As I am, after all, a material girl living in a material world, it felt incumbent upon me to understand myself in material terms.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually.Materially.

In this episode of Strange Life, we begin at the innermost layer of existence — the quantum substrate, the so-called “ocean of gravity” — and trace, step by step, how motion becomes matter, how matter becomes chemistry, how chemistry becomes biology, and how biology becomes you.

We move from:

Standing waves in spacetime

Quarks and baryons

Atoms and light

Molecular bonding and pH

Cells and self-replication

Multicellularity and tissues

Organs and organisms

And finally… reproduction

This is a 20-minute sprint through 13.7 billion years of compounding complexity.

The thesis is simple:If we can understand how these parts add up to the whole being that they do, we might be better able to understand — and look after — ourselves and each other.

Your emotions?Protein cascades.

Your behaviour?Recursive IF THIS THEN THAT chemical loops.

Your consciousness?An emergent electrochemical symphony layered sixteen degrees deep over gravitational motion.

And reproduction?Just the universe restarting its own code inside a sufficiently sheltered pocket of spacetime.

This episode is part cosmology, part chemistry lesson, part biology recap, part philosophical meditation — and fully an attempt to collapse the artificial boundaries between subjects we were taught separately.

Because physics, chemistry, biology, psychology — they are not different stories.

They are the same story.Escalated.

Welcome to the material explanation of you.

What actually happens when the framework you inherited collapses?

Season 2 opens with one of the biggest arcs of my life: the long, strange, often nauseating, occasionally hilarious journey from childhood biblical literacy to existential heartbreak, to the neurodivergent hero’s journey, and finally to the absurdly ironic place where I now find myself — stitching together my own cosmology, one seashell of knowledge at a time.

In this episode, I talk about:• Growing up in a Nigerian Christian household where scripture wasn’t background — it was the OS.• Learning to read at two years old using only two books: the dictionary and the Bible.• How autistic pattern-seeking makes faith feel like oxygen… until it doesn’t.• The first major canon event of autistic girlhood: “What the hell is going on here?”• The early heartbreak of realising the manual didn’t fully match the world.• The surprising usefulness of a Christian reflex architecture — kindness, fairness, diligence, forgiveness.• Why I never entered the “angry atheist” era.• How philosophy, psychology and later neuroscience and physics took the wheel.• The AUDHD deconstruction → reconstruction sequence that turned my entire psyche inside-out.• The slow return of metaphysics, and why theology sneaks back in when you’re just trying to understand yourself “all the way down.”• The spreadsheet I now use to track the causal chain of the universe (yes… really).• Building a worldview robust enough to hold me, but incomplete enough to keep me curious for a lifetime.

This episode is ultimately about what it means to lose an inherited worldview, survive the collapse, and craft a new one that actually fits you — especially when your mind demands frameworks the way other people demand air.

Wherever you are in your journey of sense-making, identity construction, faith, doubt, cosmology, or simple human living: I’m rooting for you.

Let’s talk about it.

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Hello and welcome back to Strange Life! The podcast about identity, culture and human psychology from the inside and out. My name is Daisy Onubogu and today we’re talking: “Christian Upbringing”.

So religious deconstruction is all the rage these days, you might have noticed. And as with most things apparently blowing up now, I don’t think it’s a matter of more people than ever experiencing the thing – in this case: falling out of faith with what they were raised on – I think it’s just more globally accessible discussion about that experience in real time. In any case it’s all very interesting. And if you peruse these stories and journeys you’ll notice that paradoxically while each specific one is unique to its own factors and circumstances, and yet the whole set is also somehow the same thing over and over again. Some people lose their faith slowly. Some lose it all at once in a moment of profound existential betrayal. And some — like me for instance — lose it in early childhood, then spend decades building a life around the gaping absence, and then only return to those old “just how did this all come to be” questions, when that pesky coming-of-age hero’s journey enters the unavoidable ego death chapter.

This season 2 opening episode is about that long arc:Early biblical literacy, early heartbreak, neurodivergence, trauma, philosophy, psychology, science in general really — it’s about what it actually means to grow up with faith – at least as an autistic child, how one can indeed live well without faith or religion, and finally: the extremely ironic turn of circling back to my old theological questions, on accident, via the slippery slope gateway drug that is: the study of metaphysics.

Let’s talk about it.

My Christian upbringing was perhaps the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.

I met the Bible before I met most people. It was one of the two books — alongside the dictionary — that I used to teach myself to read at the age of 2. The Bible was described to me as a summary explanation of everything I needed to know about life. Which means that long before I had any coherent sense of the world, I already believed that meaning lived inside texts. That if something confused me, the answer existed somewhere in the pages. That life, while monstrously confusing so far, was a system I could eventually understand through careful reading and comprehension.

Besides all my reading, growing up with a pastor mother in the super religious contexts of actual Nigeria, and then the Nigerian diaspora in Ireland … faith wasn’t treated like background scenery — it was the air we breathed. Scripture was woven into language, routine, discipline, community, expectations. It shaped my sense of morality long before I knew that I was being shaped. When the things you are rewarded and punished for are derived from a particular set of rules and principles, you come to have reflexes, instincts and strong emotional draw towards behaviours derived from that particular set of rules and principles. Unless you go out of your way to unlearn and steer against it, you’ll grow up and move through the world, acting automatically accordingly to how you’ve been shaped without ever really thinking in the moment of action, “oh I’m doing this because I agree with this or that principle, or the underlying body of understanding it is derived from” — you’ll just do it, because that’s what was coded in through reinforcement during early childhood. In a way, scary to think how malleable and automated the human animal is at the end of the day, in another sense, convenient. Because a great many of those reflexes, instincts and emotionally compelled behaviours derived from Christian culture are very prosocial and contributory towards a peaceful and amiable life notwithstanding having to share the planet with other humans and creatures alike. Having deeply ingrained reflexes toward forgiveness, kindness, sharing, fairness, gratitude, actualising one’s talents – loving in general, and away from hypocrisy, greed et cetera et cetera, comes in very handy when navigating the world.

