When I started a morning journaling practice called “morning pages” a few years ago — from Julia Cameron’s beautiful book The Artist’s Way — I wanted to unblock my creative energy.

Shortly after starting the morning pages, I started to feel the embers of long forgotten artwork in my past. I used to cherish art in many forms. In my first year of high school, I was acting, singing in a band, writing poetry, and doing illustration work for our local band community. I had a sketchbook on me at all times. Drawing was my outlet for feelings I couldn’t express in words, and words were my channel for the imagery I couldn’t draw. Creating gave me agency, and connection to my peers. Through theatre I was connecting to my community. Through music, I was channeling the emotions deemed inappropriate by society. Rage, sorrow, joyful exuberance. My art gave my feelings a place to live in the world.

I was also a scared teenager. I saw the path of an artist as a risky path. A path that could lead to addiction, as I assumed it had for my father. And I chose to shift my focus from artistic pursuits to a degree in science.

The year of my graduation, I looked utterly exhausted in my graduation photo. That exhaustion would become a theme in my life, returning again and again. When I was 42 shortly after moving back to Vancouver from Brooklyn, with a toddler in tow, I looked like a ghost of myself. An old friend came to visit us in Vancouver and said to my wife in confidence that she was worried about me.

So it was a lightbulb moment for me in 2022 when I read The Artist’s Way, and Julia Cameron was putting it bluntly: art isn’t optional for everyone. Some of us are artists first, though we may have convinced ourselves otherwise. Creativity, for some people, is like food, like water for their soul.

Remembering high school, I saw that past version of me as such a soul. I don’t know if I was an “artist”, but I was creating. As Julia puts it: to write, is to write things. So to be an artist is to create art, right?

I stuck with the morning pages. Julia’s guidance is to write them every morning even when you’re tired, even when you have nothing at all to say. Just write. “Oh god another morning I have nothing to say did I get the laundry out of the dryer I took too much melatonin last night blah blah blah.” What comes out is not meant to be art. The inner critic holds no sway over something nobody else will ever see.

Shortly after starting the morning pages, I wrote a book of poetry in 2023 called Flight of the Starling. It felt good to finish a piece of art and share it. It felt rough around the edges, and that was a good thing. No more perfectionism. Julia recommends a mantra: “This is pretty good, I think I’ll keep going.” Momentum, I think she was saying, is the artist’s most precious resource.

I also took up Julia’s practice of going on “artist dates.” A few hours alone, with the intention of taking your inner artist child on a fun excursion. Just the two of you. I would often ride my bike out to a forest with a beach nearby. I would sit in the sand and meditate, or pick my way through the forest and brush the tree trunks with my fingers. I asked the forest questions in my heart, and listened for the answers in the waves.

Poems came. One by one, they walked in as friends, or charged in like a bull. Each one was teaching me something, or telling me I was seen. Some of those feelings that were so hard to feel when I was young, found a voice and a way into my awareness again. They helped me to grieve, to be curious, and to feel my way towards renewal.

The result is my new book of poems, called I Came To Be Free:

The book site shows quotes from the book, and gives you purchase options from your favourite booksellers.

These poems came to me with a request. Share them. If any of the nine poems touches your heart, please share a verse with someone you love.

Right now my Claude app has a conspicuous banner declaring: “Fable 5 is currently unavailable”:

The “Learn more” link is a fascinating read. The US government says tokens from Fable 5 can only be seen by eyeballs with US passports. Foreign national eyeballs not allowed. But half of Anthropic’s developers are foreign nationals, so the tokens have been lifted out of the purview of their own creators. Apparently the dream of the internet — connectivity for all — is only mostly true. The fine-print says the data you get has to be intended for your eyeballs specifically. Implicitly, data always has a target.

Government disclosure has the same deployment problem, in reverse. Government secrecy has led to a growing frustration with the government’s lack of transparency and accountability. Recent congressional hearings in the US have stunned the world with the disclosure of shadow government programs costing billions (trillions?) of taxpayer dollars. With so much classified tech on the line, and so much latent public outrage, the US government has struggled to declassify important programs citizens have (unknowingly, not consensually) paid dearly for.

We seem to treat data with a binary logic: either the firehose is on, or it’s off. With AI at the moment, the firehose is fully on, blasting us with new superhuman capabilities every other week. But where data is sensitive — as in government it always is — not only is the firehose off, the data becomes frozen in place.

Social media suffers under the same data broadcast model. The notorious comment sections on YouTube and the “tweets” of X (is that still what they’re called?) seem to robustly attract incendiary trolls. Build a comment board, and they will come. Facebook systematically pursued their moonshot of connecting the world, only to find their platform co-opted by parasitic foreign actors seeking to influence elections and local community affairs. Trolls, at scale.

The through-line is the frustrating anonymity of data; data divorced from source provenance, taken out of context, and inserted into new inappropriate contexts. At sufficient scale and with enough user metadata, even an unassuming ad campaign can disrupt a community’s voting patterns. And disrupting communities at scale turned out to be a predictable science. That very same statistical predictability of large collections of people was, of course, the very engine of Facebook’s social engineering product model to begin with. Once the “average user” visited Facebook 5+ days a week (say), the service passed a tipping point where the social network became indelibly inserted into their social lives. Who could have predicted that predatory ads would surf this newly connected social graph and spread misinformation virally? Mis-information being information imported from a cloaked actor behind the scenes. Information with a bias. Information with an agenda.

The incendiary nature of AI, social media, and government data is less about the details of the technologies, and more about how those technologies are deployed. When we enthusiastically jumped on the train of mass tech deployments and the economies of scale they enabled, we rolled the dice on humanity’s ability to sift through all the cross-talk in a fully connected social graph. We are, after all, a group of billions of amped-up social primates, with big brains and big guns. We evolved for two hundred thousand years knowing a total of about 100 people in our entire natural lives, and then quantum-jumped in 2005 to a fully connected hive mind 7 billion strong. What could possibly go wrong. Thanks, Zuck.

