This newsletter has been quiet for eleven months.
I wasn't.
While the sends stopped, the writing didn't. There are more than nine hundred essays sitting in the vault behind this newsletter — a dictionary of invented words, a map of four birds, a framework with a curriculum, and a memoir that explains why all of it had to exist. The quiet wasn't absence. It was construction.
Here's what I learned while I was building: I failed fabulously at being understood in real time. Out loud, live, face to face — the translation kept failing. So I stopped translating live and started writing IT down, once, completely, for the people who can already hear it.
That's you. Welcome back.
First, a word you need
exulansis (noun) — the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
John Koenig coined Exulansis in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Exulansis Fatigue is my phrase for the accumulated cost of translation.
Exulansis is what happens to a complicated mind after enough failed translations. You stop explaining. Not because the thing you were explaining wasn't real — because the explaining itself became the wound.
This newsletter is my answer to exulansis. I don't explain live anymore. I write IT down.
The method behind the Rabbit Hole Roadmap
The Rabbit Hole Roadmap is the name of the future free webinar. TRIP names the method we will use: Tackle the Topic; Resolve the Referent; Interrogate Inklings; Practice Pragmatic Positivity.
TRIP is an application of the Johari Window. I bring my perspective and three other perspectives to one topic. The Bird Brains illustrate the questions What Is?, What If?, What Now?, and What Next? They can also help me choose a mental advisory board. Owl is someone who knows more about what I know and can falsify my premise if it is faulty.
The governing question is: Is the thing I can’t not want a dream or a delusion?
Here is how I describe the four moves in this essay:
T — Tackle the Topic. I've lived through this; here is what I am seeing. The lived moment, pattern, or tension. This is the witness position.
R — Resolve the Referent. Here is the Just Right Word for It — the thing named precisely enough that it becomes recognizable. This is where an unnamed experience becomes available to consciousness.
I — Interrogate Inklings. Here is why it felt the way it did to me — the associations, memories, contradictions, and internal evidence. Not universal explanation. Literal first-person inquiry.
P — Practice Pragmatic Positivity. Via negativa: here is how this relates to something larger than me — found by subtracting what is false, imposed, or no longer useful. This is not positive thinking. It is practical liberation through subtraction.
The movement underneath it: Experience → Name → Meaning → Liberation. What I see. What It is called. What It means to me. What becomes possible when I Get to No.
Via negativa is a literal method, not a mood: you find what is true by removing what is false. The sculptor doesn't add marble. The scientist doesn't prove — she rules out. And a Neurosparkler drowning in input doesn't need more information. She needs a disciplined way to subtract.
That's why the university was always called Get to No. The No is not a rejection of life. The No is the tool. Every honest No removes one wrong answer, and what remains — after enough of them — is the real thing. It's the same move as the Anti-nym Thesaurus: sometimes the fastest way to define a thing is to say exactly what it is not.
What IT is
Long-time readers have seen me capitalize IT and wondered whether that was a typo. It is not. IT is a defined term:
IT is what IT is at this moment in space and time. IT is "How I see IT."
IT means Identified Topic: the problem, question, or conundrum under discussion. I hold that referent until I explicitly change it. My perspective is where the inquiry begins; it does not guarantee that my premise is correct. X is the answer or understanding, and a resolved thought can close without requiring an action or fix.
What happens from here
The Neurosparkle Lexicon: words and definitions connected to the writing that made them useful.
The Johari Window: the underlying lens and the Bird Brain perspectives.
Rabbit Hole Roadmap: a future free webinar for individuals. I will create and deliver it when the waiting list reaches 100 people. There is no date yet.
Ask Auntie Paige: Async Musings in No Particular Order, with the complete archive available from the hub.
If you found me on TikTok, this is the place the videos point to. If you haven't seen this one yet, it's the best door in:
@askauntiepaige The world has never seen a tsunami like the one that is brewing. As a slew of elder Neurosparklers discover our power, paradigms are going... See more
Mark my words
Here is the one thing TikTok and Threads have taught me: the world is not ready for what happens when a whole generation of highly adapted neurodivergent people — people who got shit done for decades — finally have the terms to find each other.
It was never that we needed help finding ourselves. Many of us knew exactly who we were. We were unapologetically, radically authentic. And that offended some people.
But what I am seeing right now — I've been around for almost six decades. I am telling you, mark my words: we are in a paradigm-shifting environment.
TikTok. Instagram. Threads. Newsletters like this one. Videos, writings, dictionaries — everywhere Neurosparklers are finding each other, power is being unleashed. It is going to cause a tsunami that changes the world. This is like nothing I have seen in my lifetime, and I have been through the ups and downs and crazy times since 1967.
So hang in there. If it feels overwhelming, it's because it is.
We are about to bring the full force of who we are to bear. The world is not ready.
The language finally is.
One thing before you go
Hit reply and tell me the experience you never found a word for. Say it badly, say it sideways, say it in nine hundred words — I read every reply, and the Auntie Dictionary has room.
And if you know another Neurosparkler — someone whose translations keep failing on people who love them anyway — send them this:
Critical thinking for the cognitively complicated. That was always the promise. Now it has a roadmap.
— Paige