It also gave me medicine for the first canon event of autistic existence, opening your eyes however many days after birth, taking in a bunch of experience all at once, panicking from the overstimulation, and suddenly, self-consciously conceiving the question – in whatever passes for language in your literal baby brain – what the f**k is going on here?

Scripture when I finally clocked what it was, aged 2 — was like manna from heaven; a carefully arranged dataset that seemed to literally answer the what, why, and how of existence. I was so grateful, it was an ecstatic relief on a level I cannot even explain.

What’s going on here?Here’s a story of creation, conflict, order, disorder — arranged into tidy, symmetrical sequence.

Why am I here?A lineage, a purpose, a cosmology — a place in a divine timeline and a justifiable reason for being dragged into existence.

What am I supposed to be doing?Well here are some commandments, illustrative parables, explicit and implicit rules, viscerally impactful consequences — all the behavioural clarity you could ever ask for. And indeed with examples of successes and failures, so you know how to do it properly; exist, that is.

What will happen in the end?Oh the last chapter of the book is pure (horrifying, but again, very clear) Eschatology — paths, outcomes, endings, destinies.

It felt like a complete system, the full package manual I’d been unknowingly crying for until then. Every question had an answer. And every answer followed from something else in a way that felt orderly and knowable. It’s how I came to grasp the very concept of cause and effect. That there’s always a why, and one you find the why you’ll know what to do. And it’s worth highlighting that this effect was by design — like that’s what Christianity has always sought to be: your old gods are dead, here’s the manual explaining everything so you can look after yourselves.

An illustration: you’ve just been beaten and because it sucks, your mind is spinning around the question why why why why? Well, because the Bible said spare the rod and spoil the child.

And if you’re still spinning after that scripture is helpfully ready to double down;Because God in his infinite wisdom and omnipotence simply knows that this is how it should be. You might not agree, but remember: the mind of God is beyond yours. Sometimes you won’t get why He’s totally right — but He is. Without question.

The cobbled together understanding I got from scripture and the cultural reinforcement around me, allowed me to organise the vast and overwhelming infinity of childhood experience into solvable riddles;Well, if you don’t want her to hit you again, just be more obedient. I know you didn’t know you were going to spill the water before you spilled it, so it wasn’t “disobedience” per se — but you know: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

For an autistic child in early 90s Nigeria — where adult behaviour was frankly unpredictable, and discipline was swift, and the world felt both chaotic and poorly indexed — that kind of clarity was up there with oxygen on necessity.

On the other hand (cue ominous music) it’s precisely because of this that my Christian Upbringing was also, technically, what inspired my first contemplations of suicide, aged 5.

The moment I realised the story I had been given — about God, about the structure of the universe, about the way everything fit together — wasn’t quite adding up, I broke. I think I still remember the feeling. This nausea, this feeling of spinning and spinning, this terror. Because it wasn’t like one day someone just up and told me it wasn’t true, that like Santa it was a make-believe story, and then I melodramatically collapsed about it. It was rather that as I kept autistically moving through the world figuring out the rules of play from a crossreference of observation, feedback and biblical study, I kept running into contradictions between all three. Until there was no escaping the conclusion that either one, two or all sources were fundamentally unreliable. The Bible included things that observation of life around me didn’t include or outright contradicted, and simultaneously it didn’t cover lots of things that observation and the feedback of other people’s behaviour laid at my feet. Lots of its rules were wholly inapplicable to my actual life and context, and all in all it one day very suddenly looked like an extremely detailed tangential story about something but not about everything. And between what it was missing and what it included that couldn’t be reconciled with unfalsifiable reality, it was invalid, or at best redacted and incomplete and either way not what I needed, in terms of an ultimately explanatory and guiding manual for what was going on and how to live.

I really thought I was dying, that I would never be okay again, that I would just keep feeling vertigo and nausea and a million miles away from my body forever. But all things pass, and as anyone who has experienced the cold and surreal calm following a panic attack triggered by existential crisis will tell you, at some point, you’re lying there, alive. It’s over, and you’re still here, Only what now? I realised that living would mean returning to a confusion even worse than what it has been like before the reassurance of believing the Bible. And I remember really, really not wanting to. Really really wishing I’d never accidentally woken up in this weird and horrible and incomprehensible life thing in the first place.

But eventually, if luckily, you’re too young to know that a wish for non-existence is technically a fulfillable thing, you’ll eventually get up. Numb and hollow, and just keep lifing, with one foot in front of the other until you find you’ve adapted to your new situation.

If I couldn’t make sense of cosmology or the question of how everything came to be how it was, or what would happen after death – then I would just ignore those. Condition myself to mentally turn away anytime any such wondering popped up. I would focus instead on something I could derive from observation and feedback: how to live. How to behave. How to treat people. How to get through each day without violating rules and incurring consequences. Those were problems I could get my hands around — and besides they were more pressing, given the consequences of behavioural failure in my context of early 90s Nigerian girlhood.

Thankfully I also managed to avoid the stereotypical angry Dawkins “religion is stupid and everyone who believes is deluded” atheist phase. The deep faith of almost everyone around me in my adolescence, was no affront to me. I didn’t need to challenge it to live my life. It was an observed fact that they felt certainties I had no access to, that they didn’t choose to believe any more than I chose not to. That there was a feeling in them that couldn’t be disputed by absences or inconsistencies of text, and that it was a feeling I lacked. And without bodily, felt, conviction, there was no hope of ignoring the ways in which the bible didn’t make sense. And besides I could see the bonus upside of it for them, could appreciate faith for the unparalleled survival and resilience technology it was. Something that could hold humans unflaggingly upright even when all else failed. You were lovingly created and even though the paradise has turned into a big old mess, you’re still being rooted for, and supported in ways you don’t yet understand so keep going; and indeed, worst case, it will at least be wonderful and all worth it when you get to heaven.

