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 I realised that a lot of my own relationship to risk, complexity and trust stems from my personal life, 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

With no labels and the freedom to design and redesign relationships in a way that works for you it might seem liberating but it actually reveals how easy it is to fall back into patterns of thinking that are shaped by societal conditioning. And not only that but 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 what are my boundaries. 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 restrictions relating to who I can sleep with based on my other relationships, 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 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 rearticulate those as we learn where our edges our. And on the flip side to also know when to let those go when we realise that edge 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. 

If you enjoyed this blog post please consider donating to our housing co-op crowdfunder - the existence of which is modelling the power of different ways of governing and relating.

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?

Finding deep pleasure in food could transform our society

Realising the depth of the pleasure, eroticism and sensuality that can exist within most of your daily life has helped me develop a better relationship with myself, other people and the world around me.

Sex is no longer about instant gratification, and neither is food. Food has always bought me joy in some form, but these days it is something radically different to what it was when I was younger. In the same way I've spoken before about there being sex, and then sex, there’s food and then there’s food.

From money to energy

When I was a child my mum, due her experiences of poverty, devised a game to help us be thrifty with our food. We'd each be given a pound and told to find the equivalent of a whole meal in the supermarket for the cost - tinned beans, cheap bread and Tesco value jam tarts were always my top pics because I LOVED beans on toast.

This was both an empowering and joyful way to help us navigate rising food prices as we got older. And by the time I was living in London on minimum wage it meant I could whip up a good meal out of basically nothing. 

My favourite healthy comfort food sourced from Pingle Farm and Tofurei - tofu, brocolli, greens, soy, ginger & garlic

But it also meant for quite some time my relationship with food was about the cheapest way of gaining some form of nutrition. And while I knew a healthy diet consisted of the basics of 5 fruit and veg, and some protein and carbs, I spent my early adult life feeling exhausted within my body. 

Over the past few years understanding my autism, gender dysphoria and exploring my sexuality has meant paying close attention to my body. And in turn that has meant paying attention to what I put into it. It unearthed for me the shattering effect gluten was having on me, and how I lacked energising minerals like iron and magnesium. Removing the former from my diet the last 6 months has in turn made me pay closer attention to the world around me. Thoughtfully seeking meals that are truly nourishing for my body energises me in a way that watching my bank balance didn't. 

That said I'm lucky to be at a point in my life where changing my mindset in this way is accessible to me. Our food system is not set up to provide affordable nourishing healthy food - I'd go as far to say our capitalist system purposefully makes low energy food as cheap as chips because it keeps workers compliant. 

Cultivating appreciation and participation

When I started cooking dinners for my family as a teenager it was transformational for me in two senses. One is that I started to pay more attention to what we were all eating and would flex my skills to respond to different people’s needs such as when my mum was dieting etc. And the second is that as an autistic person it was my way of saying “I’m here, I love you, but please leave me in peace” when we were gathering.

Me dishing up dinner for friends at a recent &Breathe gathering

This has continued into my adult life and for me it is an absolute joy to contribute to a group in this way. Cooking from scratch is a mindful activity that helps me focus my often scattered and overwhelmed brain. My brain appreciates every food item I touch (it’s one of the many reasons why I’m vegetarian because when my brain would focus in that much detail on a chicken thigh it used to make me want to vomit), and I really enjoy learning about different people’s dietary requirements and showing I care by adapting around their needs. All too often people are made to feel that they are an inconvenience when they need or want something different to others, but for me there is joy and pleasure in understanding the uniqueness of our relationship with food.

I really felt acknowledged for my connection with food and how I approach cooking when at an &Breathe gathering my friend Alvin said “I like eating your food, I can tell it’s cooked with love”. It might sound cheesy but love really is the key ingredient to ensuring our bodies stay healthy. If someone loves you, and loves the earth for the produce it generates, they cook in a way that centres that rather than for the destructive capitalist values of speedy consumption.

I think more people learning to appreciate and participate within the food system would radically improve our lives in a myriad of ways. A simple walk with my kids the other day to collect hazelnuts meant they got hours of exercise, they learnt more about each other and the land they live on, and because they had the joyful task of cracking them open its the first time either of them have enjoyed consuming nuts - an amazing source of fats, fiber, magnesium and vitamin E.

My kids picking beans at Pingle Farm

Straight from the earth

I've always been fascinated by where my food comes from but for a period of time I had to entirely forget that in order to survive living in London. I was living in a bubble whereby I'd have multiple coffees a day - probably one from Ethiopia and another from Costa Rica - followed by fruit and veg grown in Spain, Peru and Beyond. 

When I moved out of London and started to feel the weight of the climate crisis I made stressful attempts to try find food with the least air mileage in the supermarket, until one of my partners pointed out those supermarkets are still going to be importing those goods whether I buy them or not so I gave up my tiny little rebellion because it was mentally exhausting me. 

That was until I came to Wirksworth and discovered a small independent veg farm, Pingle Farm, who offer veg boxes for £15! Aside from tofu, carbs and snacks this basically makes up the bulk of our shopping. I was spending double this in supermarkets on fruit and veg, for items out of season, with less nutrition and flown thousands of miles.

