I took a summer break from hosting public events, but continued to observe the full moon on my own. I collaborated with my friends to make a Full Moon Kit to inspire ideas for anyone else who also wanted to celebrate the full moon.

One of the names for this moon is the Wort, or herb moon, as it was a time when people would gather herbs for drying. Gathering the herbs under the full moon was said to infuse them with extra potency, so my friend and I combined herbs from our gardens into one herb-laden pizza pie for when the moon hit our eyes.

It was a beautiful evening for conversations and contemplations as the moon rose above the pond. I pull inspiration from other moon names and a list of shared human needs to select a theme, and for this moon, that theme was harmony. This also happened to be the word I picked for myself for this year. Rather than make resolutions, at the end of each year I reflect on where I felt most alive, where I struggled, and identify one word I want to cultivate to address this in the new year.

Last year, I found myself in the middle of many strong personalities with very different and often conflicting opinions on how things should be done. And while I’m a strong believer in the need for different perspectives in an adaptive ecosystem, I found myself questioning where things stopped being complimentary and became contradictory.

One example of this was when I decided to launch an Ann Arbor chapter of a networking event called Creative Mornings. A local newspaper called to interview me on the new event, and I can’t help but laugh when I read my optimistic quotes - “I don’t want to dictate or tell people prescriptively what we should do.”

I was enraptured with the idea of deconstructing top-down hierarchal structures where one person dictated what was best for many. I remember having a conversation in a kitchen with a few chefs about my ideas, and one of them warned me of historical examples where lack of leadership left societies vulnerable to exploitation by individuals with self serving agendas. The warning flew over my head, and I formed a committee where I invited anyone who had expressed interest in helping with the event. Suddenly, I had a table full of creatives who all had strong ideas that often conflicted with each other. For example, many creatives wanted the event to be held at a location that had a parking lot and was more accessible to the neighboring town of Ypsilanti, where most artists actually lived due to affordability. Other creatives strongly felt it should be held downtown, hoping to recreate the vibrant energy from their times living in places like New York City.

I struggled to balance conflicting desires, and spent hours fielding phone calls when individuals felt steamrolled by other people’s agendas. Later, when consulting experienced leaders in the community, they laughed when I told them about the committee I had created, and I realized I had set myself up for failure from the start.

I found inspiration in a quote from my friend Danny Akaka, a musician who once told me “unity is diversity in harmony,” much like the notes of a chord. I imagined the downtown group to be the G,B, and D notes of a G chord. And the accessible gatherings group to be the C, E, and G notes of a C chord. Every group did have to start with a few leading shared values and goals, among other things. They needed to have self awareness of what note they were, and what chord they were trying to form together. Shared values provide a point of agreement to bring people together when there are conflicts and a place to restore connection when it is strained.

Personally, I aligned with the accessible location where people didn’t have to worry about finding and paying for downtown parking. I also realized there was plenty of space for people who wanted to create downtown vibrancy to organize their own events. Multiple chords can exist in the same song of a town. I also realized the value of taking time to build trust and establish shared values with collaborators before jumping into something larger together.

In my last field note, I reflected on how my garden is teaching me pruning for people pleasers, as I recover from the impacts of my religious upbringing, which prompted a series of interesting conversations. One person in my extended family shared how their own experiences with Focus on the Family literature had also left them second guessing themselves, and surprisingly, my own mother called to share how her own perspective had shifted since my childhood. I hadn’t really thought much about the perspectives of the parents who had raised their children under these principles.

I struggled to find the happy and harmonious space between my failed experiment at a “ground-up” gathering and my “top-down” controlling upbringing. To me, these strict religious influencers from my childhood represented the very thing I had been trying to create an antidote to - a patriarchal top-down system where people were not allowed to think for themselves.

Ultimately, my ducks provided me with additional perspective. I put ducks next to my garden in hopes of them hypothetically removing bugs from my tomato plants, but when I first let them in, they huddled under the tomatoes and did nothing. We spent hours removing the hornworms and potato beetles by hand, and sprayed everything with an organic pest control.

But over the last couple months, the ducks have started getting more confident. I spent more time with them, feeding them treats, and sitting with them, and others did the same. And on the morning following the full moon, I coerced them to take a bite of watermelon I was holding - the closest they have willingly come to a human yet.

