Skip to main content

Updates

 My poetry chapbook was self-published earlier this year and can be found on Lulu, or anywhere else that books are sold. It is entitled Cracked Around the Edges, and contains poetry from the years 2015-2016 & 2019. It can be found anywhere from Amazon to Google Play store and Apple Store under the name Lily Maureen O'Nan.

I am currently also working on new poetry, an autie-ethnography, and a short story, along with doing a series of mixed media queer and kink-themed artwork. 

I have also been voraciously reading neurodiversity studies books, almost all of which have been written by Autistic authors themselves. I am currently on the book, Typed Words Loud Voices, and it is having an impact on how I view my own communication, as I find it much easier to communicate through text, so I have decided to make a concerted effort to employ text-to-speech AAC apps more in my daily life.

As far as gender goes, that has also become more intertwined with my neurodivergence as I now identify as a genderfluid transfeminine hypertwink and otherkin. The otherkin community, in particular, seems very welcoming of Autistics, as if there was not already often an intersection between autism and gender orientation/expression. My pronouns are they/them/their, ze/zim/zir, she/her/hers, and xe/xem/xyrs in that order of preference. I figured that if I cannot seem to stick to one gender identity, why not embrace multiple genders?

I am undergoing ketamine therapy for treatment resistant bipolar depression and trauma primarily, and that has also made a world of difference in my recovery process. While I know that I cannot recover from hardwired neurological queerness and wouldn't want to, it's nice to let some of the trauma and depression go. It seems that some of the anxiety is becoming more manageable as well.

I'm not sure what my original intentions were for this blog, but I'm going to try to keep updates going, so that people have a better idea of where I am coming from, and maybe the original intentions have changed, but the more I learn about the neurodiversity paradigm, the more my opinions change about a number of so-called psychological phenomena.

I am still going to university for psychology with a minor in studio art, and plan to get my master's degree in social work to become a therapist. I figured the minor in art might be beneficial to including art therapy in my repertoire and more interactive and humanistic therapy approaches for neurodivergent individuals seeking therapeutic services (and it's important that they be seeking them of their own volition). In the meantime, I have put in an application to get licensed as a community health worker and certified recovery specialist.

I will be finishing my associate degree in social science and starting my bachelor's degree in psychology this fall (in less than a month). I will be taking the required math and health class, along with human sexuality. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Updates

 Since yesterday, I have decided to use a text-to-speech AAC app for secondary communication after reading a majority of Typed Words Loud Voices. I now know that there are many different ways to communicate, including AAC and writing, which I had not thought about the latter. I have always found it much easier to express myself in written words, as I have apraxia of speech. My thoughts do not always connect well to my mouth, so I often impulsively spout out jumbled words with my speaking voice. The only thing I don't like about AAC is that it takes a little bit longer to respond to someone, but if my speech is already inefficient sometimes, it comes in handy. I have also reached page 30 in my autie-ethnography/memoir and wrote a majority of it yesterday. I had my ADHD meds increased recently, and I can definitely tell a difference in my productivity. Before my increase, I was primarily just reading, but now I am also back to writing and making artwork. I would like to eventually ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trauma Response on the Poet's Stage

 Last night I attended an event locally entitled Poetry Speaks, and it was a celebration of the life of the late Bill Sovern. I have known him since I was 15, and he gave me a stage to read poetry at a young age. The last performance of his that I attended when he was alive was over a decade ago, long before I started transitioning, and he made a comment about Jack Kerouac (likely in relation to my poetry style), and I took offense to it, although I should have taken it as a compliment since I was a voracious reader of the Beats and fashioned my early poetry after them, especially Kerouac. So, that was the last time I performed while he was still alive, but I had planned to start going to more poetry events since the publishing of my book, Cracked Around the Edges, and he tragically passed in a car wreck before I had a chance to read any of it to him. Well, going to Poetry Speaks last night was surreal. It was the loudest and most emotional poetry reading I have ever attended durin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mirror-touch Synesthesia & the "Empath"

 I personally do not like or adhere to the term "empath," but I believe I have figured out the explanation for this phenomenon, which I do experience. It's specifically called mirror-touch synesthesia, and is also related to mirror-pain synesthesia and mirror-emotion synesthesia, which I spoke of at an earlier time. Studies show that mirror-touch synesthetes experience heightened levels of empathy because, in addition to feeling at least an echo of another person's pain, many of us also feel their emotions as if they were our own. This sounds an awful lot like the horrific pop psychology term, "empath," but most people attribute it to a supernatural phenomenon if they're not lying about it, rather than a Neurodivergence. It's a lesser known type of synesthesia, but I experience mirror-touch, as well as more "traditional" types of synesthesia where many of my senses blend together. I was actually misdiagnosed with schizoaffective because I d...
Post a Comment
Read more