotional energy, which can include things like screaming, punching my own head repeatedly and other sudden acts of self-harm. The meltdown itself can last anything from a minute to much longer repeated outbursts within a single day - though there are also ways my brain starts to fragment during the build up to a meltdown.

These days I can often feel a meltdown building, which helps me implement some coping mechanisms and communicate my needs. But, if a meltdown decides it’s arriving it is sometimes impossible to stop it entirely, so the build up can feel like a tidal wave or inevitable flood which sometimes creates more anxiety within me.

Once the meltdown is released, I can feel tired afterwards but I generally feel relief and return to relatively normal/calm state fairly rapidly. This can be a particularly confusing element for other people as there is often a misconception that intense expressions of pain mean there are more sustained / deeper feelings underneath, which is why it’s important to understand what someone’s meltdowns represent and where they come from specifically.

What causes a meltdown?

For me, meltdowns are caused by a variety of things. There have been times in my past where I have experienced more ‘typical’ forms of stress or sadness which have resulted in more ‘typical’ forms emotional outburst - but for me meltdowns are generally disconnected from levels of contentment within life / levels of ‘emotional stability’.

Some of the things that can lead to my meltdowns include:

  • Overstimulation - this could be due to too much of something such as too much noise / too much touch. It’s important to note that this includes painful or pleasurable overstimulation. I can enjoy going to music gigs, or connecting with new people but it still cause an energetic build up within me that turns into a meltdown (yes being ecstatically happy and excitable can lead to a meltdown for me)

  • Feeling misunderstood / feeling confused - this is probably not just connected to pure autism but perhaps more to the trauma of being autistic (which is  a whole other blog post). There are times where I cannot connect my thinking with other people’s way of perceiving and end up getting trapped in loops of misunderstanding which start to build up distress in my body. This is particularly hard when I appear to have caused someone else pain by saying or doingsomething I thought was completely uncontroversial. It’s often not always as simple as letting stuff go / writing something off as a difference of perspective for me (which is also a whole other blog post)

  • Not being able to flow/ Not knowing what to do with myself  - Autistic people tend to have states of hyperfocus that can feel really enjoyable and aligned with how their brains work. When this is abruptly interrupted it can feel physically and mentally painful. In addition, we also have states of inertia where it’s hard to start the next thing we need to do, if I get trapped in this state it can start to build towards a meltdown if I don’t get space and support release that energy. 

Quite often people can get confused by how one day I might appear to have a meltdown over something like getting dressed or showering, and other days I’m completely fine. This is because for me the actual act itself is not necessarily the problem - it’s about where my brain is in terms of it’s processing state. If I’ve been overstimulated and then I try to shower it might take me a long time to get our of a state of inertia and that can then cause a physical meltdown. 

In addition, for me meltdowns are a result of built up energy. And this energy builds up at different paces depending on how your brain works and the context you are in. I might be completely fine attending a concert of my favourite band on my own because the songs are familiar and being alone reduces the risk of feeling confused by a friends plans. But I might have a meltdown at another concert with a friend because the music and lighting is unfamiliar and perhaps it is more overstimulating as a result, and I also have to work hard to align myself to someone else’s flow for the evening. 

I often describe this as a dripping or running tap that overflows my cup. Sometimes the overstimulation or confusion is just a slow steady dripping, other times it can run quickly and flood my brain. 


Adapting to meltdowns and reducing their harmful impact 

Unless we change the entirety of society my meltdowns aren’t going to suddenly disappear. In Atypical it really irks me when the mum celebrates the fact her son hasn’t had a meltdown in a month because, at best, it simply means he’s releasing the meltdown in less painful ways, or at worst he’s suppressing the meltdowns which will likely have a bigger detrimental effect further down the line. This is why rather than trying to figure out a ‘cure’ for meltdowns, I’ve arrived at a place of accepting my meltdowns as a reality of being autistic in a world not designed for people like me - and even if the world adapted around my needs my brain still might need to do intense releases at times. 

But it’s also not sustainable or healthy for me or others around me to simply let my meltdowns wreak havoc so I wanted to share a few things my community are working on with me.


Preparing for meltdowns

By finally coming to terms with meltdowns as part of my reality I’m able to work with my partners and friends to prepare for the impact of them. 