When I visited Pingle the other day to volunteer and find out more about their journey as me and my partners would like to one day live communally and grow our own food, I literally sobbed as left. Seeing this beautiful space where you could feel the love emanating from the soil, and where everything you could possibly need to live was there right in front of me, just made the horror of the food system crash down on me like a tonne of bricks. We are being gaslit by society. There is enough land for everyone in the UK to have a more direct connection with their food, and to be able to grow most of what we need right on our doorsteps. 

Aside from the global impact changing our growing and consumption habits would have the sheer amount of joy and pleasure I have had these past few weeks from picking the food that lands in mine and my neighbours veg boxes and from being creative with veg that is available has been transformational for my body and soul. The other day I went foraging with my closest friend, and when I came back all electrified my partner pointed out the many layers of delight I'd had from one afternoon of wandering in the sunshine, nibbling nuts and berries, and discovering the nutrients available to me from herbs like Mugwort growing everywhere on UK path ways. It would be faster to buy nuts and berries from the shop, but the time saved is no way near as valuable as the level of joy I gained from that afternoon.

Time is the real luxury in this system

There’s too much rhetoric on all sides shaming people with the idea that they either shouldn’t be struggling with food poverty, or they shouldn’t be struggling with healthy sustainable diets. Middle-class right wingers retort ridiculous things like “A jacket potato and beans only costs 70p to make” in response to people campaigning against food prices, while some Middle-class lefties scoff at those that eat Mcdonalds, and environmentalists can behave like whining martyrs when it comes to their food and farming activism.

I still cave sometimes and my kids Mcdonalds after a long day of them bickering, or when they are in a phase of refusing to eat something I feel is good for them. I didn’t own a microwave until very recently so there’s no way you would’ve caught me cooking jacket potato for kids who had gone into ‘hangry’ mode before I’d had a chance to get dinner on after a stressful day at work. And heck no I’m not a martyr for the sustainability-related stuff I get to do, it’s a fucking privilege that I get to do such life-affirming work when we live in a system that is sapping us all dry.

While I love that there are more and more simple guides for healthy and affordable eating, and that more community farms are cropping up and inviting people to volunteer, that’s simply not where most people are at when they are stuck in the daily grind of capitalism and the isolation of nuclear families.

My capacity for a more sustainable and enjoyable relationship with food has come from an entire shift in my lifestyle. My outgoings have reduced due to being able to move out of the city, my approach to work is less time intensive as a freelancer, my partner and I live and work more and more collectively with others every day, and my kids are raised by multiple households due to co-parenting with my ex. Some of these shifts have been painful and the process caused me to have less time and money for good food at times, but having the confidence to jump headfirst into this shift to an entirely different way of living comes from having both a depth of love and support from the people around me and knowing it’s the only way we’ll escape a system that is burning us to the ground.

If we want people to engage in and demand healthy sustainable forms of food production and consumption we first need to meet them with love and care for all layers of their lives, value their time and open their world to the energising forces of pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t happen as a result of shame, and time can’t be magically created when your time is owned by capitalist corporations.

The joy of feeling entirely myself at A playfighting workshop and erotic party

Last month me and my partners headed down to London to participate in Open Relating’s playfighting workshop followed by a Temple of Eros play party. I was in the middle of a PMS tornado and ended up having my first public autistic meltdown in a long-time on the way down while sitting on a packed train feeling overstimulated and overwhelmed.

Given how fractured and distressed my brain and body was that day many people would assume that jumping into my first ever experience of a play party with a bunch of strangers would be the last thing I’d be able to engage with. But what followed could not have been further from that expectation and it helped me to more deeply understand the way I experience the world and my needs as a result. 

Finding my threads

I often explain to people that the difference between my neurodivergent brain and my partners more ‘nuerotypical’ brain is that if life was a piece of woven fabric he’d be noticing and engaging with the threads that run parallel, and I’d more easily spot and navigate the threads that run vertically. The only difference in how we experience the world as a result is that much of our society is built on the threads that run horizontally, so I end up struggling with more ‘mundane’ or ‘obvious’ stuff and my experience of the world ends up as more disjointed and painful as a result. 

But in reality that same combination of perceptions means that I can navigate typically anxiety inducing conversations or experiences much more easily. My discomfort in discussions about the weather and what you did at the weekend is no different to other people’s discomfort with discussions surrounding death and sex… in the same way my ease with explicit consenting rough and tumble with a load of different naked bodies is no different to other people’s ease with handshakes. 

And on a more literal sense of ‘finding my threads’ it was so amazing to be able to go from rolling around in lycra yoga pants during the playfighting to wearing nothing but my leather harness in the evening. Honestly if that could be my entire wardrobe I’d be happy.

Seeing energy

I’ve written before about how I am often experiencing the world through a sense which exists between the visual and the physical. And wow did play fighting enable me to really lean into that way of navigating the world. Watching the energy exchanges between people helped me to really understand their vibe and got me really excited to engage with everyone. In contrast, in settings which rely heavily on spoken communication I can often get myself up in my head both worrying about not explaining myself properly or not being able to understand where someone is coming from, so I tend to hone in on one or two people I can feel safe with.

