Rebellious Reflections

If you find yourself feeling drained, anxious, or overwhelmed this time of year, you are not alone. There are ways to move through the season while staying grounded in your needs and your well-being.

For many people, grief is not something that can be “thought through.” It needs a place to be expressed, moved, witnessed, and tended to in ways that feel grounding and gentle. Experiential activities can help. These practices engage the body, emotions, senses, and imagination so grief has somewhere to go.

Wellness doesn’t have to be about perfection or strict routines. Instead, it can be a personal journey of discovery and kindness toward ourselves.

Trauma, whether from a single moment or years of instability, is not a personal failure. It is an injury. Injuries can heal. Understanding the kind of trauma you experienced can help you make sense of symptoms, relationship patterns, or identity struggles that once felt confusing or disconnected. No matter where your wounds came from, you deserve compassion, support, and a path forward that helps you feel steady again.

Grief is the wound. Mourning is the healing process. In many modern cultures, grief is often expected to be quiet, private, and short-lived. But mourning requires space, community, and time - it needs to be witnessed. Without mourning, grief can stay trapped inside us, like energy that has nowhere to go.

Beneath this surface indecision, however, lies a deeper fear: the awareness of our own mortality. Existential death anxiety, the fear of life’s finite nature and the unknown beyond it, is a universal experience. But what if our struggle to make decisions is, at least in part, a way of coping with this fear? Let’s explore how existential anxiety influences indecision and how understanding this connection can help us move forward.

Learning that you may be on the autism spectrum can bring relief, validation, and self-understanding. It can help explain past struggles and highlight personal strengths. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the challenges: many people still do not understand autism, discrimination and misunderstanding are common, and workplaces and social environments are often structured in ways that create additional stress or hardship for autistic individuals.

Your nervous system deserves care — even if your wallet’s nervous too. Let’s be real: therapy is an investment — of time, money, and...