Culling Expectations with a Machete and Embracing Neurodivergence
- authormillieprice
- Feb 19
- 6 min read
Hello and welcome back to A Writer in the Woods. This month I’ll be ranting about culling
expectations. Life as a neurodivergent has its own list of rules and regulations, and it’s about time that I start dropping unnecessary burdens.
But first some updates:
Spooky Action at a Distance is coming! My genre-bending sentient haunted house book has captured the interest of an indie publisher and has been accepted for publication. Keep an eye out on my Socials for who and when. I’m very excited to take you all on this ride, I hope you will join me.
The Sleeper is still in the query trenches, but I’m hoping that a little name recognition will get this book a read or two. We’ll see what the year brings.
My currently unpublished short story Harold aka Fed by Pain has made the quarterfinals in the Killer Shorts contest! If it makes the top 10 it will be read by prolific horror author, Tananarive Due, and special effects phenom Greg Nicotero, among others! Wish me luck.
I’ve signed up to do another project with Onyx Path’s Cursborne TTRPG line. I’ll tell you what, this tabletop game is fabulous, and I’m having a lot of fun coming up with ways to bring horror to gaming.
This blog will be posted on my website from now on so that I don’t have to worry about what I say, hence all the cussing. It will always be free, and I will try to get a newsletter service going, but until then I will advertise on the socials so that you can find the blog post every month. If your following me here from Substack, Thank you! If you’re new. Thank you! If you came here to troll, or say some shit to make our days worse, know that I have full control of my comment section and I won’t allow it. This blog is for those that need a space to feel as they feel without judgment. Including me.
AI will never be used on this blog. These are my word, my thoughts and will remain that way!
All right, let’s get to it.
Once upon a time expectations were the end-all-be-all of acceptance into a society that I rarely understood. Growing up as the eldest of four sisters I was used to having a ton of them. If you are the eldest, or have been responsible for others before you grew armpit hair, you know what I mean. It became a part of my personality, one of those things that didn’t even register as a burden because I didn’t know any other way. I had yet to learn about the expectations of being a woman, of being mixed race, or all the other bricks that would be set upon me because of genetics, status, or my basic existence, so the expectations felt like a badge of honor. Ask Millie, she won’t let you down. Get Millie to do it, she always comes through. Yeah, at ten and eleven years old, I was expected to be the strong one, the focused one, the smart one and it felt good.
Then the teenage years hit and my need to figure myself out overtook my brain, my hormones, and my desires, but those expectations still lingered over me like a dark cloud. At this time, my neurodivergent symptoms could no longer be ignored and the adults around me convinced themselves that adding more expectations would keep me from falling off the ledge like so many with my afflictions did. Of course, they were wrong. What I really needed was to learn how to take care of myself so that I lived passed my twenties.
Thanks to psychological interventions, I did in fact make it all the way to my 40s and am about to enter my “Golden Years”, yet the expectations still linger. Not only society’s expectations of how I should act or present myself but my own as well. And let me tell you dear reader, I had a shit load of them. I know, knocked me on my ass when I finally figured it out.
We don’t think about that, or, I guess it would be truer to say, we don’t get to think about what we expect of ourselves. With the way society has embraced social media and the need to present false narratives, it really is no wonder. How in the hell are we supposed to take stock of what and who we really want to be when there is a constant stream of performances telling us what is and isn’t the right way? Honestly, I feel for the young ones coming up behind me because I don’t think I would’ve been able to survive the deluge of shit on the internet these days. So, I’ve been taking some time to go through it and what I found is that a lot of my own narratives were antiquated. It’s time for them to be buried.
It happens as we age, the absolute knowledge that someday, somehow, we won’t be able to experience this world anymore. Funny how I spent my whole life trying to escape it, and in the blink of an eye I realize that one way or another, that dream will come true. Anyway, I digress. While taking stock of my life, I started to notice that there was an entire list of things that I truly believed had to be done. For example: The expectation of silent strength when dealing with suicidal ideation. I felt that in order to live a “normal” life, I had to suppress all the strange thoughts and emotions that tumbled through my brain on a daily basis. Thanks to you dear reader, I’ve learned that expectation is absolutely unneeded and by shedding it I have also shed a ton of anxiety. It’s fucking freeing!
Now I’m working on culling the expectations of career success. Look, I get it, we all want to be seen, to be heard, and if at all possible, to be understood, but that has nothing to do with career success. Career success is doing the damn thing and getting paid. Maybe I’ll make a little money, (or a lot), maybe win a few awards, and of course there is the respect of my peers, but none of it promises that I will ever be known, seen, or heard on a personal level. As a matter of fact, I think being a Best Seller would make this infinitely harder and after spending time with a few who have achieved that level, I’m pretty sure I’m right. So, I’m dropping any expectation of success that doesn’t align with who I truly am. That means shedding the burden of smiling the right way, saying the right words, and suppressing symptoms to be the right kind of person for society. I have no clue what that means or where it will lead, but I know at the end of the path, I will be me, and that dear reader, sounds fabulous!
I am still expected to wake up every morning; to keep my life balanced so the negative thought beasts can’t get a foot hold; to shower on a semi-regular basis, and to leave the house at least once a week. Shit, on some days it’s a full-on war with myself to remember to eat and my body expects to eat! I don’t know about you dear reader, but for me that’s a lot.
Anyway, thanks for hanging for the rant. For those of you still burdened with expectations that allow you to pay bills, raise kids and keep a roof over your head: Hang in there. Your time will come, and when it does, shed that shit like a second skin and don’t look back! For those of us who have run the gamut and continue to survive, I hope that you start setting down some of the weight put upon us by family, society and especially ourselves. I dear reader will continue to work to do the same. We made it this far and we deserve a break!
Until next time,
Millie
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