(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) If you're neurodivergent, have a chronic illness, or
consider yourself disabled, and you are sick and
tired of people telling you to just think
positive, change your mindset, because if you focus
on all the bad stuff that's all you're
going to attract, then this podcast is for
you.
You're listening to Feathermane Soul Wisdom, a podcast
for those looking to rediscover their wild spirit
in spite of life's challenges.
If you're living with a chronic illness, or
neurodivergent, or consider yourself disabled, and you're looking
to connect with your own inner untamed essence,
then this show is for you.
Your host is Kit Kaelstoe, Wild Spirit Storyteller.
Thanks for listening, and now onto the episode.
Hello, I'm your host, Kit Kaelstoe, and welcome
to the second season of the Feathermane Soul
Wisdom Show.
I've decided to roll us over to the
second season now that I've given my website
a nice polish and updated some of the
back-end technology that should make your experience
there much better and make it easier for
me to manage everything, and I've also updated
the intros and outros just slightly.
So, I was driving in my car.
I listened to podcasts on my way to
town.
It's about a 30 minute commute to town
when I go to get groceries and such,
and I was listening to a podcast, and
it's a podcast that I kind of have
a mostly love relationship with, but sometimes they
say things that I'm like, whoa, no, honey,
that is not how the universe works, and
this is one of those times.
I was driving home, and their podcast started,
and right off the top, they were like,
we got off the struggle bus, and first
of all, I hate the phrase struggle bus,
because it implies several things.
When you say struggle bus, first of all,
a bus is like a small cramped space.
You're going somewhere.
You don't have autonomy over like where you
stop.
If there's like five bus stops between you
and your destination, you're going to stop at
all five of those, because somebody may be
waiting to get on the bus.
Somebody may need to get off the bus
at those stops, but there's a good chance
you're going to take momentary pauses or momentary
stops at places that don't necessarily serve you,
and that's fine.
I mean, you know, that's what public transit
is for.
That's what makes it efficient, so you know,
that's how public transit works, but also the
struggle bus to me is a very ableist
saying.
It brings to mind the buses that are
used for students who need extra supports, for
students who need specific mobility accommodations to get
on and off the bus.
It brings to mind the shorter buses that
haul fewer students, and that shorter, that short
bus is often used as an ableist slur
or insult, and so to me struggle bus
kind of fits into that as well.
So I mean, right off the top, they
kind of pinged my sense of justice, my
sense of, hey, you know, we don't use
those words around here, but also right after
that, the host said something that just, that
made me want to scream, frankly.
I mean, it was just me and the
groceries in the car.
I could have screamed if I wanted to,
but they were like, well, we stopped focusing
on the negative, and so we're doing so
much better now that we're attracting more positive
things.
Oh boy, here we go again.
So I immediately came home, went to my
to-do app, and wrote down that very
next podcast I wanted to do was talking
about the fallacy of when you think negative,
you attract negative things.
Now to put on my psychology hat, there,
there are studies that have been done, and
I admit most of the studies I have
been presented with, I have concerns about the
methodology and things, and to get, you know,
really wonky and in the weeds.
But the studies that have been done do
show that, you know, it's the old pink
elephant problem.
If you tell somebody not to think about
a pink elephant, all they're going to do
is think about a pink elephant.
But I also think that the focusing on
the negative, especially for those of us who
are neurodivergent and chronically ill, I think that
there's a lot here to discuss and examine
about how neurotypical brains work and about how
neurodivergent brains work.
And I ran into this yesterday.
I was having an awesome day.
I was doing a bunch of stuff, and
the two sides of my neurodivergence, the, um,
my autism and my ADHD started fighting one
another.
The ADHD was just humming right along.
I was checking things off my to-do
list.
I was getting stuff done, feeling productive.
I had all the dopamine.
I mean all the dopamine.
I was doing great.
I was hyper focusing, and then my autism
stuck its hand up and said, whoa, you've
overwhelmed me.
I need to go chill.
Luckily, that was towards the end of the
day and when I have to go do
an evening, um, chore outside.
And so, like, I spent the next hour
before I went to do those chores, basically
watching show tunes on YouTube.
I mean, I was like totally tuned out.
And I, you know, eased into what I
was doing in the evenings, and I kind
of worked myself out of it.
But I think that goes to show you
that the neurodivergent brain, and depending on your
flavor of neurodivergent brain, or your combination of
flavors in your neurodivergent brain, that you're, it
works differently.
And so, as somebody with autism and with
sensory sensitivities, one of the things that I've
really discovered by tuning into my body is
that on my high pain days, that that's
just so overwhelming to my system.
