Neurosparklers Are Gooney Birds

Part One of the Bird Brain Sanctuary

If you've watched my TikTok videos or read the comments on them, you've probably heard me talk about Exulansis.

I use the word when I reach that point where explaining myself more isn't going to help anyone understand what I'm trying to say. More words aren't going to make someone see what I can see, and continuing to rearrange those words into increasingly elaborate combinations is only going to make me more frustrated.

More words are just going to make their eyes glaze over at best or think I am being evasive or making excuses more likely.

This week I am introducing the gestalt that became the word that Koenig coined as exulansis for the Book of Obscure Sorrows.

Of course it's a bird so what better way to welcome you to the Bird Brain Sanctuary that is my mind than to introduce you to:

The Wandering Albatross.

John Koenig derived exulansis from the Latin exulans — exile, wanderer — and the scientific name of the Wandering Albatross:

Diomedea exulans.

A magnificent bird with a wingspan that can reach more than 12 feet. A bird made to fly so efficiently that it can travel enormous distances using the wind, soaring dynamically for hours without even flapping its wings.

A Wandering Albatross can spend years at sea before returning to the place where it was born. Over a lifetime, researchers estimate that one may travel well over 5 million miles.

Sailors assumed that the birds were exiled wanderers who would have preferred to be on dry land but couldn’t find their way home.
Not the first time that a human has assumed that another being’s way of being is the wrong way of being right. (I wrote a whole book about that!)

Young Wandering Albatrosses can remain at sea for years before returning to the colony where they were born, and their enormous wings allow them to use the wind to travel extraordinary distances while expending remarkably little energy.

They were made to fly.

Millions of miles. Years at a time. On wings that rarely flap.

And then this extraordinary bird, built to soar over oceans for years at a time, eventually has to come back to dry land to make more baby albatrosses.

That's where things get interesting.

Because the same enormous wings that make the Wandering Albatross magnificent in the air don't make the bird particularly graceful on land.

Their legs and feet sit far back on their bodies. They wobble around. Their landings can look more like crashes than landings, and when people observed these enormous, awkward birds lumbering around on dry land, they gave albatrosses another name:

That's the part that made Koenig coin the word exulansis and made me choose Diomedea Exulans for the first bird you meet in the Bird Brain Sanctuary.

Albatrosses are extraordinary in the air. On land? Not so much.

Those enormous wings aren't particularly useful when they are walking around. Takeoffs and landings can be awkward. They stumble. They wobble. Their elaborate mating dances are spectacles to behold.

Albatrosses have another name once they got back to shore:

Gooney Birds.

“Gooney” means silly, foolish, awkward, or goofy. It is also an informal name for an albatross.

Imagine that.

You have a bird capable of traveling millions of miles across the planet, exquisitely adapted to an environment most human beings couldn't survive in for an afternoon, and somebody watches the bird wobbling around on land and decides the relevant observation is:

That bird looks Stupid. Silly. Foolish. Awkward. Goofy.

I imagine that if birds had words, the albatross would choose not to explain itself. But birds don’t speak to people.

They just fly.

The past three weeks have been extraordinary even for me.

The first week, I found out that I may have ovarian cancer and this Tuesday I will meet with the oncologist to schedule surgery. The second week, my dad had another stroke and I spent the week with him in the ICU. This past week, we cared for my 16-year-old special-needs niece, whom I absolutely adore but who wears me out!

I am freaking great at caregiving but not as great at being cared for. And I am exhausted from caregiving. And I am tired of caregiving.

All of those things are true individually and simultaneously.

I don’t feel guilty for melting down for a week after the MRI results while my beloved husband could only hold me while I cried.

I don't regret being with Daddy in the ICU “just one more time” after dozens of “surely this has to be the last time”.

I don't resent being with my niece and answering a million questions and listening to a million words.

But for two weeks straight, my brain was required to orient itself around somebody else's needs instead of worrying about my own.

I never built a life where another human being's needs determined the sequence of my day, and after three hours of answering questions and anticipating needs and remembering what somebody else needed next, I was fucking exhausted.

I don't know how moms do it. I don’t know how my mom did it.

I especially don't know how special-needs moms do it because they are both caregivers and mothers at the same time and often have no one that can care for them. All that bullshit people tell them about how God chooses his finest or what a blessing caregiving is isn't helpful when somebody is pulling her hair out and just wants five fucking minutes where nobody needs anything.

