What is Power, and How to Give it Back
How this autistic woman’s relationship with power colors everything in life, especially writing
I wrote my first poem when I was 7. I put each sentence on a different line so that it would feel the same as singing a song in church. This poem wasn’t about
birds, farms or ballerinas—I was asking God to heal my friend Taylor.
I knew a lot about Taylor because I was always listening and replaying in my mind what I heard adults say about him.
Born blind, almost entirely deaf and retarded. One working kidney. Round-the-clock care. Will never feed himself. Will never walk. May live to age 5.
While these adults argued about the healing ministry of Jesus or the value in a protein shake to help his mom’s hair grow back in, my eyes were on Taylor. The floor bed he slept on, the tinny beep of a feeding machine, how he liked the sound of my voice better than my mom’s because he knew I wasn’t a nurse arriving to poke him with a needle.
Taylor was my friend, and the God I knew from Sunday School stories had the power to give us miracles. So when I wasn’t praying and asking God to let me and my friend Taylor play at the playground together one day, I was imagining what this miracle would feel like.
When God healed Taylor, I knew exactly what we were going to do. We were going to laugh, swing on the swings (my favorite) and we would talk to each other. That’s what I wanted most: to know that he had been my friend even while he was hooked up to tubes at home, and he was my friend now that he was healed and running in the grass.
My family visited Taylor’s house every few months. Sometimes it was more often, even weekly. Taylor couldn’t go to church, and as he got bigger, I heard scary stories about him biting and hitting the nurses. This made me nervous about visiting him sometimes, so I tried my best to imagine a fun thing I could share with him—even though I knew the most I could hope for was a smile or a quiet groan, interpreted by his mother. None of this changed my daydreams of how, once God really heard my prayers, he and I would be friends in real life.
When Taylor died at age 9, they had an open casket. The church sanctuary was the fullest I’d ever seen. People standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting their turn to walk up to my friend Taylor, lying flat in a wooden coffin, his blonde frizzy curls resting on a blue satin pillow. This was the first funeral I’d ever been to, my first time to touch a coffin or to see someone my size inside one. I know I cried a lot in my bedroom at home. I remember being sad. But mostly I was confused, spending hours trying to piece together why the God I read about in the Bible wasn’t interested in healing my friend.
Power and the potential to silence an autistic person
Looking back, I think some cosmic and neurological power grid was laid down inside me that day: about who has power and who doesn’t. And it was clear to me then that power was something to be adjacent to and barter for, not something anyone has inside themselves. God is powerful, but we are not.
Even though at age 9 or 10 I obviously wasn’t weaving these cognitive complexities, I was experiencing a major shift. The feeling of shock, grief and powerlessness wasn’t isolated to this one instance where my parents insisted God was powerful enough to restore Taylor and my friend died anyway.
Power has been a currency that pushes me around in every area of my life. I knew that asking for the red cup at snack time didn’t work—but if I waited quietly and patiently and acted like I didn’t want it at all, I would be rewarded. When my family would eat at a restaurant, I stopped asking for the baked lemon fish because I knew my mother’s icy “that’s too expensive” was right around the corner, making dinner at Long John Silver’s much too chilly to enjoy eating anyways.
If I observed and memorized everything moving and shifting around me, I could make out patterns. And if I could anticipate patterns, I could lessen the barrage of jolts I felt as I moved through the world. By the time I was a teenager, I understood that in church, there were the special people who got invited to the pastor’s house and then there were the rest of us—the people who stay three hours longer to continue decorating the church for Christmas. The pastor and the powerful eat first and the rest of us are here to work.
Power and its role in life and writing today
Until I was 34 years old, I had never used my writing or editing skills for my own words, ideas or perspectives. I’m a trained journalist, a profession where the writer must be removed as much as possible from the story they’re reporting; the facts and the people tell the story. Journalists remain silent, and I had taken that training to literal, absolute, dissociating heart. Then I spent time in an agency, learning digital marketing jibber jabber, which seemingly equipped me to tell and sell my own story, to become a great online writer with many readers.
And I did try to harness all that marketing advice for many years. But still, I always felt less jittery if I was editing someone else’s words or ghostwriting for them. Earning money created the only power I’d been allowed to claim growing up (I started babysitting at age 12). I also lived in constant fear that my entire life was about to financially implode and make me homeless if I made one mistake—I wholly believed that I was one poorly edited sentence away from being disqualified from the work that fed and housed me.
The threads of power move through me and weave a tangled, exhausting trap most days. I feel the jolt of someone who talks too quickly for me to keep up. I feel the tug to laugh at jokes, to raise my eyebrows in surprise, to gesture emphatically (but not too much) with my arms so that people know I’m listening. All these things tie back to an autistic, dissociating person who has walked through the world with one resounding message: The me I am is not the me anyone wants. The me I am is powerless.
We recently put our mountain home on the market, a scenario rife for power dynamics that usually slip by me, coupled in a high-impact public exchange. I tried my best to disconnect from the emotional connection I feel from my house so I could “think logically,” and for the most part I did. But it’s impossible not to mention that this home is the place I arrived after a second-trimester miscarriage, not knowing that another one was just five months away.
In the last four years, I have tackled hundreds of trees, ever carrying the image of Jacob wrestling with an angel all night, despite not having been a card-carrying Christian since age 19. I feel connected to the winds of the mountain, to the Tree Spirits who stand guard over me, and so perhaps it’s not surprising that I’ve been on high alert: I want to protect my home, which means handing my trees and wildflowers over to the people who need them the most.
