A year of transforming
Looking back on Unprogrammable in 2024
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