The Grief of Community Separation (Pride Episode)

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) This is a special episode of the Feathermane

Soul Wisdom Show, specifically for Pride.

And if you are a part of my

NeuroDivergent community, and if you are also anywhere

on the LGBTQIA2 plus spectrum, then this episode

is for you.

Especially if you don't feel like you are

part of Pride or part of a community.

And I just want to tell you that

I'm going to dive right in because this

episode is full of a very important message

of love and caring and support just for

you.

You're listening to Feathermane Soul Wisdom, a podcast

for those looking to rediscover their wild spirit

in spite of life's challenges.

If you're living with a chronic illness or

NeuroDivergent or consider yourself disabled, and you're looking

to connect with your own inner untamed essence,

then this show is for you.

Your host is Kit Kaelstow, Wild Spirit Storyteller.

Thanks for listening.

And now on to the episode.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Kit Kaelstow, your host.

So it is June 2026, which means it

is Pride Month.

And this is a month where the queer

community gets to celebrate our unique individuality, our

relentless existence, our joy, and our essential being.

And also reflect on the challenges that we're

facing, as well as the ways in which

we're building and reaching out to community.

But if you are NeuroDivergent, there is a

good chance that you have always had a

difficult relationship with community or social groups, especially

if you're Autistic or AUDHD.

There are a lot of variables in being

in a group.

And one of the things that I've realized

this Pride Month, and it really was sparked

by something I read, I'll quote it for

you here shortly, was that as much as

I know that I am non-binary, genderqueer,

as much as I know my gender identity,

I really don't feel like I'm a part

of the Pride celebrations, because I don't feel

like I'm a part of community.

And there's a lot of reasons for that.

Some of them are baked into my own

trauma, my complex PTSD, rejection-sensitive dysphoria.

But some of them are also just kind

of baked into how society treats NeuroDivergent individuals.

And all of this kind of got me

to thinking about my grief coaching specialization.

And as I've been really kind of making

the connections between the grief that we experience

as NeuroDivergent individuals, the grief that I experience

or my author community experiences, grief in the

queer community, the trans community especially, that there

are just a lot of dots to connect

here.

So that's kind of what I wanted to

talk about in today's special Pride episode.

So what I read that kind of sparked

me on this was in a yoga newsletter

I receive.

And it came from a yoga organization that

says a lot of good things about being

inclusive, but yet feels really much built for

a certain body type, a certain neuro type,

a certain physical ability type.

It's like they want to be inclusive in

some ways and not inclusive in others.

And what they said was, yoga reminds us

that our individual well-being is deeply connected

to the well-being of our communities.

As we move through Pride Month, we invite

you to reflect on the ways your practice

supports connection, compassion, and belonging, both on and

off the mat.

And I sat with that for a while.

And on one hand, it sounds very good.

I mean, one of the things that I

do with yoga is I am very much

attuned into the energetic bodies, the koshas, with,

you know, the yoga's mission of yoga is

a way to know the self through the

body.

I'm very much tied into that.

And so I very much get that if

the individual people in a community are not

doing well, then the entire community isn't going

to do well.

And then inviting in the ways that your

practice supports connection, compassion, and belonging, both on

and off the mat.

And I thought about this.

And I'm realizing that there are a lot

of people this month that are feeling very

left out, and that are feeling very much

as if they're not a part of a

community.

And this has to do in large part

with social constructs, with the way people imagine

that certain genders or certain individuals should look.

But it also has to do with the

way that the general neurotypical society treats our

divergent individuals.

And so what I want to talk about

today is how to support yourself when you're

not feeling like you're a part of a

community.

I want to talk about ways in which

you can find and create your own community.

But mostly, I also want to talk about

processing and dealing with the grief that comes

with feeling like you're not a part of

a community.

One of the main reasons why neurodivergent individuals

struggle to find community is because of rejection

-sensitive dysphoria.

And it makes a lot of sense.

I mean, if you are told for your

entire life that what you're doing is wrong,

how you're presenting yourself is wrong, the way

that you're quote-unquote humaning is wrong, then

you're going to start feeling an acute ability,

an acute sensation of rejection, any time you're

starting to feel excluded.

And what that leads to is that can

lead to social anxiety, that can lead to

people basically self-rejecting themselves or keeping themselves

out of community situations.

And because of that, that means that a

lot of neurodivergent individuals don't feel like they

are part of a community in general, outside

of any small online or in-person groups

that they may be a part of that

are comprised of primarily neurodivergent folks.

Now, if you layer on top of that,

not just the current political climate, the current

climate of prosecution, and some would say outright

genocide against transgender individuals, you can also be

dealing with body dysphoria.

