UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Chelsia Potts: Any type of significant life event that throws you into a crisis and makes you realize that you have been working in a system that isn’t aligned with you, that’s when those masks become conscious. Now, once they become conscious, you have a choice to make.
Tami Simon: Welcome to Being Open: Spirituality and the Neurodivergent Mind, a special Insights at the Edge series. My name’s Tami Simon, and over the past several years, I’ve become aware of how my own mind doesn’t often seem to function in ways that people would describe as neurotypical, or we could say neuro-conforming. In fact, today, more and more people are being labeled as being on the spectrum. It’s a label that certainly comes with challenges potentially. It also comes with gifts such as heightened sensitivity, empathy, and out-of-the-box creative thinking. Is it possible that there’s a connection between being on the spectrum, having a wide or porous mind, and having easier access to the spiritual, the transcendent dimension, that which is boundless and undivided.
Could neurodivergence teach us about the spiritual journey and perhaps even accelerate our spiritual evolution? These questions and more are what we’re exploring in being open spirituality and the neurodivergent mind. Thanks for joining us. Welcome friends to our series on Being Open: Spirituality and the Neurodivergent Mind.
My guest is Dr. Chelsia Potts, educator, writer, intuitive guide helping neurodivergent individuals unmask their gifts and live in alignment with their truth. Dr. Chelsia Pots was diagnosed in her thirties with both ADHD and autism. We’re gonna learn more about that. And she’s the creator of the online platform, Divergenthood. She holds a doctor of education degree and brings a combination of academic depth, embodied wisdom, lived experience, and I would say inspiring truth telling to her work. Chelsia, welcome.
CP: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Tami.
TS: Yeah, right here at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about being diagnosed in your thirties, both with ADHD and autism, and how receiving such a diagnosis. You, in what ways did it change you?
CP: Sure. Um, I received my first diagnosis. I received my ADHD diagnosis ahead of my autism diagnosis by about two years. And when I got my ADHD diagnosis, it was after I had completed my dissertation, but I was working a job that had exceeded my capacity. Um, so I always think about ADHD in the sense of you don’t notice it until you can’t handle it anymore or until something happens where you’re just overwhelmed. And for me, that was taking a dean of students position, being 30 years old and being the go-to person and really being over capacity. So I reached out and I said, okay, this is not normal. I began to ask different colleagues, do you experience this or do you experience that?
In terms of are you overstimulated? Are you burned out? Are you having problems with executive function and asking these questions and people kind of, eh. No just get a to-do list. Um, or just get a planner. And I’m like, I have all of these tools, but they’re not working. So I talked to my doctor about it, and this had been brought up before, jokingly between doctors, friends, family, oh, you have ADHD or oh, you don’t pay attention or your head if you would lose your head if it wasn’t on your shoulders type of situation.
To the point where I was like, do I really have this? And there was a sense of relief. Of having an ADHD diagnosis because it let me know that I wasn’t broken. But there was also this sense of failure that, am I broken? What does this mean? Is this really a disability or is it an excuse? So after going and having these conversations, I talked to my doctor.
We go through all of my history from kindergarten forward. We looked at different things from too talkative during class to love her in class, but can’t stay on subject. She gets bored with the material or X, Y, and Z. And so we go through all of this. We look at the fact that I had a 1.8 GPA coming outta high school, um, barely graduated, but then she’s like, but you’re in a doctorate program. What’s going on? So we do the diagnosis. Um, I get the official diagnosis and I take medication and I feel great. I feel also a sense of regret. Of what my life could have been. I began to wonder, you know, am I actually doing the right career or am I just doing what people told me to do? Do I really like this work?
And then it threw me into an existential crisis. So and so at that point, I just felt, ’cause I just felt confused on what I was doing and why was I doing the certain things that I was doing, and who was I and was I just a bunch of symptoms. Or was I Chelsia, right? Did I have an identity?
So as this is going on, my daughter, I have twin daughters and this particular daughter, we act exactly alike and we kind of share the same sort of quirks. And I started noticing these things in her, but the question was never does she have ADHD? She was recommended for an autism diagnosis. So I take her in and she gets diagnosed with autism.
And at that point I had to also ask myself if she acts like me and we have the same quirks and we have the same complaints, what do I have? Autism? Um, so I ask her, uh, psychiatrist at the time and say, okay, do you think I should get a diagnosis? And she said, we’ve had plenty of conversations. I will probably tell you that yes, you should, but is it worth the money, right?
Because there’s not gonna be a lot of support for you. Um, there’s not a lot of things for adults. So especially if you made it this far, then it’s up to you. So I go ahead, I pay the money, I get it done. Turns out I’m autistic as well. Then I threw myself into another loop. Around, well, what does this mean?
Who am I as a person? And then that led me to seek out spirituality. Um, I started paying more attention to astrology because the way that my mind works, I said, oh, okay. I can understand that what a moon sign is and what that means for how I express myself. And it was a little bit easier for me to understand myself through that lens than the traditional You’re autistic, you’re broken sort of messaging that I would get.