When I’m in meltdown mode it is not as simple as deciding you need to do something to regulate when it arrives. My brain and body are no longer mine - it lashes out in ways that I have no control over, and I can lose my memory almost entirely. Which is why we developed strategies such as having a ‘Brain Melt’ playlist I can listen to on repeat, or a box full of goodies and reminders that can give me options for activities (though I’m still trying to work out how to remember the box exists when I’m on my own and having a meltdown). 

One of my partners has also written me a letter to read when he isn’t there or struggles to be present within a meltdown. And I’m building up the amount of people that understand the intricacies of my meltdowns so I can return to others for co-regulation when I can’t move out of the meltdown state on my own. 

I’m still learning how to structure my life in a more flexible way that enables me to feel confident to cancel social or work plans as I can feel a meltdown building but I’m not there yet with anyone but my closest connections, plus I’m still processing an immense amount of grief around the idea that I have to make space for meltdowns in this way. 


Responding to the warning signs 

I’ve noticed recently that if we can catch the early warning signs we can do things to plateau my energetic build up, but despite a lot of attention paid to this we have also gotten it wrong many times and ended up simply delaying the meltdown because we haven’t created space for me to release.

One of the warning signs for me is what I call ‘broken glass brain’. My thinking starts to fragment  and often in a bid to explain the intense pain within my brain I will start to express anxious thoughts about core parts of me or my community that can be quite contradictory to how I usually feel. In it’s extreme this can become a form of paranoia - where my brain is in so much pain and confusion that my I begin to rationalise that experience by presuming that others are intentionally confusing me or fear around whether they care for me, or by turning in on myself and pointing out the parts of me that deserve to feel that way. 

And this can seemingly come out of the blue even in spaces where I feel loved and affirmed. I was recently at a queer bar with a good friend of mine, dancing away, when suddenly the music, space and all the new faces became unbearable. All it was was a form of overstimulation, but in that moment my brain wants to give me more ‘rational’ reasons for feeling that way and floods me with anxious thoughts. 

At this point many people will want to reassure me around my anxieties, which doesn’t work because the brewing meltdown was never about those anxieties - it was about energy build up that needs to be released physically. Instead when partners or friends recognises these warning signs they might squeeze my arms repeatedly to release the energy build up, suggest I go outside for a walk or rock with me back and forth with my headphones on. 

But while these acts can help lessen the effects of the meltdown I’ve found I need to do a lot more to take me right back down to a regulated state that can be sustained. Quite often this can be hard because it will likely involve cancelling social plans or work plans and spending a day decompressing / eating well / exercising etc if I want to avoid the meltdown building back up again. 


Avoiding worsening the meltdown

There are many ways that I and others have responded to my meltdowns in the past that have actually elongated them and exacerbated the harmful nature of them. And some of the examples of this directly link to the causes of meltdowns - by which I mean we can sometimes respond with things that were actually part of what caused the meltdown in the first instance.

For example, if feeling misunderstood can cause me to have a meltdown then the experience of someone being confused by meltdown will just make it worse. Or if make myself hold in my outbursts it’s a very explicit example of not being able to flow and therefore I get more stuck within the meltdown.

I also require others to shield me from unnecessary stimulation because when I’m not yet melting down I often overestimate my threshold. One of the most beautiful acts one of my partners did before either of us really understood me as autistic was that he took his noise cancelling headphones off and simply plopped them on my ears when we were on a busy tube because he could see me starting to get overwhelmed.


Giving in to a meltdown 

Sometimes no matter how much I look after my physical and mental health a meltdown will arise as a result of something unexpected. And I’m learning that feeling less embarrassed about how my meltdowns look to other people enables me to express them more quickly and safely, and other people can help with this too. 

Once I’ve started to fall into a head-banging space now one of my partners will often put his whole body weight on me if we are in a safe space to do so, or squeeze me with his whole body to keep me contained. The strength of him against me releases my physical sensations and I can sometimes almost ‘come to’ as if I’m an entirely new person that has stepped into my body. 

Another thing I’ve found once the meltdown has arrived is that I get complete time-blindness. I feel like I’ve been stuck in that sensation forever, that it will never pass. It’s why my meltdowns in the past have been known to turn into suicidal ideation, which can be really scary for someone that thought I was absolutely loving life just yesterday - because I was and still am, it’s just that something has overstimulated me and now I’ve lost all sense of reality in a way that I feel will never end. 