And so, so strong of a sensation that
that's all I can focus on.
It's, it's like somebody is, you know, walking
around behind me with a big megaphone and
shouting in my ear.
You know, if that were happening to you,
that would literally be the only thing you
could think about.
You'd be like, excuse me, could you like
not do that?
And with the body, it's much the same
way.
When my body is in really bad pain,
which it, it has been quite a bit
due to some weather situations, and the fact
that my medical team doesn't really care that
I'm in this much pain.
Then, you know, I do what I can
to alleviate it.
I, you know, just for those who are
new to the show, I'm a yoga instructor.
So I do yoga, I do meditation, I
do breathing, I do mindfulness, I'm really gentle
with myself.
And I love the practice of self acceptance.
So I do all the things that they
say you're supposed to do.
But when my body feels like somebody is
literally pounding on me with two by fours,
then that's all I can think about.
And of course, that's all I'm going to
think about.
Now, am I attracting more pain by that?
You could argue that since I'm focusing and
noticing on that, that maybe in my brain,
there's something going on there.
But the truth of the matter is, my
body hurts, whether I think about it or
not.
My body hurts at a variable rate.
And so when it hurts less, then I
can, you know, I don't think about it
as much, although I still do think, you
know, Oh, God, you know, that knee is
bothering me or all my shoulders are so
bad.
And that's just one small example.
When you are dealing with socio economic things,
when you are dealing with financial issues, then,
you know, you have to think about them
to some extent.
Because you have to figure out, you know,
what's my budget?
Do I have any more any opportunities to
try and do a side hustle?
Do you know, am I using social media
effectively to promote my business?
There, there's a million things that you need
to think about in relation to your finances.
And thinking about those things is not going
to attract more poverty into your life.
In fact, I would argue that thinking about
those things is going to make you take
more action.
Now, if you are referring to the, you
know, Oh, woe is me, I don't have
any money.
Acknowledging a fact does not attract more facts.
I mean, you know, Oh, woe is me,
I'm in pain.
You are allowed to feel upset about the
state of your existence.
You are allowed to state the truth of
that and how that feels to you.
And so I think that's the first point
I'd like to make is that when somebody
says, you know, Oh, only think positive.
They are wanting you to deny the truth
of your existence for their comfort.
And I don't know about you, but as
somebody who received my diagnoses very late in
life, and has, you know, now reached a
point in life where I'm expected to be,
you know, basically angry all the time.
I don't make myself smaller, deny my existence
for other people's comfort.
And I don't think you should either.
That's part of connecting with our wild spirit.
That's part of, you know, connecting with your
wild untamed nature.
You're not going to tame down any part
of your experience for somebody else's comfort.
I also think that we need to think
about, and this has come up actually in
several things that I have run across over
the past couple of weeks, that everybody kind
of throws out all these, you know, handy
meme worthy things, you know, think positive, get
off the struggle bus, do this, do that,
without thinking about where all of that came
from.
And the truth is that all of that
positive thinking will change your life.
A lot of that came from a guy
called Napoleon Hill.
I believe that was his name back in
the 20s.
So the other thing is it came out
after his death that pretty much everything he
said in his book was a lie.
He claimed that he, you know, got rich,
made all these connections, had this wonderful life,
because he thought positive and changed the way
his mind was going.
And it, no, he was just a grifter
selling some snake oil.
Not only did everybody in the 20s buy
it, because of course everybody wanted to be
a part of the gilded age, but people
in the decades since have bought it to
the point where it's been packaged and repackaged.
The secret, the law of attraction, so many
things.
And so I feel like that the people
who tell you that don't quite know the
history of it, aren't quite willing to look
at the history of it, and aren't quite
willing to look at the fact that what
they're selling you are the same, it's the
same snake oil, just packaged in a more
modern packaging.
It's like if you look at Coke cans,
Coca-Cola, if you look at the cans
of Coke, you know, through the decades, the
Coke cans that we have now don't look
like the Coke cans we had in the
80s, but you still recognize it as Coca
-Cola.
That sort of thing.
And so I think when we do that,
we uncover a couple of things.
And we uncover some fundamental differences between the
neurodivergent brain and the neurotypical brain.
And those differences are really about who gets
to connect with their wild spirit, who gets
to connect with their untamed spirit, and who
doesn't for the sake of a neurotypical society.
I'm going to take a deep breath here,
because I will be honest, maybe it's the
perimenopause, but like I am reaching the point
where this is getting me really angry.
Because for me, I could no more tell
the storm to calm down for my comfort.
I get, you know, thunderstorm rolls in at
like three o'clock in the morning, you
know, big crashes of lightning, big, you know,
big booming reverberating thunder that shakes the house.
