A Mess of Things

Updates, Imposter Syndrome, and More

✨Reminders✨

• The Guerrilla Feminist is reader-supported! Thank you to the folks who pay monthly to support my work. If you want to be added to a paid plan, go here.

• Wanna add to The Guerrilla Feminist Spotify Playlist? Go here.

• Forward this email to a friend you think would enjoy it or take a screenshot and share it on social media and tag me!

  ---

by Leah Goren

Ciao ciao, dear readers! How are you? How’s your heart?

I have had a tough week. Though I love the cooler weather, the transition from season to season is always a bit of a struggle for me. It feels a bit disorienting, especially going from summer to fall. I had a bitesize panic attack at work this week, which hasn’t happened for a long time, and I’ve been feeling a bit hopeless with regard to my mental health and my trauma brain.

Whenever I feel like this, I try to immerse myself in things and people I love. I do my somatic exercises. I do my “voo” breath. I write. I try to delve deeply into what I’m passionate about—which is writing and educating, mostly.

More specifically, one of these passions is teaching and educating about online abuse (or digital violence as I prefer to call it). I released info about my first ever online class that I will be teaching in late October about Digital Violence + The Nervous System, and I feel so excited about this (even more excited about the amount of signups I’ve gotten already! Thank you!) This class has been years in the making, and I started actually putting something together for it last year, but then pausing.

I am trying to not have imposter syndrome, or at the very least, to not listen to my imposter syndrome. As someone who was consistently told in my youth that I was “stupid” or a “problem” or would “never amount to much” due to my disabilities, my imposter syndrome is a very heavy thing. I am trying to just do the damn thing, and spend less time analyzing whether I should or should not.

As someone with C-PTSD who learned very early on in life to live in my head instead of my body, I have been trying to drop into my body more than ever in the past year. The issue with this, however, is I also have SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) and SPS (Sensory Processing Sensitivity).

SPD and SPS are different, but similar. SPD is having hyper-vigilance as it relates to any sensory input (taste, smell, vision, hearing, touch). This quote sums it up for me:

Many adults describe the feeling as being assaulted, attacked, or invaded by everyday experiences. They are bothered by sounds or textures that most people don’t hear or feel.

On the other hand, SPS is not considered a disorder, but a personality trait. It’s defined as:

a personal disposition to being sensitive to subtle stimuli and being easily over-aroused by external stimuli. It has recently been proposed as a human neurobiological trait found to be significantly higher in 10–20% of the population.

This part is especially important:

SPS is not associated with dysregulation, but with awareness, depth of processing, and needing time to process information and stimuli.

Needless to say: I’ve got my work cut out for me.

I’m really happy it’s fall. I’m really happy for new + fun + exciting opportunities that are coming up. I’m also, of course, really scared about a bunch of things. I am trying to hold the both/and—a new and very difficult concept for me.

I am trying to live (and thrive) in a world that was never meant for me or people like me. The gravity of this never leaves me. But I continue on, because what else is there to do?

---

🫀 Mood Board for the Week

1. I’m offering my first ever online class! It’s called Digital Violence & The Nervous System. It’s on Oct. 29 for 2 hours, $35 (sliding scale), and you will receive a recording even if you can’t show up live! Also, Black, Indigenous and other POC get in free! Read more about it and sign up here!

   

2. From The Labor Bund to the Lesbian Bar - Molly Crabapple

3. How Glossier Sold Us Nothing -

   The Unpublishable

4. The sacred patterns of the people we love -

   the examined family

5. I’m doing a takeover on

   Margeaux Feldman
   ’s Softcore_Trauma IG account on Tuesday, September 26! I hope you’ll like it!

6. Wisconsin’s Black infants have some of the country’s highest mortality rates. These solutions could help

7. Everything

   Marlee Grace
   says here

8. This book sounds interesting (and very needed)