Over the many years of working with clients, whether it was helping to build a website or consulting a larger group, I began to notice a few trends in the folks I worked with:

• A high level of energy followed by an inability to focus
• Brilliance in creating new pathways to communicate
• An overwhelm of personal and professional responsibility
• Sensitivities to justice, changes and environments

It took me many years to understand that so many of these folks were just like me. I never lacked an inability to spark a new idea. In fact, I had helped launch many new projects however the maintenance of those projects bored me. This made me a great consultant, however the process of networking and sales brought me away from the silence I enjoyed in libraries and long-form writing. COVID happened and the way we interacted online changed. I oscillated between high peaks of creativity and the deep lows of overwhelm. My brain was constantly processing outcomes and also fatigued from trying to understand a world that I felt so different from.

While working at Harvard University, I had access to a boundless manmade resources: updated technology, recreation spaces and even a music rehearsal room during my lunch break. I was surround by neurodiverse minds and high achieving people who had never met a Puerto Rican in the midst of brutal winters and colonial gray houses. The intellectual stimulation felt great but my sense of meaning was lost. My friends were Caribbean curators and historians who brought color to ivy towers. I still had not yet defined how neurodiverse I was and how neurodivergent people aren’t just good at math but we are also great at watching birds and being a part of the wild. It wasn’t until years later that I re(dis)covered a sense of self.

In 2017 I rematrariated to my ancestral Puerto Rico where there are limited man-made resources on top of the aftermath of Hurricanes and natural disasters. It is home (for me) to the most beautiful beaches and mountains in the world. The streets are not cleaned regularly, roads are broken, buildings are in ruins and the library in the town that I live now has little and no books to explore and moldy walls. I couldn’t gamify my experience here the way I could in the Harvard village. Systems were failing and those in power were also failing the people. The highly curated environment of focus, exploration and observation at Harvard had transformed to the unpredictability of nature and living in the world’s oldest colony. This forced me to find stability and routine within myself which has been one of the most daunting and gratifying experience of my life.

I went a bit feral in this process to get back to a clear canvas. I learned how to surf and became a dog Mami. My dark brown hair was bleached in the sun. Journal entries that would document interpersonal reaction of societal conditions transformed into love letters to myself that I was still afraid to share with the world. I departed from the traditional styles of writing that I was trained in and I started to use shapes and collage. I began to remember how I would draw shapes and color my textbooks in order to memorize dates and concepts in middle school. I started to go full circle and reclaim what my inner child knew before the pressure of choosing a school and confirming to an idea of what both teenagehood and adulthood should look like in America. I studied myself and walked in nature. My animals would then teach me how to get out of surf and back to land.

When the lockdown ended, I had to find a way to share my inner world with my fellow humans. I was terrified yet slowly over time, neurodivergence became a way to connect with others while also holding the gruesome and beautiful details of my life close to me. I started releasing stories that had no audience but my own shame and anxieties. I started realizes that I was not lacking, but that I had been conforming to neurotypical ways of being as a way to survive. With my animals I could talk in song and make weird noise. While working from home I could stop typing and spin around the room or have a dance break without being told I was out of order or too hyper. I began to learn that outside of the power of my brain, I had a whole sensory world to explore.

I now know that I need both variety and routine to stay engaged. I need days walking barefoot on the soil and also I need to take myself out on a mall date and get blasted with AC and thick eyeliner. After so many years in the states, I began to see myself in my ancestral place while inviting the possibility of the future back into my life. I had to really see who I was and how I wanted to navigate through the world while appearing to be in shambles to friends who were still working companies and enjoying big bonuses. After surviving severe COVID, I realized I had experienced severe burnout in the gifted program to excellence pipeline and that it was time to ask go all in to work in a way that hold my brain, routine, and spontaneity. Through this process I began to see myself as a part of nature again and not separate from it and in doing so. I finally connected to peer support and realized there were many more ways in this world to provide for oneself and family that could prevent burnout.

From nature I learned a few things.

• Fear can be the moment where we are ready to push past the boundary, like with surfing, it doesn’t go away even as we progress but rather lets us know that we are living.
• It is not my time to disappear into the mountains, no matter how much I want to escape. A balance can be made and it’s my time to share with folks while tending my inner world becuase I am also the mountain.
• Sometimes you’re not depressed but you’re around assholes or you become so focused on perfecting your own inner journey that you become one. I am certainly not an asshole but I have departed from the mirror of narcisstic personalities that attach to neurodivergent ones.
• I have a personal responsibility to managing the flow between routine and adventure. Being the human to a cat and dog is the most exquisite manifestation of that. My Harvard sisters were surprised I got a dog before a cat because I too am cat and my dog is my sun ❤

That is all for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post. I will be writing weekly. Writing such an important practice in my life, so it storytelling. Here is one from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, an incredible and neurodiverse storytelling.

Enjoy!