Anami Grace | Made Up Life

Women, in the patriarchy are socialized to meet the needs of the many and outsource their needs to *gestures vaguely* but the problem with that is that chronically unmet needs create significant trauma for the individual experiencing the need.

Deconstructing this belief within myself has been the ultimate inconvenience and has lead me to some pretty dark places in my soul. Because not only was I taught in childhood that it was unsafe for me to need but my needs were often conflated with my also being an incredibly particular human. I really liked things the way I liked them, and especially my mother would downplay them and make it seem like it was unreasonable for me to even exist, no less to need something from her.

Now, with perspective – she too probably had PDA type autism that was undiagnosed, but it wasn’t my fault or responsibility to know that or to help her through that. I was her child.

But, I can nod to that and understand that to the monsters, we are monsters. However it does not erase the fact that I had special needs in my childhood that were chronically unmet – and that created a disconnect from my body and my playful spirit. Which showed up as maladaptive coping mechanisms in my adulthood.

So, today – as I was holding myself in devotion and deep cleaning my kitchen and cooking myself the most ridiculously flavorful breakfast I was shown that it was okay for my needs to be special to me. It was okay for me to dote on myself with as much unapologetic love and not only enjoy meeting my needs, but to recognize them as valid, within reason, and give them to myself with as much wealth and presence as I could muster.

And. Here’s the thing. Y’all. Loving myself through meeting my own needs wasn’t inherent. It was something I had to learn through a variety of incredible challenges in my life. Please imagine my surprise that when I started to recognize my own needs as valid – and unapologetically meet them, how well I did.

Here are a few needs that were unrecognized in my childhood that I had to reconstruct my life around in adulthood.

Emotional Support Context: Needing a little extra explanation about why something was needed or wanted. I wasn’t trying to be difficult, I just really needed to understand so that I could reframe the situation and create buy-in from my body. This showed up in a variety of ways, but most recently when I took a new position at my old job and was asked to take notes for a meeting without being given a list of acronyms used or being told the context of the work we were doing.

Extra Sensory Needs: Listen. Y’all. I’m ridiculous about flavor. I didn’t just want my food to taste wonderful, but I needed it to taste good. I wasn’t going to be able to eat it or enjoy it without being ridiculous about it – but this is why I learned to be a wonderful cook, was to meet this need for flavor on my own. I also have an incredibly important need around music. I not only use it to *stem (It’s a post for another day, but I don’t see it as stimming, but as a spiritual and physical need that is an evolutionary advantage), but to move energy through my body and to expand my human body’s experience of life.

Fashion: I have to dress my body in a way that is comfortable and adorable. I would love to expand the fashion world by creating a line of clothing/capsule wardrobe for autistic women that is tagless and created from natural fibers. Because being able to hold your body in style isn’t just a want. It’s a creative need.

Routine: I have to have a flexible routine so that I can follow the path to exit my house in 10 steps. I have to be able to predict what is next to keep my nervous system regulated and happy.

Novelty: I have to find a way to experience the same things differently and from a new perspective, and have the opportunity to learn and grow because that is what I came here to do.

Movement: I not only have to move my body for at least an hour a day. I have to stem by moving music, energy, love, and kindness through my body via way of my biofield.

Clean & Organized Space: With quantity time to be unperceived in it. This was something I really struggled with in my adulthood. Because I didn’t understand that I was allowed to take up space in the world, I allowed relationships and other people to encroach on my space/time/safety. And chronically held their needs above my own, as if caring for them and their things could change my relationship with having and meeting my own needs.

This was particularly difficult in my last relationship in which I didn’t have enough space in my own house for my own things because his things were nicer than mine. And then was aways called “messy” and disorganized. But in reality I needed accommodations like my laundry system of laundry baskets on a shelf rather than a chest of drawers.

Play: I had to make up ridiculous stories about things to help myself move through them and find creativity within relationships. I met this need by making up creative play stories about my animals, and creating hilarious back stories about their lives. Like. Lilian is a ho. A retired street walker who gave up her nightlife to be perpetually annoyed about the lack of chicken in her dinner.

Modeling/Patience/Collaboration/Attunement: I watched TV like I was a detective for most of my life, so that I could have some understanding about how the world worked outside of my body, and so that I could become incredibly good at masking. Not just so I could hate myself the most, but so that I couldn’t ever really replicate anything I’d observed because unfortunately life does not work like the movies. But it was the only tool that I had easy access to model human behavior. (I’ll bet a lot of autistic people and star seeds relate to that statement.) And echolalia helped me script conversations with people that mirrored human behavior.

I also desperately wanted to be part of a team, but couldn’t because of my delayed fine motor skills, and living in a chronically dysregulated body that couldn’t tolerate the discomfort of exercise without having complete autonomy over my body.

Lastly, Language: I needed authentic and descriptive language that articulated my experience with kindness and love. Because I always sought to understand the world through language, this was the most important need that I held in my body.

Having all of these needs is incredibly inconvenient for me. Meeting them is equally ridiculous, and as long as they remained chronically unmet I took them out on EVERYONE in my life by trying to shrink myself as a way to minimize my own needs. But. The problem with that was that I couldn’t ever shrink enough to make my needs go away.

My name is Anami Grace, and every day I make the world a better place by caring for my needs with curiosity, love, compassion, kindness and excitement. Because when my needs are met under these conditions – I then am free to use my superpowers on the world, and invite them into my wholeness, rather than ask them to meet a need they didn’t create, badly, and without attunement.

But. Every single one of these needs is valid, and the thing I love the absolute most about myself. And so when I fell in love with the inconvenience of being me, it shifted everything in my world. Because. Then, I had a me to love me through it. No matter what it was.

Anyway. Love and light to you all. Take care! Bye.