So I left them to it and charted a different path and by charted I mean stumbled around feeling my way in the dark — first into philosophy, then psychology. Those became the frameworks through which I made sense of human behaviour, suffering, conflict, love, power, responsibility. The cosmic questions — the ones about origin, metaphysics, the nature of existence — I shelved indefinitely because every time I tried to wrap my head around the vastness of what those questions were poking at, I’d have a panic attack — what’s my own with the origin of the world or what’ll happen when I’m no longer consciously extant to experience it? What matters is I’m here, now, dealing with whatever b******t I’m dealing with.

And that approach worked.Age 5 until Age 29 more or less.And when I say that all changed with the coming of age journey, I’m not talking about “adulthood” in the generic sense, but the specific AuDHD self-actualisation journey: diagnosis-seeking, somatic healing, ego dissolution, trauma integration, identity reconstruction. That whole enchilada.The great psychological reorganisation that happens when everything is turned inside out by the pursuit of the understanding of who you are, on a deeper and more comprehensive level than whatever you had until then in the form of shallow ego. Which is the same thing as: the pursuit of understanding how all this (you) came to be. And while you’re only doing this for the very sensible and practical purpose of understanding how to live in a way that can actually work, and you’re definitely not trying to seek anything strange or spiritual, the cosmological and metaphysical nature of the question is unavoidable. Or maybe that’s another autistic thing. Maybe if a neurotypical person was trying to understand how they came to be as they are, they would be able to start from their own childhood, and wouldn’t need the explanation to be giving on every level, from childhood experience to the biochemical and then inevitably the quantum physical nature of it all.

Alas.

So anyway, yes in trying to figure me out all the way to the bottom, I returned or was introduced to the territories of study I used to actively avoid, on account of the cognitive and emotional overwhelm of it all: the so called hard sciences of chemistry and physics, then metaphysics and inevitably, theology, mythology. Et cetera

In fairness to myself, I wasn’t actually dragged kicking and screaming through these subjects out of a misunderstanding of needing these answers in order to simply figure out how to live. I realised at the beginning that I already knew that even without a full explanation of existence and the like, I did understand enough about how the world was and how to live in it. I copped on that the search for more and more explanations of AUDHD on every plane of science that had brought me in this direction was actually just me looking for reassurance that it was real and that it really did explain what I’d been missing about myself. And accordingly, I could just stop looking for more explanations in different languages and accept Autism and ADHD, and then combine the implications of it all being true with all my prior philosophical and observationally derived understanding of how to live, and then go ahead and do just that.

I acknowledged before really diving into these studies that my desire for more knowing was just because irrepressible curiosity is the scar of autistic confusion. That I wanted more answers, but I didn’t need them, and could live happily without them… but equally I could also live happily gently seeking them; that I didn’t have to be scared of thinking about these subjects, if I could do so calmly and alongside simply living my actual life, and keeping in mind that I didn’t actually need to succeed because it didn’t matter, answer seeking was just a stim. I could work to condition myself out of it. Or I could enjoy indulging it, so long as I was careful not to let it overwhelm. In other words my obsession with seeking answers may be born of neurodivergence and trauma, but having acquired this scar of a habit, I may as well enjoy the bonus life side quest of getting to make sense of everything after all. Of getting to stitch together all the assembled pieces of knowledge into a causally ordered, explanatory narrative.

And now? Two years later?Ahead of schedule, aged 31, I think I’ve built, and continue to refine and detail, an understanding that actually holds. Comprised of the OG principle rule set for how to live assembled from observation, feedback and philosophical study from age 5 until 27, beefed up by understanding neurodivergence and psychology more broadly acquired age 27 to 29, and now… overlaid and interwoven with an account of how everything has unfolded from the big bang until now, causally and effectively. As in I literally created a spreadsheet to track all the milestone cause and effects I collect – the cosmological, geological, evolutionary, historical.

By definition, I’m drawing from everything: from science, history, theology, psychology, culture and trauma studies, physics, mythology, consciousness theory, developmental biology and genetics, anthropology, somatic wisdom…? Haha

I’m basically letting the fact that I’m endlessly curious about everything work to my advantage instead of being a curse. Letting my mind wander as it does, letting myself enjoy the stim or dopamine of consuming and learning anything I comes across, knowing I have a framework to bring it back to and to relate it with the knowledge base of everything else learned so far; knowing that I’ll align it to wherever it best fits in the narrative timeline of “everything that happened and how it all came to be this way”.

Now obviously this means I’m assembling things in random order and indeed with big gaps littered throughout. Which means I’m equally using this project to practice being comfortable with tricky feelings like: the discombobulation of not yet knowing what you don’t know yet, or the wariness that you half-understand something but you’re not sure you can explain it yet and if you tried you might find you actually don’t understand at all. I’m getting comfortable with a more equal ratio between clarity and mystery in whatever I purport to know. With allowing pattern and randomness to coexist as the substrate of the timeline. With allowing intuition and evidence to be equally valid sources of input. et cetera

It’s like those miniature cities built of matchstick type projects that weirdos used to build as a continuous hobby over their lifetimes. Basically I go out and find random bits of knowledge and come back and add it where it seems to belong in the timeline, refining whatever is refined by the accommodation and shifting whatever is falsified when logically investigated and compared against the new overall set.

And yeah, for the first time, my worldview is stable – dynamically so in fact. Robust enough to hold me up already and so neverendingly incomplete as to to give me a lifetime of distraction and sport collecting knowledge and adding more detail.

So mea culpa. This episode wasn’t really about Christianity. I guess it’s about what happens when the framework you inherited collapses — especially when you need frameworks to function at all – and the long, awful, occasionally beautiful process of creating a new one.

Wherever you are in terms of understanding yourself in the context of the universe around you, I’m happy for you, rooting for you, or both.

Have a nice day! (and don’t forget to like subscribe or click the relevant supportive thing on whatever platform you’re consuming this. It makes all the difference. Thank you!)

Across this first season of Strange Life, we’ve met many of my selves — or rather, many aspects of one:The autistic one with learned patterns in place of reflexes.The Igbo one, shaped by ancestors and colonial ghosts.The ADHD one, chasing sparks and struggling in stillness.The 21st-century woman, performing a 12 000-year-old script.The traumatized one, re-wiring a spiky nervous system.The gifted one, both bright and burnt by her own voltage.