Suddenly, as if empowered, they dove into the potato plants, excitedly chirping, and I realized they were digging up the larvae of the potato beetles. I had read ducks were excellent for this, but up until this point, they hadn’t so much as looked at the potatoes. But as they felt safer, they became more comfortable exploring and discovered their natural place in the garden. Previously, potato beetles had quickly repopulated the plants, but it has now been several weeks without a beetle sighting.

In the song of life, every note has a place, but sometimes we need time and a safe space to discover who we are, where we are, and how those things fit together.

Today, my connection with the divine is much different from my childhood. For a long period, I was antagonistic towards religion, and then agnostic, at best. Nowadays, I feel the closest I have ever felt to the divine - because my connection is not founded in fear of hellfire, but rather in appreciation and awe for the world that surrounds me.

I recently had the pleasure of observing a family who is religious and reminded me very much of my own upbringing, except their children had joy in their eyes, rather than fear. I realized that in their upbringing, religion was serving the purpose it had been meant to, unlike mine.

And it got me wondering if perhaps religion is not unlike a cookbook. When I think about my friends who are chefs, most spent years following cookbooks to learn the principles of combining elements, and now they are so experienced in that muscle that they can intuitively improv on the foundational knowledge of their ancestors to create their own renditions of recipes that integrate their own unique relationship to the ingredients and what is growing around them.

And when I look at religions, I see many similarities in basic principles and traditions and lore, but each reflects their own unique region, and evolved over time. And as cultures mesh and people travel, many religions blend and evolve. But much like cookbooks, they all reflect similar principles - rituals and methods for combining the elements around you in a collaborative way to nourish the community. Every religion has evolved from cultural traditions of gathering and observing the natural world, where the divine expresses itself most prominently. Through this lens, I have started to wonder if even the practice of science itself, studying nature, is not just another evolution on the foundation of religion, that started as a study of nature. And yet now, many people find themselves extremely polarized as they fight to define their group as the holders of the ultimate truth. But one of my favorite cornbread recipes was created by my friend Parisa, who blends her foundational knowledge of a variety of cultural recipes with the current inspirations around her.

And so now I find myself wondering how one could build on the good parts of the foundational knowledge our ancestors have left us, while finding harmony in new blends of herbs to connect with our environment as the world evolves.

To understand how this impenetrable jungle came to be, I have to back up a little first.

This spring, I decided I wanted to be a farmer. Well, kind of.

I am part of what I like to call the growing group of “homestead hopeful” or “country curious” folks.

I mastered all the gateway drugs - backyard chickens, kombucha, and even (gluten-free) sourdough. And still, I wanted more.

In my idyllic world, I rotated ruminant animals through pastures while my flock of chickens followed behind to pick through the bugs and further distribute nutrients. I would grow an entire years worth of food in my garden and store it in my earthen cellar (hobbit door optional). Ideally, there would also be a space for retreats and country co-working during the day where remote workers could take brain breaks in the garden with the ducks and pick fresh herbs and flowers to take home for their dinners.

Something like that.

I had all the dreams, but none of the land. So, I started asking around. Someone agreed to rent me a garden area, but when I went to start planning, we found it still occupied by the prior tenant. Then, I heard of another, larger space that might be open. I hunted down the woman who owned that farm, who was out of state for a family emergency, but we started working out an arrangement over the phone. My friend Greta was also interested in farming, and we decided to collaborate on the venture. We both immediately planted a bunch of tomato and pepper starts indoors to make sure we would have enough for our garden. Greta found an old Victory Garden pamphlet from post WWII that made it seem easy.

You can grow a year’s supply of food with just a few hours of work per week, the pamphlet promised. “Maybe we can do this after all,” we sighed with relief.

But circumstances prevented the farmer from returning to Michigan, and after a month of planning, we realized her land was not going to work out either.

We were back to square zero, only now we were the parents to dozens of tomato starts that were quickly outgrowing their small flats.

I went back to the drawing board, and after a few weeks I secured permission to garden a 20’x20’ plot overgrown with thistle and willow.

Weeding was a lot harder than anticipated, especially with vicious thistle and willow roots that never seemed to end.

