WHY I TEACH JOURNALING & WHO I TEACH IT TO

I teach journaling to queer & neurodivergent people because their / our perspective on the world is so fucking beautiful & the support for them to express it in all its truth and glory so little available. We have been taught, from a very young age, right into adulthood… to try to both experience and express through systems, codifications, narratives, & ways that were built for a "normal" / neurotypical / heterosexual / gender-conforming brain.. We find ourselves lost, in worlds of masking, where the only support available is to help us be more like a typical person . There is so little support and space that encourages us into being more like ourselves. WHY JOURNALING? I work with journaling because it is an incredibly useful intermediary way-point between our personal private inner worlds and the possibility of sharing them. When we write in our journals, we take steps to express & externalise the uniqueness of our perception… [...just pause and consider for a moment … the uniqueness of your perception … ] The corners of the universe that we are privy to that so many don’t even know exist.. And so often we are habitually looking away.. Because we were taught to try to be normal, we had to pretend they didn't exist. On even the most pragmatic levels, we can be considered seers - we see worlds outside of the consensus reality. We see possible futures & ways of interacting with the universe that haven’t been considered before .. because mainstream worlds have lacked the capacity to imagine them… We experience them. It isn’t just a cool idea. Some of us think in non-linear explosions. Some of us experience a merging of the senses. Some of us have senses that there are not words for yet. Some of us can change our proprioception (sense of the shape of the periphery of our body) at will. Some of us can make connections and networks between seemingly unrelated things. We are superheroes… Our extra insights count, they matter, they are awe-inspiringly beautiful, they are new/ different ways of seeing & exactly what a world so entrenched in the swamp of an endlessly regurgitated self-destructive script.. needs. We need you. We need your voice. So, I implore you.. If you perceive the world differently, love differently, f*ck differently, create differently, function differently to the norm… make a space inside of a notebook… where you cannot be the imposter, because there is no one else there… and start to speak, to nourish YOUR VOICE… allow yourself to unfurl. Cultivate relationship with it. This is how we begin to change the world… by becoming intimate with our own beauty. This is the first step on the journey of sharing ourselves more with other people. & and it starts with sharing ourselves more with ourselves. I do this because I want to get more UNIQUE voices speaking … to themselves & the world… I do this because I understand how hard it is initially, to find yourself, in the quagmire of other people’s narratives of you… because I understand how petrifying it can be to venture into this space… & also how much you long for it. Because when we share ourselves truly, uniquely, magic happens… new universes are born between us in the form of new possible interactions. We innovate the cosmos. We give joy to our own hearts (fully expressed) because we deserve it, we are worth it. We are fucking special.