Given the overstimulation and meltdown in the morning, and my past experiences of spaces with lots of people, I’d expected to want to stick close to my partners throughout the night and to not find many other people attractive. But the opposite occurred. As a result of the playfighting, during the play party ice breakers and pair activities I was readily seeking out people with intriguing energies and confidently inviting them to engage with me in ways I often reserve only for close friends.

Consent and boundaries

As a highly sexual person who’s brain takes a while to properly connect with my body I have often found that I am far too late to realise when someone has overstepped my boundaries. I also find that the way I communicate my uncertainty or what feels like an outright ‘no thank you’ is often ignored by people repeatedly. I think much of this overstepping doesn’t just stem from misoginy within our society, but may also be connected to different neurotypes and cultural upbringings. But it is everyone’s responsibility to listen out for cues we might not be familiar with, practice patience and seek out emphatic yes’s when it comes to building intimate relationships.

I often have a ‘what-ing’ phase when first exploring an intimate connection with someone. Repeatedly asking things like ‘What are you thinking’, ‘What did that expression mean’ etc. in order to get to know their unique responses to pleasure or discomfort. But the facilitators and the other participants in the play fighting space and play party gave me much more inspiration for different ways of communicating and seeking consent.

The playfighting itself was a good way to practice this without heightened feelings of rejection. At the start of each fight you would sit opposite your opponent and state where and how you didn’t want to be touched, and the others would repeat the boundary to really sense check it and pay attention to what is being requested. I have since repeated this way of inviting boundary setting ahead of intimacy with a new partner by asking if there is anywhere someone does or doesn’t want to be touched. It not only helps everyone to feel safer that they’ve each been explicit but I also found hearing the responses to these questions really sexy. Being with someone that knows their body and is in control of how it can or can’t be touched makes me feel like so much more is possible, because I know where I stand and can get creative within the parameters they have set.

And this combination of both sexy and considerate communication played our beautifully towards the end of the play party as part of a sexual health conversation with someone and our respective partners but that really requires a whole other blog post. So watch this space for all the sexy details of dental dams in my next post on ‘Navigating sexual health within polyamory and open relationships’.

By the end of the evening I was absolutely buzzing about how safe the space had felt for me, and what that had in turn unlocked for me and my partners. Having experienced uncertainty, confusion or harm in most “normal” public spaces it was a complete joy and relief to realise that there are spaces like this where I can invite more feelings of safety and vibrancy into my life, and I learnt so much that I can take into non-sexual and non-physical spaces too.

The beautifully complex emotions of polyamory

One of the joys for me of being polyamorous is the incredibly unique human experiences and nuanced emotions that you experience as a result. It’s intense but being able to experience things that there are simply no words for, where you exist in a space beyond human imagination because no-one ever taught you that script, is liberating.

But with these feelings coming thick and fast as my polyamory grows and expands I thought it’d be a fun process to try to put words to just some of the things I have experienced and will continue to experience on this journey.

Melancholic contentment

Earlier this year I had my first experience of breaking up with a long-term partner while still being partnered with someone else. And while the break up was deeply saddening being able to process that with someone that loves you and who really knew the intricacies of the relationship you were mourning (to the point where they shared in the heartbreak somewhat) was an incredibly healing experience. It brought me and my partner closer together and it also felt like together we were able to give my past relationship the space, closure and respect it deserved.

“Flitty”

Compersion is a common term within Polyamory. But as an anxious person that struggles with knowing how to navigate uncertainty at times, while simultaneously loving adventure and being surprised by all the possibilities that life brings, experiencing my partners dating escapades at a distance brings juicy cocktail of feeling. It’s kind of an exhilarated hopeful fluttery feeling but with a good dose of nervous energy which makes it more flitty … I’ll never forget staying up all night when my partner was on a date and not being able to sleep contentedly until I knew that my partner and their date had had a safe and enjoyable sexual experience together.

Metaorgasmic knowing

Wow I can still feel the deep, loving desire and contentment I felt when two of my partners first kissed each other. And then when ever I heard of or saw them connecting intimately I’d get a kind of orgasmic feeling by proxy because I had experienced sexual desire and orgasms with both of them so had a deep sense of what the two of them would be experiencing together. Given that to each other my partners were originally one another metamours I feel like metaorgasmic describes the sensation I experienced perfectly.

Coupled magnetism

My partner has dated someone who has at times contacted us interchangeably, and someone I dated used to enjoy sex with us both because it felt like he was a massive part of me and that we were one big shared embodiment. I’m realising how affirming it is, and how whole and connected it makes me feel, when people see and enjoy the larger embodiment of me and my soul mates. In return the energy that gets sparked when you and one (or more) of your loved ones develop a deep shared desire for someone else  together brings this whole new layer to experiencing the ways energy and attraction moves. As a result you can start to experience things beyond your individual human form which in my experience unlocks something incredibly spiritual and magical.