Anytime that I would go online to see or research or figure out about myself. So that’s kind of how, you know, it all started out and how I got my diagnoses and what it did for me initially. But it’s been a whirlwind since we initially got that diagnosis.
TS: Now it’s interesting that you brought up astrology ’cause there’s so many different ways. Astrology’s just one. There’s so many different ways we can understand how potentially we’re not. Neuro conforming or neurotypical individuals. And one of the things in this series that I’ve been trying to really tease apart is this whole notion of being. On the spectrum, is it actually a helpful label to take on, or is it just another form of pigeonholing people? And when you describe it, if it makes us feel in any way less empowered or like we’re broken, that’s not helpful. So I wonder how you see that, the usefulness of the diagnosis and labeling.
CP: Yeah, I think it’s a gift and a curse, to be completely honest. I think it’s a gift. And a curse in the sense that the diagnosis gives a lot of people words for their experience. And a lot of people can find power in knowing that, hey, I can now advocate for myself because in the spaces that I’m in, if I have autism or if I have ADHD, then I’ll receive certain benefits or there will be certain accessibility allowed to me that I wouldn’t get. And I think in that way it’s helpful.
Where I think it’s harmful is that if we only look at ourselves through the label, if we continue to put our power outside of ourselves and we say, okay. I have this diagnosis, I’m neurodivergent. And so that means that I need to go and someone needs to provide me with something that I can’t provide for myself.
Whether that be safety, whether that be money, whether that be any of the things that we say that we need, that we don’t feel like we can get from within. So when that happens. Now we kind of have the opposite approach where I think people become dependent on not only just the label, but on rooting their power outside of themselves, and then they become helpless and they become more disconnected with who they are because you’re not just autistic or you’re not just, you don’t just have a DHD and you can’t think, or if you struggle with BPD or all the different forms of Neurodivergency, you’re not just that. But the way that the system is set up, it almost teaches you that you have to rely on this to get what you want. And if you do show any sense of being gifted beyond what you, what we’re showing you then maybe you don’t need the help. And people are afraid of that. Like I feel like it just becomes this interesting relationship with, I want to be seen, but I’m also afraid and.
I haven’t been seen for so long. So if you take this label away from me, then who am I and what do I have left? And then what am I gonna do? And that’s where I say it’s literally a gift and a curse, because I know there are some people where I have said, don’t worry about the label. And people have gotten insanely upset, right?
Because for them they find somewhat safety in it that I’m like, well, who am I to take it away? But I also can see the harm that they can do. But I also realize the privilege. That I haven’t even known and then being able to play the game of, yes, I want to identify with this label, but yes, I can find my own power.
And so it’s, it’s complicated. It’s complicated to say either or, but I think there’s good in both. But at a certain point, I get concerned with how much dependence we have on labels and how much it restricts us from seeing ourselves beyond it.
TS: How did your own spiritual life open after your diagnosis with autism?
CP: Hmm. Well, I don’t feel like I—so with the ADHD diagnosis, I felt, okay, this is not all my fault. I’m, I am laid a lot, but okay, there’s a reason for that. I can work with it with the autism diagnosis. I had a rejection because what I saw labeled as autism was not necessarily this. Wounded bird type of situation. Um, it was me thinking differently and me being proud of that. And I think a lot of that stemmed from me being gifted when I was younger and having that kind of label. I think that does play a big role that I always tell people of. I was labeled as gifted. So there was this kind of idea of like, oh, here she is. She’s smart.
TS: Can you tell us about that? What was that? How were you labeled as gifted? What was that?
CP: Yeah, so in the, we had gifted and talented programs where I was, I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. So in my elementary school, I was identified as having high test scores. I was an early reader. And also I was just very bored in the classroom. So most of the time when they were going through material, I would be pulled out. And I would go and we would do games and we would do other activities and we would create and it was the creation that I enjoyed the most, which I think stems right into my spiritual life as well.
I was always rewarded for creating, um, I didn’t have to stick to the bubble, as in the other kids. I will never forget. In fifth grade, I was taking my time doing a standardized test. And I didn’t finish the section in time. So I go to the teacher and I say, Hey, I didn’t finish in time. I’m sorry. And she says, oh, don’t worry Chelsia, I’m sure that you will get leaps and bounds what the other kids are gonna get on this test.
And I felt bad. I think that was, that was one piece ’cause for society, I think in a way where I was like. Well, why is it that most of the kids in this area, and this was me not reflecting, this, was me thinking as a 10-year-old of social injustice and those things of like, well, why, why would most of the kids in this class not do well?
And why am I doing well and what does that mean? Trying to make sense of it, but because I was always getting rewarded. And pulled out and set aside. And the rules didn’t apply for me because I was the teacher’s pet. I was easy to deal with. I kind of had an he about myself and about who I was. So there was this privilege around me, kind of if I’m different than, and maybe in my kid mind I was better when I was older.
