A Year of Integration: Power, Belonging, and Winter Wisdom for Autistic Women
Image Source: Sacred Mists Circle
In Celtic mythology, the Cailleach is the ancient keeper of winter. She governs storms, stone, sea, and stillness — not as punishment, but as unapologetic preservation.
She is known to take many forms and wears many faces. But unlike the exhausting shape-shifting so many of us are taught to perform, the Cailleach does not fracture herself to be acceptable. She embodies the whole.
She commands respect for difference — for terrain, weather, timing, and limits. She does not ask the mountain to become the sea, or the winter to behave like summer. She honors what is, and in doing so, holds immense power.
For years, I have returned to her wisdom as a way of understanding my own nervous system, my work, and my relationship to the world.
This year feels unmistakably like a Cailleach year for me.
Not a year of reinvention —
but a year of integration.
Entering the Ocean
The ocean is among the many land forms under the Cailleach’s command — a force that reshapes us quietly over time.
If you’ve ever swum in the sea, you know this truth:
You rarely exit where you entered.
You wade in slowly and float or swim along. You follow the current without realizing it, and when you finally turn back toward shore, you discover you’ve drifted — sometimes far — from your towel, your markers, your original place.
Neurodivergent people know this ocean well.
We enter the waters of neurotypical norms early — social expectations, professional systems, productivity culture, relational rules that weren’t designed with our nervous systems in mind. We learn to swim by adapting, attuning, masking. We take in messages about who we’re allowed to be and how we must perform to belong.
Over time, the drift happens.
Sometimes it looks like exhaustion.
Sometimes it looks like success that doesn’t feel like ours.
Sometimes it looks like swallowing misguided beliefs — or in my case, being told you couldn’t possibly be a therapist and be autistic, leaving me with answered questions from my lived experience. And sometimes because of this, you wake up far from yourself.
Winter wisdom doesn’t ask us to swim harder.
It asks us to return to shore.
Recognition Without Rejection
This past year, I took a solo road trip to New Mexico — a quiet rebellion against the narratives I had absorbed about myself.
For a long time, I believed ADHD explained the full picture of my neurodivergence. Other traits — deeper sensory sensitivity, relational differences, internal intensity — remained unnamed.
While there, I met with Dr. Evanko and participated in the development phase of a new assessment instrument she is currently researching and refining. The tool is not yet finalized. But the approach itself was immediately different.
The questions reflected lived experience.
They asked not, What’s wrong with you?
But, How does your nervous system actually work?
And in that space, something I had long suspected was finally named.
I’m autistic.
My response was a quiet recognition and a few tears. Part relief. Part grief.
Throughout the assessment, I felt reflected.
Because I was being described, not diminished.
That experience offered something rare in a world that often sees neurodivergence through a pathological paradigm. Instead, language was being used to named difference without framing it as deficit.
Autistic Women & Power
Many autistic women share a profile that is still widely misunderstood:
high intelligence
deep empathy
rich inner worlds
strong moral and emotional attunement
And yet, translating that depth into easeful experiences within neurotypical systems can be genuinely difficult — not because of a lack of care or effort, but because the system itself doesn’t make room for difference.
Like the Cailleach, autistic women often wear many masks.
But power is not found in endless adaptation.
Power is found in integration and standing strong in who we decide to be in any given moment.
Power is being willing be awkward at something, changing our minds, and stating our desires — unapologetically and with full conviction.
In asking:
Who do I even want to be when I stop performing?
What forms of expression are actually mine?
How do I want to move through the world — and with whom?
Neurodiversity is not a flaw in the system.
It is a part of the system, and it’s time to make room for it.
Integration, Not Reinvention
As this understanding continues to integrate, it is shaping how I think about my work with other autistic women and neurodivergent adults.
As this assessment instrument evolves through ethical research and refinement, I’m hopeful about the possibility of eventually integrating it into my work in accessible, responsible ways — particularly for women who:
suspect they may be autistic
cannot afford a $4,000 + comprehensive evaluation
have struggled to find affirming assessments covered by insurance
My intention is not to replace formal diagnosis where it’s needed.
It is to support self-understanding, reflection, and power — tools that help people see themselves clearly and without shame.
Belonging and power are not opposites. They’re inextricably linked.
They grow together in the ways we decide we belong: to ourselves and to the world.
A Winter Orientation
Rather than resolutions, I’m orienting this year around integration and release.
Some winter practices I return to again and again:
writing a letter to myself each January, to be opened the following year — naming desires (however outlandish or edgy they seem) without apology
choosing reflection over productivity
unplugging and reconsidering how I use my time and energy
Instead of asking, What else can I add?
I’m asking:
What layers do I want to shed in preparation for something to be born anew come Spring?
For me, that has meant releasing:
forced relationships
unnecessary screen time
outdated paradigms that don’t serve my life or work
ways of working that ignore my nervous system
Winter does not ask us to hurry.
It asks us to listen.
And sometimes, listening is how we find our way back to shore — not as someone new, but as ourselves, integrated, whole, and standing in our power.