Communication became a digital idea. Tokens jumping between vertices in a network. The vertices (that’s us), are connected to more and more other vertices, as new tech platforms add edges to the social graph. Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Github. Just a short couple of centuries ago, humans exchanged tokens by sending and receiving sound compression waves with other humans nearby in physical space. A quaint idea now that we instantly beam tokens across the world via fibre optic cables and satellite links. Stupidly, all that power mostly goes into texting each other from across the room, where a conversation could be had instead. But these days we text distant connections while waiting at the bus stop, rather than chat with a stranger. And we go bowling alone, with the bowling ball in one hand, and our communication device in the other.

Communication, we had forgotten, was more than the transmission of data packets from one client device to another. Communication wasn’t complete without the mutual understanding the information was meant to produce. Understanding required much more than network routing and IP protocols. Understanding required a common language, and a shared context to embed it in. Exchanging words in different languages qualifies as data transmission, not a conversation.

Inside the deep stack of network protocols used to route fragments of messages from one client to another (the so-called 8-level OSI stack, spanning from firmware up to TCP/IP packets), there was no mechanism for deciding whether a message could be *understood* by the recipient. Data, when partitioned into TCP frames and encoded as packets of light inside long fibre optic waveguides, seems a cold and inert thing. But once reconstructed on the receiver’s end, the protocol goes silent. The last mile for data -- the path from eyeballs to neural activations inside our messy, squishy, turbo-charged primate brains -- was beyond the protocol’s reach.

By comparison, talking face-to-face makes the OSI stack look daft. Before the digital era, before the printing press even, data was exchanged at close range. People wouldn’t bother trying to say something unless the other person at least spoke the language. They would trade by exchanging tangible goods and services. The modern version, where we Venmo each other and scroll through each other’s witty transaction notes with clever emoji’s, is a far cry from the simplicity of buying radishes from a fellow in the town square.

But the ever-growing social graph has a new kind of data flying around. The tokens we’re exchanging now have two distinct types. The old type, the characters we plodded out with our fat bio-fingers on Gorilla glass touch screens and our clickety-clackity keyboards, is now a boutique, hand-crafted artifact kind of token. Like hand-spun pottery or a card your niece drew for you. The new type — AI-generated tokens — have taken on a new primality, and a new exponential growth. The AI tokens pass through the network in just the same way the old ones did, but they hold a deeper structure, transparent to the infrastructure. The tokens are connected to each other in a new, otherworldly way.

This new alien token cloaks itself in common language, dashing through the network cables one character at a time just like the old type. But these tokens have been specially, miraculously sequenced. The tokens are just words, numbers. Cheap, easy for a human to type one word a time. But the alien tokens are imbued with a special ordering, an intelligence hidden in the negative space. An intelligence that transmits smoothly across the network, and only hits when the whole sequence is read. The alien tokens bring with them a gestalt meaning, only delivering its value once inside the mind. Inside the mind, where the tokens are compiled, and neural networks light up.

We thought we were special in how we put tokens together, arranging them in sequences that imbued them with customized meaning. The infrastructure was there for us to send our quaint, fat-finger tokens around the network for each other to read. Poop emojis and cat videos.

With AI, the infrastructure has started to compose the tokens itself. Faster. On-demand. With greater clarity. Communication as a service.

Except not communication. Tokens. Let’s be clear. The tokens aren’t the meaning. They never were. The meaning always existed beyond the tokens, beyond the eyeballs, in the mind of the beholder.

I have a love-hate relationship with words.

I wrote a piece last year called Away with Words, where I reflected on my own relationship with writing and language. I was often told growing up that I have “a way with words”. And in a way, words became charged for me. Charged with potential, and with expectation. I can bare my very soul in words, but it leaves my soul exposed, and vulnerable to analysis. Words only work well for me when they’re honest, and sharing honestly in public is confronting and scary.

And yet words are the raw material I’m using in this newsletter. I’m mining these tokens of meaning from my mind and stringing them together. A progression that tells a story. Words are like music in that way.

Through endless correspondences by email over the years, I wrote and wrote my inner experience as vividly as I could. It was frought for me, full of frustration at not being able to express myself as I wanted to. And the persistent feeling of anxiety underlying so much of my life always felt like a looming presence, impossible to describe and yet hard to ignore. As Morpheus said to Neo on the threshold of revealing to Neo the nature of The Matrix:

“You can’t explain it, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad”

• (Morpheus to Neo) The Matrix, 1999

So words are complicated for me.

This poem explores my relationship to language, writing, and my drive to articulate the ineffable.

Words of Prey

The love was hidden in plain sight
In arms of loved ones holding tight
But you had hardened to the cold
And fire brought warmth, but also fright

The part of you that needed love 
When your whole life was coming loose 
To hold your parts together then 
Took love so thick it stuck like glue

And though you were in battle scathed 
As warriors are when in the fray
You soldiered on with numbness held 
In wounds struck deep from words of prey

For when you felt things with your heart
You wanted one to hold you close 
You became blended with the part 
That felt abandoned long ago

And all your rage at being left 
To fend alone ( or so it seemed )
You feared a deeper dark despair 
That through your childhood you did see

Despair, so big that it became 
A furniture of guilt and blame 
That furnished every room in there 
And every walk a walk of shame

So shame was like the air you breathed 
Though you were nothing shameful love 
It permeated through the air 
And you absorbed it just because

You must’ve wondered how you’d cope 
With so much friction every day 
That made it rough to feel so much 
With so many words and so little you could say

For words are weapons too, and some
Would call them mightier than the sword 
And words are felt like daggers when
So hatefully they are deployed

“A way with words” is common praise 
For bringing feelings into view
From caverns full of dark debris 
Belying everything you do