I was like, I felt a sense of guilt of I’m gifted and I think differently. So what does that mean? Um, do I speak up, do I not? Um, why are my ideas always different than other people’s ideas? Um, but then that also kind of led me onto the spiritual path, which I know we were gonna get into as well.
TS: Yeah, yeah.
CP: Kinda all weaves in together.
TS: Tell me more about the spiritual opening in your life and how that trace of giftedness you feel is part of or informs that openness.
CP: Yeah. So spiritually I’ve always been in tune to situations, um, and knowing what’s being said, what’s being said when it’s not being said. So I’m always thinking behind the curtain.
I rarely, I don’t really do a good job of listening to words. A part of that is because of the way that I take in auditory. I have to wear Kafta, use captions on everything. If I listen to a song, I have to read the lyrics or else I’m just kind of grooving to the beat. So I’m always paying attention to the mood, the feeling.
People, a lot of people say that to empath. People will say it’s clear, clear, um, cognizant or those different things, but I’m always feeling I’m a feeler. Now. Over time, I felt very weird as a child, I felt weird. Because I felt misunderstood. I felt like, well, why don’t you notice that you didn’t know?
They didn’t say that, but, or telling my mother in our exchanges like, you think I’m stupid or You don’t understand why I don’t get that. And her being upset because she’s like, I never said that, but I would be so aware of it. That I’m like, you may not have said it, but I feel it. Um, and then her even confirming that for me later on in life.
So as time began to go on, I started to realize that this was a spiritual gift and I started to look at the DSM in relationship to being autistic. And as I was looking at the DSM along looking at different indigenous psychologies from different tribes, um, rooted in my family ancestry and seeing, okay, well, how did they look at these traits?
I felt this conflict, but also relief. Like there, there is more, right? So when you look at the DSM, for example, it says someone that seeks patterns and they’re seeing patterns of the unseen. That, that’s how I remember it. That may not be exactly how it was worded, but these seeking patterns, and I’m like, that’s autistic.
Wait, no, that’s a, that’s a gift. That’s actually something that we can use in society. Why is, why are some of these things seen as a sense of autism related to a disability? So I started to slowly break away from what Western psychology was telling me about this and leaning more into what spirituality was telling me about this.
What does it mean to be able to walk into a space? And know the feeling in a room and how does that inform you, and how does that inform who you are? How do you stop yourself from being overstimulated? Right? Why do people wear head coverings? And looking into tribal reasons of why people wear head coverings.
Looking into different herbs and thinking about, well, how do I use these different herbs or teas? Just drinking teas or grounding myself or walking or sitting in the grass. How can I incorporate what I now know as gifts? Yes, they’re, yes, they can be qualified as autism, and they are, but they’re also gifts.
How do I walk with that instead of always trying to suppress it or hiding myself in the house? How do I actually show up and how do I help other people show up? And once I started doing that, I started realizing this is bigger than me. And I started seeking more spirituality. I started to pray more. I started to get more into my spiritual practices, but I also started to really just walk it out and heal and stop being afraid and stop telling myself that I was broken, or, oh, you’re always overstimulated.
I would shame myself all the time for just not being aware of how to handle my gifts. That I had. So that is when I really started my journey of relentlessly saying, okay, I’m here. Like you can take the ego, you can take, go ahead, I’m done. I’ve controlled it up to now and it hasn’t gotten me anywhere. So here, here I am, what do I need to do? And that’s really what kicked it off.
TS: You describe this under a big umbrella term that I think a lot of people are using that I wanna talk about, which is unmasking, neurodivergent. Unmasking. And you know, I was thinking, well, okay, what does it mean we put on all these masks in order to fit in? I get that. I think all people do. What I would like to understand more is the unmasking process and what you think it takes to do it.
CP: Yeah, so the unmasking process for me, how I’ve come to conceptualize it and I, I think in Venn diagrams, so I’m gonna explain this in sort of a, a funnel you would say, um, you said that all people mask, and I agree with that. I believe that we come into the world and we come into a world that has a set of existing systems that are already in play, and those systems are played out through our family lines.
So if we’re talking about, um, patriarchy, if we’re talking about sexism, racism, like all of those things impact how our families, how we’re brought up in our communities, our schools, what we learn. So we all mask at certain points. For some of it us, it started way early, right when we’re two or three years old and we’re noticing that people think some of the things we do are weird, so we change or we morph or we notice when we do a certain behavior, we get more hugs or more praises, so then we become people pleasers.
Or when you go to school, like how I mentioned with being gifted, well when I achieve. I get claps, I get rewards. So now I’m an overachiever, right? So we all put on these different masks, and I call them the resist rebel, reduce where you reduce yourself and retreat. So I have four different masks that I talk about.
