Forty

Dear Friends,

I am 40 today! That is so wild. I am in disbelief.

Frankly, I am struggling with mixed feelings. I am surprised how difficult this milestone feels. It is a lot of grief for the decades spent without communication. It is a lot of dismay for how difficult my life still is. It is a lot of apprehension for how challenging it will be for me to achieve my dreams into the future.

I am sort of in a down mood over all of this.

Yet I know that I have so much to celebrate. I am having a positive impact on the world. I am surrounded by friends all over the world. I have a loving community that helps me thrive. I have done so much more than I once dared to dream. I am loved and have a beautiful home.

So I am trying to celebrate all of that. I don’t know why I am in such a funk. It is not typical of me. And I don’t like it. I want to focus on the brilliant things I have done and experienced in my five plus years with communication access in my regular life.

Thank you for being such a big part of this new life. It is still beyond my comprehension how many of you are part of my community. I am so excited for all I will do and share with you in this new decade!

Your Friend,

Danny

French & Physics to calm the mind

Dear Friends of Danny,

Danny has declared: “I am cranky today.” He didn’t get sleep last night. Today he’s struggling because “I want to do so much, but I am so tired.” So there’s a bit of dysregulation bubbling up, on top of whatever it was that prevented him from sleeping last night.

What’s helping him in the moment is a strategy he and his therapist came up with, to really get him into the thinking part of his brain. Informing us that his brain needs way more than we’d realized, he suggested transcribing* foreign language literature *while* listening to intellectually engaging podcasts. Because of course that’s relaxing… 😉

So today, he’s transcribing excerpts from Voltaire’s Candide, in French (which he has never studied), while listening to The Titanium Physicists podcast. This is his 3rd time using this practice to help regulate himself. I’m so impressed with how deeply it engages his attention, and it’s something he can do on his own once someone sets it all up for him.

He gave me permission to share this. We’d love to hear of any similarly intellectually challenging regulation practices you’ve tried!

Danny’s older sister bear,

Tara

*Our dad taught him 10-finger typing when he was a kid – even though it’s not something he can use for purposeful communication, he can transcribe easily

Back in the ocean

Dear Friends,

At long last, I got back in the ocean! Wow. I needed that. Good old vitamin sea.

It was so crowded getting to the beach. I guess it is the last hurrah before schools start. But we managed to find a calm and uncrowded spot in the water with tons of leopard sharks and guitarfish and rays. It was so mesmerizing to swim above them. It was surprisingly easy to snorkel after not doing it in several months. It was so good to be back in the ocean after the colder months and then my arm injury. It was so amazing!

We didn’t bring a camera in the water, but imagine rows of guitarfish and rays half-buried in the sand, with majestic if small leopard sharks gracefully winding above them. It is a gorgeous world under water.

I am so glad to be back to ocean activities. I missed being in the sea!

Then we got burritos. So it was an amazing day!

Wishing you all a great weekend!

Your Friend,

Danny

It happened again

Dear Friends,

Well, after another wonderful Motormorphosis, I had another panic attack on the plane home. It was so unexpected. It was disappointing. It was so scary, too. But it was also a good experience to go through, because I handled it much better this time. My support team responded more confidently this time and helped ground me right away.

So I was able to calm down more quickly and felt a lot less shame than last time. It helped to have more tools in our toolbox than two years ago, like more experience coaching my body and knowing that intellectually stimulating podcasts help get me back into the thinking part of my brain. Plus Tara was more calm because she had seen this happen once before. That helped my mom be calm, too! Plus my mom has learned a lot about co-regulation in recent months.

This was still disheartening. Tara had been very mindful about ensuring my regulation as we boarded. Yet it still happened. It came out of nowhere. I need to process that.

I think I need to accept this as a possibility in all my future flights. I had hoped it would just be a one-time fluke. So that is a letdown.

But Tara and my mom could help me quickly. So that makes me less afraid of future episodes.

The crew and other passengers were surprisingly chill about it. That helped a lot, too.

Oh well. We keep learning and adapting. That is how this disability is.

I still cherish this Motormorphosis experience! I am proud I am more resilient than two years ago.

Your Friend,

Danny

Another Motormorphosis!

Dear Friends,

Oh my goodness, I am exhausted and overjoyed and full of new amazing memories! What an unforgettable experience at #Motormorphosis2025! Wow. I love this community. And I feel so loved.

I don’t know how to write a post that can capture the essence of this weekend. But I will say that having my mom join for the first time made it all even more special. And there were so many very special moments, on top of the usual magic of seeing friends in a nonspeaker-inclusive space.