You wake up, you're like, oh, you know,
oh my god, we're gonna die.
Maybe that's just me.
You know, I could no more than like
go out on the front porch and be
like, excuse me, thunderstorm, could you calm it
down?
I'm trying to sleep.
The storm is going to be like, haha,
here's some more thunder and lightning for you,
crazy person.
And so I want to be the thunderstorm.
Not in that I want to, you know,
make noise and wake people up, but in
that I want to be firm.
And this is who I am.
This is my nature.
This is, you know, this is it.
And so we could, you know, we could
take this down several notches.
Squirrels love to raid bird feeders.
You can try to do everything you can
to squirrel proof your bird feeder.
But there's a chance that your squirrel is
still going to steal the food out of
your bird feeder.
The squirrel will find a way.
Is it cute?
It could be.
Is it annoying?
If you're the one buying the bird seed,
probably.
But the squirrel is going to squirrel.
And we have to accept that.
We have to acknowledge that that's the situation.
And we can do two things.
We can either scream at the squirrel not
to squirrel, to which the squirrel is going
to pretty much ignore the big screaming monkey
on the front porch.
And I say monkey because we're primates.
And so, you know, theoretically, that's kind of
how a lot of nature looks at us.
You're going to tire yourself out, stress yourself
out, and not change the squirrel's behavior.
And with that, you could ignore the squirrel.
But the fact is, you'd still be spending
extra money on bird seed.
You would still be, you know, trying to
fix the parts of the bird feeder the
squirrel broke.
The situation would be there even if you
tell yourself, well, the squirrel's not, you know,
the squirrel's not raiding my bird feeder.
Well, it is.
You're just ignoring it and deluding yourself.
And so, I think that's where when people
say, well, don't focus on the bad things
without giving you any other context, then they're
telling you to delude yourself.
They're telling you to ignore the squirrel raiding
your bird feeder.
They're telling you to, you know, no, it's
not thundering and lightning.
And there's no severe thunderstorm warning.
Just for the record, today it's sunny.
But we're in the Midwest.
It's spring.
We're supposed to get storms in a couple
of days.
It happens.
You know, you could tell yourself that.
But if you don't take cover during a
severe weather warning, you do risk very serious
injury or worse.
You do risk getting hurt.
And so, if you acknowledge the situation, I
am in a lot of pain today, or
that light is too loud, or my God,
I can hear the electricity in this room.
I have got to do something about it.
Acknowledging the situation is not going to attract
more of that situation.
My husband and I hate overhead lights.
We're both autistic.
Can you tell?
But if I, if he, he's usually the
one that turns on the overhead light to
do some, to clean or something.
If he turns on the overhead light and,
you know, I'm on the bed like going,
bright light, bright light, as I'm working on
my laptop, like I'm some sort of little
moggly from the movie or something, then, you
know, that's not going to make all the
other lights in the house turn on and
like march and, you know, increase the illumination
in the room I'm in.
That's simply an acknowledgement that, hey, you turned
on the light.
I hope you had a good reason.
And obviously, we communicate better than that.
Once you have that acknowledgement, you can then
figure out what to do to fix it.
That might be on a high, high pain
day, giving yourself grace, saying, you know what,
my body hurts today.
I can't do what I wanted to do.
I'm going to curl up with a blanket,
a book, the favorite show I'm streaming, whatever
makes you feel better.
If it is the case of like bad
sensory inputs in a room, it's going to
be, you know, hey, can you turn the
light off?
That's really hurting my eyes right now.
Or, you know, is this going to be
quick?
Usually in our case, it's like, you know,
if it's not obvious, I'm like, why did
you do that?
He tells me and I'm like, okay, make
it quick.
Acknowledging it and even, you know, even if
you're groaning and, you know, growling about it
the entire time, you can still do that.
You can still understand the situation is what
it is, and you can still do what
you need to do to make any changes.
There's a big difference between working through the
situation as it is, working to find a
better place, and just completely deluding yourself that
the situation doesn't exist at all.
And the other thing is, notice that even
with like the sensory issue, there's a two
-way communication.
And this is the other part that really
got me when I was listening to this
podcast.
So it is a spiritual metaphysical podcast.
They talk a lot about new age style
topics.
They do teach classes.
I suppose people could turn to this podcast
for a guru, and you've got to be
mindful of that.
I mean, if you're putting yourself in a
position where you're teaching people, you need to
be mindful that if you're teaching people, people
will do what you say.
Hopefully, maybe, or at least they'll consider it.