Platonic desire

As I practice relationship anarchy the false lines around what type of attraction and connection is valid or approved disintegrate. And with the freedom to explore whatever possibilities I and others wish to I often find myself forming deeper bonds with my friends as I allow myself to feel sexually and intimately attracted at times, even if neither of us want it to lead to any actual physical intimacy. That desire makes me more interested in their sexual fulfilment and in turn it brings us many layers of new conversations to explore and creates a new kind of compersion for me as platonic connections explore their sexual sides with other people.

Presence, relief and symbiosis: The endless possibilities of sex

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted something. Because, well, I’ve been living. And by that I mean really feeling and experiencing all the highs and all the lows of my existence. I’ve finally officially started reading Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown (after many years of following her content but never having the attention span for books…thanks ADHD!) and she begins early on with this:

“I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning in to what brings aliveness into our systems and bring able to access personal, relational and communal power. Conversely, I have seen how denying our full, complex selves—denying our aliveness and our needs as living, sensual beings—increases the chance that we will be at odds with ourselves, our loved ones, our coworkers, and our neighbors on this planet.”

While her book is about all forms of pleasure, for me sex continues to be a core aspect of my life that guides me through everything. So I wanted to share some of the many things sex brings to my life beyond basic pleasure and intimacy.

Presence

As someone with a racing ADHD mind it is only within the last couple of years that I’ve started to learn how to experience complete clarity and bliss. And my capacity to access that state didn’t come from mindfulness or meditation, it came from sex. There are times during sex when a movement feels like it could go on forever and I get completely lost in the smallest of sensations. I’ve since been able to hone my presence in other spaces within my life but sex is by far the fastest way for me to be present in the here and now.

A deeper understanding of my identity

I’ve written previously about gender fluid play. But the sex I’ve had over the last few years has completely transformed my understanding of myself in a multitude of ways. It is a space where all the different energies and spirits within me can be seen and explored. At times my partner feels like he is having sex with multiple people. It is the way that different sides of my learn to exist harmoniously together. Where nothing needs to be hidden and repressed.

Non-verbal communication

As an autistic person I find that my words often don’t match my thoughts, and that I’m constantly anxious about being misunderstood. The physicality I have with my partner was a form of processing and that goes beyond sex too. We’ve found ourselves using forms of kink or playfighting to grapple with complex differences and I can’t wait to deepen this practice at the Conscious Playfighting session with Open Relating.

Multi-dimensional orgasms

Sometimes when I orgasm I come around after and say to my partner “woah that took me to a crazy place” because sex can completely transform my experience of the universe. I’ve had times where I feel like I’ve experienced all of my past and future orgasms at once. Where it has very literally blown my mind and the only way to describe the sensation is like I’m travelling through space and time.

Other people’s orgasms

As a polyamorous person I’m very lucky that I get to witness and experience lots of people’s orgasms in a very real way. But sometimes I can experience them even when it’s just me and my partner present physically. Quite often when my partner is forming a new connection with another person they will pop up during sex and I’ll imagine what they might experience when my partner pleasures them and it is honestly like my being completely shifts in response to the energy.

Symbiosis

When I get completely lost in sex I experience me and my partner merging in ways where it feels like we two parts of a larger body. Or where I become an extension of their limbs, or they becomes an extension of mine. There have been times when I’ve been orally pleasuring someone and it’s felt like I’m doing that to myself, or vice versa. To feel the flow between organisms in this way is magical and helps me to understand the way the natural world is connected.

Stress relief

I’ve written before about how my relationship with orgasms used to solely centre around stress relief. I used to feel ashamed about the fact I’d often masterbate 5 or 6 times a day to regulate myself due to such high levels of anxiety. And sex with other people would often result in anxiety which I’d go to the toilet to relieve after having pretended to come. Thankfully sex completely shifted for me over the last few years and this is no longer the case. But I continue to use it at times as a form of regulation and if you ask me a wank is much healthier than a pack of cigarettes.

Endless possibilities

Sex has taught me how expansive our lives can be. It is beautiful to finally be in a place where I know there is a never-ending space to explore. As I grew up and through my 20s my understanding of sex was so limited and narrow, and that reflected itself in my life and generated feelings of stagnancy, claustrophobia and apathy. Now that I can see how endless and infinite the possibilities of sex are, I can see how endless the possibilities for how we choose to live are. There are so many ways of shaping our lives, our work, our relationships and there is pleasure and exhilaration that comes from experiencing the expansive beautiful complexity of our existence.

Gender fluid play

Gender is an incredibly fluid concept for me these days and fully embracing that within myself, and exploring that with my partners, is what has enabled me to be more deeply connected during sex, and shown me the expansive possibilities of all the different ways we can be intimate with one another.

I used to be fairly repulsed by penises. It is what made me first presume I must be a gay woman. But now I realise I was actually a non-binary person with a masculine side I'd been hiding from. And it was through sex with one of my current partners that I was finally able to fully acknowledge this.

Your dick or mine?