We put the willow to use in mapping out and extending the height of our fencing.

During the weeding process, we discovered so many earthworms, we couldn’t find it in our hearts to till the soil up, so I mulched pathways and added compost to the beds. Greta had to leave town after the weeding and fencing process, so I agreed to take on the planting process. The problem was, we had planned for a much larger garden area, and when our plant starts were combined, we had 75 tomato plants and 25 pepper plants. The Victory Garden plan advised spacing tomato plants generously.

But when I smelled the sweet fragrance of the baby tomato plants, I couldn’t bring myself to kill any of them. Which is how we ended up with 100 tomato and pepper plants packed so tight Uncle Sam would be shaking his head at us.

As summer progressed, Greta brought the lessons she was learning while volunteering at another farm to our garden, and we began staking and pruning tomatoes, save one area we thought was determinate tomatoes.

As it turned out, they were not determinate, but by the time we realized this, things had already gotten gnarly. And in a garden already tightly packed, the area might harbor mold and rot that could threaten the rest of our plants.

So last week, we made the decision to start aggressively pruning the area, which at this point meant cutting branches laden with tiny green tomatoes.

“You’re either growing tomato plants, or you’re growing tomatoes,” Greta repeated the advice of the farmer she had been volunteering with.

A tomato plant will put out as many leaves as it can and try to create as many seeds as possible, without any concern for the quality of the fruit. Pruning away the extraneous branches allows for air flow and helps the plant put it’s energy into creating healthy, vibrant fruit, which is especially important in a crowded bed where nutrients are limited. But every slice felt like a slit to my heart as I watched the beautiful branches fall to the ground.

Greta and I have been calling this our gut garden, because we are both focusing on tuning more into our gut this year. I grew up in an evangelical background where scriptures were weaponized to subserviate feminine energy for the patriarchal purposes of enforcing a fear-based heirarchy.

Fueled by religious influencers like The Institute in Basic Life Principles or No Greater Joy Ministries, there is a wave of recovering millennials who grew up in households influenced by organizations that claimed you had to follow a heirarchy of divine authority, or risk hell. In this world, women exist for the purpose of serving men, and are supposed to blindly follow the directions of men as divinely appointed messengers of God. These teachings urged women to submit to anything a man said, even if it meant committing a crime, or letting your husband abuse your children. In this world, a woman thinking for herself or having gut feelings was the devil speaking. In my childhood, I had to wear a head covering to symbolize that I was under the authority of man, who was my head, and God was his head.

It wasn’t until much later that I discovered the ways religion has been historically repurposed as a tool to create a caste system against women, and I am still working to learn how to listen to my gut after years of conditioning to ignore it.

“Everyone says listen to your gut, but I never know if it’s my good gut or my bad gut,” I complained to Greta, as I snipped away at the tomato foliage.

We were discussing areas in our life where we were trying to decide what to do. As a conditioned people pleaser, who has been programmed to attune to the needs of everyone else, it’s hard to know sometimes what to prioritize. Which in my life, has led to me pouring a lot of energy into branches that sucked all of my energy without nourishing me.

In the last year, I’ve learned to prune things in my own life, and focus more on the fruit that feels most authentic to my life, but many of these snips are painful. The more energy I pour into something, the harder it is to step away, following the sunk cost fallacy.

And as I clipped a branch laden with green tomatoes, I remarked that it wouldn’t be so hard if I had trimmed the sucker when it was young, before the tomato had put all this energy into growing such a fat stem. I wondered if some of the things in my own life would have been less painful to trim if I had removed them the second I started to feel unease, instead of letting it fester.

You have to give yourself grace, Greta reminded me, it’s all part of the process. And in many ways, we wouldn’t be the people we were if it weren’t for all the things we’ve experienced. In the same way, we reflected that while we’ve enjoyed volunteering and learning at other people’s farms, it’s also been really helpful to have a little garden of our own, where we can make all the mistakes and find the right way for us.

And when we have farms of our own, we will know where we want to prioritize our energy, and why, not based on what somebody else told us, but based on our own lived experiences, including all the mistakes - no - maybe decisions is the right word, that we made in our little gut garden.