You can be dealing with a situation where

due to the community you live in, due

to the state you live in, in the

US or in the UK, due to the

people around you that you either are unable

to transition or do not feel that it's

safe to transition, or to even begin exploring

how you might change your body to better

align with your gender identity.

And so you might be a transgender individual

or a genderqueer individual who would like to

make changes to your physical presentation.

And because of where you live, it's not

safe.

You don't feel like it's safe.

You don't feel like you're going to be

accepted.

Then that adds an additional layer of grief.

So I want to pause for a moment

and state that a lot of what I'm

speaking about here is coming from my own

feelings and my own lived experiences.

I sincerely hope that if you are somebody

who shares these lived experiences, that what I'm

saying actually resonates with you.

But please know that I am not speaking

for the entire neurodivergent community, and I am

very much not speaking for the entire queer

community.

So how do we deal with those feelings

of grief?

The first step would be to acknowledge that

they're there.

Grief is not something that if you're thinking

of healing, like you know, you scrape your

knee, you put a band-aid on it,

maybe a little antibiotic ointment, four to five

days it goes away.

Two weeks, a month later, it's your knee

doesn't look like it's ever been scraped.

That is a level of healing where the

issue goes away completely.

It's not an issue ever again.

Grief, along with many of the other things

that we deal with, isn't like that.

It doesn't go away.

It can lessen over time.

We can learn to live with it over

time, and it may always be a part

of us.

Now there may be a time where it

doesn't hurt as bad, where it doesn't feel

as bad.

And this is kind of described, there's a

a cartoon, or cartoon isn't the right word,

but like a mem or a diagram that

I've seen go around social media quite a

bit, that shows a like a marble in

a jar.

And when you first experience grief, you experience

it very acutely.

It encompasses the whole jar, which would be

you and your being.

And eventually as you go on, it's not

so much that the marble gets smaller, or

the grief gets smaller, but the jar or

your container, your body, your experiences, yourself, your

soul, gets bigger to accommodate the grief.

And so the grief gets lessened, because basically

you've learned to deal with it, to companion

with it.

You've learned, you've learned to almost befriend it,

rather than try to shove it away and

make it this big scary monster.

It's like the, you know, you're laying in

bed, and you see a shadow on a

wall, and you might think, you know, oh

my god, what is that?

Or you hear a noise, and you think,

you know, somewhere else in the house, and

you're like, oh my gosh, what is that?

You turn on the light, you realize, oh,

that's what that shadow was.

Or you step out to the living room,

you see that the cats are kind of

playing, you know, having the zoomies at like

2 a.m., and you're like, oh, okay,

that's what the noise is.

You shed some light on it, you've made

this, you've made it much smaller in its

environment, without actually stopping whatever's there.

You know, you're not moving what's causing the

shadow, unless it's bothering you.

Your cats may stop having the zoomies, but

they'll have the zoomies again, and you'll be

like, okay, I remember that's the cats having

zoomies.

It's the same sort of thing when you're

dealing with grief.

So step one is to actually say, hey,

I'm grieving.

So in this case, it's pride month.

It is perfectly acceptable and perfectly okay to

say, hey, this is pride month.

I am not feeling celebrated.

I am not feeling like I am part

of a community that's being celebrated.

And that hurts.

So acknowledging that, putting some sunlight on it,

putting, you know, some awareness around it.

The next step is, especially when you're starting

to deal with rejection sensitive dysphoria, would be

to actually think about, not so much, I

don't want to say reality, because what you're

perceiving is reality.

But maybe think about that narrative, and how

what you're seeing and feeling and experiencing, either

is happening or isn't happening.

So, you know, it's, it's pride month, I,

you know, don't don't know how active you

are in your communities on social media.

Maybe you're seeing a lot of people post,

you know, different things and getting a lot

of comments.

You post, maybe you're talking about your gender

identity, maybe, maybe you feel cute one day,

and you're sharing a picture and saying, hey,

I feel cute today.

And you're not getting the feedback or the

validation you want.

One of the ways to look at that,

for example, is to look at the algorithms

and say, okay, the social media algorithms are

set to promote certain things.

Is it possible that people care, but the

algorithm is suppressing my content?

And the answer to that quite often is

yes.

So then once you kind of start to

think about that and go, okay, so in

my case, I don't feel like I'm a

part of pride or the community, in part

because I don't feel like I'm a part

of community in general, unless it's like these

small little pockets that I have created for

myself on the internet.

It's not related to this.

But you know, I can think of a

group that I'm in where I very much

feel like I'm on the outside looking in.

And I don't think that that's the case.

I think that I'm a lot more welcomed

and a lot more supported than I am.

But that's just the impression I'm getting.

And honestly, because I haven't spoken up about

that, thank you, rejection sensitive dysphoria.

