Paige Mitts
About Me

I’m Paige. Auntie Paige.

Writer of Ask Auntie Paige and the Neurosparkle Newsletter.

I never had to fix my Bird Brain.

I was given a framework for critical thinking as a child. When I was tested for the gifted program, I learned how my own brain works, and that my IQ itself is the thing that makes it hardest for other people to follow me. Because I had the framework early, I never had the struggles so many diagnosed and self-identified neurodivergent people describe. I built a life that fit my Stack of STIQS, and I lived my dream without trying to alter my Bird Brain.

Then came the Meantime.

Caregiving became the center of everything, for about eight years.

I had just begun publishing my first book. I hoped it would be my only book: the one I would talk about for the rest of my life, the way my aunt did. The outline still exists, on a piece of paper. At the bottom of that paper are my notes from the day my father had his stroke.

Six months later, my mother died, suddenly. Only then did I understand why I had always felt understood: my mother and I communicated without words. For over half a century, I had never had to explain myself.

Then, all at once, I had to learn to find the right words, and to read the changes in my father’s mind. He had been misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s. His stroke had caused vascular dementia, in the part of the brain where executive function lives. He was still brilliant. Recalling his brilliance had become the challenge. Studying his mind taught me my own.

My mother had been his person since they met at 13. Now I was. My dad, my husband Greg, and I got through those years by sheer will and perseverance.

The Meantime is over.

My father is cared for, exceptionally, at the Illinois Veterans Home. I get to be his daughter again, a daughter he gets to watch living her dream.

The one book became more than 13 million words. I couldn’t not think out loud. Out of those words came a lexicon, and a language that did not exist three years ago.

TikTok is where I found out that not writing was no longer an option. My words don’t exist in my mind as language until I hear them spoken and reflected back to me. Recording videos let me form one thought at a time, as a gestalt. When I started talking about my Neurosparkle Bird Brain, other people recognized themselves. That is how this became a conversation bigger than me.

Now I live on Quincy Bay with Greg, with hummingbirds at the feeder and a body of work that already exists. My job is to organize it and deliver it.

I can’t not write. The question is whether sharing what I’ve written can make a living or a difference. Perhaps both.

The Newsletter

A word can be a symphony or a soliloquy.

The Neurosparkle Newsletter is where I make myself choose. Once a week, I take what I’ve been thinking about and bring you one essay, story, question, or Just Right Word.

Ask Auntie Paige is where I don’t have to stop.

When a sentence in the newsletter needs an essay, the essay lives here. When the essay needs another essay, that one can live here too. You decide how far down the rabbit hole you want to go.

Brief at the surface. Bottomless underneath. Reader-controlled depth.

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How I write

I have spent most of my life noticing things.

Things that don’t fit. Things that connect. Things everybody seems to know that nobody can quite explain. Words that almost mean what we need them to mean. Questions that lead to other questions and occasionally somewhere useful.

Ask Auntie Paige is where I write those things down. This is what it means to see the parts and the whole individually and simultaneously.

Some thoughts are short. Some require a deep dive. Some contradict things I wrote years ago because I know something now that I didn’t know then.

That’s not a bug. That’s the corpus.

You don’t have to start at the beginning.

There isn’t one.

Explore the Ask Auntie Paige Archive