They kind of, they kind of encapsulate how we operate, kind of on a big umbrella, um, to kind of break it down even more, like for reduction, right? When we reduce ourselves. It basically means that we go into a system where we realize that we are too much for that system or we don’t fit in. So this might be the person that asked too many questions at the job, but then quickly notices that now you’re written up and you need to figure out why you’re challenging authority, and you were just asking the question, right?
So then you reduce yourself to fit into the space. You stop asking so many questions, or you say, you know what? I know that if I put so much effort into this, it won’t be appreciated. So I just won’t work to my best. And then you become depressed. Then you have people that resist. Now these people are the people that go into a space.
They sense that it’s unjust, but they begin to work towards changing it. Not really realizing that the work will go for Naugh because this system is rooted in whatever behavior, right? So these are the people that will start, like for example, an African American faculty and Staff Association or an LGBT group on campus.
It’s an effort to resist the system, but it’s still within a system that requires you to have a separate group. So over time, these are the people that get burned out. They’re tired, they feel just overwhelmed with always wanting for something to change and never actually changing, but they aren’t actually living in their full truth because the space really doesn’t allow it, which is why we have to have this separate group.
Then you have your rebels. Now these are the people that will go against the system, but they also go against themselves. So these are the people that will quit the jobs. These are the people that will stop coming to the family functions because they already know how it is, so they’re gonna do their own thing. These are also the people that just say, you know what? I’m gonna build my own garden, or I’m gonna do X, Y, and Z, and I’m gonna be self-sustaining. But in doing that right. Have you really aligned yourself with who you are or are you just rebelling for rebellion’s sake? And those are two different things.
And then the last one are the people that retreat. Now these are the folks that will often tell me I’ve stopped going outside. I don’t go anywhere. I only wanna work from home, um, because I don’t wanna engage. They do this to protect themselves, but also they isolate, they become depressed. And I see this a lot in autistic communities because of just overstimulation in general.
It’s like, you know what? I just won’t do it. So we all do it in different ways. Um, I call it, you know, the four Rs reduce retreat reveal. Um, other people will just call it a people pleaser or an overachiever or whatever. Um, but the fact is, is that we all. Mask. Right? We all mask. Now, once you realize that, and that comes to your conscious awareness because the masks in which I just explained are more subconscious. These are not masks where you consciously know that you’re doing it. It’s just something happens and you realize it. Either you get fired from a job, you burn out from a job, um, you argue with a parent. A parent passes away, any type of significant life event that throws you into a crisis and makes you realize that you have been working in a system that isn’t aligned with you.
That’s when those masks become conscious. Now, once they become conscious, you have a choice to make, right? You can decide that you want to really go forward and go on this quest to figure out who you are, whatever that means for you. At that point, people decide to do that, usually, if they have the tools, right?
But a lot of people don’t have the tools to really think about well, or have the space really like I have to work and I don’t believe I can self sustain. I don’t even know. Maybe they lack education or lack education self. Right? And that’s where a lot of us are. ’cause if you’ve been masking for so long, do you really know who you are? Right?
So a lot of people will say, okay. I’ll just stay here. I’ll just keep the mask on and then I’ll find different ways to express myself. But they never really feel fulfilled, right? And so it’s not really until I believe that you can take all of these different identities, right? You’ll even if you’re an overachiever, if you are a people pleaser, taking all those, kind of dialing it back and figuring out why did I start this behavior and how far has it taken me away from who I really am?
And taking that and not shaming yourself for it, not being regretful or remorseful for things that happened because then you fall into depression and you stay stuck as well. Um, not getting anxious and saying, I need to change this right now. And then now you’re just a mess and you’re burned out again and you keep burning out and burning out and burning out and I’ve been there.
Right? That is when you have to really figure out, how do I really. I’m looking for the word, and it starts with an RII. It is blanking on me, but essentially, how do you take your power back? How do you reclaim, now I’ll use that word instead. How do you reclaim the pieces of you, right? The broken pieces, the pieces that you’ve hit in the way, and then how do you now embody those?
And then walk in alignment with who you are instead of against it. And I think this process is lifelong. Um, I think one of the unfortunate things about Western psychology and a lot of the Western healing practices is that they’re quick, um, six sessions and then you’re, you’re, you’ll be good. We’ll solve this problem. When really it’s always a process of becoming right. So as soon as you figure out something that comes conscious to you. I guarantee you in about a month or a year, something else will come conscious. So you’re always growing, you’re always going forward. But that is what I think the journey is. I think just the big hump, especially when it comes to neuro, all divergent people.
Is that once they recognize that they are masking, it’s do you have the tools? Are you able to have the executive function? Are you able to have the ability to call your power back with all of these things working against you to even be able to get there and know that you can get there? Because that’s where a lot of us get stuck.
TS: I relate to these four Rs, and I imagine many of our listeners do in one way or another. They can say, yeah, I can see how I’ve reduced myself or rebelled against the system. My curiosity here, Chelsia, is when you. Step away and drop those ways of reacting and trying to find some safety in the midst of this and some way to configure yourself. My experience is that what’s left is an open wildness. A lot of energy, a lot of power, and a lot of unknown expression, and I’m, I’m wondering how that rolls for you and how you find your center in the midst of that open, wild field.