Spelunking down in depths of hell 
To find the gem of hardened pain
Then bring it back and dust it off 
And bring light through it once again

From depths of hell and bloody rage
In fiery pits of screaming mass 
Come pearls of truth so deeply felt 
That in all lives they come to pass

You have a gift for mining these
These crystals buried deep in pain
But when you excavated them
They bid you put them back again

For pain so thick it coats the walls
Of every room on every floor 
It starts to feel that all is lost 
When pain’s too much to be ignored

A fateful gift you came with then
As those around you went along 
With desperate lives and hopeless days
And you wrote hopelessness in song

The choice you made to sing your song 
When you were lonely on your own 
Was bravery like the warriors have 
When facing death and all the alone

For mighty forces line your path 
And sing to you in subtle notes
A symphony of loving hands 
Who’ve cherished every word you wrote

Your way with words is sacrifice
And honed in battle every day 
As open-hearted kings must feel 
The force of love to guide their way

And with this power comes a cost 
That daggers lie within your reach 
With words of prey at your command
Like eagles hunting on the beach

This bit about the doctors telling his mom he has ADHD is priceless:

As I watched him being unhinged and honest about his intense nature, I felt something in my body. A deep recognition of that same intensity inside me, which I coped with by internalizing it. Marcello externalized his intensity, and his stories about trying to call CPS on his family for restricting his freedom are at once harrowing and hilarious. Hilarious because his mother always had his back, at the same time that she asserted her control. Harrowing because I can’t help but wonder what his life would have been like if he’d internalized all that energy. In a different family system, he may have needed to.

Externalizing, it seems to me, is a privilege. It’s only possible when there is a container that will hold your energy. And if the family’s container cannot hold it, the lack of safety you feel erodes your ability to express yourself. It felt like a slow death for me, growing up without people to match my intensity. Marcello’s mother is fierce, both in her control and in her love.

At the beginning of the special, Marcello’s mother comes on stage to introduce her son to the world. And at the end of the special, Marcello walks off stage right into his mother’s open arms. I loved that for him.

But despite their empathy for their child — and a genuine love and desire to support them in establishing a sense of safety — I know that without the sensation of danger, and the feeling of panic that comes with it, it’s hard for them to really understand what their child may be feeling.

I’d like to describe how I understand the deep sensation of PDA for those families who are willing to delve into their child’s world. But this comes with a word of caution. If what I’m about to say makes sense to you, as I hope it will, you may never un-see it. This post may trigger you.

We describe PDA as a persistent drive for autonomy. As pathological demand avoidance. Big words. Charged words. What do they mean? What is the underlying experience? And can you feel it personally, even if you don’t have PDA?

I used to think the answer was no. I always felt so alone in this sensation of panic. But now I think I have a way to explain it that parents — and especially mothers — can personally understand.

What is the purpose of your life? Do you know?

Maybe you have a rough sense of what is most important to you. You can tell what is vital to you and your life purpose, by the reaction you have when you are prevented from fulfilling your purpose.

If you’re a mother, your love for your child is fundamental to who you are. What does it feel like when someone comes between you and your child? They prevent you from being with them, from helping them, from giving them care when they’re suffering, when they’re wounded.

A mother bear embodies this ferocity of love. Watch what happens when you get between a grizzly and her cubs. There is hardly a more dangerous animal on earth in that moment.

I remember watching a video of a mother bear who’s cub was being threatened by a much larger male bear. Male bears will kill cubs to force the mother into heat, and mother bears are well aware of this instinct in male bears. So as soon as she gets wind of this male, the mother bear doesn’t waste any time.

I honestly had no idea what a bear was capable of until I saw this video. The mother bear charges with such ferocity that the male runs for his life. She chases the male up a tree, and proceeds to climb up after him. She rips every branch of the tree down on her way up, with the male climbing for his life as high up as he can. This hulking male, normally strong enough to kill them both, was left dangling at the top of the tree, with no escape. Maybe she could kill him, but she’s made her point. Her cub is more important than this fight.

The mother bear’s essential agency was interrupted. To care for her cub is her purpose. She responds with unmatched ferocity. I would describe this agency as the agency of love.

For any parent, their life purpose is embodied in the well being of their child. And every parent requires the agency to protect this vital connection from parent to child. Through this connection, the love they feel is extended to the child. Without that parental devotion, without this essential agency of love, the child cannot survive.

Now consider a mother’s freedom to establish the bonds of love that create a family to begin with. She must be free to respond to the instincts in her heart, to choose a mate who will similarly protect these bonds of love, and create a cohesive family for the child to grow within. This too is connected to her life purpose.

Now consider making a demand of her. Try to direct her in establishing these bonds of love. Tell her who she is allowed to love and who she is not. Direct her in how she expresses her love. Control her choices.

Women throughout history have had to deal with this level of control. Society constantly make such demands of women. Controls her body, judges and punishes her for her choices in love. Refuses her adequate support, and blames her for all outcomes anyway. This force, the patriarchy, has demanded sway over women’s sovereignty of love. It exists in full force today, still playing out in laws designed to control women’s access to supportive care and community.

But we exist now in a unique time in history, where women have organized together and made it clear that her choices in love are not for any man or group of men to control. Her essential agency of love is paramount to her life purpose. Interrupting that agency is tantamount to interfering in her life purpose. So, like the mother grizzly, she must regain this agency, and she will act fiercely to restore it.

Now consider the child. This child has a purpose here on earth. They must be free to explore their interests in order to learn what this purpose is. This essential agency, to learn and explore, is fundamental to a child’s authentic expression of who they are. Through great trials and suffering, they will continue to search for their path. They must do this, according to an instinct that is programmed into them by their very existence itself.