I’ve talked in the past about how sex took on an entirely new meaning when I met my partner. One of the things that was different with him, in comparison to other seemingly heterosexual sex I’d had in the past, was that he was willing to explore our bodies in ways that extended beyond the rigid forms of sex I’d been used to. I still remember the first time he slid his up alongside my clitoris from behind me and the feeling of rubbing it against me as if I had a penis myself. My pleasure at feeling like his penis was mine got us both excited to play around with it in different ways and we discovered there were so many ways for us both to experience pleasure from sharing his penis. Playing around with how I straddled him so that as he moved inside me it felt like I was actually moving inside him, or lying on our backs with our legs intertwined and periniums touching while I wank him off.

Sometimes we’ll become so deeply connected that when he ejaculates from blow jobs or hand jobs I feel the pleasure run all through me too to the point where I’m more satisfied than if my own body had climaxed. And he has experienced the same through my orgasms too.

Phantom penises

I joked in a polyamory WhatsApp group I’m part of that a ‘one penis policy’ is ridiculous because sometimes I feel like I have a phantom penis. And it turns out it wasn’t just a concept I was making up and one of the people in the group shared a lecture on the topic of ‘energy genitals’

One of my favourite things to do with my partners is to press my clitoris right up on his perineum or on my other partners vagina. Sometimes when we connect in this way we can intensely focus on the sensations and it feels like my penis is inside of them. The first time I got myself to the point of climax like this with my partner said it felt like his boyfriend had just come inside of him.

Sometimes my brain experiences dysphoria if it comes out of the fantasy. And I’ve had extreme emotional meltdowns during sex at times as a result. Its why sex toys like double ended dildos don't work too well for me. It feels less like an extension of my body and that can create a dysphoria which rips me out of the moment.

Endless combinations

It’s not just different ways of using our respective genitals and ‘energy genitals’ that has made our sex so fluid and expansive. My partner often says he feels like he’s in a polyamorous relationship just with me because of the different energies we bring into our relationship and sex. There are times when we can do exactly the same sexual acts but one time it feels like we are boyfriends and the next time it feels like we are girlfriends. We’ve had times where the energy between three of us during a threesome has meant my partner’s penis hasn’t been present at all, and other times where it has been a central feature. And outside of sex sitting with my arms around my boyfriends shoulders in the cinema when he’s in a a super camp vibe is an incredibly profound and wholesome experience for me. He’s over 6ft and I’m only just 5ft 5, but somehow I can feel big and sturdy during those times. And other times I feel tiny in comparison to him as I snuggle up in his chest.

The binary disconnects us all

One thing I’ve realised through exploring different gender roles in sex and relationships is that heteronormative cisgender sex and binary roles limits all of us - regardless of you gender or sexuality. Our human bodies are capable of so much more pleasure than what is handed to us through gendered roles. The rigidity of how men and women are supposed to achieve climax (or in many heteronormative relationships how just the man climaxes) limits our sensual experiences and our capacity to truly see all the layers of our human experiences.

What gender fluid play have you tried? Do you experience any dysphoria with parts of you during heteronormative sex? How has the binary limited your experiences in the past?

I’d love to chat more to people who are in the process of exploring their gender beyond the binary, whether it’s in relation to sex or not, so I might start a little gender non-conforming pleasure WhatsApp chat. DM me on my instagram if you are interested!

The gifts that polyamory gave me in 2022

When I reflected on how secure and loved I felt on the first Christmas I’d spent alone I realised there are gifts that my relationships and my polyamorous community and mindset has given me this year which are far beyond what I would’ve believed was possible when I first came out as polyamorous two years ago.

I wanted to share a few of the beautiful things I’ve gained as part of this journey to date but there’s so much more that I’ll be expanding on in posts throughout January.

Validation and growth

When you are willing to let yourself and those you love experience love from all angles it provides endless opportunities for building a deeper connection with yourself and pushing your potential as a human. For me the point of being in relationship with others has always been about growing together, even if it’s a fleeting connection it is valuable relationship if I have learnt more than I have lost. This sense of validation and growth doesn’t have to come via polyamorous relationships but the effect is multiplied when you’ve got a diverse group of loving humans who reflect back the different parts they love about you, help you to see the things you didn’t notice or understand before, and hold you accountable in your journey to becoming a better human.

Freedom and security

I’ve spoken to many people about the fact that one of my partners, Nick, is my first ever experience of a secure attachment. Like many people the way that I’d reassured myself in longterm relationships in the past was by remaining fiercely independent, assuming control or ultimately becoming detached from my own body to endure feelings of insecurity.

There is a solidness to my connection with Nick that I can physically feel. And it is that which makes us great at giving one another freedom to explore. Many people say polyamory for them is about ‘not expecting one person to be everything to them’ or having multiple people to meet multiple needs but that’s not the case for me. While I don’t expect or ever want Nick to meet all my needs or to be everything, the success of our polyamory to date is a result of the fact that mine and Nick’s bond is so deep that it could fill our hearts enough on it's own, and so secure that we know it will weather anything and everything. Contrary to the protectiveness that many couples create when they fall deeply in love, our love massively reduces anxiety around exploring other deep connections or the possibility of accidentally ending up in a toxic situation.