Each episode turned one of these facets toward the light — examined it, questioned it, reframed it. But none of them exist alone. Each interacts with the others, transforms the others.

That, in essence, is intersectionality: not addition, but chemistry.

A concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality began as a framework to explain how Black women were falling through the cracks of feminist and anti-racist movements that treated race and gender as separate lanes. But it’s since become something bigger — a map for understanding how identity works in real life, how each element of who we are compounds with others to produce something entirely new.

To be autistic and Nigerian is not the same as being either alone.To be a gifted woman is not to be a gifted man with longer hair.To heal trauma within one culture may look like betrayal in another.

Intersectionality is how those truths braid together.

It shows us that identity is not a list of labels but a weave of forces — a living chemistry between internal wiring and external expectation. It’s why two people can live through the same event and walk away with entirely different readings of it. It’s why “who is the most oppressed?” is the wrong question, and “what is happening at this intersection?” is the right one.

In this final episode of Season One, I try to map that weave — tracing how autism and ADHD merge into AuDHD; how womanhood and giftedness distort and refract each other; how trauma and heritage entangle across generations. And, ultimately, how intersectionality is not only an academic framework but a way of seeing — one that teaches us to recognize complexity with more precision, and each other with more care.

Maybe that’s the invitation this season leaves you with:To look at yourself not in parts, but in patterns.To see how your intersections make you specifically, singularly, strangely you.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or read the full transcript on Substack →

🧭 Further Reading & References

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color (1991) — PDF via Stanford:https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/04/Crenshaw_43_Stan_L_Rev_1241.pdf

bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? (1981) — Publisher (Routledge):https://www.routledge.com/Aint-I-a-Woman-Black-Women-and-Feminism/hooks/p/book/9781138821514Feminism is for Everybody (2000) — Publisher (Routledge):https://www.routledge.com/Feminism-Is-for-Everybody-Passionate-Politics/hooks/p/book/9781138821620

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984) — Publisher (Penguin Random House):https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198292/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990) — Publisher (Routledge):https://www.routledge.com/Black-Feminist-Thought-Knowledge-Consciousness-and-the-Politics-of-Empowerment/Collins/p/book/9780415964722

Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1990) — Essay PDF via Open University:https://www.open.ac.uk/cultural-identity-and-diaspora-stuart-hall.pdf

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) — Publisher (Arsenal Pulp Press):https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Care-Work

Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (2017) — Publisher (North Atlantic Books / Penguin Random House):https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600122/these-wilds-beyond-our-fences-by-bayo-akomolafe/

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017) — Publisher (Duke University Press):https://www.dukeupress.edu/living-a-feminist-life

Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined (2018) — Publisher (Duke University Press):https://www.dukeupress.edu/bodyminds-reimagined

Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed (2021) — Publisher (NYU Press):https://nyupress.org/9781479830376/misogynoir-transformed/

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) — Publisher (Seal Press):https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ijeoma-oluo/so-you-want-to-talk-about-race/9781580056779/

Kimberlé Crenshaw, TED Talk – The Urgency of Intersectionality:https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality

So for this bonus conversation, I invited someone whose mind I deeply admire: Sara Caplan — writer, musician with the band Chill Touch, member of UCB’s first all-trans/GNC/non-binary improv team, and a philosopher currently pursuing her Master’s at Cal State LA. Sara brings sharp analysis, humor, and a trans studies lens to everything from David Graeber deep dives to tabletop RPGs.

Together we pull at the tangled threads of:

* How trans women fit into a 12,000-year “chain of survival and storytelling” that I called womanhood.

* Whether it’s really possible to trace patriarchy back to a single climate event — or whether domination arises from other patterns.

* The contradictions of wanting to abolish gender categories and cherish womanhood as solidarity and joy.

* The role of fathers, daughters, and generational shifts in reshaping power.

* Beauty practices as both subjugation and resistance.

* And the underrated through-line of humor — how comedy has always been one of patriarchy’s fiercest challengers.

It’s a lively, sparky exchange — part philosophical duel, part collaborative storytelling. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we wrestled with the differences, and in the process we both got clearer on what’s at stake when we talk about origins, oppression, and the possibility of change.

If the first Womanhood episode was a map, this one is a campfire debate — full of laughter, sparks, and deep questioning.

✨ Listen in, and then take it further: share with a friend, sit down, and have your own version of this conversation. Because womanhood — however you define it — has always been carried forward in the stories we tell each other.

📚 Further Reading & Sources

On Patriarchy & Its Origins

* The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule — Angela Saini (2023)https://www.angela-saini.co.uk/the-patriarchs

* The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity — David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021)https://www.farrarstraus.com/books/the-dawn-of-everything/

* “The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis” — NASA Earth Observatory explainer on sudden climate shiftshttps://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/YoungerDryas

On Gender, Trans Studies & Womanhood

* Susan Stryker — Transgender History (2nd ed., 2017)

https://bookshop.org/p/books/transgender-history-susan-stryker/8639719

* Judith Butler — Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990, classic text)https://www.routledge.com/Gender-Trouble/Butler/p/book/9780415389556

* María Lugones — Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System (2007) [PDF]https://www.ou.edu/content/dam/WGS/Documents/Reading%20Room/Lugones2007.pdf

On Beauty, Power & Social Construction

* Caroline Criado Perez — Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019)https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/

* Naomi Wolf — The Beauty Myth (1991, foundational feminist critique)https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-beauty-myth-naomi-wolf

On Humor, Resistance & Power

* Rebecca Krefting — All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (2014)https://jhu.edu/books/title/all-joking-aside/

* Lindy West — Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman (2016)https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lindy-west/shrill/9780316348452/

But the lived experience is messier. Giftedness often means growing up confused, alienated, neglected — and carrying the constant risk of burning out your body, or even spiraling into madness.