It is exhausting. And it defies explanation to anyone who doesn’t know what it’s like. Including me.

The problem is that because Neurosparklers are exceptionally good at something, people, including me, can assume that doing that thing shouldn't cost us very much.

But every hour I spend doing one thing I do incredibly well is an hour when I cannot be doing something else I do incredibly well and want to do more than anything else.

Write. Create the Bird Brain Sanctuary. Share my Just Right Words.

For the last seven years, what I have wanted more than anything is to sit in my office and work. Hopefully that time has arrived. If I actually hit send tonight, this will be week 3 in a row.

I have this whole new office set up now. I have taken over our rental property until after the surgery and for the first time in years, I am sitting exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to be doing.

Writing this. Hoping to stretch the three week streak into momentum that has eluded me for three years.

But if you judged me by my output over the past three weeks/years — whether I got my newsletter out on time or at all, whether I checked things off my list, whether I did what I said I was going to do, whether I looked particularly effective at life—you would have seen a very different Paige than the one I wanted to be.

I want to soar. Instead, for several weeks and several years before those weeks, I have been doing what had to be done exceptionally well because that’s what Neurosparklers do.

We get shit done because it has to be done and we make it look so easy that when we wobble, we are judged on the wobble. Not on the soar.

If you judged me by my published output during the past 7 years?

You saw the albatross on dry land. You saw me wobble. You observed me crash land over and over. You watched me take off only to disappear for years at a time.

Only to crash land once again. I am not starting over. I am heading back to sea.

This is where the Wandering Albatross stopped being an interesting bird fact and Diomedea Exulans became something I couldn't stop thinking about as I introduce the Bird Brain Sanctuary.

Neurosparklers tend to have spiky cognitive profiles.

Some of us have exceptional abilities to do the things we do well better than almost anybody else in the world, and somehow people take evidence of exceptional ability in one environment and turn that into an expectation of exceptional ability everywhere.

That's not how brains work. That's not even how birds work.

Nobody should look at an albatross with an 11-foot wingspan and says, Well, if you're capable of flying millions of miles, surely you should be able to walk across this beach without looking ridiculous.

Except that's exactly what we do to people.

We judge intelligence by performance on tasks that have nothing to do with intelligence. We judge capability by performance in environments that have nothing to do with someone's Strengths, Temperament, Intellect, Quirks and Story (STIQS).

We judge productivity while someone is caregiving, organization while someone is overwhelmed, and competence while someone is trying to perform a sequence of tiny technical tasks that may have absolutely nothing to do with the extraordinary thing their bird brain actually knows how to do.

You see the wonky wobble and decide we've seen the bird.

You haven't.

You saw the bird on land.

A whole slew of GenX women are reaching the point where we are no longer allocating fucks to trying harder to become less mediocre at something at which we will never excel.

We are done worrying about being judged by how gracefully we perform in environments we were never designed to inhabit.

We are tired. We are full. We have spent decades being incredibly capable, which has mostly resulted in people deciding that because we can, we should.

No. More.

There comes a point when just because you can doesn't mean you're the right person to do what needs to be done.

There comes a point when you stop allowing somebody else's view from the beach to become your definition of your Bird Brain.

There comes a choice when Exulansis becomes a choice long before Exulansis Fatigue becomes the consequence.

So that's my question for you this week.

Maybe you're not flailing.

Maybe you're wobbling because you're out of your element.

And maybe the people judging your wobble have absolutely no idea what you can do once you spread your wings.

Echolalia is the cure for Exulansis Fatigue:

So now a Gestalt for the Neurosparklers who see it/It/IT the way that I do…because Sara Evans sang it better than I could ever say it in words:

What someone calls me depends upon whether they observe me soaring dynamically or wobbling out of my element because I am doing what has to be done.

I choose to call myself a Neurosparkler.

A term I coined in 2023 because there is still not an official diagnosis for GenX 2e AuDHD Women who became Unconventional High Achievers who got shit done.

I refuse to define us in more acceptable words because if you know, then you know and if you don't then more words aren't going to help you understand. I’m ready to outjargon the jargonistas and build the lexicon that makes sense to us.

May You Choose to See What Was Always There,

Auntie Paige

At over 11 feet, the wandering albatross has the biggest wingspan of any bird on the planet. One of these birds can fly millions of miles during a lifetime, but they don't live a solitary existence; they are masters of the long-distance relationship.