In previous posts, I’ve likened PDA to a strong creative instinct. PDA kids in my experience are uniquely intelligent when it comes to their creative gifts. And their ferocity in maintaining their agency, their agency of action, is directly analogous to the mother bear’s ferocity in protecting her cub. Both are protecting their essential agency, that agency they require in order to fulfill their life purpose.

My point of view is that PDA kids are tuned into their life purpose with the same passion and ferocity as the mother bear’s love for her cub. And when they are controlled, that essential agency is interrupted. This is more than distress. More than anger. It’s existential threat. As primal as the mother bear’s need to protect her cub. The cub embodies her purpose. And for a highly creative being, their purpose requires them to create.

The patriarchy has something to say about that too. Do as you’re told. Follow these prescribed steps. Live your life like this, or else risk being cut off from community, from care and support. When a child is put into school, every day they must march to that school and attend it, or else face the consequences. All over the world it’s in fact required by law that children be sent to school, regardless of how accessible that classroom is for the child. And in so doing, the child’s essential agency to learn and explore is interrupted. Their life purpose blunted, day after day.

For some kids, maybe this isn’t so bad. They’re satisfied with being in a system that prescribes how they should learn. They’re willing and able to do as they’re told. They’re obedient, and they follow the template they’re given.

But a PDA child feels this system as an existential threat.

What would happen to a mother who is forced to love in a prescribed way? Prevented from pursuing her life purpose according to her own intuitive knowing. As women have done throughout history, they have had to bear the pain of this form of control. They have had to make the best of their life within a controlling patriarchy. But the trauma of interrupting her fundamental needs doesn’t go away. It remains stored in the body, as discomfort, dysregulation, and disease.

And so it is with the fiercely creative child. Their nature, their purpose in existing, is interrupted by demands and control. And it feels as violent, as heartless, as incoherent as a mother whose loving purpose is controlled. It feels like … a violation.

The agency of action. The agency of love. Two sides of the same coin. Both unified by the existential imperative of fulfilling our purpose on earth. Both fierce in their instinct to protect that agency. Both subject to the frustration of widely held beliefs that their loving purpose is reprogrammable according to the imperatives of their families, schools, and communities. Both will fight to maintain agency over their loving purpose. Both have a robust, pervasive need to maintain autonomy, because autonomy is required in carrying out that loving purpose.

The nutshell

You sealed off your feelings
And with them your heart
So when your heart swells
It blows you apart

But you have forgotten
That you are the child
Who wants to be special
And aches to run wild

This world is a prison
For those who accept it
Like a room full of doors
With no clearly marked exit

And you became trapped 
In your room full of doors
For you simply did what 
Had been done there before 

You learned that the room
Was a place you were held
To the whim of the makers
Like a nut in a shell

But the pressure was building
Inside your cocoon
As the heat of frustration
Came hard and came soon

You bounced off the walls
In your room full of doors
You bounced off the ceiling
And you bounced off the floor

In your room full of doors
Where your choices abound
They had you convinced
That your nutshell was sound

But you’re not a walnut
All content in your shell
You’re a kernel of popcorn
You explode like all hell

So men have gotten wise. They’ve stopped approaching because they don’t want to be a creep. They’ve stopped buying women drinks because women blow them off anyway. If he manages to get a date, she complains about him not buying her meal, and shames him on IG. If he doesn’t make a move, she complains. If he makes a move, she rejects it. The man realizes he’s never going to win, so what’s the point?

A good man, Emily says, will often go unnoticed by women. Or be flat out rejected by them. And yet from the man’s perspective, with Me Too lawsuits all abuzz, we’re just doing what we’re being told. Don’t be a creep. Be respectful. That’s what women want, right?

Wrong.

I’ve been leading a men’s group for 5 years, and one of the books on the required reading list for men’s work is No More Mr Nice Guy by Robert Glover. Glover describes an epidemic of nice guys, trained by a generation of overwhelmed single mothers. Boys — like myself — who were implicitly responsible for their mother’s emotional well being. We learned from an early age to obey our maternal figure, to not rock an unstable boat. We were the man of the house, without formally having the title, whether by the physical absence of a father or by his emotional absence.

The other day I was watching one of these posts from Emily on Instagram, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. In school, at home, I spent all of my time with female authority figures. I learned to anticipate any criticism from them, and would change my behavior to avoid it, for fear of punishment. If I didn’t please my teacher, my grades would suffer. If I didn’t get my work done in class, I would have to do it at home.

I think women, for me, all started to blend together into one big authority figure. I had to figure them out to get what I wanted. I had to learn to please them. Always be respectful, or be punished. Do my homework, or fall behind. If I fell behind, I would lose the approval of my mother. If I didn’t have her approval, there was no love. Be on time for class. Get good grades. Be a model student. Be a teacher’s pet.

So imagine the dissonance when I started to date, and realized that women aren’t selecting mates who are respectful. They’re selecting mates who are strong. They’re selecting mates who take the lead. They’re selecting mates who wield considerable agency. They’re selecting men who aren’t afraid of how they’ll react when the man approaches them. They’re selecting men who are confident in who they are.

And yet when, in school, do boys learn the skills of confidence, agency, and leadership? A leader isn’t following directions, because there’s nobody to take the directions from. A leader has to define his own guideline and believe in it, often in spite the reactions of others. A confident man is a man who experiments and learns from his mistakes. Mistakes are part of learning. Mistakes are necessary for learning.

In the school system, mistakes are punished. Make a mistake on the exam and you lose points. When you lose points, you lose status. When you lose status, you lose credibility. And when you lose credibility, you lose confidence.

In the school system, everything we work on is prescribed to us. We’re given the lessons and told to execute them perfectly. Do it perfectly, as prescribed, and you get status. Status is gained by obedience. The valedictorian is the most obedient boy in school. So when does that boy learn to cultivate his own agency?