CP: Yeah, you described it perfectly because that is exactly what it feels like, um, is a lot of energy, a lot of movement. I remember I went to a coach who worked on embodying your voice, and I was describing who I wanted to be, and I said I said I, when I see her, she’s embodied, she speaks slowly, she speaks clearly. She’s fluid. She’s all of these different things and. She was like, you know, I feel a lot of energy from you and it’s chaotic.
And I felt one, I was a little offended, but I felt seen because I was like, it is chaotic in here. So for me, I had to really get very centered on routines. Um, meaning I do the same thing every day, but with some variants. So for me, what that means is that I always wake up and I do my self care. Um, and I do my spiritual care.
So I start my morning, I do all the hygiene, all the brushing, all the lotioning, all of those things. And then we go right into centering myself with some form of meditation. Now, my meditation is not the deep breathing, even though breathing is a part of it. Um, that’s boring for me, right? I do not like that.
So I dance. I know other people that will do art or do different things, but essentially I, I express myself in some way, whether I’m writing, whether I’m journaling, whether I’m dancing, um, I’m doing something to move myself into my body so that I’m out of my head because my head cannot contain all that energy.
And that is where I think I spin out. And I think really that’s kind of the real embodiment of ADHD for a lot of people. It’s just. This boundless energy with nowhere to go. So essentially I tire myself out and then I can ground myself into my day. Then I’ll get my coffee if I want. I’ll get my tea if I want, but I have to start my morning focused on me, focused on getting into my body and out of my head, so at least that energy can be going to something productive versus me just spinning all day and burning out, because there was two years of my life that was spin, spin, spin, spin, burnout, spin, spin, spin, spin, burnout. And that was probably the most depressing years of my life because I was never grounded. So I was never really in my body. I was just in my head and using my body, just dragging it along everywhere I went. And I was tired and exhausted. So that’s what I do now to center myself.
TS: You described one of your gifts of the way your brain works, your perceptual system works, is that you see patterns you see in patterns, and I wanted to understand more about that. Maybe if you could give some examples of how you see patterns.
CP: Yeah, so I’ll give a very, I’ll give a work example. This will be a very, probably one that a lot of people can relate to. So I remember when I started to really notice how the patterns were showing up at work would be, I would be in a meeting and we had a leader who was very, very demanding on the outside and everyone felt unsafe in the space. They felt like they had to walk on eggshells. They had to have everything together that they have. They had to be ready for anything all the time, and it created a very tense and anxious workspace. Now, what I saw was a leader. Who knew what they wanted, but wasn’t really emotionally intelligent and was probably flustered themselves.
And it just came out almost in the sense of where her energy flowed into what everyone else was doing. So when I had this initial thought, I started to pay attention to, not necessarily what she was saying, but what was she doing? What was she doing when she was in breaks? How was she writing? How quickly was her hand moving or not moving? How did her speech inflect? Did she end a meeting early? When did she do that? How did she do that when she did it? What’s going on? Maybe behind the scenes. Maybe we’re making this about us and we shouldn’t be. So I began to ask all these questions I observe, and then I would come up with a conclusion.
Now as I’m doing this, Tami, I think what I’m doing is normal. Everybody does this. This just makes sense, right? I mean, we’re looking at the patterns. Okay, she’s doing this, she’s doing this, she’s doing that. If everyone just paid attention, then they would know that this is what’s going on. I hadn’t really accepted that this was a gift, right?
So I would go and I would tell people, okay, this is how we need to navigate the situation. Alright, let’s do X, Y, and Z and then don’t say this to her because that’s how she’s gonna take it, and let me figure out how I can have a conversation with her so we can kind of. Weave this in. So I would go, I would have a conversation with her, I’d have a conversation with the people, things would come together, and then it would be this nice community.
Now over time, I noticed that this would happen to where people would come to me and they would say, what do you think about this? Hey, here’s the situation. What, here’s what I know, this is what’s going on, what should I do? And people were doing this all the time to the point where I was like, what’s going on here? Why do people keep asking me these questions when they can just look for themselves? And then I figured out, oh wait. That’s a gift. Now, once I realized that this was a gift, I started using it to navigate my life, um, whether it would be a job or me seeking how to move up in my career, okay, I need this skill.
So let me get that. Let me talk to this person. Let me recognize. What my limitations are with some people. Let me recognize what people’s limitations are with themselves, so I’m not overtaxing people with asking them things. So over time, what it helped me to do was see how to bring people together, which even as I talk about it right now, still feels like a fish in a bicycle, but overall, it helped me see how do we bring people together? Because not only am I seeing patterns in work situations, I’m seeing patterns in people across situations to where I’m realizing we’re all just human right, no matter race, gender. Divergent, not divergent. We are all human people.
