My name is Aradia, and I am a millennial living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
I know first-hand the transformative power of embracing your unique creative impulses. My special interest in The Wheel of Time book series started as a solo obsession, and became the first and biggest of the podcast projects that I am involved in! When we embrace our creative impulses we embrace the fullness of ourselves, are likely to find communities of like-minded people, and can live our best lives.
Backstory
My parents met because they were both odd birds with a love of music and questioning assumptions. In the fern-filled forests of Oregon they raised my sibling and I to be proudly weird, boldly strange, and (relatively) unashamed of our needs.
I easily picked up the skill of reading before age 3, because my dad enjoyed seeing how fast I could learn to match patterns. This gave me lifelong hyperlexia that can sometimes feel disabling in its acuity, but mostly has been an asset. I also was a serial movie-rewatcher, which my mom never thought was odd because she also found it comforting! The day I was handed a Walkman and a book-on-tape, I was hooked to that medium as a perpetual background noise.
My mom had a massive autistic burnout when I was about 7, the upshot of which was I got two step-parents and two homes. It was my step-father who one day spotted the word “autism” in some newspaper destined for the wood stove in the early 2000s. From the time I was age 12 my mom was actively engaged in her own autistic journey and peer-support community building, expressing her grief and joy through original music and engaging with outreach to schools in the hopes of mitigating some of the bullying she had suffered.
I was put into Waldorf school from kindergarten to 8th grade, then tried two public high schools in two years. Waldorf has many flaws and there are many reasons to critique them as an institution, but for me in that community in that time, there could have been no better match. My teachers loved me, the learning experience worked for my brain and played to my strengths, and my behavioral issues were accommodated instead of punished.
While in middle school one of my classmates handed me a book, saying “you like big books, you might like this.” That book was The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan, book one of the Wheel of Time series, which wouldn’t be completed until after Jordan had died and I was a legal adult. I did indeed like the book, and eagerly devoured the 10 books that had been released at that time. I have been obsessed with these books ever since, using them as a kind of decoder key for making sense of this confusing world, and specifically listening to the audiobooks narrated by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. They have provided me with a comforting white noise that can ground me and let me hear myself think, or can put me to sleep, for decades.
As an explosively expressive child I was put into Aikido classes that taught me to focus my energy, direct my power, and move with purpose. I can think of at least two times in my childhood in which I would have been seriously hurt but for my trained skill at falling intentionally. I stopped in middle school because of a schedule conflict, but I always remembered the lessons, and when I was in college years later I found that same Aikido society had a dojo in town, so I rejoined to deal with the stress of college.
It was such a distressing transition from a small close-knit private school to a massive public institution that I promptly spiraled into my own deep autistic burnout. Waldorf had demanded I be a unique and creative individual, public school only cared if I could game the system well enough to be unremarkable, and I struggled intensely with the social pressures of having more classmates than I could ever meet. Moving from a massive public school to a significantly smaller one reduced the social issues didn’t provide sufficient intellectual stimulation, and eventually I learned that I could get a General Equivalency Diploma and just skip the last two years of high school altogether. I took two years to think about my life goals, and went to college the same year that my age cohort (who didn’t take a gap year) did.
Present Day
Before I was old enough to drink alcohol I had married an autistic person who had become a friend of the family when we were both distressed young adults, and despite our youthful communication issues we did manage to egg each other into slightly better self-care and stability. Neither of us could manage adulthood alone, but together we have a dynamo that keeps the lights on, and we even managed to get three college degrees between the two of us.
During college I discovered a podcast called Wheel of Time Spoilers, and through that shared hyperinterest I found a community of fellow weird people who were as obsessed with these books as I was, and who deeply appreciated my encyclopedic knowledge of what happened. Over the years some of them grew to be very close friends, some larger and looser communities also formed, and ultimately I ended up acquiring the skills of an independent podcast host and producer. I am now co-host of WoTSpoilers and three other (non-WoT) podcasts, have helped several friends with their podcssts, and rely on this hobby to structure my weekly tasks. All because I just couldn’t stop listening to the Wheel of Time audiobooks endlessly, first on tape, then on disk, and now as mp3s.
College degrees in hand and family resources at our backs, my spouse and I retreated from the sensory overwhelm of a college town into the woods, still filled with the same ferns that loomed so large over my child self. In the cool quiet darkness of a rural environment, with space and time to just be, we have thrived. Accommodating our needs, discovering our preferences, exploring our horizons, creatively existing for ourselves… that was the space in which I realized that I was SUPER stuck mentally, and ultimately found my way to acknowledging that I am just as autistic as my mom and joining autistic peer support spaces in my 30s, just like she did.
Now I am a few years into my autism journey, into becoming a coach and a peer support for my podcast colleagues and audiences, and into being the person that you might choose to book for some coaching.
My other interests include sewing, puzzles, connecting history and social justice, listening to podcasts and audiobooks (not always the same ones!), starting new games of Baldur’s Gate 3, curating playlists, and helping my spouse keep the kitchen functional.