Coming Home to Ourselves

a new course for neurodivergent creatives

Nov 14, 2024

Some of you may remember that last summer, my friends KR Moorehead, Meg Max, and I offered a new course called Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice. The course filled up in the first two weeks of Early Bird sales, and we are now in the thick of it.1 It has been a genuinely transformative experience, working and learning with my co-teachers and the amazing course participants. Collaborating with KR and Meg—on this course, and some other projects, with some other collaborators, in the works!—has been a revelation. It has felt like the final piece falling into place of a long coming home journey that I’ve been on for almost two decades now. It’s been a journey of unmasking for sure, but even more than taking off an ill-fitting mask, it’s been a journey of finding—no, of creating—a new way of feeling at home in myself. There have been so many other elements in this homecoming—loving and being loved by my partner Joel, my delight and pride in my incredible kids, the blessed community that is DDS, my small but deep in-person community here in Philly.

But finding colleagues (who are also friends) to help me put my creative work out into the world (and insist that I both need and deserve a tiny bit of financial security as I approach “retirement age”)? Well, I blush at all the cliches that come to mind as I try to describe this experience. The words that came up during my meditation this morning were “You are exactly enough.” No longer the unbearable toomuchness of being me, no longer the shameful notenoughness of my unconventional work life … just exactly enough.

For years I have had in the back of my mind the subtitle of a creative nonfiction/memoir-ish book: Coming Home to Ourselves in a Neurodiverse World. I’m not sure what the main title is, but this subtitle has grabbed ahold of me and not let go. I have some other things I want to write before I write that book, but I feel sure it is in me and wants to get out.

A starting point, it seems, is to teach and explore this idea with some of you. So I’m excited to announce that Meg and I have been cooking up a course for neurodivergent creatives to share this journey with with other folks for whom it resonates. It is a new course called Coming Home to Ourselves: A Course for Neurodivergent Creatives.2 I really do believe that our creative lives can be at the heart of facing the confusing, disruptive, and often heartbreaking process of unmasking as neurodivergent people. Unmasking often (maybe necessarily?) means losing much of the sense of home we once had (even if that was only ever partial and often fraught) … but our creativity can also lead us home again in a new way.

This course will be limited to 15 participants per session (we’re offering two), and we will offer a community that feels like home for people who have felt out of place, ashamed, and alienated from their creative selves. Through short presentations, in-session creative projects, and conversation, we will

~create a comfortable and intimate space in which to share and work together

~look to our past and map out our creative lineages

~explore the ways we have felt like aliens and misfits in the places we have called home, and reimagine what home might mean for us

~look at the spaces where we currently create (whether that is an art studio, a desk, or a perch on the corner of your couch) and explore our own sensory and organizational needs and ways to accommodate them

~explore ways of finding and creating ecosystems and community that support and center how we want to feel in ourselves and our spaces

~explore homemaking rituals, systems, and connections that will support us as we move into the future

~receive invitations into conversations, creative making, and practical applications to welcome ourselves and each other home

The course begins the fourth week of January 2025 and goes for six weeks. Tickets will go on sale from 23 November 2024, and there will be a limited number of early bird and subsidized tickets. For more information about the course, check out all the info at KR’s website. If you have any questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to respond to this email, or leave a comment below.

We plan to offer Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice again in the Spring of 2025, and you can join the interest list to be eligible for early bird pricing.

This course is being offered through a new platform being developed by KR Moorehead called “KR Presents: A curated collection of courses offered by a variety of excellent, handpicked facilitators, all available to book right here. In this space I connect amazing facilitators who have skills and knowledge to share, to a wide audience of writers and creatives.”