In this episode, I unpack:

Why some brains are wired for dense signal flow between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus

How confusion, alienation, neglect, and psychosis shape the gifted experience

The physical costs of running hot (from stress to immune dysfunction)

And why joy is possible, once we name the category and support it instead of pretending it’s just arrogance in disguise

As always, this is part essay, part personal story. I’ll share what it meant for me to be a child spinning theories faster than anyone could help me refine them, and how I’ve carried that into adult life.

If you’ve ever felt “too much” or “too odd” — or parent, teach, or love someone who does — I hope this episode helps you make sense of the gift behind the mess.

Further Reading & References:

“Hebbian Learning: Neurons That Fire Together, Wire Together” — https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/hebbian-learning

McGaugh, J. L. (2000). “Memory—A Century of Consolidation” (Science). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.287.5451.248

Research on memory as a reconstructive process: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/memory

National Institute of Mental Health on ADHD: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd

National Center for PTSD on Complex PTSD: https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/types/complex_ptsd.asp

Risk of psychosis in high cognitive functioning: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.662558/full

Stephen Hawking biography (ALS & work): https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Hawking

Hank Green on his cancer journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usQ0rSe-C9Q

SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted): https://www.sengifted.org/

We begin with ADHD (episode three’s theme), joined by the wonderful Sheila Henson — a coach with over 20 years experience in the space. Sheila brings both lived experience and deep expertise, and I couldn’t imagine a better first guest for this experiment.

Together, we tackle listener questions on:

* ✦ How to stop beating yourself up when ADHD traits are misread as carelessness

* ✦ Parenting approaches that encourage pattern recognition without shaming

* ✦ Balancing punctuality needs with time agnosia and late-running brains

* ✦ How managers can create workplaces where ADHD contributions are valued

* ✦ Whether ADHD is “chemicals in motion” or culture, disability or superpower

The conversation is candid, funny, and practical — weaving strategies, lived examples, and the reminder that curiosity often heals more than judgment.

If this episode resonates, the best way to support Strange Life is to share it with a friend, leave a review, or keep the conversation going in your own circle. Together, we can reframe how we understand difference.

Find more of Sheila’s work at sheilahenson.com. Or follow her on Instagram!

CPTSD. Depression. Addiction.

In theory, these are three different diagnoses — separate boxes on separate forms. But in practice, they are often three faces of the same nervous system story. In this episode of Strange Life, I trace the outlines of each condition and lay them side by side — until their overlapping shapes reveal something truer, and maybe more useful, than any one explanation in isolation.

We begin with CPTSD, where “C” stands not for childhood but for complex. It describes the systemic damage caused when a nervous system grows under conditions of chronic fear plus helplessness — whether in an abusive household, a prison camp, or any place you can neither fight nor flee. What happens when adrenaline, meant for emergency survival, becomes the everyday fuel of your growth? Neural pathways carve jagged instead of smooth; commas turn into exclamation marks. The result is a brain and body tuned to intensity, one that looks a lot like ADHD from the outside — but whose texture is terror, not thrill.

When the system runs that hot for that long, sometimes it collapses. That collapse is what we call depression: the lights dim after years of overdrive, colour drains from the world, and even grief dulls to a numb grey. The Russian word toska captures it well — an abject boredom with life, where nothing tastes, smells, or feels like anything. From inside, the logic of continuing can become almost impossible to grasp.

Enter addiction. If something — a drug, a ritual, a chemical, even work or exercise — jolts the nervous system back into Technicolor or cools it enough to breathe, of course you reach for it. And keep reaching. From the inside, relief feels the same whether it comes in a blister pack or a baggie, from espresso or from MDMA. The boundary between “treatment,” “indulgence,” and “sin” is drawn not by neurochemistry but by society.

And so the three knot together: CPTSD as a body wired on adrenaline, depression as its eventual collapse, and addiction as its desperate workaround. This is my lived story too — one of hyper-arousal, recurrent collapse, and the chemical interventions (in my case, THC) that keep sensation and aliveness within reach.

To untangle them, to see their outlines clearly, is to glimpse not just pathology but the strange, fragile logic of survival.

Further Reading & References

Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery – foundational text introducing Complex PTSD.

Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score – on how trauma shapes nervous systems.

National Center for PTSD: What is Complex PTSD? – https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/types/complex_ptsd.asp

WHO ICD-11: Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http://id.who.int/icd/entity/2070699808

American Psychiatric Association: What is Depression – https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/depression/what-is-depression

Medical News Today: What is Toska? – https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/toska

NIDA: Understanding Drug Use and Addiction – https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugfacts/understanding-drug-use-addiction

Carhart-Harris, R. et al. (2021). Trial of Psilocybin vs SSRIs for Depression – https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032994Hashtags

#StrangeLifePodcast #CPTSD #Depression #Addiction #TraumaHealing #Neurodivergence #MentalHealthAwareness #ADHD #ComplexPTSD #PodcastRecommendations #SurvivorStories #HealingJourney #TraumaInformed

What does it really mean to be a woman in the 21st century?

Between chasing the ever-shifting rules of femininity and questioning the very foundations of “womanhood” as a category, the modern experience of gender can feel like running two marathons at once — one for survival, one for understanding.

In this expansive episode of Strange Life, Daisy Onubogu maps both sides of that struggle. She traces the architecture of gender back not just to patriarchy or politics, but to ancient climatic shifts — like the Younger Dryas, the sudden freeze that upended ecosystems 12,000 years ago and shaped the societies that followed. From there, she asks: how did those environmental shocks crystallise into cultural ones? And how did “womanhood” become a role to be policed and performed?

Along the way, she takes us through themes of:

Performance & approval — why so much of femininity is judged by external reward structures.

Biology vs. culture — exploring the ongoing debate over what is “natural” in gender, and what is constructed.

Myth & narrative — how stories we inherit (from Eve to Barbie) continue to script modern womanhood.

Resistance & reimagining — what it looks like to reject or reinvent the scripts altogether.