Last fall, I took a short writing course from an author I admire. The form was a series of weekly emails delivered to your inbox along with a short video. He promised he would give personal feedback on your essay at the end, so I submitted my essay, and held my breath. The feedback arrived a week later:

I was, in fact, quite disappointed.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I wanted feedback.

The whole point of signing up for the class was feedback.

I wanted him give me the secret sauce: tell me how I can be like you.

So I replied and said you can use my story, but would you be willing to trade me an hour of consultation in return?

My problem, I explained, is I can write things that are totally for myself, or strictly for others, as in marketing and journalism, but there’s not much of me in it. How do you manage to blend the two to share a bit of yourself while also connecting with others?

“Of course,” he said, so we set a date on his calendar.

Growing up homeschooled, my parents taught me the basics of phonics and spelling and from there on out, I was mostly a free-range writer. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized not all of my siblings spent their childhoods hiding journals, it was something I just assumed we all did. I was constantly driven to express my thoughts on paper. No sooner had I done so then I immediately felt the need to hide my pile of word vomit. But even as I ran out of space to hide my notebooks, like a duck in water, I couldn’t stop my hand from writing.

The day of the consultation arrived, the secrets of the universe about to be revealed.

“How do you connect your writing with a greater audience?” I asked.

“Well my wife is my editor, so maybe marry an editor?” he said.

He’s a humor writer, so I wasn’t sure if he was being serious or making a joke. But I’ve been following him long before he met his wife, so I knew he has been persistently putting his thoughts out in the world even without a wife.

These were not the great secrets of the universe I was seeking.

“What do you admire about my writing?” He queried.

“I admire that it’s imperfect,” I said, “and I mean that in a good way. You’re honest, whimsical and have interesting insights, but reading your writing feels life a conversation with a friend rather than a lofty oration.”

“What do you think is preventing you from putting yourself out there?” he asked.

Honestly, I didn’t know.

He gave me some other words of wisdom and wit, and then we parted ways.

I sat on the question and thought about it. I realized there had been a period where I was publishing blogs sharing my personal experiences. I didn’t have a large subscription list, but I enjoyed doing it, and then my father died. Shortly after, I stopped sharing personal blogs. There was a lot of trauma surrounding his death, as well as his life. And where I had been freely sharing my thoughts, the things now dominating my mind were the things I couldn’t speak on, so I stopped altogether. I found myself so caught up in what others were thinking, I no longer felt free to express my own thoughts, afraid of it not being good enough. My fear of imperfection, the very thing I admired in this writer, was the thing holding me back.

Last summer, my friend Parisa Soraya invited me to a writing group of about five people. I wrote about the complications of my father for the first time in that group. I shared it in the small group, and in that moment it was enough. It was far more cathartic than putting it under my mattress. I realized that I didn’t have to write for the world, writing for five people was enough. As our group shared our writings with each other, we all felt more seen and less alone.

I was also part of a script writing group at that time, and together we worked through our ideas. I had a short film I had started with my group of improv friends, and they provided feedback as I fleshed out the rest of the script. Through the course of last year, I watched my group bring their scripts to life on film while my script sat on my laptop. The group was incredibly supportive, and my friend Heather Turman even offered to direct my script, and her wife offered to be the narrator. Both were established in the field, but as we talked through it, something didn’t feel right to me. Would my script reach a larger audience? Undoubtedly. But also with the heightened level of production, there wouldn’t be the same space to explore without worry of perfection. But mostly, I had started the idea with my improv friends, and I wanted to finish it with them. So I decided to make the film for free, with my friends, in a simpler way. Heather was a relentless cheerleader for me putting my ideas out there, however felt right to me, and she hung out while we shot it for one day over the holidays. And then, I put it on youtube. I shared it with my friends. They laughed. The film festivals rejected it. But for some reason, I felt deeply satisfied. The day after I finished it, I sat down and outlined an entire script for another short fictional story. It felt as if I had been creatively constipated, and once the block was removed, the backlog of ideas had started to flow again.

My friend who played the lead in the film came to one of my full moon celebrations, and some of my friends recognized her. “You’re Claudia!” they exclaimed. In the larger world, we were unknown, but that night she was a celebrity, and we shared a lovely evening of laughter and music and stories. In that moment, I realized the process was the pleasure, and my work doesn’t have to be for more than a few people to be worth sharing.

