It is with tremendous pride and joy that I am introducing Spiramind! I am forever grateful to all of my incredible partners and friends. You have been such a source of encouragement, inspiration, and love over the past few months. The conversations I’ve had with you all pushed me to get creative, trust myself, and work hard to envision the potential for this project.
When I stepped back from working directly with survivors, I needed to turn inwards. I imagined how I might continue that essential work in a way that would provide survivors’ communities with high quality education, honor my own disability needs, and flesh out a niche for the unique needs of neurodivergent people. Spiramind was born out of these desires. I am so thrilled to be able to officially share it with you!
At its heart, Spiramind is a celebration of the way I understand my own brain. This project, like many wonderful things, was born out of struggle. Specifically, my personal struggle to reconcile the new-found knowledge of myself as autistic with the overwhelming reality that I spent my life suppressing my autism. This challenge sent me spiraling – and it became clear that I had to prioritize rest.
It was from a place of rest rather than survival that I was able to think about the constructive shape of those spiraling thoughts. It is a pattern that I had been trained to hate and overpower. I wondered about the commonalities between a spiraling whirlpool and a spiraling snail shell. How can so much fit into such a small space… how can so much come from so little?
Introducing Spiramind
When I paid attention to my thought patterns in other circumstances and realized the spiral is a beautiful way to describe the autistic experience of growth and joy through repetition. I discovered that the idea deeply resonated with other autistic people. Whatever I did next needed to embody that spiral. In the spirit of spiraling thought, I looked back on my older work for inspiration.
I had been taking ancient Greek in college when I first started working on anti-abuse activism, so I pulled out my old Greek dictionary and looked up “spiral,” or, “speira.” What stood out to me in the definition were the words “folding, coiling, cycling, engendering, and scattering.” This was not a pointless or tragic spiral. This was a spiral that culminated repeatedly in birth.
Excited, I flipped through the pages looking for words related to the brain. I landed on the word “phren,” which you may recognize from the outdated and racist practice of phrenology. In Greek, the word describes “the heart as the seat of the passions or thought, wit, or to be in possession of one’s own senses or be sensible, to have willfulness, to understand, to think, to be wise or sage, or to be in deep thought.”
I stared at these two Greek words and saw a description of my experience as an autistic person. It felt right to tie them together into “Speiraphren.” After info-dumping about ancient Greek to various friends, it became clear I needed to simplify the name. I settled on Spiramind, and got to work.
Thank you for coming with me on this journey, and for believing in the vision of a world where all facets of neurodiversity are celebrated, respected, accommodated, valued, and loved.
With all my heart,
Zoe Collins