This isn’t intended to signify a hierarchy in how we relate to other partners, but more that a profound freedom and security for both of us was born out of our attachment and laid the foundations for us both to explore and confidently build meaningful relationships with others. And even if the shape of our relationship changes, we both know that what we’ve built together and within each other will endure.

Continuous curiosity

When you have the first two gifts it’s easy to remain in a fairly constant state of curiosity about the world around you. I still have plenty of anxiety due to my trauma and my autism but each day I connect more deeply to this endless source of universal knowledge and wisdom which calms me and allows me to flow through far more than I ever imagined.

My interests and my social interactions are deepening and widening as I learn to love simply being intrigued by the people around me, and allowing people to be intrigued by me and my life in return.

While this capacity to be continuously curious isn’t unique to polyamory it is becoming more and more apparent that many straight monogamous friends have so much that they take as a given - they rarely seem to lift up the surface to see what magic hides beneath. This is immediately apparent when they dismiss my gender or polyamory as being ‘something inconsequential’ or totally gloss over it. Whereas some of my favourite conversations these days are when someone totally new to polyamory goes “Wow that sounds beautifully complex, tell me more!” or when they haven’t understood the nature of “non-binary” people before and build the courage to ask detailed questions about how I experience gender.

Deeper friendships

Since coming out as polyamorous my friendships have flourished. And I believe this is down to two things. I’ve written before about how being polyamorous in principle can help dissolve the arbitrary divides and hierarchy between platonic connections and intimate or romantic connections. I’ve had the freedom to simply allow connections to become whatever they become and as a result there is less nervousness between me and friends around what topics or behaviours are “suitable” or “unsuitable”. We shape our friendships around who we each are as people and what is unique to how we communicate.

In addition the openness I’ve shown around my journey with polyamory (and sex and gender and autism) has meant that people feel able to speak openly about their own inner thoughts, desires and confusion. I’ve talked about the joys of strap-ons (and other taboo topics like stress wanks) with straight male friends, shared the adventures I’ve had with people who enjoy living vicariously, and been someone people have felt able to confide in and ask for advice from when questioning their understanding of themselves or their partner.

Experiences beyond imagination

I’m planning a whole post about words that need to be invented for some of the feelings and experiences I encounter as part of polyamory but much of my love life this past year has been beyond what is possible to describe with the English language. Whether it’s shifting from feeling like a best friend, a soul mate, a dominatrix, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, with one partner in the space of an hour, OR having deeply spiritual threesomes that last for hours OR physically sensing the NRE (“new relationship energy”) building as I witnessed my partner kiss my other partner, OR lying in bed worrying about the anxious nerves that my partner and someone he likes are having during their first date, OR declaring my desire for a good friend and becoming more deeply connected to them as a result when they reject me.

I’ve experienced all of these things and more this year. And every time it sparks magical feelings that I never even knew were humanly possible. And there a moments where I could happily lose myself in that feeling for eternity and I’d be content. The excitement of what is possible is somewhat overwhelming now that I’ve experienced far more in a single year than I’ve experience in a life time, but this is what I think it truly means to be a living, thriving being.

Limitless love that spans time and space

When you realise you only know and experience a fraction of what is humanly possible. When deep love and connection is welcomed in every corner of your life. When you allow yourself to feel so deeply that a single kiss feels like it could last forever. Time and limits lose all meaning. Many monogamous people often say weird comments about how “maintaining one relationship is tiring enough” (which usually just makes me think they are in the wrong relationship) but I suppose the sentiment is not that dissimilar people in the polyamory community talk about being ‘polysaturated’ where they can’t sustain more partnerships, or the decision to stop having children because you can’t juggle the competing demands of them.

I understand all this in a day to day sense, particularly if you buy into societal expectations for how people should show love (no partner of mine is ever going to consistently be getting presents on their birthdays and Christmas). But I have connections who I’ve loved so deeply in a single moment that they could walk in and out of my life and our love would endure forever. Knowing that it is possible to spark that kind of love repeatedly with my partners in whatever time we have at our disposal, or that at any moment I have the capacity to spark it with someone new, is utterly profound.

If you enjoyed reading this please follow me on instagram or buy me a coffee to encourage me to keep writing and sharing!

Seeing energy and the things unsaid

My partner went out on a date the other night and I absolutely loved every moment apart from one bit when I tried to visualise him enjoying himself with the person but had no visual reference map for creating this understanding in my head. In that one moment a huge shot of anxiety rushed through me, and started to send me on a spiral of fear. My brain felt it and filled in the gaps with intrusive thoughts. 

This happens a lot to me in all sorts of contexts, but it usually happens over the phone or in the presence of someone else, and as a result it has often been misinterpreted by others as anxious attachment or jealousy when it’s completed unrelated to that. (Don't get me wrong I do a lot of work around my anxious attachment and my jealousy so I'm not saying I don't have those things) In turn that misinterpretation leads to intense meltdowns because as an autistic person I am traumatised by all the times I haven't felt able to communicate my experiences to others / when people haven't understand the nuance of my thoughts and feelings.  

But for the first time I was able to pause in the moment and say to my brain "that's interesting that you need a visual reference to map this experience onto, why is that". And a FLOOD of memories and knowledge came rushing back which helped me to understand the beautiful layer of the world that my autistic brain operates within. 