I’ve recently bought myself a visible timer which I’m going to use as I let out my meltdowns to enable me to know not to panic and that it will pass. I also find listening to music helps me to understand that it’s just a song or two until the feeling fades. 

After a meltdown 

Meltdowns are exhausting for everyone involved. Though quite often I find I personally spring back from meltdowns feeling more alive / focussed / capable than many people expect. Again this is because it isn’t a response to a form of depression or anything that is emotionally weighing on me on a daily basis. It is the energetic release that comes with a meltdown that frees up my brain to function again. 

So in the early days I would have recovered fairly rapidly, but my partner who had witnessed all of the harm would feel exhausted and confused. I’ve been learning to show care for myself and others in this aftermath rather than berating myself for causing inconvenience or pain to others. 

I also have times where multiple meltdowns can happen within a single week, so even though I come out the other side of the meltdown feeling much better I need to remind myself to take it slow and keep negative stimulation to minimum to avoid slipping into another meltdown soon after.

The other thing that occurs for me is I will lose my memory of most of the detail of a meltdown. If I’ve hurt myself during the meltdown I might forget why my head or hand is hurting, or if I’ve said anything during a meltdown it’s likely I won’t remember that either. My partner and counsellor both play a role in helping me to retrace my steps and understand what was going on for me so that I’m able to continue to develop my strategies for dealing with meltdowns going forward. 

The upsides of meltdowns

The reality is I experience meltdowns as a result of feeling the world very intensely. And this shows up in joyful euphoric ways as much as it shows up in painful ways. The other side of the way energy builds and fragments my brain, is the same process that occurs when energy builds in a way that creates magnificent creative connections within my brain. The way my body responds with losing all sense of time and having very physical outbursts, is the same process that is occurring when I have the most ecstatic mind-bending orgasms or whole body responses to beautifully stimulating food, touch or music. 

In addition meltdowns are a very visceral way for my brain and body to speak to me about what I need and should be paying attention to. The majority of humankind are so cut off from their somatic processing that they can be completely oblivious to the perpetual harm they are inflicting on themselves and that the system is inflicting on them. My meltdowns might be hard to navigate within a system that only values certain ways of existing / certain ways of communicating and expressing / certain forms of productivity, but it keeps me grounded in who I am and acts as a marker for the ways the system is in conflict with that… giving me an opportunity to be deeply conscious of the life I’m building and why that’s important and meaningful to me.

Travelling through time

“The past and the future lives inside the present’s energy
So show a little tenderness now and love flows endlessly
Time is on a loop like the sun, that’s it’s destiny” - Riz Ahmed

Time is not linear. There have been many moments when I have been shown that but wasnt entirely sure because my perception gets warped a lot. For much of my adult life I have experienced what I called "broken glass brain" on a regular basis where all of a sudden the reality of life would overwhelm me and my thinking would shatter into a thousand pieces. Sometimes it would feel like each of those pieces could hang there in the air in slow motion, while my human vessel panics frantically and cuts myself on the sharp edges. Until eventually a few days later, as if by magic, the pieces glue themselves together again just as fast as they'd shattered. 

These days I understand this to be an autistic meltdown. It is painfully excruciating and scary. The world (and time) as we know it completely disappears from view. But I realise now that what underpins these moments and sensations is the same thing that underpins the many beautiful mindblowing moments I've had during connection building, creative activities or sex where my brain explodes and time stands still, speeds up or goes on forever. In each of these moments, the painful or the ecstatic ones, I believe what I am experiencing is both infinity and nothingness. Its almost like this world disintegrates and my consciousness is floating around in the dimension above us.

And in these moments it's as if my past or future selves can pass messages to me. Many of us are well versed in communicating with our past selves - for lots of us they still exist as visibly as the person in the mirror. The fear and pain that I carry from the past is present constantly, the teenager or child that came before can speak through me whenever they choose. As traumatised beings we are rarely relating with the person right in front of us.

But the future is different. Many of us don't believe people can see the future, let alone speak to it, but when I first experienced the depth of my connection with my partner I realised we are swimming in it right now. 

