Dear Friends,

Time for another All Our Brave Hearts episode! This one is a bit sad, so save it for later if now is not a good time for that. This episode is on grieving a loved one. We recorded it after losing our beloved dog Hana, but before losing Houdini. It was a tough time. It became even tougher.

But we discuss the beauty in grief. And the strength we can find in honoring the memory of our loved ones. And I share how being able to communicate helps me so much in processing grief.

You can read or listen here, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I hope that you find this episode healing if you have experience grief recently.

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

Tara leaves tomorrow on a month-long trip. She is returning to Southeast Asia for her conservation work, but is hoping to connect with nonspeaking autistic people and their families in Manila in mid-May. I will miss her so very much, but I am excited for her.

This is the third year she has had an extended trip like this. So my support team knows how to handle it. My mom and I have many great activities planned. My younger sister will be able to shift her schedule to spend more time with me. And my aide is with me two days a week, and we have a nice routine. So I will not be bored or lonely!

I will not post on social media except for pre-written introductions to new All Our Brave Hearts episodes while Tara is gone. I will miss you all! But a little retreat from social media will be good in a way.

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

I am so proud to share that it has been six years since Tara and I reached fluency in spelling! It has been a very full six years. I can hardly believe all we have done in my personal life and professional, public work. This is beyond my dreams.

These years have brought me so much joy and fulfillment. They have also had challenges and sobering realizations. They have seen me bloom into an existence where I can share my words and have a positive influence. They have taught me so much about what I can do in this life.

The most precious part is that it is all because of my family. The unwavering efforts of my mom throughout my life. The way Tara changed her life to save mine. The way Eira has become even more my accomplice in fun and self-compassion in our fluency. This is because of my loved ones.

Tara is my angel. She gave up a thriving career and her dreams to make new dreams with me. I am so forever grateful for that.

We have so much more to share with the world. Thank you all for being with us! The community you all build here is such a gift.

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

Finally, we have a new All Our Brave Hearts episode up! This was recorded in early December. Fittingly, the topic is how time passes.

This is about how my experience of time shifts in my life. From hopeless times without communication, to busy blooming into a new chapter, to adjusting to life’s rhythm, time has passed in different ways for me.

You can read and/or listen here on Substack, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Tara tells me that we have another episode ready to go, a third one being transcribed, and a fourth one ready to edit. The drought is over!

Thank you Tara for the efforts, and thank you all for listening!

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

Last year, Tara and another S2C practitioner started holding speller study group sessions for several of us older spellers. This was an effort to provide much-needed intellectual stimulation and social time. We are so starved for both.

We called these “salons” after the French tradition of intellectual gatherings. This was a dream of mine: time with a group of friends spent sharing our ideas and learning together.

Tara always cautioned: “I am not going to start a day program! That is way more than I can take on.” And I respect that. But she and her collaborator Gigi couldn’t sit by while we had such a need for any activity that would be intellectually and socially fulfilling. So they decided to offer these study group series to help fill the gap.

They started with the Coursera course by U Penn, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry or ModPo, that I took five years ago. We met once every two weeks to review material and discuss. We loved it! It was so much fun. And I learned a lot from how my friends responded to the poetry.

Now we are doing weekly meet-ups to discuss Judith Heumann’s memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist. This has been fantastic! We are discussing deep ideas about disability and inclusion and advocacy. My friends are finding newfound conviction in their right to have a fulfilling life and to stand up for that right.

These salon series will continue through the year. I am so proud of Tara for doing this and thankful to Gigi for hosting many of the gatherings. I appreciate them creating this space.

The need for truly challenging intellectual stimulation is so real. Our brains crave it. I hope one day our intellects are truly appreciated by more of society. I am not saying this out of arrogance, and I don’t think intelligence should be a requirement for being treated with respect, but I am sharing that our minds want to be engaged and there is so much we can share with the world with the right support and opportunities.

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

A small but mighty update: Today, I managed to put a puzzle away before finishing it. This is a big win for me! The puzzle was wearing me down. It was consuming my brain. It was about to spiral into fixation. I am not feeling great physically, so I was extra worried about the prospect of being up all night obsessively working on it when my body needed sleep.

Tara asked if I might allow the puzzle to be put away without being completed. I replied that it would be very stressful to my compulsive side. So my mom offered to help me complete it as soon as possible. I resigned myself to having a long night of toiling away on something I didn’t even want to do. But at least it would be faster with my mom’s help.

But minutes after this chat, I was able to convince my body to clean up the puzzle! I just got up and walked over to the table and swept the pieces into the box. I couldn’t believe it!

I feel so proud. I am gaining confidence in my potential to develop pathways to help me with my most disruptive compulsions. This will be a long and difficult journey to achieve, but I am growing less hopeless about it.

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

These recent days have been so wonderful. I am so grateful to have days like these.

I am going to just list some of the fulfilling things I experienced: Stand-up Paddleboarding two Fridays in a row; dinner with our kind neighbors; coffeeshop reading and writing sessions; runs in the sun; celebrating my late dad’s birthday and St. Patrick’s Day with family; new issues of my favorite food magazines arriving; the speller salon study group that Tara and a friend are facilitating; hiking with my mom and Riko; swimming in my neighbors’ pool with their dog; doing reading for the salon with my mom on the deck; and writing a lot of poetry and recording All Our Brave Hearts episodes.

This is possible due to my regulation being steady lately and my family.

I know good times like these are temporary. But I also know they return.

I feel so calm and happy and also very confident that I can have a fulfilling life. I hope to help make this sensation possible for more of my peers. A world where we can have beautiful lives is possible if people learn to choose to care about us. That is my belief.

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

It is St. Patrick’s Day! My dad used to love celebrating. We would go to see a parade and enjoy the festivities at the House of Ireland at Balboa Park. He missed Ireland, even though he stated that he could never live in that weather again.

His birthday is actually the day after St. Patrick’s. So that added to the celebrations.

I am proud to be Irish. It is a special place. It endured so much under brutal colonization by the British, and yet its language and culture are thriving. It is a place I hope to live one day.

I am grateful to be connected to spellers over there. Their community is growing. It is exciting to see!

So this is just a quick post to recognize a special day. Eirinn go Brach!

Your Friend,

Danny

Dear Friends,

I have been in a great place recently. Regulated and mostly happy. So it was a good time to dive into some heavy stuff with my therapist.

I have been wanting to figure out how to transform my rage into a less destructive feeling. It is only in adulthood that I have felt explosive anger regularly. It is not my nature. It is not how I want to feel. And it makes me do things that I don’t want to do.

It has been challenging to explore this, because whenever we try, I get dysregulated. My therapist is good about treading lightly, but I still would get so triggered. So it has been slow going.

This week was different. I was able to dive below the anger and into the deep sadness. The anger is protecting me from an endless grief. That is so profound to realize finally. I knew it intellectually, but I finally felt it this week.

Wow, a lot of thoughts and feelings came up! I kept spelling torrents of sadness. It flowed out of my heart onto the letterboard. It was so cathartic.

I have a lot to process. It is heavy, but it is something I need to do. It feels liberating to be in the process of familiarizing myself with my emotions.

I know that I have many reasons to be angry. But I don’t want to be controlled by anger. That is a big goal of mine.

That is it for now. It is good to share this journey with you.

Your Friend,

Danny