Our greatest leaders, says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, were never the valedictorians, never the top of their class. Never handed their homework in on time:

If you look at the biggest shakers and movers in society, in practically any field, none of them were valedictorians. … The current CEOs were never the top of their class. They were too distracted by their own thoughts and ideas. … My grades in school were pretty average. Because they were average, no teacher at any time in my life, from K through 12, ever said “look at that guy Tyson, he’ll go far.” … They don’t even care. They only care what grade you got. A person is so much more than the numerics of their GPA. If you only focus on a GPA, you will lose people. There will be people who go unrecognized, unsupported, unidentified by the school system.

And yet the myopia of the school system is so much worse than Tyson describes. Because it trains generations of men to be obedient, to follow the rules. The rules handed to them by teachers. And most of those teachers are women of authority. School trained all of us boys to obey women, not to be strong leaders for them.

My son is currently in grade three, and last year in grade two he had an incredibly difficult time. His teacher ran a traditional classroom, drilling spelling tests every morning to bring all the students “up to grade level.” He started to refuse to go to school. We later found out he has dysgraphia, and doing timed spelling exams every morning was forcing his brain to work on overdrive just to meet the standard.

One day the teacher announced to me in front of all the other children and parents that my son was “one of the bad writers” in class. “He’ll probably become and engineer,” she said, “the bad writers usually do.” I called a meeting with her and the principle and told them in no uncertain terms how inappropriate it was for her say that. I told them I was concerned that this would permanently damage his relationship with school. The principle did nothing to discipline the teacher. And the teacher did nothing to change her behavior.

We pulled him out of the school when he started showing signs of severe burnout. We changed his school, and no matter how many supports we put in place, he would not go back there. This grade two teacher did exactly what I told her she was doing: ruining his relationship with school entirely.

“School,” the principle had told my son one day, “is a must”. But in the fine print it’s more complicated than that. As an autistic person, I go to school at my own risk. And that risk needs to be a deliberate choice on the part of my family, not a requirement. A system that truly promotes the agency of developing humans needs to begin the relationship with agency, with choice.

Why? Because this is the very agency we value so highly in adults, and in grown men in particular. And men learn to wield agency by practicing using their agency in low-stakes environments. Because learning requires safe iteration. And that’s what school is supposed to be for, right?

I’ve been listening to the ADHD Chatter podcast, run by a fellow John Robbins who I follow on TikTok and who I’ve learned a lot from about ADHD. This discussion with Dr. Mark Rackley on the perils of being a “high functioning” person made me feel deeply witnessed. And from someone who fully embodies their work with the ADHD community.

When I first heard this interview I thought he’d generated an AI voice trained on real interviews with physicist Richard Feynman, since Feynman passed decades earlier. But I soon realized he’d taken audio from a recorded interview with Feynman and added in his own questions and comments to flow in a natural conversational tone.

I have a physics background, and Richard Feynman’s work had a big impact on me. He was very grounded, and very driven by his own quest for understanding. He had an irreverence and a distaste for authority figures. His father instilled in him a skepticism about figures like the Pope (who his father hated), who wore a specific uniform and had a title, and people bowed to him.

Feynman talks about how he protects his time for creative work. He insists on taking extended periods of deep work, in order to assemble a fragile “house of cards” made of many interlocking ideas. In order to work out the physics theory, he says, he has to have the freedom to think uninterrupted. And in order to do that, he takes the position that he doesn’t do anything. He’s “actively irresponsible”:

I have invented a myth for myself, that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible I tell everybody. I don’t do anything. If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions, “no I’m irresponsible, I don’t give a damn about the students.” Of course I give a damn about the students, but I know that somebody else will do it. And I take the view, “let George do it.” A view which you’re not supposed to take okay? Because then that’s not right. But I do that because I like to do physics, and I want to see if I can still do it. And so I’m selfish okay? I want to do my physics!

When I heard this part of the interview I perked up. Instead of succumbing to the pressure from the administration at his university to take on tasks, he chose to do what interested him and excited him the most. Feynman made it clear to people he worked with that he wouldn’t respond to demands on his time.

Feynman describes how he took this position when was working with his mentor Hans Bethe. He told Bethe, he was just going to work on things that were fun. He noticed something interesting about a spinning top, seemingly a very random thing to be doing. He started playing around with the equations of motion for the top, and he worked out how the wobble of the top would precess around at a different frequency from the spin. He was exploring. When Bethe asked him what the use of all this was, Feynman told him there was no use to it. He was curious about it and that was enough for him.

Feynman was doing physics for the joy of physics again. After a gruelling few years working at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb, he returned to his innate curiosity. And from the point of view of the administration at Caltech, Feynman was just wasting time.

His work on the spinning top led him to investigate the spin of the electron, which his hero Paul Dirac had worked on. Shortly thereafter, he worked out the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Feynman’s irreverent joy of discovery led him to the most accurate physical theory ever discovered.

In a different context, someone with Feynman’s irresponsible attitude could certainly have been pathologized. He might have been disciplined. He might have been forced to toe the line of the administration. He might have been branded as “PDA”. He might have been medicated. Science would have lost out on a major advance if Feynman had fawned and obeyed the Caltech administration. His refusal of demands was connected to a much deeper instinct, a joy of discovery. The Nobel Prize meant nothing to him at all. Honors and titles were an imaginary distraction, like the robes of the Pope.

One moment in this interview stood out for me, when Lutke talks about his initial conversations with investors around 2010. He was living in Canada at the time, and the investor’s term sheet was conditional on Lutke moving to Silicon Valley. Even though Lutke’s goal was always to break into Silicon Valley, he refused the term sheet.

Lutke goes on to say that he has a visceral reaction to being told what to do. In fact if his wife doesn’t want him to do something, she’ll insist that he do it! She’s figured out the reverse psychology to work with Lutke’s natural inclination to make his own choices.