It’s a sharp, sometimes irreverent exploration — one that insists on taking gender seriously, but not solemnly.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

✨ Further Reading & References ✨

Curious to dig deeper into the ideas behind this episode? Here are some of the texts, thinkers, and resources that shaped it:

🌍 Climate, History & the Roots of Society

Hank Green explains AMOC (Gulf Stream) -- https://youtu.be/pThcIgJyNME?si=xOuugYcR0TgcWJgL

Younger Dryas — Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/Younger-Dryas-climate-interval — overview of the abrupt cooling event that reshaped ecosystems and societies.

NASA Earth Observatory: How is Today’s Warming Different from the Past?: https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php — clear explainer on past climate shifts, including the Younger Dryas.

Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel — classic (if debated) argument for environment shaping civilisation.

The Dawn of Everything — David Graeber & David Wengrow (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything — rethinking the origins of hierarchy, inequality, and social roles.

👩🏽‍🦱 Gender as Category & Performance

Gender Trouble — Judith Butler (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Trouble — foundational text on gender as performance rather than essence.

The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Masculinities — Raewyn Connell (overview): https://www.raewynconnell.net/p/masculinities_20.html — explores how masculinity is socially constructed and enforced.

💄 Womanhood, Beauty & Social Approval

The Beauty Myth — Naomi Wolf (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beauty_Myth — how beauty standards function as tools of control.

Femininity and Domination — Sandra Lee Bartky (Archive.org): https://archive.org/details/femininitydomina00bart — analysis of how women’s bodies are disciplined in daily life.

The Second Shift — Arlie Russell Hochschild (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Shift — still-relevant study of unpaid domestic labour.

📖 Myth, Culture & Narrative

“Barbie’s Body Politics” — Journal of Popular Culture: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1998.00209.x — academic look at Barbie as a cultural text.

“She’s everything”: Feminism & the Barbie Movie — Feminist Media Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2024.2381254 — on Barbie as a contemporary feminist battleground.

Eve (Genesis) — Jewish Women’s Archive: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/eve-bible — how the Eve myth shaped Western ideas of womanhood.

🔮 Reimagining Gender & Futures

Feminism Is for Everybody — bell hooks (overview): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks — accessible entry point into feminist thought.

Glitch Feminism — Legacy Russell (Verso): https://www.versobooks.com/products/460-glitch-feminism — argues for rejecting fixed categories in the digital age.

Testo Junkie — Paul B. Preciado (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_B._Preciado — memoir-manifesto on hormones, identity, and reimagining gender.

Strange Life Podcast

What happens when your brain doesn’t follow the standard IF-THEN rules that society is built on?When the reflexes you learned in early childhood aren’t the “normal” ones… and the world notices?

In this expansive and electric episode of Strange Life, host Daisy Onubogu unpacks the true shape of ADHD—not as a list of symptoms, but as a unique way of experiencing the world that can either make you society’s darling or its scapegoat.

From time-blindness and nonlinear thinking to the euphoric joy of pattern-matching, Daisy offers a compelling reframe of ADHD not as dysfunction, but as difference—one whose value depends almost entirely on social context and privilege.

This is for anyone who has ever wondered:

Why am I always late even though I care?

Why do I take in so much of the world?

Why do I see connections no one else does?

Let’s talk about it.

🧠 Topics Covered:

How reflexes are formed in early childhood—and how ADHD rewrites them

What happens when you don't respond to stimuli the “normal” way

ADHD + privilege = genius. ADHD + marginalization = “problem”

How society reacts differently to the same traits based on context

Time-blindness, novelty-seeking, and dopamine-chasing as encoded survival

Pattern-matching as a compulsion, defense mechanism, and creative gift

The ADHD–autism overlap (AuDHD) and how they can beautifully balance

Understanding brain chemistry as motion, not just imbalance

Why medicating isn’t selling out—but conformity shouldn’t be the goal

💬 Quotable Moments:

“When you’re ADHD without the privilege that makes you lovable, you become punishable.”

“Time-blindness isn’t laziness—it’s just that my brain is responding to X74 instead of X.”

“ADHD people fall in love with linking things because those connections used to save us.”

“You’re not wrong. You’re just different. And different isn’t broken.”

🔎 Tags:

ADHD podcast, neurodivergent podcast, ADHD symptoms, ADHD pattern-matching, ADHD time blindness, ADHD vs autism, AuDHD experience, executive dysfunction, dopamine ADHD, ADHD brain chemistry, ADHD reframing, Strange Life Podcast

🧩 Referenced Concepts & Frames:

IF-THEN reflex development in early childhood

Pattern-matching as both trauma response and gift

Time-blindness and alternative cognitive processing

ADHD as context-sensitive (star vs problem)

ADHD & brain chemistry explained through physics analogies

AuDHD dynamics and overlap: routines, novelty, masking, burnout

A reframing of dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline as motion states, not static chemicals

💌 Stay Connected

Follow Daisy / the podcast and get updates:

Instagram: [@daisyverao] / https://instagram.com/daisyverao

TikTok: [@daisyverao]

Substack: [⁠strangelifepod⁠] / https://strangelifepod.substack.com/

Website: [⁠https://msha.ke/daisyveraonubogu/#about]

* talkative

* emotional

* mercantile, and

* a dancer

These are the top stereotypes you'll find if you ask those who profess to be in the know about Igbo people.

That not only do we love to talk, we love words. If an Igbo man hears a word he doesn't recognise he'll ask the meaning — unless he's feeling shy, in which case he'll look it up later. And best believe in a few days, you'll hear him using it, savouring the feel in his mouth, talking it up and down like a new pair of shiny shoes.

You'll also hear that the Igbos are people of big feelings; that half our language is melodramatic exclamations of woe! "Eewo", "chai", and "chay" are chief favorites of mine. We wail, we weep, we rage; what we feel is on our face and in our words, and it's almost never chill.

Thirdly if there is buying and selling to be done, the Igbos are there. You'll hear this; that we're wizard hustlers held back only by our high minded principles. a

And finally fourthly, you'll hear that we move like wires conducting electricity — effortlessly as per design. With a joy or at least a trance like hypnosis unmatched by any other experience. Except perhaps sex.

