‘my central priority is the cultivation of human potentials for creativity, well-being, and beautiful weirdness – and our capacity to bring such potentials to realization ultimately depends not on our choice of identity labels but on our choice of practices’
Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies
Hello,
I’m Sarah.
Forgetting the Self is about identity, neurodivergence and zen practice in a self-conscious age. It’s about learning to live authentically when you think differently. It’s about the shapes of the stories we tell and what they say about us.
After my son received an autism diagnosis last year, I kept hearing that autistic children usually have at least one autistic parent. Interesting, I thought, giving my partner the side eye. It slowly dawned on me it wasn’t him, it was me. I was that parent. I had always felt different and at odds. Finally I understood why.
Since then I’ve become obsessively (autistically!) fascinated with all things neurodivergent and curious about how I might start, at my late age, to embody an autistic identity: to discover what Emily Dickinson calls ‘the self behind the self concealed’.
But no identity is fixed. No story is entirely true. As a long-time zen practitioner, I keep hearing the words of 13th century Japanese monk Eihei Dogen echoing round inside: ‘To study the self is to forget the self’ he said. I don’t want to just replace a neurotypical performance with an autistic one. I want to find out who I am, in the knowledge that ‘who I am’ is fluid and without a centre.
We live in an age of self-consciousness. Social media is full of curated lives. We photograph perfect sunsets and artful restaurant plates, leave out the 4am musings and the irritable commute. We filter and burnish. We build our profiles.
I don’t want to do that here. I feel like I’ve been given a fresh start, a way to reread my past and rewrite my future. In Forgetting the Self I aim to track my own unfolding identity and emerging practices for daily life, as a way of making space for others who might want to do the same. Autistic psychologist Dr Amy Pearson says that when you change the narrative, you change the future. I want to play my own small part in that change, so that people who think differently might one day be better valued, better understood.
If any of this resonates and you want to read more, you can subscribe below. I hope this will be a place to connect and explore together; after subscribing you can get in touch with me directly, as well as joining subscriber-only conversations. If you have stories to share or ideas for future posts I would love to hear from you.
Bio
Sarah is a writer and erstwhile musician. Her stories and articles have appeared in Ambit, Gutter, Brittle Star, Northwords Now, The Letters Page, and New Writing Scotland. She has Masters degrees in both creative writing and music therapy. In 2023 she was awarded a Creative Scotland grant that helped her finish a novel called Auditorium, in which she wrote about motherhood, neurodivergence and music (currently out on submission). This year she’s one of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards cohort. She’s currently working on a series of personal essays.
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