You know, I mean, I don't want to
be all authoritarian because that's not the case.
I really encourage people who listen to this
podcast and who take my classes and that
to try.
You know, have a curious mind.
That's all I ask.
And the tone of this basically was, if
you don't stop thinking about whatever is a
pain point in your life, if you don't
stop focusing on that, nothing is going to
change.
You're only going to attract more, and it's
going to be your fault.
It's the last part that really got me.
It's going to be your fault.
Hello, victim blaming has entered the chat.
And so with that victim blaming, that's a
whole new layer of not good.
Because there are so many things that go
into even what appears to be a cut
and dried situation.
So for those of us who are neurodivergent
and have a chronic illness, the easy knee
jerk thing to do, you have diabetes, you're
clearly not eating right.
You know, whether it's a medical provider or
somebody, you know, you know, nothing.
It's all on you.
Oh, you have chronic pain and you're not
losing weight.
Well, that's your fault.
That is their way, again, of making themselves
feel better and absolving themselves of all responsibility.
But more importantly, they're basically absolving the socio
economic cultural systems of all their responsibility too.
I just got done writing an essay talking
about how being chronically ill really connects us
with this planet, which many would argue is
chronically ill right now dealing with climate change,
and just the weird things going on with
the weather.
And that, and you know, one of the
points I made was that, okay, a single
tree in the forest has to take in
nutrients, water, air, all of that good stuff
to survive.
And so in to some respect, it is
on that tree to do that.
However, that tree is affected by all the
other trees in the forest.
And whether that's, you know, a little forest,
like the one I have in my backyard,
that's kind of a little buffer zone between
us and the properties around us.
Or whether it's, you know, thousands and thousands
of acres, like the Mark Twain National Forest,
or any national forest that, you know, is
in the US.
I happen to live in the Ozarks.
There is quite a bit of the Mark
Twain National Forest not too far from where
I live.
Acres and acres and acres and acres of
trees.
But even something as big as a section
of the National Forest, and in the case
of the Mark Twain National Forest, it's actually
several large forests in a very vast geographic
area.
It's not just like one national park.
There's a whole bunch of little pieces of
it scattered throughout the Ozarks.
But those little pieces are, you know, many
thousands of acres.
And, you know, the health of that is
based, in some respects, to the land around
it and what the people do.
I'm thinking about, like, the Emerald Ash Borer,
I think its name was.
When it first showed up in Iowa, all
of a sudden it was like, okay, you
can't bring in your own firewood.
You need to buy it only from authorized
dealers.
Because people bringing in firewood from other states
moved this pest across state lines and brought
it into Iowa, where it really proliferated.
When we think about the invasive species here,
the invasive species that we have came over
from long distances and in ways that, like,
people didn't even notice.
If you're dealing with an invasive species, you're
dealing with something that somebody basically either thought
was good that they introduced into an ecosystem,
or that they didn't even know was there.
And then all of a sudden you got
this big problem.
You can't blame, for example, the Ash Tree
for its Emerald Borer infestation without actually looking
at all the other factors.
And, you know, okay, the, you know, the
people moving firewood, how did this pest originally
get into the U.S.? There's so many
factors.
And I don't see this as a neurodivergent
tangent.
I see this because it connects with our
thoughts.
If I'm having a bad pain day, okay,
yes, in this moment, I have pain signals
going to my brain.
I have signals going to my brain that
my brain's interpreting as pain, and they're localized
in various parts of my body.
I could catalog them.
You guys probably aren't interested in that.
I wouldn't be if I was listening to
this podcast.
You know, and there are different sensations, and
they're caused by different things.
But all of that is connected to other
things that happen, that are connected to things
that go back, you know, 50 years.
Because that's how old I am.
And that all those experiences have built to
this moment.
And so for me to just say, you
know, oh, well, I'm not in pain today,
doesn't do anything to address the 50 years
of damage that have been that has been
done to my body and nervous system, by
various factors, including people who did not want
to see that I was neurodivergent, or who
did not want to believe my lived experiences
around some trauma that I experienced.
And so, you know, I always believe that
when you blame the person that that's the,
you know, that's, that's the coward's way out.
That's the cop out.
Even now, like with our political situation, you
can tell somebody, hey, your vote caused this
to happen.
But then you have to look at why
the people voted that way, what caused it.
And that goes back decades.
And it's so much wider than just going,
you know, haha, you voted for this, now
you're getting hurt.
That's probably another show.
Maybe not.
But everything is connected.
And that to me, that's, that's what my
autistic brain has taught me.
Everything is connected.
Patterns upon patterns upon patterns upon patterns.
And when you start to put those patterns
together, which is