Now there are good reasons for these notions to be circulating; the fire for the smoke is plenty. That's a sub part of the talk thing, by the way — the Igbos love a proverb, love a wise saying, a pithy axiom, a turn of phrase!

Anyway to start there are good reasons for the Igbo love of talk. We recorded our history and collective knowledge orally, for millennia. Like many cultures including pre-colonial Irish peoples and pre antiquity Greeks, for instance.

For so long, by some accounts from as early as 10,000 BCE, this cultural group used story rhyme and poetry to log all that they discovered understood and experienced. Like: a vast cosmology so comprehensive there are Igbo scientists today using it to bridge the illusory gap between spirituality and quantum physics. Like: medicinal sciences of herbs, chemicals, psychotherapy and functional movement. A legacy that culminated in the great crisis of 2010 when Ada Onubogu decided to study something other than medicine at university and all my relatives lost their collective minds.

Anyway when you record things via speech and memory for so long you end up with an epigenetic compulsion towards oral communication.

Moreover when the British were peak Britishing, in what would become Nigeria — during the colonial era I mean, they set up a situation where to be useful to, and to be more like, them meant to be marginally safer from death or destitution. So speaking the King's English to an excellent standard — a standard beyond even what the native speakers could manage became a much valued characteristic.

And the thing about colonisation is it goes on for so long, you forget that those adaptations were even learned in the first place you feel you can't imagine yourself otherwise. And besides language is a self propulsive thing — parents will speak to their kids the way they know how to speak, and those kids will in turn adopt it accordingly.

So the big feelings thing then, secondly, I would say is largely because the modern world has only known an Igbo culture forged in the hellfires of slavery, colonial decimation, and civil war — with a side of famine and impoverishment.

There has been much to wail and gnash teeth over, much to rage over. Like when slave trade era Jamaican plantation owners forever changed the population trajectory of the entire ethnicity by combining a preference for Igbo slaves — because they had farming skill and collectively held agricultural science knowledge — with a tendency for such cruel treatment, they had to keep restocking on the regular.

Or when they (The British*) broke the literal and metaphorical backs of Igbo chiefs to force them to dismantle their freedom loving, broadly egalitarian, council-run villages, in favour of an extractive empire colony designed only to convert every part of the nature and land into British wealth.

Or when the unstably cobbled together Nigeria that the British reluctantly handed over to the new postcolonial government treated Igbos in a way that felt like the last and final insult they could tolerate. And a push for secession and an independent state culminated in a devastating civil war that ultimately saw millions dead and even more displaced. Not to talk of the subsequent asset seizure which saw most Igbos stripped of all they owned and given £20 with which to start over.

These are bodies and a collective unconscious laden with so much grief, so much fury…

I know that it took me personally about three years to weep myself dry and heal; and while some of that salt was an account of personal tragedies like my father's death, or the rapes and assaults I experienced etcetera, at least some was a multigenerational ache, bigger than just me.

Anyway I do think besides all of that — the impact of the last millennia or so on the emotional dispositions of the Igbo peoples, there is also a genetic, physiological tendency towards physical sensitivity. But we'll come back to that on the dancing point

Meanwhile and next, let's unpack the mercantile thing.

And really if I were going in order this would have been at the top. If Igbos are known to be anything, it is merchants and market goers. Enter an Igbo person's shop and you are buying something.

I'm so sorry you thought you came to browse? This woman has sized you up to know how to best explain the item you just glanced at as the answer to your deepest heart's desire.

Now we are never escaping these allegations because even the literal cosmology of the Igbo peoples, our analogy for how the universe functions and came to be, is literally founded on the metaphor of a marketplace.

One that converges in a 4 day cycle: Eke, Orie, Afor and Nkwo.

These are the 4 days time can be divided into, because each is a distinct kind of combination of all the factors and motion and matter of the universe; and after the fourth kind of combination, we get the first again, and the cycle repeats over and over — as long as the universe persists.

Everything in the universe comes together, collides in a manner determined by the Chi, or core essence of each of the components. And this exchange of energies, this combination of potential into some actualisation or other, is what a market is, as far as Odinani Igbo traditional cosmology goes anyway.

As components of the universe ourselves, we are no different. Our inherent potential, our Chi is here to converge and collide with other potentials in the universe, into some beautiful dynamic shape of exchange.

It's true on the subatomic level, it's true of chemistry, it's true of biology, and it's true too on the sociological level.

Life, according to the Igbos, is about nurturing, understanding and being led by your Chi — your shape of inherent potential — into some actualisation; into something beautiful that you then bring to the marketplace of society to exchange with others.

And moreover, that actualisation process, of your Chi manifesting into the skill or art, or wisdom, that you bring to society's marketplace is itself the result of the same process playing out on all the levels.

It is the subatomic, the chemical, the biological and the sociological collisions between your inherent composition, your Chi, and the surrounding environment, that will shape and develop you into your actualised, manifested, realised self.

Igbo towns and villages were always designed around the marketplace for this reason, and Igbos will literally run small buy and sell empires as hobbies even today.

The other aspect of this marketplace and convergence thing is community and collectives. The Igbos are very collectivist; huge on family, huge on events, on socializing, on parties, on tribe…

Which obviously checks out — if the foundational logic of a group of people is that the universe is a nonstop party of collision and exchange, you can appreciate why a person alone makes no sense to them — to us.

Without us who do I collide with, to exchange with in order to manifest into existence? Without us who am I? Etcetera.

Practically, beautifully, we see both sides of all this come together in the Igbo practice of apprenticeship (Igba Boi), where business owners essentially as standard, will seed the new business of one of their young associates. You work in my shop for a bit, I buy you a shop of your own to run, you hire some young hotshot to work in your shop, he works for your shop for a bit and then you in turn buy him a shop of his own, and on and on the cycle goes.