In a world run by algorithms, politicians, and press, an increasingly smaller number of people decide whose voices are worthy of being heard. And as few voices get louder, the collective gets quieter, as people no longer feel their personal stories and experiences matter.

One of the most rewarding parts of hosting my full moon storytelling circles at Root Camp has been watching quiet people who don’t consider themselves “storytellers” sharing their moments of delight, whether it’s in a recipe, a plant, or an experience.

My short story, inspired by this process, is written from the perspective of a Muse - the mythological creature that feeds divine inspirations. I imagined a world where each human, called a seeker, has a Mentor and a Muse. The Muse, represented by the gut, feeds you divine inspirations only you can bring to the world. The Mentor, represented by the head, helps you refine it for the world outside of you.

In this world, I imagined the Muse shows up to happy hour after work with her other Muse coworkers, frustrated because her seeker is in her head, only listening to the Mentor. As a result, the Muse is feeling the weigh of carrying around a backlog of unexpressed ideas. As they converse, another muse expresses jealousy.

“At least your seeker listens to their mentor,” she states, “I feed mine so many wonderful divinations, but she throws them out into the world without concern for what anyone else needs, and my divinations never reach their full potential.”

This has become my process of late in creating. I start by exploring what sparks me, sheltering the soft voice of my Muse from the previously loud voice of my Mentor. Once she has spoken I then invite the Mentor in to refine, and then I test it out. After trying a small thing, I see what resonates and what doesn’t, both for myself and for the people I care about. The process inspired me to write a poem:

I named this blog Field Notes of A Whimsic, inspired by this idea of blending the spark of whimsy with the philosphy of stoicism. I’ll continue to share my field notes as I experiment with this process of creating, and I would love to hear what parts resonated and your own experiences and stories.

Your story doesn’t need to be read by a hundred people to be worth sharing, the fact that it’s a unique piece of yourself that you have curated for people you care about is enough. As for this blog. it was written for my friends who have given me space to feel like my stories mattered and find my voice again.

It was a seemingly innocuous question, posed by the bank teller at the drive-through as she glanced back at myself and my other siblings in the back of the van.

My ten year old face lit up with hope. Why yes, yes - we would love some lollipops.

My dad’s face lit up as well.

“You know, actually…” he began.

Oh no.

I shrank down behind the van bench in front of me. “Just say no,” I pleaded in my head.

It was too late.

My father dove into a monologue on how our family had stopped getting colds after we eliminated processed sugar from our diets. As he droned on, the teller’s eyes rolled back in her head almost as far as the drive-through line creeping out onto the main road behind us.

Every few weeks, a new article comes out on the current loneliness epidemic. Growing up, my parents had never heard of such a thing. I wished my parents were lonely.

Heading out the door to run errands with my parents, I had to resist the urge to wrap some overnight provisions in a little handkerchief and tie it to the end of a stick. It didn’t matter if they were running into a friend or conversing with a stranger, the chatting would drag on for what seemed like a century. When they finished the final knee-slapping “welp” of their midwest goodbye, I would rise shakily from my seat on the floor, brushing imaginary grey hairs from my face as my creaking bones struggled to find my feet.

These days, I deposit checks on my mobile app, my childhood woes alleviated by our modern day conveniences. But the other day, I went to the bank in person to open a new account. The teller peered at me down the hollows of the hallway, startled to see a live human. As we started talking, I learned he struggled to find a job in his desired field after the pandemic messed with his internship plans, so he gave up on pursuing that path. I found myself biting my tongue resisting the urge to launch into a little good old fatherly advice, and we chatted it up a bit as he talked through his frustrations.

As I walked away from the conversation, I felt a little hit of endorphins from the exchange with a human instead of a machine. And I couldn’t help but wonder if all these inconveniences we’ve eliminated were actually connections.

I used to pride myself in being independent, which is ironic because we are more reliant on other people than ever before. Everything I am using, from the walls around me to the computer I’m typing on, required thousands of people’s contributions. The hunter-gatherers relied on the 30 people in their band. Today I rely on the village of Amazon and Apple, fueled by millions of people. Yet the digital divide of our modern day conveniences has separated us from the flesh and blood that enables our lives, creating the illusion of independence.