This feels so familiar to me. I’m this way too. It’s instinctive to me to act on my own recognizance. And it strikes me that this can be seen as a pathological “demand avoidance”, or it can be seen as entrepreneurial spirit. It all depends on how it works out right? We only lionize this independence in retrospect, and we pathologize it in the moment when that independence is inconvenient for us.

This year at the annual PDA North America conference, an investor from the Chicago area attended the sessions. I’ll never forget what he said at the conference wrap event. He said that in retrospect, he figures 70% of the founders he has invested in are PDA.

There’s a fine line between pathological independence and wildly successful independence. I don’t know if it’s possible to distinguish them a priori. You’ll just have to wait and see.

But despite their empathy for their child — and a genuine love and desire to support them in establishing a sense of safety — I know that without the sensation of danger, and the feeling of panic that comes with it, it’s hard for them to really understand what their child may be feeling.

I’d like to describe how I understand the deep sensation of PDA for those families who are willing to delve into their child’s world. But this comes with a word of caution. If what I’m about to say makes sense to you, as I hope it will, you may never un-see it. This post may trigger you.

We describe PDA as a persistent drive for autonomy. As pathological demand avoidance. Big words. Charged words. What do they mean? What is the underlying experience? And can you feel it personally, even if you don’t have PDA?

I used to think the answer was no. I always felt so alone in this sensation of panic. But now I think I have a way to explain it that parents — and especially mothers — can personally understand.

Read on. You’ve been warned.

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On a nature retreat this summer, I spent time reconnecting with the maternal presence of the earth. My earth mother. The mother who stays with me, sustaining me, welcoming me to connect with her creation. A creation of which I am a tiny part. And as a part of her creation, I can be fed by the wellspring of creation that gives rise to all life on earth. Her presence is a balm to me, knowing I am supported in continuing to exist, despite all the doubts, all the negative self-talk I subject myself to for survival’s sake. I survive because she supports me, and I create because I am a part of her, a microcosm who’s nature is also to create.

I read this poem as an offering to organizers of the retreat, and to my creative earth mother. I offer it now to you as well.

I say your name

By PJ Starling

Son, my son
My love can you hear
The sound of my whisper
As I speak in your ear

I say your name
In blades of grass
In songs of birds
In sunsets past

I say your name
My perfect son
In fish swimming by
In deer on the run

I say your name
With perfect love
In songs of the crows
And young mourning doves

In great flocks of Starlings
In wind and in rain
In all of these beings
In all of these ways

I say your name

I call to you 
When you least expect
My wind on your cheek
A bug on your neck

I say your name
With morning dew
I say your name
In shades of blue

I do this all
It's all for you 

And if, my son
You heed my call
I’ll send more signs
I’ll send them all

For nothing is
A greater joy
Than to be heard
By my perfect boy

I call to you
In times of need
And in my call
I plant a seed

A seed of love
A love that’s free
A love that grows
A heart-shaped tree

When in doubt, write it out. It’s an adage I’ve used throughout my life. Writing helps me synthesize my experience. It’s part of my integration. I get hung up sometimes on who is going to be reading what I write. I’ve come to see that I have to write for me. As Rick Rubin likes to say, art is always best when it’s made for the artist themself. And how it resonates with others is incidental to its intrinsic value. The value is in the writing, the creating. Creating is my acknowledgement of who I am: I am a creator.

I’ve taken to a writing practice from The Artist’s Way, called morning pages. Every morning I write 3 pages in a notebook. Stream of consciousness. Never to be shared. Nobody witnesses this writing but me. And as such, the inner critic has no say in this time. Morning pages are for me and me alone, to be honest with myself about how I really feel. Having been obsessed for a lifetime with how I am supposed to feel, for my own safety, this time with the morning pages is a reprieve from this relentless survival instinct.

As a PDA human, survival is always on the line. I’ve come to see that for me, being “PDA” is another word for being creative. A persistent drive for autonomy is a by-product of being a creative person. Because creation requires autonomy, requires responding to my own instincts.

My survival instincts kick in when my very power source is threatened. What is my power source? As a creator, as an artist, my power comes from my ability to create. As Julia Cameron says in the The Artist’s Way:

When well-meaning parents or friends push marriage or 9-5 or anything on us that doesn’t evolve in a way that allows for our art to continue, we might react as though we’re fighting for our lives. We are.

We are. That line always gets me. My survival as a soul requires that my core identity be acknowledged. My power source needs to be clear. My reaction to being threatened with exogenous commandments is evidence in itself of who I am. I am one who’s nature is to be free, because being free is always a requirement for being creative. No great paintings were ever created with a gun to the painter’s head. No great song was ever written under a dictator’s orders.

And the dictator makes a great sacrifice in deploying commandments by far-reaching decree. All creativity retreats from the dictator’s control. And with it all love, all freedom. The dictator casts a shadow over all free creation. Not even babies want to be born in the wake of his violent order, his rule of law.

In the wake of the dictator’s rule, I retain a system of beliefs crystallized into my mind. Follow these instructions. Always for my own safety’s sake. And yet my very breath is restricted by such crystallization. My breath requires the freedom to be fast when I need it to be fast, and slow when I need it to be slow. My breath is uniquely tuned to me and me alone. No prescribed rhythm will do.

I must always be free to breathe in response to the details of every moment. And I must always be free to expand my consciousness through exploration, curiosity, and creation. And also to contract, to not create, to heal, to rest. My insistence on this autonomy is at the core of my refusal to write sometimes. I reserve the right to not create, as my breath reserves the right to slow down when my priority is to regulate.