Alright so what about the dancing thing? I wager that much like the talkativity thing, millennia upon millennia of Igbo peoples, using rhythm and sound to coordinate human collaboration, and embed and adhere information to memory, has etched a sensitivity to rhythm and sound into the DNA telomeres passed from generation to generation. Until we arrive at me, a woman so dyspraxic, I walk into doors several times a day. But add music and watch me move like water.

Anyway whatever the why of it, the fact of the matter is self evident. Igbo people dance like the music enters our body to play us like an instrument. And oh my the transcendent joy of it all!

Chai

I genuinely think that there are certain songs that if you play them at my funeral, I will rise for at least one more dance. Now I'm laughing to myself at the imaginary skit of trying to leave the dance floor — to go back to the dead — but the DJ keeps you trapped with bangers!

Anyway speaking of me, I am as usual a strange member of this club. You'll notice that come up a lot in this podcast — autistic but extremely social, a leftist who worked in venture capital, an Igbo person who doesn't properly speak the language, or do big feelings actually.

And up until three years ago I didn't even necessarily think of myself as a true member or carrier of this culture. The first factor is the obvious truth of having spent most of my life far outside of the ancestral lands and the population density of my people. While in Nigeria we lived in Lagos and we spoke English at home and I only went to my father's village once, as a child for his funeral. And then I moved to Ireland and I didn't visit Nigeria again until last year.

The compounding factor was that in my adolescence I went through a relatively classic immigrant child phase of feeling cripplingly ashamed of my difference, and thus very keen to eschew all of it and assimilate into, in this case, Irishness, as far as possible. And by the time I got over it, I just went from active rejection of the culture to a muted disinterest or neutrality,

It felt like a thing that existed in my life but also had nothing to do with me. Like a weird old cloak you’ve inherited; it's in your closet, but you have no context for it, and so no way to appreciate it. And actually maybe you rather feel like it doesn't go with your aesthetic…

Thankfully the multi year, obsessive navel-gazing that unearthed my diagnoses also helped me finally unpack my Igboness. To understand how much I did have in common with my people after all. To feel like I could even say that, "my people" without cringing or feeling like a fraud.

So now I'm learning more and more Igbo and delighting in the ways that this knowledge of the culture and the sense of connection deepens my enjoyment of all the Igboest parts of me,

Like my obsession with kinship and love and community. My feral relish for any opportunity to dance, and the hypnotic effect of tone and rhythm on my mind and my body. My tendency to pontificate verbosely, just for the fun of it.

And there is still so much to discover, and deepen understanding of, and affection for.

I want to someday be fluent in the oh so beautiful music and poetry of the Igbo language. I want to actually visit my village properly as an adult and meet everyone. I also want to meet these Umuada all over the world that I keep hearing about — meet all my namesakes, all the overachieving first daughters trying to hold the world together — I think we'll have a lot in common!

Anyway on a final note, before anyone talks, know that I am very comfortable with my mosaic identity. With the fact that there's no washing off the Irishness from my Igbo. Or the fact that I feel Nigerian not Biafran, and that I loved the Yoruba language and the culture long before I came around to sorting out my internalised self hate and reclaiming the Igboness I had tossed aside.

And I wouldn't want to wash any of that off. I love me as I am — in my full culture-mongrel strangeness and beauty.

So there you go that's Igbo heritage for you.

Have a nice day!

What is autism really like from the inside? In this powerful debut episode, Daisy dives deep into the lived experience of the autistic human—unfiltered and unapologetically rich with insight, nuance, and dry-dark humor.

From why autistic people are missing the invisible "vibe map" that most people are born with, to how we build replacement systems of logic, observation, and raw processing power—this is a journey into neurodivergence that moves beyond stereotypes and into the heart of autistic cognition.

Whether you're autistic, love someone who is, or just want to understand what it feels like to exist in a world that wasn't built for your brain, I'm almost certain this episode will challenge, enlighten, resonate... all that good stuff.

🧠 Topics Covered:

The "sense of resonance"—what neurotypicals take for granted, and autistics must construct from scratch

Why autistic life often feels like playing 4D chess every waking moment

The two major autistic archetypes I know: the "Hiders" and the "System Builders"

Why learning becomes a stim, a survival strategy, and a source of euphoric relief

The toll of continuous over-processing: health, burnout, and sensory overwhelm

Bullying, misunderstanding, and the consequences of violating social expectations

The joy of show-and-tell, and the beauty of shared understanding

Why, despite it all, the autistic mind is something to be deeply proud of

💬 Quotable Moments:

“Autistics land in this Rubik’s cube of a flesh container and have to author a stop-motion life animation with zero context.”

“All autistic hobbies are just learning in different guises. Fight me outside about it.”

“We love show-and-tell because it’s an antidote to the loneliness of living in your own universe.”

🔎 Tags:#Autism, #autisticmind, #neurodivergence, #neurodivergentpodcast, #autisticexperience, #identitypodcast, #StrangeLifePodcast, #autistictraits, #AuDHD, #ADHD, #resonance, #autisticburnout, #autisticmasking, #sensoryoverwhelm, #socialconfusion, #autisticwomen, #blackautisticvoices, #autismawareness, #autismfromtheinside, #lived experience autism

📚 Referenced or Related Concepts:

⁠Resonance⁠ (the felt intuitive knowing of things many neurotypicals rely on for social navigation)

⁠Fascia and bioelectric feedback⁠ in sensory processing

⁠Glutamate and cortisol⁠ in autistic cognition and burnout

⁠Uncanny valley⁠ responses to social divergence

Also this episode intersects with current research on autism and neurodivergence. For further reading:

⁠Monotropism: An Interest-Based Account of Autism⁠

⁠The Double Empathy Problem – Damian Milton⁠

⁠Sensory Processing in Autism – NIH Study⁠

📬 Stay Connected Follow Daisy / the podcast and get updates:

Instagram: [⁠@daisyverao⁠]

TikTok: [⁠@daisyverao⁠]

YouTube: [⁠Strange Life Podcast⁠]

Substack: [⁠strangelifepod⁠]

Website: [⁠daisyveraonubogu⁠]

🎙️ Subscribe, rate, and review if this episode moved you—it helps more people discover Strange Life.