Seeing connection or disconnection

Since I was young I have been confused by secrecy surrounding love and desire, or the opposite of that resentment and distance. Everything seemed to be unnecessarily clouded with pretence and I could never work out why, and it was that that creates anxiety within my brain. A simple example is that I had a boyfriend as a teenager who quite blatantly fancied one of my best friends. I never had a problem with the fancying, it was the fact they couldn't seem to speak it out loud or acknowledge it when it was right there in front of us and I didn't understand why it was something that needed to be silenced or obscured. When he eventually slept with her a few years later I wasn't hurt by the sex, I was hurt by the fact I didn't know or understand his reasons for keeping it secret, that he was actively trying to obscure something I could *literally* see and touch.

And the latter is where I now understand my experience of connection and disconnection is different from many. I literally see it and sense it in ways others do not. Not in a "bright visual colours dancing across the room" kind of way. But in a half physical, half visual kind of sense.

 Sometimes I see two people interact and there's so much visual buzz and sensations around them due to their connection that I either get buoyed by that energy and can join in on the flow, or I get sensorily overwhelmed and can't keep up with the "standard" stuff I'm meant to pay attention to like words and body language AND the giant whirring energy surrounding the pair. 

 Other times I can enter a room of full pain and resentment and the underlying energy makes it difficult for me to breathe or to look at people. Some people in that room think I'm the weird one for not being able to socialise or maintain eye contact, but I can't understand what game everyone is playing cos the "elephant" is very literally right in front of our faces. It is a physical and visual experience for me, it is not a metaphor. 

When people don't see what I see

What I realise now is that in many instances people aren't actively trying to obscure the truth or deny my experience - they simply don't see it. 

What this means is that I'm there either pointing something out that takes them by surprise (which some people absolutely love and others get defensive around) or I'm waiting for them to acknowledge things that they simply don't connect with. And when that doesn't happen I get anxious because I then feel like I'm existing in a more confusing space than I realised. 

Just to be clear I'm not talking about people having "different points of view" or "different beliefs". I've always enjoyed exploring those differences with others and enjoy it when other people's thoughts and interpretations challenge my thoughts and interpretations. What I'm talking about is a very real, physical and visual, type of sense and experience around the layer of energy that connects or disconnects. 

Why having no visual or physical map is a challenge 

This brings me back to my starting place. One of the ways I have coped with the energy that surrounds connection is by grounding it in more "common" senses. When I first dated my girlfriend, going out in public was a challenge because she didn't like physical touch. The only way for me to not be overwhelmed by the energy between, us combined with the energy in a busy restaurant, is to be physically touching the people my connection is with. Otherwise the energy from other connections becomes distracting or I become overwhelmed by the situation. 

In addition, it's why going to familiar places is useful when I don't know what the energy dynamic is going to be. If I have to navigate seeing all of this unspoken energy AND navigate a strange environment it's a challenge. If my sense of place is secure then I can engage with the energy layer easily. 

When me and my partner were long distance living we had this huge gigantic energy connection which spanned across my world and his world. I could feel that connection running all through me and around me. But it was so big that in order to manage and cope with it I needed to visualise it alongside the physical world. But sometimes that would come up against a barrier. I didn't know what much of his physical world looked like. So when we were talking on the phone in his living room and his daughter and her mum were in the next room I couldnt ground our connection or their connections in physical space. They were all just floating there filling my senses. I had no visual map to place the connections on. And I had no way of touching him to be able to focus on the words he was saying. 

While my partner and I do lots of things like sending each other videos of the spaces we are in before we speak or text, this isn't always a viable option (I wasn't going to to get him to send me pictures of his date for instance). 

I don't yet know the answers for managing these scenarios where my experiences of connection need grounding. Or where I'm feeling and navigating the sense of energy that others aren't. But what I know is that having this clearer understanding around how I experience the world will enable me to be less anxious.

When I'm overwhelmed by something that others don't see, or overwhelmed by trying to navigate the many sensory layers I experience without having a visual map to place them on, I now have the words to explain to parts of my brain or to other humans that “I'm not a weirdo, I just experience things differently and that's okay”. And that it’s not that people are always keeping things secret from me or trying to ignore the obvious energy layer that’s present, it's that I get to know and experience these beautiful layers before others even know they exist.

7 things I've done this week that you might not associate with autism

Trigger warning: This post does mention suicidality and mental health. However it may give you a fresh lens on what it means to experience feelings of suicidality.

I’ve had many highs and lows as I’ve started to understand myself as autistic over the last year. But this week I had some profound realisations about what my brain can do when it’s allowed to operate in the way it was meant to, and the ways my body reacts when it’s not allowed to operate in the way it needs to. I’d love to hear if any of these resonate with other autistic or allistic people!

1. Drawn what I was trying to say

Sometimes I feel like the English language was not made for Autistic processing or experiences. I can often feel like I'm both in constant translation mode and that my words come out faster than I've processed what I actually mean.

