Dr. Claudia Laufer

       For decades, students and teachers of mine alike have told me to write a book. They felt that my diverse and often insane life experiences, coupled with the vast and broad amount of academic knowledge I have stored in my memory with 11 years studying at university level, would be of use to many others. However, getting a masters and a doctorate degree as a neurodivergent immigrant, parenting a neurodivergent child with no family or partner at my side to help, running a private practice, supervising interns and treating patients at community acupuncture clinics and teaching at university didn’t leave any time to actually sit down and write. My days were too busy with getting my son to and from school, doing homework with him, planning and cooking healthy meals my son would actually eat, fighting for my son’s IEPs to be implemented as written, thinking about patients and their needs well after they left the treatment room, grading papers at night once my son was finally asleep, and researching approaches to help my students with learning disabilities and neurodivergent brains succeed in a school that insisted on fitting into neurotypical and normative structures. The little free time I could find was spend taking my son out into the wilderness areas of the Sequoia National Forest and the Mojave deserts, to give him a time to synch back with nature without internet, phone reception, electricity, tight schedules, and academic and societal demands. Over the past decades, my son and I had already witnessed the effects of climate change and careless campers on our favorite feral playgrounds. Many areas were ravaged by fires or closed down due to destruction caused by city folks playing house in the woods, literally decorating once beautiful areas with shit and toilet paper. Then, with the advent of Covid, everything changed.

 

       I had to close my private practice, and the community clinics I worked at had to close their doors during the lockdown as well. My son had to abandon his design studies at college because his classes didn’t translate into the online format that schools adopted to continue teaching, so I was left with only a few classes to teach, and a lot of financial challenges to face. Overnight, our busy lives running between jobs and schools and home turned into house arrest with nowhere to go. When clinics were allowed to be operated again, California required practitioners to be vaccinated against Covid, which for me and my family wasn’t an option; my son and I both got injured by vaccines before and were not willing to take the risk with this one. So instead of being able to jump back into a resemblance of my old life, at age 53, I had to completely reinvent myself. After more than 20 years of working full time while raising my child without family to help, I was pretty much out of spoons, and was running exclusively on faith and passion. After spending three months in Germany end of 2020, trying to gain a different perspective on everything, I opted to move to North Carolina in 2021 for a romantic relationship with someone I had originally met on a dating site. What I envisioned to be my future life as part of a community in the rural mountains turned into a 2-year midlife pilgrimage through the south that brought me back home to Los Angeles in January 2023 instead. I knew I didn’t have it in me to start up yet another practice, so I took on pet and house sitting as an interim gig with plans on creating a blog and online classes.

 

       Despite my history as a journalist and writer, it turned out that while it was easy to write about things I had learned, it was much harder to write about myself. When it came to teaching classes, I found while it was easy for me to teach a class live in front of my students, creating online recorded classes was not flowing smoothly. Moreover, I had gotten to the point where I accepted the fact that I will never have THE answer to a problem, that I will never be able to fix anyone, and that everything I knew was just a few perspectives in a sea of billions of other perspectives. It also seemed like every time I learned something new, it provided more new questions than answers. As I was weeding through the different subject matters I’m passionate about, which included neurodivergence and the role of the nervous system in how our lives unfold, trauma healing, gender diversity, and natural and healthy living, every post I wrote felt like a pompous attempt to teach others about things I still had way too many questions about. My motivation was still to provide fixes to problems, and if my own life had taught me anything, it was that there are no simple one-size-fits-all fixes to any problems I was trying to address. I had tons of personal experience with overcoming the challenges my AuDHD nervous system encountered in the binary, neurotypical world I lived in. However, every single patient and student I worked with had slightly different challenges, even though the overall presentations were similar. I saw the differences between those who were set in their ways and had a hard time challenging themselves and those that had an easy time adopting new perspectives despite facing the same challenges of divergence vs. normalcy, each had their own blessings and own curses. I knew I wanted to share my perspective because I know many would benefit from it, but I was never able to really pinpoint these benefits to the point that I felt comfortable publishing what I wrote as an official guide. Moreover, many of my approaches are based in self-accountability, and in today’s climate, people prefer to look to the outside for change, rather than understand that any significant and lasting change requires uncomfortable internal work.  