When I simultaneously and suddenly fell in love with my anchor partner there was a moment where it felt like I saw and experienced every single layer of our existence all at once. Initially I believed the sensation was a signal of some forms of past lives. As if my cosmic being had been searching for this through past eras and other dimensions. As if we had known each other for a millenia on a cellular level. What I have come to believe now though, as I unlock more wisdom about the way time moves, is that in that moment I saw the entire universe forever. 

As I think back to that moment the closest way I can describe it is through the metaphor of a button switch for a floor lamp in a darkened room. Its as if my foot pressed momentarily on that button and it lit up everything in a fraction of a second. What I saw during that illumination was my fate. 

My fate to be loved wholly and purely, and from that point onwards to forever be seeking to connect with that love no matter what separates us in the years, universes and dimensions to come. Perhaps I will be stuck in an endless timeloop, replaying and re-exploring the depth and beauty of this love. If that is the case I am at peace and content. I am even content with the death or loss of the people I love as a result. When me and my partner had sex the other day it felt as if my future self had travelled back into my body to experience every layer of the person the other version of me was presently grieving many decades into the future. Knowing I did not need to fear the potential loss of the love of my life was profound. Knowing that our love and experiences exist infinitely - regardless of the direction we travel through time. 

Or perhaps time is not cyclical either, but instead concurrent. And with that I could reach through the expanses of time to the ghost of my grandma, or my child as an adult, and connect and settle our souls. If this is the case I can learn to stretch out through time, reaching into the past to tell my wounded self that this love is here to stay, or my future self that I am safe and I am home.

As I hone my ability to travel through time, I discover that my broken glass brain is more a signal that I’m not in alignment with where I’m supposed to me. And as I learn to follow my instincts I am finding I can access love, connection, reassurance beyond imagination. The other day I stood on the steps of a random hotel in Amsterdam, waiting for a friend to get a taxi home, and my soul travelled into the future and felt as if I was remembering a deep sense of gratitude for the evening we had shared. What a powerful feeling to know you are exactly where you are meant to be.

Loving as world-building

There’s a million painfully bizarre ways that people refer to the central relationships in their lives but one of my the least favourite phrases I hear people say is “we’re settling down”. We are often led to believe that the heat, energy, and electricity we feel within connections are simply symptoms of early days excitement, and that compromise and endurance are what ‘true love’ looks like. But what if both these narratives are incorrect? What if the buzz we crave from new relationships is because capitalism has stripped the every day joy and ecstasy that is possible when we go deeper into our humanity? What if when we look at the idealised long-term monogamous relationship we are being sold something that feels like comfort in order to ensure we remain quietly complicit within the broken systems that are rapidly destroying the world around us?

In many ways I had a fairytale romance when I married and had kids with my best friend. We’d ticked the boxes and we were ready to be ‘settled’ as a nuclear family (albeit within a life full of debt and unhealed trauma). But to sustain the love story we’d need to commit to repressing whole parts of ourselves - in fact as two trans people hiding within a heteronormative world we actually needed to hide ourselves entirely. And this is not uncommon even within monogamous relationships between two cis hetero people. When ‘two worlds collide’ it is commonly believed that you have to lose parts of yourself if you want to maintain that connection. Goodbye solo travelling. Goodbye to the hobbies that consume ‘too much’ attention. Goodbye affectionate friends. Goodbye to the mother that annoys your other half. Goodbye to challenging the status quo because it’s better to be stay safe and contained now that someone loves us.  Goodbye to changing the world. And that’s if we’ve even bothered to bring our full selves to our relationships in the first place - most people connect with others by presenting a narrow, curated version of themselves that they believe is most palatable to their colleagues, friends or lovers.

And while some of us might “choose” to settle down and narrow in these ways, many others find themselves forced into this way of living and loving as a result of their partners’ possessiveness or wider cultural or societal expectations. In “Abolish the family” this type of love is described as ‘property love’.

Until my relationship with my anchor partner Nick, I had no version of love that demonstrated anything other than the above. I never knew what love looked like because my free will/spirit had been crushed under the weight of the cis heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In “Abolish the Family”, Sophie Lewis shares a quote about “Relinquishing the organised poverty in favour of an abundance we have never known” and it makes me realise that my love only transformed when I accessed/ allowed myself experiences that were completely beyond my imagination. It is through those moments, where I step out of this world and experience a whole new world, that I learn how to keep expanding what is possible. It gives me the tools, insight and knowledge to build and shape an existence more powerful and profound than I could’ve ever dreamed.