When I draw scenarios, feelings or ideas it offers more nuance around what I'm actually trying to say. It tends to communicate my intentions and experiences more realistically and clearly. And it is far more soothing and reassuring for me than talking.

2. Looked up at an actual visual thought

Sometimes my face does ‘weird’ things that in the past people have been confused or disconcerted by. What this has meant is that I often mask my autistic tendencies so as not to make other people feel uncomfortable, and in turn that limits the way my brain works naturally and makes me worse at conversation/problem-solving/brainstorming etc. In contrast I love working with people like my partner and those I connect with via Collaborative Future because I mask less in conversations. And it meant that as myself and a co-facilitor, Joel, were planning a workshop this week I was able to freely say “one second”, physically look up at the intricate visual thought that was going on in my head and then communicate with more clarity on how we should run an exercise within the session.

3. Asked to be squeezed

I LOVE being squeezed. Not only does it regulate me in times of stress but it also gives me huge waves of sensory euphoria (sometimes I reckon my body enjoys squeezing more than most ‘normal’ people enjoy orgasms). Both my partners now know instinctively how to squeeze my arms when I’m feeling rejected, how to squeeze my body when I’m feeling overwhelmed, how to squeeze my head when I’m all in a muddle and it has absolutely transformed my daily life and my capacity to keep going with things.

4. Made eye contact

For years the stereotype of autistic people not making eye contact stopped me from ever actively exploring autism as an explanation for my experience of the world. However there are two completely opposing situations where I make eye contact regularly. The first is when I’m feeling deeply uncomfortable and like I need to look as “normal” as possible in order to get through a situation and where I need to be hyper aware of people’s facial expressions because I don’t yet know what all of someone’s behaviours/intonation mean. This happened at a kids birthday party this week and I was super overwhelmed by the end of it.

The second is when I’m deeply comfortable with someone and I can get lost in them or lost with them. If I know someone so well (and it can take a good year or so of continuous interaction to get to this point - and continuous questioning of what their facial expressions mean) then I can easily sit and look at them as we talk and enjoy losing the need to think about either of our faces and just hear the words.

5. Talked avidly about the intricacies of Music

One of my most enjoyable and energising moments this week was when my partner asked me how a piece of music would’ve been recorded. I could instantly visualise the recording studio that I used to go in when I was studying Music Technology as a teenager and could imagine all of the layers building up with the piece we were listening too. I also really enjoyed it when he asked me to make a very specific type of playlist for his gym sessions because I could explore a specific genre that I hadn’t been familiar with for a while, along with a direction and purpose that helped me narrow down what songs to include.

Understanding the importance of autistic special interests has been profound for me. There have been whole chunks of my life when I’ve ‘lost’ my special interests because others have seen it as unimportant or because work/relationships/children have taken over but spending a short amount of regular time building my energy & exhilaration in this way can have profoundly positive affects on my brain.

6. Been suicidal

On Monday I was seemingly suicidal. Even though I’m technically the happiest I've ever been. Living in an allistic world with an autistic mind is draining and confusing and has, I now realise, caused me an immense amount of cPTSD as a result. (I recently joked with my partner to share something "normal" and I'll tell them why it's triggering) I also wasn't able manage the signs of impending burnout and overload that were occuring for me so eventually they had to explode out of my skin and brain in a very vocal and physical way.

While someone with allistic communication and "typical" ways of rationalising situations would've seen no reason for feelings of suicidality in this moment, the physical pain and mental burden that I experience at these times can mean the only way of communicating the immenseness and intensity of it is through the idea of death and the act of self-harm.

This may sound strange to some but my partner and I actually concluded with our counsellor that in moments like that I need to be acknowledged (i.e. Yes that’s understandable that you feel that way) and then left to my own devices so that I can be comfortable doing whatever physical stimming I need to do. And in many cases it has been known to pass as rapidly as it came on. In the past this switch has left some people confused: how I can be suicidal one moment, causing them absolute devastation and out enjoying myself the next. It’s because I’m not depressed. I’ve had an intense autistic meltdown where those are the only words that come close to describing what I’m experiencing in that very moment, but once it’s been allowed to be released my body and brain feels liberated.

7. explored hundreds of pasts & futures in 15 minutes

I misheard something my partner said to me this week as a rejection of us and our life together, and as a result my brain spent time rapidly processing everything I’ve ever experienced in the past that was connected to that one sentence, and every possible route through ‘what next’ in order to problem-solve myself out of the situation. I only noticed the sheer amount of experiences and the level of detail that my brain thought through on response to this one sentence because it turned out I’d misheard and we had to go back and redo the conversation in order to unravel the image I’d built up in my head. Now we all do this at an unconscious level. The difference I find with autism (and likely trauma) is that it is happening at a conscious level and I can sometimes feel like I’m literally experiencing all of those past and future scenarios all at once. It was so intense that it rendered me mute. What it made me realise is that part of the reason I probably struggle with some “executive functioning” and social interactions is because the level at which my conscious brain is operating is off the chart. It’s processing so many layers all the time - which is great in some scenarios (like spotting the intricate team dynamics in my work around DEI & organisational culture) and awful at other times when my partner thought we were just going to have a basic conversation.