The most meaningful was being awarded the Landen Bosak Advocacy Award. This is in memory of Landen, a bright young speller who was taken from this life too soon. I am so honored to have been nominated and selected. There are now so many fierce speller advocates out there, so I know just selecting one was not an easy task. I am so humbled and will strive to deserve this honor more and more. I am so grateful that I could meet Landen’s mother and his S2C practitioner. Thank you to the Spellers and Allies Advocacy Network for selecting me. It meant so much to have my friends and fellow advocates Tyler Mason and Divyesh Jain present the award to me. Landen, thank you for the beautiful legacy you have left.

The other meaningful event at the conference was presenting on a group presentation and a panel. I love presenting! It is amazing to have a room of people hanging onto my words. To have gone from not being able to share my words to presenting to an audience is particularly powerful in in-person settings. Much appreciation to my fellow group presenters and panelists. It is so cool to present with other spellers!

I also celebrated my 40th birthday a little early with a nice dinner out with some close friends I’ve met through my leadership and advocacy with I-ASC. And there were some other lovely meals out with friends.

I am also confessing I snuck into the practitioners’ conference to watch Tara’s presentation. It was fantastic! I was so proud. I had never seen her present professionally except for her PhD defense. She is so good at it.

I am so on a cloud of happy feelings. Thank you to all who came up to say hi. It means so much to meet you. I wish I had more time and energy to catch up with all my friends old and new. It is so special to come together to create something so magical. Thanks to the hard-working team at I-ASC for putting this event together!

Much love,

Your Friend,

Danny

A Brave Episode

Dear Friends,

I am happy to share this from the gate for our flight to Motormorphosis! I am so interested in your responses to this episode. It is about how nonspeaking autistic voices get lost among the narratives of speaking autistics and the stereotypical “autism moms.” Now I want to emphasize that I know many fantastic allies among speaking autistics and many autism parents who are amazing. But as in many cases with humans, the dogmatic voices are the loudest.

So please listen with an open mind. I appreciate you all!

Listen/read on the All Our Brave Hearts substack, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Your Friend,

Danny

Happy Birthday to Tara!

Dear Friends,

Well, today is special because it is my sister’s birthday! Tara is my blue skies, my fierce sister bear, my soulmate. She is a loving force for good. She is so soulful and mindful. She is also pretty smart for a neurotypicalish person. I couldn’t ask for a better personal assistant, manager and agent, collaborator, and ally.

All my words reach you through her hard work as my CRP and her work to format and post according to my instructions. It is a lot of work. I love that she has so much integrity in centering me and my authentic words.

Happy Birthday Tara! Thank you for opening my life.

Please share your appreciation of her efforts!

Your Friend,

Danny

Poems from dear friends

Dear Friends,

It has been a tiring week. But I want to share two poems that dear friends wrote for me when I broke my arm. They are also spellers and close to my age and they are in southern California. I so appreciated their instant compassion and their ability to speak to my feelings. Another dear speller friend also wrote me a poem, but I haven’t yet asked him if I can share it publicly.

So here are the poems by Austin Baker and Philip Lopez. Thank you, my friends.

Your Friend,

Danny

Sorry about your arm, by Austin Baker

The pain is obvious in a way
The grimacing and stressed yells.
The splint over swollen arm on broken bones
Is painful to imagine
Let alone inhabit.
There is more to it, though,
Isn't there?
The self-loathing
And frustration
And wondering why
You must cope
With your difficult body
The thinking that
Your compulsions and
Dysregulated nerves
Trap you to
Reckless movements and
So much suffering
I hear it all
In your breathing
Your stimming
Your heart's sadness.
It is our fate.
It is awful,
But better with you
In my life
And I hope
To help you too.

--
To your tendency to blame yourself, by Philip Lopez

It is too easy
To flood your mind
With shame
There is so much of it
Our whole existence
Is bathed in it
Someone must be at fault
For our inconvenient
Bodies
It seems
There is power in blame
I wonder if
You could see 
Your body
As nature
As storms and glorious sunsets
As waves and tranquil lagoons
As millions of
Birds
Migrating throughout a world
That people shaped
Disregarding their pathways
As my friend
Whom I never blame

Trying So Hard

Dear Friends,

I am so thankful to you for your warm congratulations on my citizenship. I had a wonderful celebration with family and friends in our new back yard. The view was fantastic and the company even better!

But dysregulation is back at me again. I am staving off the explosive rage and running around, but it is such hard work. I am still stimming loudly and so compulsive. It is so exhausting.

I want you to know that I am almost always working to keep it together. Many people assume that nonspeakers are spoiled or tantrumming or just not aware that we are being disruptive. Let me set this right. I am fully aware that it is disruptive. I am not in any way willfully doing it. It is not an issue of discipline or respect or awareness on my part.

So I need you to know that I am almost always trying to stay regulated. It is a constant and tiring effort.

That is it for today. I needed to write a post to share and to do some purposeful activity to help me stay grounded. That helps in the moment.

Your Friend,

Danny