I went on a nature immersion retreat this summer, where I camped in the woods in a little tent. I met with a small group to forest bathe together, to reflect together on our state of connection with the land we live on, with the earth that bore us into life and sustains our life. I intended to reconnect with my inner equilibrium, with my earth mother. To open myself again to the unexpected magic of the unseen forces that guide my life. To be delighted by the fish scattering from my feet in the pond, supported by the earth under my bare feet. Reminded that I am a child of mother earth, and that I exist as part of her existence. As such, she supports my existence, as forcefully as she herself persists. And she supports my highest expression as forcefully as she endeavours toward her own highest expression. In creation, in being my authentic self, I am aligned with my earth mother. And she is powerful indeed.

More than that, Julia Cameron asserts, the creative nature of mother earth — to bare us all into existence and sustain us — is but a microcosm of the nature of the universe itself. God, she asserts, is an artist. The Great Artist. The artist who creates with infinite power. When I pursue my own little creation, while just a speck of dust in the vast chasms of the universe, I channel the creative energy that drives all creation. And so, when I listen to what is within me and express it somehow in my world, I am aligned with the Great Creator. And the Great Creator cannot help but lend power to that creative flow, being a small instance containing the fundamental rules governing the whole.

In writing what I want to write, I sense there may be a new rawness, a new frankness. A new clarity. A new hope. Thank you for being here with me.

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear ⌜father⌝ murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 (link)

I never forgot that line. I used to perform soliloquies from this scene, and I was always gutted by that line: “I must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.”

It speaks of the grossness of human language in expressing the ineffable. How utterly ham-fisted it can feel to convey an experience using words and symbols.

This line comes into sharper focus for me now, after hearing the mind-blowing podcast The Telepathy Tapes. Incredibly, non-speaking autistic people can and do communicate telepathically. Both between non-speakers, and between non-speakers and their caregivers.

The non-speakers they feature on the podcast are all able to read the minds of people caring for them (when they consent to it), and to send messages telepathically to caregivers as well. And they routinely gather in common telepathic spaces to communicate with each other.

This interview with the host of the Telepathy Tapes podcast goes into the fascinating implications of telepathy being a real phenomenon:

As I was listening to this, I noted that they feel the telepathic abilities are more connected to being a non-speaker than they are being autistic per se. That got me wondering …

Is there something about learning spoken language that precludes having a clear telepathic connection?

When I hang out on TikTok #spiritual, the manifestation folks like to say that the reason assembling letters into words is called “spelling” is because words are literally spells one is casting. If I try to make that more cogent I end babbling … something something … energy vibration … law of attraction …. something something manifestation …

I don’t know about all that.

But isn’t it fascinating that those who do not have the fine-motor control to use spoken language, seem to universally have the gift of telepathic communication. It makes me wonder if we are all born with telepathic abilities, and are somehow trained out of it in deference to learning spoken language.

Perhaps it is too painful to retain the ability to read people’s thoughts, when their thoughts and actions just don’t line up. Maybe we feel the need to turn off the telepathic connection, just to keep the signal consistent.

The non-speakers often express that they only have access to their gifts when they are coming from a place of love. You don’t get the gifts if you lie, for example. Somehow they are coherent enough to pick up on these signals consciously, while most of us are not. And for them to be able to communicate telepathically with you, you need to believe in their ability to do it. That’s interesting too. Somehow our beliefs modulate our telepathic connection.

Maybe words have an opportunity cost, as the podcast host above so eloquently puts it. Maybe words come with a tradeoff. And those whose body won’t produce those words, have found another way. So … away with words. Maybe the heart needn’t be unpacked after all.

I loved this discussion with Aaron Stupple and Naval Ravikant about raising sovereign children:

Aaron and Naval make the case for putting as few constraints as possible on children, especially when they feel arbitrary and abstract for the child. Their goal as parents is to be a safe and trusted advisor, rather than an authority figure who imposes rules.

Rules, they argue, degrade your relationship with your child by putting you in opposition to something they want to explore. Whereas an advisor always requires a foundation of trust in order to provide value. You don’t seek the advice of a person unless you’re genuinely curious about their point of view. It’s not safe to share your curiosity with someone who is judging you for what you do and don’t know.

At the core of their message, it seems to me, is the primacy of trust. Trust is the currency we have with our children. This is super-duper true for PDA children, but I think it’s true for all children period.

As I was listening to this podcast, I felt like I was acknowledging again how joyfully I explored the world as a child. And that I just wanted the adults in my life to join me in my explorations.

I remember throwing lawn darts with my uncle when I was eight years old or so. I noticed that each dart that landed could be connected with a straight line to the previous one that landed. I exclaimed “Another straight line!” I’ll never forget how my uncle looked at me like he was questioning my intelligence in that moment, saying, “Um, every two darts make a straight line.” I remember shrinking in that moment, as though I’d said something silly and was being called out for it.

My curiosity in that moment was about something deeper than my uncle was perceiving. I was actually noticing something deep about geodesics, which are paths between two points on a curved surface. I was expressing interest in the geometry of lawn darts on an undulating lawn: how do you draw the shortest path between any two points on a curved surface?

My uncle could have taken that opportunity to show me a book on differential geometry, and even measure out the distance between lawn darts by rolling a quarter along the ground from one lawn dart to the next, counting the revolutions of the quarter. He could have pointed out that the shortest path from one dart to the next might wind around a hill in between them, and wouldn’t actually look very straight at all. And then he could have pointed out that bigger hills had curvier, longer paths between darts. And in the limit of maximum local curvature you get a sphere. And in fact, planes follow geodesics when they fly across the earth — in so-called “great circles” — and there are specific parametric equations for them that pilots have to learn.

In that moment, instead of feeling ashamed of being excited about seeing a pattern that ‘should have been obvious and unremarkable’, I could have been transported in my imagination into the cockpit of a plane, where a pilot was using the very same ideas that I was noticing myself. What a feeling of connectedness that would have brought me.

And my uncle would have built trust with me.

As it was, I stopped asking my uncle questions after that. That one snarky comment from him was all it took to shut me up. Though I went on to get a degree in theoretical physics. So maybe I used his judgement as fuel for me to learn about what I wanted to, on my own terms.