We don’t have to talk to people anymore. Instead, we can have food delivered off our phone and then sit and watch shows of people making food. In the past, bumping into a person in the wild was a way to meet a potential partner. Now, we can use a dating app to order a person like a pizza, and then sit on the couch together and watch a tv show about people dating.

And while at first it seemed great, the stats on our collective wellbeing and mental health give me pause. We’ve replaced the ‘sex’ of hanging out with the porn of scrolling their social media pages, and take a pill because we are sad and lonely and wonder why we don’t have any new “friendship babies” in our communities. In the world’s longest-running study of happiness, relationships were the strongest predictor of well-being, but it wasn’t just romantic partners and family. It was also the relationships we had with our wider community like the grocer, or the banker. Every smile exchanged or door held contributes to a feeling of communal well being.

When I first moved home to Michigan, I was living in Ann Arbor while working remotely for a company in Minneapolis. For the first time, I found myself physically separated from the community I was working with. And while I enjoyed the convenience and autonomy it allowed me to create periods of deep, uninterrupted focus I needed, I started to feel lethargic and restless, like a forgotten houseplant. A plant originally designed to be part of a larger network, sharing an underground network of roots and exchanging nutrients and support with the other living organisms around them. And while I had the artificial light and fertilizer of zoom meetings, I found myself pacing the floor of my home office craving more.

I started volunteering at a local co-working space, where I found countless others like me, craving the day to day interactions we had so gleefully surrendered at first. I started collaborating with the space to create rituals like Flock, a mid-week coffee check-in to share highlights and struggles from the week (the name was inspired from watching my own chickens hanging out together). I organized a series of field trips for adults, like a drunk history tour of the pubs of Ann Arbor, or tea time with a local business owner. The more I organized, the longer distances people started driving to join. Some began planning their trips into town around rituals like Flock.

As people started coming to me with their own ideas for programs, I decided to start a community committee with a general call to action: create the community you want to see. When we gathered for our first meeting, I asked, “what do you want people to feel?” and then “what are your ideas to make this happen?”

As they shared ideas for cultivating connection, I encouraged people with similar goals to start small and work together, and over the next six months we grew both our initiatives and the committee. At the end of the experiment, many of them reported the most rewarding part was the bonds formed while collaborating on a project with another person in their physical community.

I realized people weren’t just missing connection, they were missing culture. It’s not enough to combat the disconnection by putting an event on the calendar. There are countless events listed in the local paper with few meaningful connections made, and despite the slew of lonely people, I’ve talked to many third spaces struggling to get those people in the door.

In the past, religions and the workplace provided a cultural framework for people to deepen bonds through shared values, stories, rituals, and experiences. And with lower participation in both the religious and workplace culture, the digital world has started to fill the culture gap with shared rituals like doomscrolling. Personally, I find the most satisfaction in cultures that combine 3 P’s:

• people

• purpose

• pleasure

Happy hours and adult recreational sports leagues gave me people and pleasure, but little purpose. My remote job provided purpose with people, but without the pleasure. Each interaction was a scheduled meeting, with a scheduled purpose. Those unplanned, in-person exchanges with your banker or co-worker added a level of fun and frivolity to a purposeful exchange.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss the days of Kirby vacuum salesman. I don’t want to deliver my letters by stagecoach, or roam the suburbs hunting for sustenance. And perhaps the shift away from traditional religious and workplace cultures reflects a rejection of systems that no longer work the way they were intended to.

Change is part of life, but how can we use the new tools at our disposal to fill the gap with a new culture of connection?

This month, I launched a new experiment called Root Camp. Root camp is a social club designed to spark conversations that deepen ties in my community. I’m starting by hosting a collaborative storytelling circle and a down-to-earth dinner with a handful of like-minded collaborators. Not everything I’ve tried so far has worked, but every experiment is useful information to inform the next attempt, and I hope the stories are useful for others trying similar things.

As a child, one of the first stops on my father’s weekend errands was to our local hardware store, where they gave away buttery bags of popcorn every Saturday morning. Free popcorn was his excuse, but he would inevitably end up talking shop with the staff about his upcoming projects for the weekend while I measured the length of the aisles with my shoes.