I don't think there's been a lot of

conversations about that.

But I'm imagining that that's not what is

meant.

Obviously, I could probably fix that by speaking

up.

I could also fix that by leaving the

group and finding a group where I do

feel welcome and I do feel supported.

And so I know for myself, and this

I would say with step three is to

kind of work through this.

Why do you not feel like you're part

of a community?

Well, for me, I have not done anything

to change my presentation.

Therefore, when a lot of people look at

me, they assume my gender identity aligns with

the one that I was assigned at birth.

Because I haven't done anything to try to

change that other than I dress.

Well, I have no sense of style.

I dress in my comfortable clothes, often masculine

presenting.

And so that's just how I come across.

Which is good.

I mean, because it's masculine presenting, but there's

still parts of my body that mean that

every time I go to the feed store,

I get ma'am.

It's like, you know, and I just say

thank you.

I'm like, whatever, they don't know any better.

I just deal with it.

But I feel like because I have not

as visible in my transition, a lot of

my transition has been how I view myself

internally, how I feel about myself, the love

and care and support I give myself.

That's not externally visible.

Therefore, I don't feel like I am a

part of the trans community, even though as

a non-binary genderqueer person, I very much

am.

And I very much could encounter the issues

that my community deals with as far as

using public restrooms and that sort of thing.

Because in many ways, I am gender non

-conforming.

The thinking about it, I want to caution

you not to assume that the problem is

with you.

And I feel like I'm probably going to

have to do a part two of this,

because I could, I need to talk about

how the community at large, and I don't

care if this is the queer community, the

writing community, basically the neurotypical people need to

do better with accepting and supporting and accommodating

the neurodivergent people around them.

And that's where the neurodivergent grief kind of

collides with the grief of of being queer

at the moment.

Like grief is one of those things that

the more I think about it, and the

more I start connecting dots, it does not

fall into neat little silos.

For example, on Pet Grief Pathfinder, because I

started my journey being certified in pet loss

grief support.

And I just want to say, if you

have lost a pet and you're struggling with

the grief, I do encourage you to go

to Pet Grief Pathfinder.com.

You can book a free call with me.

There are monthly grief circles you can join.

I have a newsletter.

You know, there's support for you there.

My grief journey began there, but I very

quickly realized, I mean, even just like one

or two classes into my certification, I very

quickly realized that the other communities that I'm

a member of, being a published author, being

neurodivergent, being queer, being disabled, that there's grief

inherent and grief that happens in those communities

as well.

And a lot of it overlaps.

It doesn't, there's no, you know, it's not

like the grocery store where you have the

dairy case, and then you have the frozen

food section.

And the frozen food section is all, you

know, okay, here's your ice cream, here's your

frozen pizzas, here's your french fries.

It's not all nice and neat like that

when you come to grief.

Grief overlaps.

Grief pulls on all of our life experiences.

And so this Pride Month, you know, I'm

talking about not feeling like being part of

the queer community, but it comes from a

lot of other places.

And so as a neurodivergent individual, I often

feel like, even though I may be like

in a workplace, my reviews may say exceeds

expectations every single year, I don't feel like

a welcomed or a good member of that

community, because my neurodivergent brain does not fit

in and operate the way the neurotypical brains

work in that space.

And I think that happens a lot in

the queer spaces as well.

Because, and again, some of this is cultural,

some of this is society, but there seems

to be a focus on very specific groups

of queer individuals and very specific presentations of

those individuals.

And so what happens is, while there is

a huge overlap between neurodivergence and between being

queer, you know, again, across the whole LGBTQIA2

spirit plus spectrum, there's a big overlap there.

And so if you're in a community that

that is often forgotten by kind of the

the grand narrative that is presented by what

you see on in media, maybe the loudest

voices on social media, if you're part of

a community, if you're if you're on that

spectrum, that is not well represented, you can

feel left out.

And so I think it's important to acknowledge

the way that all of our identities interact

with each other, intersect with each other, and

influence one another.

And I think it's important to think about

how the grief that we may be feeling,

and not just this month, but any month

out of the year, how the grief that

we may be feeling arises out of the

intersections of those identities, the way that those

identities have been shaped.

Because the truth is, a lot of the

things that I feel in the about not

being a part of the queer community, I

also feel in the neurodivergent community, which is,

you know, kind of earth shaking a little

bit to think about.

Because while I am not, well, let me

back up a bit.

While I am very good at masking and

presenting on my gender identity, and yes, that

is a form of masking.

Um, where, as I've gotten older, and as

I have entered in different stages of my

life, it is no joke that if you

are in perimenopause, you're it gets harder and

harder and harder to mask your neurodivergence.