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       It wasn’t until my last attempt at finding co-creators for my vision of an educational blog and the subsequent creation of an off-grid community and healing center bombed that I woke up to my current approach. I had not only studied a lot and opened myself up to countless opposing viewpoints, I had also managed to integrate some of the most opposing facts and truths I was taught into a congruent story that didn’t put blame on anyone, but simply described the dynamics I observed around me through the lens of my collective experiences. I realized that the way I had been trying to find co-creators online was an approach that didn’t work for what I was trying to create. I’m old-school and only use technology as a tool, whereas most people who were interested in helping were so immersed in the world of 2D screens that they had lost touch with the basics of natural life. They wanted community, but not in a 3D setting where the collective was providing what we needed for life outside of online stores and social media. So instead of launching my idea of Humans on the Spectrum, which was meant as an educational site for humans who are neurodivergent or gender fluid, I decided to write the Memoires of a Feral Crone. This new perspective is focusing more on detailing my own journey through time and space, the ways I had been able to overcome my own struggles with being divergent in nervous system function and gender identity, and how my collective experiences, good and bad, shaped me into who I have become. I know some of my opinions and perspectives are unconventional and triggering to some, but know that it is not my intent to judge, only to explain why I see things the way they are, supported by tying together the scientific, psychological and religious narratives along with visual aids to help others understand the connections I see.

 

       My life’s journey covers a lot of ground. I was born and raised in Germany in a small, conservative town in the countryside, and at age 24 moved to the progressive and huge city of Los Angeles, following an inner drive and compulsion I had no control over. My parents both were born during WW2 and carry deep trauma that I inherited. I had worked as a radio journalist in Germany, covering the Jugoslavian war in the early nineties. During my first apprenticeship at the printing house, I learned how to alter photographs by hand to make entire people disappear out of it without a trace, something that can be done with photoshop in minutes these days. I spent 11 years in higher education as a student, and 10 years as a professor. I had worked on farms, grew medicinal and food gardens for much of my life, have worked with animals and humans all my life, worked as an outdoor artist for years where I learned a lot about weather patterns and predicting weather based on the changes around me rather than relying on the often inaccurate weather forecasts on media. All these are skills that are written into my bone because I didn’t only read about them or learn about them, I lived and experienced them, which allowed me to evaluate what I learned much more critically.

 

       Much of what I learned as facts in my 11 years of studying turned out to hold some truth, yet nothing translated into real life as THE truth. While I am old-school in many things, especially in my approach to technology, my evolving relationship with my son and his circle of friends has helped me to stay rooted in their world as well as mine, and my ability to change and grow my perception with ease has created a state of inner peace with my past, my present, and whatever the future might bring. Instead of writing this blog from the perspective of a teacher that passes knowledge down to their student, I am writing the blog as an example of how one immigrant, neurodivergent, genderqueer and single parent human being managed to overcome the many hurdles and challenges that life brings with it in an epic, comical and often tragic adventure of countless questionable and unsafe decisions survived and processed into wisdom for myself. I am sure many will see themselves in my stories of successes and failures, just like I continue to see parts of myself reflected in everyone around me. In the end, we are all just mirrors to each other, and in order to become a fully realized human being, we need to make peace with both the light and the dark aspects reflected back at us.

 

       My hope is to create a safe space where we can return to looking at real life instead of the binary judgmental and absolutist narrative of the 2D world of the internet and screens. I hope that my perspective creates a type of blueprint that allows people to step out of the world of division, out of the world of man vs woman, blue vs red, religious vs scientific, good vs bad, right vs wrong, and enter the world we all share: that of human beings struggling to understand their place in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile and unstable. Hopefully, together we can come up with a vision that does not rely on endless wars to keep peace that never manifests, but a vision that embraces nature as our mother instead of treating it like it has become the enemy, and where humans support each other through the dark valleys we all have to walk through in life.