When my father died several years ago, my stepmother went to the bank to close out his accounts. When she gave them his name, every teller’s eyes lit up.

“He used to come in every Saturday morning to cash his checks,” they told her with big smiles, “he always brought us bags of popcorn and new stories.”

When she relayed the anecdote to me, there was no doubt in my mind where that popcorn had come from.

While I have since learned to take big bites, small talk remains a struggle. Often in large groups who have mastered the art of small talk, I sit and listen, resisting the urge to drop conversational bombs. As it turns out, when people are laughing about the Monday blues, they don’t want to dive into a reflection on how the Gregorian calendar defies natural patterns, or wonder what life was like before capitalism invented the concept of time as something that could be bought and sold rather than a simple state of existence.

No no, I’ve learned my lesson. Now, I just smile and say “haha ugh I am so feeling those Sunday scaries,” and then look away, unsure of what to say next. But I have also realized, if I get sucked into deep conversations for too long, my brain wags heavy. Being around masters of small talk has helped lighten my mental load of deep thoughts and lean into the delights of everyday life.

And I wonder if the differences between masters of small talk and those who struggle is just part of what makes a community an adaptable ecosystem. Comedian Mike Vecchione has a theory that successful marriages are the ones where one person is boring, and the other is crazy. I have a theory that anybody can be crazy when put in the right situation.

The other day, I presented some of these thoughts while doing standup comedy, and I polled the room: are you crabbier when you are sleep deprived, or when you are food deprived? The room was equally split in half, supporting my theory that there are two types of people - the snackers and the nappers. Some of the most successful couples have one of each. In a situation of singular deprivation, at least there is one person to hold down the fort while the other goes crazy. Personally, I’m the friend that always brings snacks. I can survive off limited sleep for days, but if I go two hours without food I can’t think straight. My ABS system is Always Be Snacking.

As I get older, I see biographies of people who are doing things I admire, and I feel like everybody who achieved great things had inclinations of greatness from an early age, and I feel like I’ve missed my window to do anything of meaning with my life. Once, I had a friend tell me “Liz, I love hanging out with you because you’re so awkward. It makes me feel ok being awkward.” And I realized, if being weird is my life’s calling, I actually am a child prodigy of weird.

Crust curation aside, I was also homeschooled K-12 and spent my childhood milking goats, adorned in a long homesteader dress and headcovering that would make the modern trad wife movement proud. In those days, homesteading wasn’t cool, so public outings drew a lot of stares. My dad had said we were called by the Lord to be a peculiar people - at least I was able to live up to one of his expectations.

Fast forward to the part where I opted out of betrothal and went to college and got a degree in education. My very first day in grade school was as a Special Education teacher. And I realized that while I could shed my headcovering, I couldn’t shed my weird. They sent me all the kids who didn’t want to sit still, and I thought “lady, neither do I.” I had spent my childhood running around on the farm, and it boggled my mind that movement was only acceptable as a form of recreation. Movement used to just be part of everyday life. For me, it was baling hay and chasing escaped farm animals. For my ancestors, it was hunting food, or trying not to become food. Now, we spend ten minutes driving around trying to find the closest parking stall so we don’t have to walk five minutes to the gym to get on the treadmill. Imagine how much more motivating it would be if your strava said “Congratulations, you ran six miles AND escaped a pack of velociraptors!"

And what would have happened if the early homosapiens had punished their children that didn’t want to sit still? I imagine the dad grimacing as he shakes a bone admonishingly:

“Neanderthal Junior, why are you always running around hunting and gathering? What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just sit still in the cave and look at petroglyphs like your brother Todd? He’s been staring at that outline of a woolly mammoth for three hours. Have a gold star, Todd.”

Speaking of neanderthals, a recent study found genes associated with autism in their brains. These genes are associated with stronger visual processing, nerding out on details, and pattern recognition but weaker activity in networks tied to social interaction. Maybe neanderthals also hated small talk and wanted to just get things done. The cool thing is how these newer studies can help us understand these traits and how they were helpful as a natural feature, not a flaw.

