about me...... A geek for all things community. writer-in-progress. parent of 2 exceptional daughters. former school & mental health counselor, Christian seminary trained, denominational mutt, gone awry. midWest born and raised, but West Coast transplant. recovering perfectionist. out-side-the-box Jesus follower.
A pleaser by nature.... but a rebel out of necessity, I am a "wanna-be-normal" person in recovery. A girl of the late 20th century who loved to learn, play, and win by the rules, but a woman of the 21st whose life events were unfaithful to her 20th century's promised rewards, I am a meaning-maker gone full throttle. I'm an in-process gal, seeking to shape the process of those who come across my path for the good.
I have been spending too many years to count, trying to down-play, dress-up, and even hide my SENSITIVITY, my EMPATHY and my INTENSITY. It has taken this, complicated, blessed road to mid-life, to realize that what I sought so hard to erase are truly some of my most powerful gifts. So here's the heads-up, I am going to see, and hear, and engage with you - SOLID. I am a gal who lives in full language and total color, all in. Nomad's Antidote is designed to a space where I explore, learn, and write my exceptional journey out, with the hopes that hearing, understanding, and inclusion will grow for ALL neurological nomads and those who love them.
In a very simplified nut shell, my life's most significant crisis involved the brain. More specifically, the brains of two of the people I was created to love and be loved by the most - my mom and my oldest daughter. Most of us don't consider the brain, until required, and I was no different. At the young age of 54, my mom suffered a traumatic brain injury, as the result of a leaking brain aneurysm. Just three years later, the young age of 11 months, my oldest daughter underwent an MRI to reveal that she has a congenital brain condition (agenesis of the corpus callosum - nodcc.org/corpus-callosum-disorders/). Little did I know how upside down my world would become. The reality of neuro-physiology spliced right through my previously ordered life. My new experience of my old life was fragmented and shaded into a shifting kaleidoscope of gray. Living, learning, and loving through (neurological) gray matters has toughened me against tolerance for the shallow and straight-up stupid, and pushed me into the deep end of living, learning, and loving fully.
Fast forward from first diagnosis, over 12 years later, I, my mom and daughter, have been on a journey - one filled with "out of the box" living and loving. As a mother and a daughter of neuro-diverse loved ones, I am leaning into the hard spaces of life, to find a joy and a grief that can only be described as sacred. "Sacred joy, sacred grief," you ask? No, not an intentionally harmful god, but a God who meets creation in the thin spaces - the moments where suffering and joy and every-moment-in-between occur. The fluid "gray" living, that holds the experience of both-and has produced a beautiful view of life and sacred that my previous, "check-the-boxes" living could never provide. My story and purpose have been molded by the love and hope we are creating in gray matters.
Since the days of her initial brain anomaly diagnosis, our oldest daughter has been described by the specialists as physically healthy, highly verbally gifted, high-functioning autism, learning disabled (dysgraphia/dyscalculia), sensory processing disorder (dyspraxia), and vision impaired. But these words only provide a hint of what our daughter lives through and they do not even begin to describe the full color beauty she brings to the world. As we have lived the days and seasons of her life, this journey has been a huge gift of wisdom and an even bigger invitation into life's sacred. Since the first on set of my mom's traumatic brain injury, she has used all her faith, heart, and might to hang on to the gifts that living in a battered, and determined body offer. Though her fleshly limitations seek to restrain her, my mom's spirit continues to fight through life towards love.
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