When my partner says “We’re going to keep building a world where…” it runs through me more than words like ‘I love you’, ‘Marry me’, ‘I’m yours forever’ ever could.  Because it shows me that our love is alive and active, and it doesn’t simply exist… it creates! As an example, when I have an autistic meltdown I no longer feel the need to shut down parts of me to protect my relationship, and Nick doesn’t feel like he has to pretend to be okay with things to protect me. Instead he holds it all, even when it doesn’t make sense, and says “We’re going to keep building a world where your brain and body has more of what it needs”. And this is now how I want to love everyone.

With my kids I don’t want my love to be expectant or imposing. Instead of “Because I love and care for you, you should listen to me”, we will get creative together. We will explore the shape of our love, and let it shape the way we live together. I also won’t love them passively out of duty and biology. We will work hard to create worlds together where we can discover our authentic connection, and our love will grow when we need it to, and retreat when they need more from others.

In addition to this I think it’s important that this world-building form of love is open and expansive. Sometimes we shelter within the worlds we’ve built - as a queer trans person this has been deeply necessary at times in order to protect my energy. But many people exist within a ‘batten down the hatches’ or ‘us against the world’ form of relating - creating isolation, separation from community and fuelling toxic cycles of co-dependency.

In ‘The Mushroom at the end of the world’ Anna Tsing talks about the symbiosis that occurs between fungi and other plants and trees. She talks about how humans have often focussed on categorising individual species, but that actually fungi often join forces with other living beings to create whole ecosystems, and that the ‘individual species’ within this would not exist without the other.   

When I think about this, I think about the partners, friends and family I actively choose to connect with to create community. Community does not passively happen because we are simply connected. There must be investment in how ideas, culture, and value flows within that community. We are a community because we can create worlds together. Those worlds can simply replicate other worlds or we can love even more actively and put the work in to actually cultivate something magnificent.

And when loving is about world-building we can finally discover the true power of it. It is an endless expanding, renewing, cyclical resource. I’ve often joked to partners that the energy I feel as a result of mind-blowing sex is revolutionary, and that more good sex could be the answer to most of societal problems. But there is a half truth in that. As described in Radical Intimacy or this blog post on queer platonic relationships, capitalism has attempted to commodify everything including love and relationships. When we finally realise that our love can not be contained, and that loving others should not need to involve making ourselves and our worlds smaller, we might actually discover an authentic existence that is both electrifying and rooted, freeing and safe. An expansive world where loving is the currency that keeps us all thriving.

Are stability and relationship anarchy incompatible?

Many people within my life, whether they are monogamous or polyamorous, have responded with caution when I mention the concept of relationship anarchy. The concept of relationships being shaped and reshaped, and individuals having complete freedom over what they share with who, can feel daunting for some people. In a world where we have not developed enough skills to navigate fluidity and change, it can feel overwhelming to have to continuously question what a relationship is and design it based on the deeper fundamentals of who you are and what you desire at that moment in time, rather than on a simple label or static status.

Quite often people incorrectly believe fluidity equals instability. This belief is held both by people with systemic power who want to maintain a status quo which provides them with comfort and control, as well as by people who are oppressed and harmed by the system. We are taught that if we can manage to gain some security and certainty we will be safer within that system. Even though my body and brain actually feels more steady and grounded when I’m able to flow and loosen my grip on the world around me, there are very few situations where I feel comfortable enough to flow in that way without harm or risk. As a result someone like me could incorrectly assume that it is the fluidity and uncertainty within my life that is dangerous. But the truth is simply that our systems and structures are not built to support fluidity and flow - they are rigid and ruptured - and so therefore flowing within them can bring risks. 

Rigid categorisation is deeply woven in the fabric of our society and legal systems. Throwing away that categorisation (and the inherent hierarchies that come with it) is like stripping off naked at a party. While that might be liberating for some, many of us may experience more vulnerability than others when enacting that. As Andie Nordgen writes in the Road to Relationship Anarchy: “The cost of making a completely custom relationship agreement can look very different for different people, and the tyranny of “structurelessness” must be considered — where too little structure can turn into power and benefit for those who already possess it. Relationship Anarchy must be equipped with this power analysis, and be open for declaring structure to relationships when it’s needed to protect individuals from each other.” (Thanks to my good friend Chan for bringing my attention to this quote)

In addition, regardless of the structures we are part of, we do all crave and need consistent love to feel secure. Whether that’s from ourselves, our partners, or our friends. Within our society we have falsely presumed that monogamy and romantic love is synonymous with commitment, consistent love and stability. And in turn we have wrapped up all forms of relating into that monogamous commitment - sexual intimacy, emotional intimacy, financial support, co-habiting etc. This is why it is easy for so many of us to perpetuate the hierarchy that suggests romantic love from a single partner should be prioritised above all else. 