But as a teacher, my job was to change the features of children that didn’t fit the system. In one of my graduate classes, a professor told us if a parent is resistant to testing or medication, we could give the child Mountain Dew and observe if it calmed them down. Another mentor told me one of the students needed to be medicated. He rarely sat still for more than a few minutes, and his writing was all over the place, chaotic scribbles. But when I let him disregard the standard writing prompt and write about his favorite monster trucks, he read me back a story full of vivid details, his eyes flashing. One day he came into the classroom, eyes glazed like a donut. He sat down and wrote a few sentences replying to the standard prompt of the day, handwriting as neat as could be but lacking the previous imagination. Other teachers celebrated his new medication as a success. For some reason, I felt sick.

It wasn't just the crushing of their brains that disturbed me, it was the crushing of their souls. A third grader, who I will call Matthew, was one of the most creative children I worked with. His pictorial responses to prompts had incredible original humor and wit, but when he went to write letters, they came out backwards.

When I sat in the IEP meeting with his care team and parents, the mom would cry and the dad felt frustrated because their child was doing so poorly in school. But everyone was looking at the arbitrary letters that said A for you are worthy, and D for you are a failure, because his skillset didn’t match the ones prioritized by the system.

He was promised a trip to a battleship museum if he achieved 80% on his spelling test. Matthew studied hard, tracing shapes and singing the songs until he wrote each word correctly. But when the test started, he began breathing heavily, his fingers shaking with trepidation. Everything he had practiced went out the window. I am not sure who was more heartbroken by his grade, me or him. I wanted to give him an A for his brilliant mind. I was frustrated at the system that was forcing me to take a duck out of the water to climb trees until he was mediocre at everything. His achievements were being measured by a ruler that had been created for a different type of brain.

I wondered how my own brain and self worth would have fared in a traditional school. I spent hours running around the farm, and could be quite scattered. I’m still a bit scattered to this day, not unlike being a magician playing tricks on myself. My knack for making my car keys disappear prompted the addition of an apple air tag. Instead of ‘pick a card, any card,’ it’s ‘pick a browser tab, any tab,’ because at any given time I have 46 of them open. The other day I went to open a private google document and saw a colored cursor blinking in my document and panicked. “Who is in my private document?” It was then I realized it was me in the three other instances of it that I already had opened. But once I find something I’m interested in, I can spend hours locked into a deep dive. As a child, this manifested as reading an entire book from cover to cover in one sitting, often opting to skip core necessities like food or the bathroom rather than break my focus.

“Why is everybody suddenly neurodivergent?” my friend asked the other day. Both of us knew people suddenly announcing they were “AUDHD,” a combination of Autism and ADHD. For some, this label seems to come with a sigh of relief, like “thank god, this explains why I’m like this.” And I can appreciate the ways that building tools for my students taught me how to build tools for my own brain.

My only concern about the increasing neurodivergent labels is the framing of these differences as a disadvantage. Autism Spectrum Disorder. Attention Defecit Hyperactivity Disorder.

What if it wasn’t about understanding what’s wrong with your brain, but what is right? And then equipping ourselves with tools to become our best version of the person we were made to be?

We live in a society that has looked at the rainbow of brains and said “Ok, red and blue are the only “normal” colors.” And so we created educational systems and work systems that are built for those types of brains. But if your brain is yellow, you feel weird and depressed and anxious because you don’t know why you are so terrible at fitting into systems that were built for red brains.

In a Cambridge study, it found that dyslexic minds have heightened abilities in other areas necessary for exploration and problem solving. These findings were presented through the lens of “Complimentary Cognition,” a theory that our brains evolved with varying strengths that improve human adaptability through collaboration. In other words, we need to be different, together.

What if the labels were more of a system like “Congratulations! You have a yellow brain, that’s wonderful and has so many great things to add to the world. Here are the tips for how to be the best yellow you can be and blend with the needs of the other colors to create a complimentary rainbow.” What if labels for brains were more like a hex color code for your unique combination of colors?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but weirdness is in the brain of the cultural architect. We need the snack people to wake the nappers up when the velociraptors are coming, and the sleepy people invented brunch for the snackers. And with the rise of AI, perhaps this is a good time to look at making it ok to move again. In a time when everything is being turned on its head, how can we build new systems that nurture an adaptable human ecosystem?