We all experience different things, but we think that it’s so different when it’s not like it’s really all the same, and throughout my life, I think I’ve seen, I’ve lived in very poor neighborhoods. I grew up very poor. I went to very nice colleges. I’ve worked at community colleges. I’ve worked at very prestigious institutions, and I’ve seen, like, people are just people.
And these patterns that exist. They exist on a universal level. They exist in a community level, an individual level, and we’re all connected. But I think my big question, and probably my mission in life is how do I take this understanding in order to bring people together instead of separate, right? Like, how do we bring people together? Even if it’s as small as a boss in a meeting who’s driving everybody crazy? I never saw it that way. I saw it as this is a community. This is the second place for people. These are people’s lives. So if this person is driving somebody crazy, then how do I use this gift to help us all navigate this better so your life can be better? How our way of being can be better, so how we live together can be better. So that’s kind of how I use that.
TS: Now, this is really interesting to me, and I’m glad we’re talking about it because when I first heard you say, I see patterns, for whatever reason, I was like, oh, like. Geometric forms or analyzing data or something like that. But as you’re describing it now, it’s more an emotional attunement to the web of dynamics that are happening between people and patterns that will help us actually understand each other and connect with each other. And I’m like, oh, that’s really interesting, Chelsia, is sort of seeing into the heart web, if you will, in a situation. I don’t know if that’s exactly what you’re saying, but that’s what it felt like to me.
CP: Yeah. No, actually, yeah, that is really exactly what it is. I like the way that you described it because yeah, that’s what it is. And I was thinking when you said, like data recognition too. Actually, I do love data, even when I think about data, and even thinking about work, and I hadn’t thought about this when I was initially explaining it, but that would be how I would translate. Because what I learned is that people don’t like the hard stuff, especially when you’re talking about businesses and numbers and how do we increase retention or whatever the problem is at the place you’re at. But they do care about numbers. So I would use different things to essentially talk about human patterns, but I would say, Hey, we are gonna lose X amount of Z revenue if we do X, Y, and Z.
TS: Yeah.
CP: Um, and a part of that was why I had an issue with the workplace and why I ended up working for myself was I was like, I can’t translate this if you really don’t care. Like I need the heart to be there.
TS: Now, I’ve heard you use this phrase, unconventional intellectual, and I was attracted to that. And I think part of it is some of my motivation in doing this series on spirituality and the neurodivergent mind is that I realized I learned differently from the way that other people learn and that I don’t learn in a deep and meaningful way to me when information is presented in a very abstract intellectual way, I need to have it come with some type of. Relevance lived experience, personal connection, storytelling. And so the part of my interest was like, why? Why is this, why can’t you just be a successful regular academic Tami? Like, why not? Why do you glaze over and just think, you know, this is empty and, and you don’t have a feeling for it. Why does that human feeling part have to be so alive for you to care? And I’m curious because when you think of neurodivergence and learning and different kinds of learning, especially with the doctorate degree that you have and the way you look at this, I’m curious to hear from you what you think the gifts are of the way you like to learn.
CP: Yeah, so that’s a great question. And I want to think about it. Because I think for me, the way that I learn, I have to care. Like, the heart has to be there and for me, I think that has caused me some of what I used to think were the greatest losses in my life, um, because I felt like I was always on the outside of things or I was always not thinking about things concretely because it never really mattered to me about the titles or the positions.
And so when I would get certain things or be awarded something or a position or whatever the case may be, TikTok followers, whatever, whatever people care about. I never cared about it in the same way that they did. So while someone may say, oh look, you have all these followers, or, oh, look, you have this doctorate degree.
Are you great? I have this great job. Or you have, and you’re so young. I’m like, I just wanna do the work. I like, I’m here to do the work. I’m gonna help people. Um, I want to use what I’m doing and what I’m learning to teach other people. And in a way, I always feel like that. I think that’s where that unconventional piece comes out, where I felt like I’m kind of battling with the world, I would say the neurotypical world, but I know all neurotypical people don’t think that way, but it’s just like, I care to learn because I wanna use whatever I’m learning, whether it be from a book, whether it be from my life, whether it be from someone else lived experience. I wanna take that and I wanna transmute it, to help someone else. And if something happens and I get an accomplishment along the way, that is great. I probably should celebrate more to be a little honest. I don’t really celebrate much, um, of anything, but I don’t know. But then also in a way, I think how I learn does detach me from the human experience because I’m always looking at things from a bird’s eye view.
I’m always looking at patterns and how do things connect? I rarely am thinking about how things feel, even though it’s coming from a heart place, I kind of pull myself out and I’m like, okay, let’s think about this. My bird’s eye view. But it’s a big part of the human experience is feeling. And so I think at least in this lifetime, that’s what I’m here to learn because I keep getting put in situations where I have to feel. So if there’s something that I don’t feel from, I think I maybe don’t find it as valuable.