While many people perceive Relationship Anarchy as anti-hierarchy, in my experience the underlying nature or need behind some hierarchies may still exist. It’s just that there isn’t any hard or fast rules around them being arbitrarily dictated by labels. Instead you are consciously engaging yourself and your connections in deep work to ensure you are making choices that reflect your autonomy rather than narratives that have been put upon you.

Relationship Anarchy allows me to unpack presumed norms around what stability and love is, and instead create more conscious, valuable  and aligned versions of love and care with my partners, friends and communities. For me it is about unpacking every layer of care and pleasure that we might share with other people, and actively deciding whether that is truly important or not within a given context. We design our relationships based on us as individuals and collectives rather than presuming you have to do something or prioritise something because other people tend to wrap those things up together, or because that’s how you’ve done things in the past. 

As an example I used to think that sharing your money with a romantic partner was a sign of deep connection, trust and commitment to mutual support. But having been through a relationship where much of the latter wasn’t actually present and I experienced financial hardship as a result, I’ve learnt that there might be situations where I need to maintain financial independence regardless of how much I care about someone else. At the same time there are other contexts where it makes entire sense to share finances… not necessarily because of love but because of a communal commitment to investing in a particular kind of life together.  At a more basic level an ex of mine used to praise me for bringing them a glass of water when we went to bed - saying I demonstrated so much more care than their other partner who would never do this. At the time I didn't see it as a important act of love, but the status they had given it made me panic about regularly servicing them with water to show them I cared. And since then I’ve event found myself having momentary unexpected feeling of resentment when my current partners don’t bring me water at bedtime - even though it never was and never will be important to me personally.

Within Relationship Anarchy, if I am someone that needs more emotional intimacy than others, then I am free to seek and cultivate that from multiple sources. I can make it central to all kinds of different relationships, whether that’s my partner, a friend, a therapist or the person that runs my local gym. The same goes with sexual intimacy. If that is core to my experience of the world and it helps to keep me grounded I can seek that with whoever I wish whenever I desire. Or perhaps sexual intimacy gets in the way of emotional intimacy for me, so I can choose to prioritise the latter as core to a relationship with a long-term partner, and only enjoy the former sporadically with other connections.  

For me relationship anarchy in a broad sense, and non-monogamy more specifically, is just an extension of how we should all be learning to relate to others if we want to create a society that values individual autonomy and collective care, over and above rules and hierarchies enforced by those who wish to oppress and control the behaviours and freedoms of others. 

Capitalism wants you to wrap up every single need into one person because it means you have to pay to outsource anything you can’t manage or meet within your household. In most situations it is nearly impossible for a couple to single-handedly raise children, financially support a family and still maintain nourishing intimacy - unless they can afford to pay a nanny to be their co-caregiver. Capitalism believes it is acceptable for a low-paid cleaner to help you out in your home, but it does not like it when multiple adults wish to live together out of love and friendship in order to share this burden collectively. 

Growing up in a society fuelled on isolation, it is no wonder that desperation for control and order becomes the stance that many of us adopt when it comes to relationships. As our one last life line to connection and care, loving relationships become a commodity that someone or something else could ‘steal’ at any time. Why do children act out so viscerally when they parents are glued to their phones? Because someone is stealing our attention. 

But we will only be able to access everything we need to cultivate healthy, stable, consistent care when we learn that we cannot control other people’s behaviours, and that our relationships are only worth as much as the value we wish to create together rather than the status or obligation that is bestowed to us by society based on exclusivity, marriage or child-rearing.

Relationship anarchy isn’t disarray and chaos. It is a way of building thoughtful, empowering relationships that generate mutual value for those participating in that relationship, Only once we are capable of experiencing multiple deeply mutual and profound relationships in a variety of ways within our communities will we understand what true stability and limitless love and care can look like.