So when an offer came in above our asking price, after only being on the market for six hours, I felt the throngs of power showing up again. It was a really good offer, filled with practical benefits like a pared down inspection. It had a 24-hour deadline. I accepted their offer in full agreement with my husband, except I didn’t realize that “accepting backup offers” meant something I didn’t wholly understand. I thought someone could come in with a more competitive offer—a higher price which would then empower us to pay off more pandemic and medical debt. But when I realized I was wrong, I felt the same old jolt. Power and anger seethed through my body. You misunderstood, again, and now you’ve betrayed your home.
My husband did understand what we were signing, though, so I took some comfort that his mind was fully aware of how we’d just sold our house that quickly. I tried to rest and trust that my home was protected beyond anything I could give it. And then another jolt came: when our house appraised for $2,000 under the asking price, the buyers wanted to try to bargain back the $5,000 they’d put in their original above-ask offer. The $5,000 that persuaded me and my husband to take their offer instead of letting other buyers have a chance. They saw an opportunity to take some cash and power back, and they did.
A writing power manifesto that surfaced in my least powerful moment
What came next was a moment so overflowing with rage that I called my best friend and sobbed and yelled at the top of my lungs.
“I’m having a moment here,” I told her. “Something is pushing to the surface. Something about power and how I have moved through the world feeling like I have NONE AT ALL.”
A few minutes into our call, snot was running over my lips and dripping off my chin, and my mind was playing movies from my life at lightning-fast speed. And here’s what I said:
Don’t ever let me forget what it feels like to be powerless.
Don’t let me forget that $7,000 can come back to me because of my privilege, my skin color, my connections and my abilities.
Don’t let me forget what it feels like to have 20 subscribers on my email list, reading my work. What it feels like to write day after day for years on end, and feel like nothing moves people.
I’m not writing because I want to amass power and hoard it and exchange it with other powerful people with checkmarks next to their name.
I want power because it is the necessary, cruel currency of our world and I want to give that power back to the voiceless.
I want to always be ready to sit at the feet of the mother whose babe has just died and I want to be with her and let her know I’m reading her story, even if no one else on the Internet has caught on to her quiet grief.
This is what power should be for.
Toni Morrison said the function of freedom is to free someone else.
Same goes for power.
Same goes for writing.
The function of writing is to free someone else.
And, starting today, I’m not afraid of that power anymore.
By the end of the call, she and I were both crying and talking back and forth about power dynamics in the workplace and industries that have amassed power at the expense of the powerless. And how if this is the work we’re both called to, then we are ready.
Power and the desire to have people reading my work
As I’ve been packing our life into boxes the last few weeks, processing my relationship with power and writing and having a voice, the number of subscribers to my work has taken a turn I never saw coming. When I wrote a Note about going from 12 to 292 readers, I never expected that this would become a catalyst for even more readers finding my work.
In the first week after publishing that note, 98 people signed up to read The Editing Spectrum. A number I’ve never seen in my life. And now, a few weeks later, I’m processing what it means to have 800+ folks signed up to hear what I have to say next.
When I try to visualize what all you wonderful people would feel like in real life, I see you all sat down in a makeshift sort of church filled with sofas of all lengths and sizes. Even as I get busier and have more comments to read and respond to, I still can’t clump you all together as a single, solitary, flexible entity (as some marketing advice would urge). No, each one of you exists as an individual with their own story, ragged nerves and a notebook of writings you offer each day. I could not be happier that you are here.
And yet, all happiness aside, I keep coming back to this question of power. So instead of going in lightning-fast circles all alone in my safety shell, I am handing this question of power back and inviting you to wrestle with it alongside me.
I am asking all of us who are seeking more readers, and by extension, more power, to what end?
When I ask myself that question, I find that I’m very uncomfortable with the reality that people weren’t listening nearly as closely when I had 12 readers as they are now that I have over 800. And now that you’re all here, giving me a platform, giving me a little power, I want to make sure I’m finding ways of handing it back to you.
One way I can think to share power is with The Spectrum Spotlight, a series of guest essays I launched only a couple months ago. In this column, neurodiverse writers can share insightful, deeply valuable essays about their special interests, and readers learn more than they’d ever find with a Google search.
Another way is to offer referral rewards, so folks who can’t afford a paid subscription (which comes with Ask An Editor monthly threads) can still get one by referring a few friends.
These ways of sharing the power from this platform aren’t perfect, of course. I might miss one of your thoughtful comments or stray too far into spiritual reflection when you signed up for advice on newsletter growth. Indeed, it feels inevitable that I will show up imperfectly. But I’ll still show up.
I’d love you to keep showing up, too. Join me in the comments to talk about power and powerlessness. What would you do if the power that your writing gives you was taken away? Is power, at best, an illusion? Or is it currency? And once we’re given it as writers, how can we share it with our readers?
Pardon me while I leave this comment through a face full of tears from reading this.
One thing my mind keeps circling back to again and again is a need to build a strategic and mutually beneficial network between creatives of all kinds who share a like-minded vision of working together to shift that balance of power and restore the agency the present power holders have stolen from us. I've been collecting a mental list of creatives that I'd add to my presently imaginary co-op. You've been on that mental list.
I've brought this up with some others on here, and there has been interest, but I don't want to share my ideas too openly because I don't want them to fall into the hands of corporate exploiters. Unless another Discord already exists, I'm thinking maybe I need to add a new channel to my existing server where interested parties can share ideas and begin to put a plan into action. Would love to know your thoughts.
Such a beautiful essay. I can relate so much with the feelings of powerlessness. I felt powerless and at odds with the world my whole life. When I read about someone else experiencing some of the things I did, it is like being given some of that power back - power to exist, a validity in self.