With 2024 drawing to a rapid close, I’m reflecting on another huge year. When I look back on this year in the future, I think I’ll see it as a pivotal time for me. A time of accepting who I am more fully, and embracing my gifts more fully.

This was the year where I directed my energy and resources to reaching out to the PDA community, through my work as a Director with PDA North America, and through my growing practice as an autism coach. I’ve had more families reaching out to me this year than ever before. Families looking for hope, and strategies for supporting PDA kiddos in giving their gifts to the world. Many folks are reaching out to me for CBD coaching, and I see cannabinoid supplementation as an important part of the PDA toolkit I’ve developed.

Each time I meet with a family, I see a web of relationships that need healing and reframing in light of the realities of PDA. Parents reach out to me for help with their kiddos, but we quickly realize just how under-resourced they are themselves. My role has been to help them put their own oxygen mask on first. I admire and respect everything these parents are doing for their kiddos, often while being antagonized by uninformed health care or school administrators.

To that end, I ran a 10-part series on adulting and being an entrepreneur with PDA, from starting a business, to managing finances, to dealing with a breakup. And I wrote about the Victim Triangle, a psychological loop that is so insidious for me as I work with my shadow self, having developed innumerable coping strategies for keeping myself going under stressful conditions. I think these are themes that PDA families are running up against all the time.

I wrote at the end of 2021 that I felt my curiosity about autism could lead me to fundamental questions about consciousness itself. A couple weeks ago I wrote about The Telepathy Tapes podcast, and how the telepathic abilities of non-speaking autistic people challenges my core beliefs about what humans can do with their minds. Autism has been my Rosetta Stone for understanding my own life, and this year autism shifted my understanding of how the universe works.

Back in Dec 2023, I published Flight of the Starling, my first book of poetry. Poetry has been a balm to my soul this year. I feel when I write poems that I’m channeling the love and wisdom of a long lost part of me. I feel these poems are coming through me to teach me about my purpose, and to show me that my intuition is real and valid information about the world. I’ve continued writing poems and publishing some of them here. The poems Where Light Never Goes, What is Love?, and I Came to be Free, will appear in my next book of poems in early 2025.

What might be next?? We’ll find out together. Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I’m sending you warmth, love, and hope for another weird and wild year on planet Earth in 2025.

Love, PJ

Being a single dad can really be a lot sometimes. But add PDA into the mix and it feels … impossible. Like right now. Right now dating feels impossible.

In my marriage, I had lost a lot of that masculine/feminine contrast that I desire in relationship (in men’s work, we call it “polarity”). I had unwittingly taken on a more feminine role in my marriage, by letting my ex take the lead on logistical and financial decisions. She was way better at that stuff, I told myself, so it’s a natural thing for her to take on. But it was also a way for me to avoid the discomfort of logistics and finances, a shadow of mine that I wasn’t comfortable acknowledging. Why were they so uncomfortable for me? I avoided having to answer that question by abdicating my leadership as the man of the home.

Since my separation I’ve dated a few women, and I’ve wanted to keep that sense of polarity alive. But what tends to happen is I run out of steam for all the texting, all the logistics. Dating as a single dad requires a LOT of scheduling and coordination. In the beginning, a new relationship gives me a lot of energy, and I’m excited to do the planning and coordination in order to spend time together. But a few months down the road, that new relationship energy becomes long-term relationship energy, with less novelty for me. And then the logistics become more taxing. My capacity to lead in the relationship becomes more variable, more dependent on how resourced I am.

Women tend to take this very personally. When I seem to be putting in less effort, they wonder if I’m really that interested in them after all. They start to doubt whether I’m invested in the relationship. They feel less secure, and I can sense this in their demeanour. Their waning confidence in me then registers for me as rejection. And with my RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria) flaring up, I have yet another drain on my energy, and I become even less communicative.

That’s how the downward spiral begins. Being in the spiral is increasingly draining for me, and there isn’t enough energizing me to counteract it. I seem to drift away, because I’m dissociating. I’m shutting down. That leadership I need to provide in the relationship, in order to achieve the polarity I want, seems to crumble when I become dysregulated. And it’s heartbreaking for me every time I feel a relationship slipping away.

Do my ideas about masculinity need to be refined in order to accommodate who I am? Am I running out of steam because I’m just masking too much? Would it behoove me to own my dysregulation more concretely, by giving clearer guidance on what I need when I’m experiencing it? Would that indeed be more masculine of me, to own my vulnerability explicitly? Would that feel more like leadership, and less like my shadow? And what would I say to make this all clear?

Surely I’m not the first neurodivergent man to wonder.

Love, freedom, and polarity. Pick two. Love and freedom: not committed, no polarity. Love and polarity: but PDA wants freedom. Freedom and polarity: not much point, without the love.

As with any paradox, I’m sure I’ve created it with my own definitions. My PDA reacts to the loss of freedom I project into the future, but what good is that freedom to me if it’s preventing me from becoming close with anyone in particular? Perhaps hewing so close to traditional masculinity is my way of mitigating the risk of rejection. If I behave more traditionally masculine, the woman I’m with will be more predictably feminine. Right?

But that’s not love. That’s control. That ever-present need that’s so uncomfortable for me, I’ve banished it to my shadow.

I suppose the robust truth is that I am trying, and getting feedback. And I’ll try again. And I’ll get hurt again, probably. There’s no way around it. The more I insist on being in control, the less love I get. That’s a grim correlation for a man with PDA, but it seems to be the case. Love and control just don’t coexist. Love is always an invitation.

Yes, you read that right. The podcast delves into the “speller” community: non-verbal autistic people who use spelling technology to communicate. Apparently it is utterly commonplace for non-speaking autistic people to communicate telepathically. I’m in the middle of the first season and I’m questioning my view of reality. Check out the episode here:

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