Different types of touch you might enjoy inviting or giving

As an autistic person I often struggle to read when someone does or doesn't want to be touched, and I can also find some touch overstimulating. I've learnt explicitly asking someone if there's anywhere they hate being touched, or anywhere they love being touched can be both informative and a huge turn on for all involved.

I've also found because we are so cautious to explore our bodies and other people's bodies we often fail to vocalise or experiment with all the different ways we might enjoy touch. In my experience queer people tend to be a little more experimental because there is often gender fluidity to account for, but in other ways we are equally prescriptive as our heternormative peers.

One of the best things about being polyamorous is I learn new ways of touching and being touched all the time. And as a relationship anarchist physical intimacy can exist outside romantic or sexual relationships too.

So here's a variety of non-sexual and sexual ways of touching that you might enjoy.

Stroking collar bones

The first time my partner stroked my collar bone it released the weight of the world. It is one of the most useful and delicate bones in our body - it is the bone that gets broken most often. We should show it more care.

Do you feel soothing tingles when you stroke your own collar bone?

Walking fingers around a face

The first person to walk their fingers around my face was my son who was three at the time. His intense studying of me made us feel connected. And the pressure points he unlocked without knowing eased the mental stress that was building through parenting.

Try walking your fingers around the face of someone you love. Does it help you really see them? Do you notice the way they relax in response to certain points you touch?

Biting fingers

Our fingers do so much work in sex (and life) but so many of us don't consider them to be erotic within themselves. If you've never tried putting your fingers in someone's mouth, or never put someone's fingers inside yours you might be missing out. I find biting other people's fingers and knuckles also gives my jaw a much needed relief from clenching and gridning.

Forehead rocking

You don't have to exchange fluid to feel bonded with someone. I can spend ages rocking my head back and forth on my partners forehead. It releases pressure and makes me feel just as close as kissing.

Arm squeezing and butt massaging

My arms store a lot of energy. When someone squeezes them from top to bottom it is like they've squeezed all the bad juices out of me.

Also screw back massages. Our butts so so much work for us that having a good squeeze can sort you right out. This type of attention pre-sex also gets me feeling more loose and relaxed.

Chest clawing and pushing

A lot of people's relationship with their breasts is complicated. We festishize breasts like no other part of the body but the doesn't mean everyone wants theirs grabbed and fondled.

A lot of non-binary people I've dated have often preferred having their chest grabbed and pushed.

Kissing behind the ear

There are areas on our body that rarely get touched or even seen, so it can feel electric when they do. Do you remember the feeling of that whispering game as a kid? Being kissed behind my ear often evokes that fizzing energy for me.

Content warning... Things about to get more sexually explicit

Tracing pant lines

Too many people regardless of gender or sexuality rush straight in to getting down to business when sex is on the table.

I've been loving having the top and legs of my pants stroked and teased with. And cautious fumbling around pants can make me feel like a giddy teenager again.

Putting just the tip of a finger or bellend inside a vagina

Just because porn tells us deep penetration is the most enjoyable of sex it doesn't mean it is. My gspot is actually near the entrance of my vagina so the first time I orgasmed through penetrative sex was with someone who has a small penis. I used to think that having someone deep inside me was more connecting but actually we can sometimes experience more of each other when we keep a little distance.

Rubbing or licking a bellend like a clitoris

And if you have a penis you might be missing out on more intense orgasms by showing your whole shaft in someone's mouth or with vigorous hand jobs. Try going slower and gentler with just rubbing the top of your penis and you might unlock something more akin to a long intense clitoral orgasm.

Thrusting against a perineum or just below someone's Coccyx

And if you are like me and don't have a penis but wish you did don't fear. Our clitoris’ are powerful little fuckers. We all know (I hope) the joy and wonder of grinding our vulva and clit against someone else's wet vulva, but have you ever tried fucking someone's perineum or coccyx? The pressure often makes my clit feel much bigger and harder and I've been told my partners sometimes experience it as if I've got a penis as a result.

Tight binding mixed with slow stroking

One of my sensitivity issues is that touch can suddenly feel too soft or too hard. It's why I loved experiencing a harness and want to do more binding because the pressure across parts of my body was super grounding in a way that enabled me to enjoy slower and rougher touch.

Share your ideas: Are there any electricfying or soothing ways you like to be touched?