TS: Okay. Chelsia, something else I wanted to follow up on. You mentioned that when you started exploring post your autism diagnosis, your own spirituality and really unmasking more and more that you explored, also ancestral connections and what I heard was a kind of ancestral spirituality that you feel from your lineage of generations back that was informing you and I’d love to hear more about that, specifically the spirituality of that.
CP: Yeah. So specifically I’ll go back to my grandmother. She transitioned in 2020. She was 95 years old when she transitioned, but she played a big part in my upbringing. My mother was a flight attendant and so she was always on the go. But my grandmother, she provided a very solid foundation. And with that foundation came routines. Now these routines, as a child, I looked at just as routines. I have to get up, I have to take a bath. I have to say my prayers when I go to sleep, I have to eat at a certain time that should, those are the rules. In reflection, what my grandmother was doing was setting me up to make sure that I was in line spiritually. Now, for me, that was going through the lines of hoodoo. Right? And so not understanding, ’cause this was never explicitly explained to me at the time, but hoodoo is a blend of indigenous cultures coming here, blending with African cultures, and actually kind of creating Christianity and kind of blending it all in.
So it’s its own kind of practice and spiritual close practice in which African American people looked at their ways of healing from Africa, indigenous lands, and then even the Bible and moving themselves forward and actually moving their spiritual practice and purpose forward. Now, as a child, I was confused ’cause I was like, well I, I think I’m Christian ’cause there’s a Bible here. Well, we never go to church. Huh. That was always confusing to me. But now I see what all of that was rooted in. So that led me to really try to understand more about what Hulu was, what spiritual practices meant, and what the responsibility of spirituality was. So I started to look at her line, my grandmother’s line, her, uh, siblings, women, eight women. All entrepreneurs, all working, doing their own thing.
And we’re talking about 1920s, 1930s, forties, fifties, where I’m like, these women had businesses. Now hearing these stories growing up, I’m like, oh, okay. Yeah, they had a, she’s a seamstress. Oh, she does house cleaning. She has X, Y, and z. I’m never, I wasn’t thinking about how these black women were entrepreneurs in the south at a time where it was not easy to sustain yourself, especially as a woman. So I look back at that and I’m like. Oh, this is deeper than just me lighting some candles and taking some baths. Um, there is actually a responsibility that comes with this that is also rooted in my family line because a lot of the practices that I do now.
Or just really reiterations of what my grandmother was doing with me then. So as I began, like I would say probably when I hit burnout, which was 2023 or so, I hit burnout. I was just exhausted and tired, um, and I felt like I had nothing left. That’s when I started grounding myself. Through these practices that I realized were connected to my ancestral line.
From there I learned about my grandfather who, or sorry, my great-grandfather who grew up in Mississippi and learned about, he lived until he was 107 years old, and he was a root worker. He worked with the land, he used the elements. And I remember when I was a child, I told myself, or I heard—not even sure what language to use around some of these things, but I said everything that we need is here on earth. And I remember I told my mother, I said, if we eat things that are not of the earth, then we have to heal ourself with medicine. But if we use things that are of the earth and everything that we have, we can fix with things from the earth. And my mom was like, oh, okay. I was like seven. So she was like, whatever that means.
And so then I looked back and I was like, oh, wait a minute. Like these things are rooted in you. They’re just things that you, that you either knew that are ancestral, that maybe you came back from another lifetime. I don’t know. But I do know that it’s something that’s just in me that keeps me connected and grounded because otherwise I don’t necessarily know if I would have the strength to do the work to continue to kind of go up against systems or to even go on a quest to find myself and become who I am. But I think because I have a responsibility to keep going and I think about my grandmother, I think about my mom and think about, like, the unrealized dreams that she’s had, but also the things that she loves about life. I just look at it a lot differently. Now, especially when it comes to spirituality and realizing that it’s deeper and it’s bigger than me, uh, which was a lot of ego work, I had a lot of ego work to do in that. I’ll blame the gifted education for that but a lot of ego work had to be done.
TS: Alright, Chelsia, I just, two final questions. One of my favorite videos of yours that I found on TikTok is called Autistic Glory. And you say, when they told me I was autistic, I knew that was just part of the story. And then you, you go on in a very poetic way of describing and claiming what you feel is autistic glory. And I wonder if you can speak a little to that.
CP: Yeah. Oh, I do remember that. I, so that was actually, so that was a freestyle poem that I did. So I liked to play around with writing and poetry. Those were one of the things I liked to have fun with. And so I was playing around with this, and I was having a day where I was really tired of doing autistic content from the lens of if someone hears us, someone sees us, someone frees us. I mean, essentially that’s what most of the videos were. Let us ask the question, let us do this. And I was like, I’m done. Like I am done with this. Leading from my knees is what a friend described it to me as. Like, I wanna stand up. So it essentially allowed me to take some of the power back.
