It takes more than courage to snap out of functional freeze

You’re just overwhelmed and under resourced.

Things are bad right now, and you’re not sure how to make them better. Or even if it’s possible to make things better.

On top of that, you’re fighting with your kids about homework. The dog has been barfing weird strings on the rug for a week now, and you’re starting to get nervous about it. Your whole family keeps passing around an endless series of exhausting and irritating viruses.

You know you should take a walk and get some sunshine, but it’s just so cold and wet and gray outside, and your bed is so warm, and ICE is down the street, and AI data centers are probably poisoning the air, and your outside pajamas are in the wash right now, so no, not right now!

A walk is too much to ask on top of losing every sense of safety and security you had been clinging to, only to watch it be stripped away.

Even when you’re doing stuff, it still feels worthless.

Do your senators even care about your calls?

Didn’t that donation just get eaten up by platform processing fees?

Are your kids going to eat tonight’s dinner after hours of cooking, or will they just graze the dusty chocolate coins and peppermint sticks in the holiday detritus still lying on the sofa?

So it’s no wonder, after years of resisting, fighting, educating, and taking courageous action, you’re starting to wonder if you should just give up and hand the job off to AI.

If you’re feeling frozen, guilty, and worthless about managing the bare minimum, it’s not because you suck as a parent or advocate.

I’m not here to shame anyone for feeling burnt out and apathetic. Especially if you’ve been through this routine before, you know that this is not the first time things have been this bad, and it won’t be the last.

And yet, still we persist. Our ancestors fought so we could be here, and because kids deserve a better future, too. It’s just who we are. It’s who we want to be. We’re the folks who keep showing up. (Groggy and kinda stinky from hiding in unwashed sheets for months - but still.)

The good news is that snapping out of functional freeze is possible. And every time you find your way out, it gets easier

Everything we do in Raising Luminaries is designed for neurodivergent caregivers with a moral compass. So when I talk about functional freeze, I’m not talking about clinical depression, being locked in a basement, or anything completely outside your control. This is bean soup - if you need serious help/can’t eat beans, this recipe isn’t for you.

But if you’re feeling numb or stuck or spiraling into inertia, and would like to use your executive functioning challenges to change the course of society - here’s three helpful things you should know:

1. Winter is the perfect season for recognizing what’s broken and disrupting bullshit business as usual.

2. If you’re feeling a mix of apathy, despair, and procrastination, I have a trick to snap out of it designed explicitly for neurodivergent caregivers.

3. You should not (you must not!) try to know everything, do everything, or save everybody - especially when you yourself are barely hanging on.

Instead of making this a ridiculously long email expounding on all three, how they work, and how to transform this knowledge into action without putting even more on your plate, I’m going to take my advice and stop diluting my point.

I’ll be back to unpack these, one by one, over the next bunch of weeks. I’ll explain how they work, and how to use them to stop scrolling, get out of bed, and change the world.

I’ll be back in a couple weeks with more. Despite my own sense of false urgency - I need to explain all the things, right this very minute - despite knowing I’ve created an entire decade of articles, workshops, toolkits, and podcasts about them.

Because it’s one thing to know there’s a problem and how to fix it, and it’s another thing to actually have what we need to implement the solution. But we’ll get to that.

Meanwhile, keep caring for your family and resisting when you can - it’s mattering more than you think.

with you,

Ashia

Confronting a friend and telling them that what they are doing isn’t okay is pretty much the scariest thing that a kid can do. And we know that supremacy and injustice thrives in silence.

Taking small, tiny steps toward scary things is the only we can grow stronger – and the world can get safer and more just for all.

Courage Toolkit