And some of that has to do with

burnout.

Some of that has to do with the

fact that, you know, you reach a certain

age, and you just don't care anymore.

You know, masking and fitting in just isn't

as important as it used to be in

certain contexts.

But I have noticed that the ways that

I don't feel don't fit into feel like

I don't fit into the neurodivergent community is

also ways that I don't feel like I

fit into the queer community.

And that comes down to gender dysphoria.

That comes down to how I feel in

my body, the messages that I've taken in,

and how I'm working to work with those

messages, to do the wild spirit storytelling, and

the work that I do with wild spirit

storytelling, and the work that I do with

grief with the grief pathfinder.

Because that if there's one thing that ties

together my grief this month, it's the dysphoria.

It's that I don't look like somebody who

gets attention on online.

I don't look like somebody who matches my

gender identity, and I don't believe I ever

will.

Um, for many reasons.

And so because of that, this month has

been very difficult.

And I got a little more personal in

this episode than I think I thought I

was going to.

But I'm also sharing again in the hopes

that you are not, you know, that if

you're listening to this and you're resonating with

this, that you're not alone.

I said in the opening that this was

going to be a big old message of

love and support for you.

And I feel like what I have said

maybe has not been.

But where I want to go with this

is that when we acknowledge the grief, when

we kind of dig under the surface and

find out what's causing the grief, we keep

asking that existential question, why?

What we can do is instead of meeting

that grief with recriminations, with feeling bad, with

feeling like we missed something, feeling like we

should do something better, we can actually meet

that grief with absolutely radical, absolutely enthusiastic, absolutely

ecstatic self-acceptance.

Radical acceptance.

Note I didn't say love.

If you can meet all of that with

self-love, that is amazing and wonderful and

I'm so happy for you.

But I don't want you to feel like

that if you're not at the point yet

where you can meet that with self-love,

that you can at least meet that with

self-acceptance, radical acceptance.

And radical acceptance is not giving up.

Radical acceptance is not accepting the status quo.

It is saying, you know what, this sucks

right now.

This is what I'm feeling right now.

This is what I'm dealing with right now.

And it's okay not to be okay.

And I know that's kind of a cliched

statement, but it's also a good starting point.

When you're dealing with grief, to say it's

okay that you're not okay allows you to

feel your grief, whatever form that takes.

If you're breaking down in tears, if you

want to scream into a pillow, if you

can go to a remote area and just

scream your frustrations into the woods, that's even

better.

I've been known to do that since I

live very remotely and it is very helpful.

So I highly recommend screaming into the woods

if nobody's around to get concerned.

Screaming into a pillow, you know, giving squishy

hugs to your cat or your dog, crying,

however you can express what you need in

that moment.

I encourage you to to find out what

you need and to express that.

Self-acceptance just says, hey, it's okay that

I'm not okay.

It's okay that I am feeling these things.

And if you can, self-acceptance is saying,

I am here for myself.

I'm going to support myself through this and

I will get through this.

It may not feel good.

It may suck.

As the meme says, this may pass like

a kidney stone, but it will pass.

But that self-acceptance that you are loved,

you are not alone to yourself is super

powerful.

And that's the message that I guess I

want to leave everybody with today.

You are not alone.

You are amazing.

I know you may not feel it right

now.

If you're dealing with the grief of pride,

you may feel like you don't belong.

You may feel like you're isolated and alone.

You are not alone.

You are amazing.

It is okay to grieve.

It is very human to grieve.

It is very natural to grieve.

And I say that in the sense of

nature and the wider world.

Animals grieve.

It is okay.

And once you acknowledge that, and once you

acknowledge those emotions, I feel like doors are

going to open.

So I'm going to make a note next

week.

I'm going to talk about what the community

can do to support us.

The neurodivergent community.

What the queer community can do.

What our online communities can do to support

us.

And how you can stop masking.

Because the other part of radical acceptance is

accepting yourself exactly how you are.

And who knows?

I might even share another story.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you are a member of the queer

community, I want to wish you the happiest

and most joyful pride.

I am with you.

I am celebrating with you.

And if you're in my neurodivergent community, I

would love to invite you to my neurodivergent

grief circles.

They happen once a month.

You can go to feathermanesoul.com slash events

and find out when the next one is

and sign up.

I would love to have you join me.

Thank you so much.

Don't forget to like and subscribe.

Until next week.

You've been listening to the Feathermane Soul Wisdom

Podcast hosted by Kit Kaelstow.

Learn more about feathermanesoul at feathermanesoul.com.

As a wild spirit storyteller, Kit is passionate

about helping those who are neurodivergent, disabled, or

living with chronic illness rediscover their own inner

wild spirit.

Visit feathermanesoul.com.