I was reading the DSM that day and I have random days as I like, I’m like, well, let me see what, what’s going on as I try to make sense of the diagnosis and what it means. And as I was reading it, I just. I didn’t believe it in that way. I said, this exists, but there is more to the story. There is more to the story of the way that I talk, the way that I tell stories.
One of my biggest insecurities that I found that people love from TikTok was the ability to storytell, but I always was like, make it quick, make it short, talking bullet points, da da, da, da. Reduce yourself, reduce yourself, reduce yourself. So that video and really kind of. What I’ll share now is you do not have to make yourself small. You are not who they tell you that you are. They say that you don’t know how to socially interact. Is it that you don’t know how to socially interact, or is it that you’re doing it your way? Do you have to perform for people or can you just allow yourself to be and know that you’re safe? I think we often just go outside of ourselves.
We want acceptance, we wanna be loved, and that comes from a good place. But at a certain point, I had to tell myself who I was. Instead of letting a DSM or a manual or a job, who wants me for my productivity more than anything else, tell me who I was and make myself feel less than. I had just gotten tired and I think the next video after the Autistic Glory or either not too long after I actually made a video proclaiming that. I said, I am done. I said, I will no longer be talking about my disabilities. I’ll be talking about my abilities, and I am done talking about the things that disable me in a world that was never made for me to exist fully.
TS: So beautiful. Okay, final question. Our series is called Being Open. Being Open, and there’s a working hypothesis under that series title that people who are on the spectrum perhaps have a greater level of openness to experience. They’re more permeable or porous to everything that’s happening. And I’m wondering how you relate to that hypothesis.
CP: So how I relate to that hypothesis is I see it this way: I believe that we are all people, everyone, not just autistic people, and all divergent people are all here as spiritual beings having a human experience. I believe that autistic people, the way that we think and the way that we conceptualize the world is more through a spiritual lens. And when we think about the spirit world, I also, I wanna be very careful and say, I’m not talking about like star seeds or like this hierarchy of thinking, but more so just spirituality. Um, and us in our spirit form. In our spirit form. There are no genders. There are no racists. Um, I can be black this lifetime and a white woman next lifetime, who knows?
Maybe a white man, I don’t know. Who knows? Right? We can come into this life in whatever form that we need to be to accomplish the goals that we need to accomplish here during this lifetime. To me, when we think about autistic people being more open, it is because we are usually operating from that lens. We’re very cerebral beings, which is why, um, I even consider stemming differently when people talk about repetitive movements. I look at that as us just bringing ourselves down into our body, right, and allowing ourselves to bring ourselves in. So we’re not always in our head, but because we are in our heads, connected to the spirit.
I believe that that is why we can have these interactions. I believe that’s why a lot of people that identify as neurodivergent also identify as queer or somewhere on the L-G-B-T-Q-I-A spectrum because of this openness of being able to receive and have conversations. I think there’s a reason why we struggle with hierarchy. Right? This idea that because you have this title that you are better than someone or because you are in this space that you’re less than, right? I think all of those things go into the idea of being open in just more ways than one, but also I think there’s duality in that as well, because just as open as we are, I think we have to be open to having a full human experience, which does mean some of the icky things we don’t wanna feel, even to just come with having a body.
I think sometimes, I don’t know, I’ll speak for myself in this. Sometimes I feel especially if I’m not consciously in my body that I’m just like. A spirit walking around in this thing. Like I don’t even recognize, just like, okay, I am here. Um, but actually having that full body experience requires us to feel too. So yes, being open, I do think it relates, and I got a little, as I started, started thinking about the, uh, the idea of feeling in the body and that separation, I think that might’ve led me into another, another, another conversation topic. But I think that’s why I think at the core, I feel like neurodivergent people, we are more cerebral, we’re more spiritual, which means that we’re more, more open because all of these worldly constraints, they’re just worldly constraints. They just don’t exist in the spirit world. I just don’t believe that.
TS: All right. Can we end with just a couple lines of spontaneous poetry right here, Dr. Chelsia Potts. You give it to me. Give it to me.
CP: Give it up. Give it up. Alright. Oh, man. Okay. I’m nervous. Let me see. Okay. You have to gimme a topic.
TS: What we’ve been talking about, and the blessing that your presence is right now to this moment in time and this discussion and series that sounds true, is putting out into the world, celebrating our spiritual glory as humans on the spectrum.
CP: Yeah. Got it. Hey, it’s Dr. C. I’m sitting with Tami talking about all the things that we can be, they call me autistic, but it’s more than me. It’s more than I can be. And see, as we sit here, we need to release all the things that they put on us, all the things that we can’t discuss, all the things that put us in a rut. See, they try to tell us that we ain’t nothing. They try to tell us that we can’t be. They try to tell us that we can’t speak, but I’m telling you that the power’s in me. The power’s in you. The power that we can do what we came to do.
TS: Dr. Chelsia Potts, she’s created the platform, Divergenthood. What a joy to be together. Thank you so very much.
CP: Thank you. Thank you. That was fun.
