The Nest

01/06/2026

📣 The Nest Schedule Just Got an Upgrade!

Our updated session schedule is now live — and so is our expanded Session Information Tool.

Whether you're looking for sessions for a young person, teenager, adult, Autie, gamer, artist, animal lover, creative thinker, or community seeker, it's now easier than ever to explore what we offer and find sessions that may be a good fit.

✨ What's new?

• Updated weekly session timetable
• Age-range filters to quickly explore options
• Expanded Session Information Tool
• More detailed information about participant experience
• Functional-capacity focus areas
• Support pathway information
• Clearer session descriptions across our programs

The Session Information Tool is designed to help families, participants, support coordinators and allied health professionals better understand what each session offers before reaching out.

As always, every participant is unique. Final service alignment and support pathways are reviewed by the Neurodivergent Empowered team during follow-up.

🌈 Somewhere you're free to be you: https://free2bme.au/our-supports

Explore the new schedule and Session Information Tool today.

29/05/2026

Today is LGBTQ Domestic Violence Awareness Day.

One of the quietest reasons people don't reach out is this: telling someone about the harm often means telling them about the relationship first. For many LGBTQIA+ people, that's two conversations stacked on top of each other. The coming out. And the harm.

Sometimes the coming out hadn't happened yet. Sometimes it had only happened with certain people. Sometimes the person they would have told was the same person they weren't sure about being out to.

So they waited. Not because it wasn't serious. Because telling carried its own danger.

If you have ever held a hurt because the cost of speaking it felt higher than the cost of carrying it, you are not alone. And it was not your weakness. It was the weight of having to explain yourself twice before you could even be heard.

You belong here. You are believed here. And when you are ready, the words are allowed to arrive.

If you need someone to talk to:
1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732
QLife (LGBTI peer support): 1800 184 527
13YARN (First Nations support): 13 92 76
In an emergency, 000.

29/05/2026

IT'S LAUNCH DAY, and I get to share something close to my heart.

I'm a co-author in Resilience & Reinvention, a book full of true stories from women all over the world who have walked through things that felt impossible, and found their way through anyway.

These stories are not about pushing harder or performing strength. They are about coming home to yourself. About the quiet courage it takes to stop shrinking, and to let your life make room for the real you. Soft places make brave people, and this book is full of brave people.

I'm so proud to share these pages with such a beautiful group of women.

Today we're going for #1 Bestseller, and if you'd like to be part of that, I would love your help.
Grab your ebook copy here:
Amazon AU: https://bit.ly/4uunkI9
Amazon US: https://bit.ly/4nU4uHZ
Amazon UK: https://bit.ly/49nfxU6

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. You belong here.

Today's Resilience & Reinvention featured author is Tanya Hicks! ✨

Tanya Hicks is a globally recognised advocate, author, and visionary founder, redefining leadership through her groundbreaking concept of authenticity architecture. With transformational programs and empowering stories, learn more about how Tanya ignites a movement of courage, connection, and purpose, inspiring individuals and communities to embrace their unique strengths and create a ripple effect of joy and meaningful change worldwide.

Order your copy today: wcwpress.com/resilience-reinvention

26/05/2026

A quiet conversation between Sparkly and a friend...

We spend so much time noticing what makes us different. But underneath all of it, we're built the same way. Bodies that grew through the same stages, the same six layers, the same first six weeks where every embryo is identical.

That's where this conversation starts. Not with difference. With everything we share.

The body develops s*x in layers. Chromosomes, go**ds, hormones, hormone receptors, ge****ls, and the brain. For the first six weeks, every embryo's go**ds are the same. After that, the layers begin to develop at different times, through different signals. In most people, they all line up the same way. In some people, they don't. That isn't strange. It's what happens in a system with six moving parts.

When a trans person says their gender doesn't match the s*x they were assigned at birth, they're describing what happens when the visible layer and the brain layer developed in different directions. The biology already tells us this is possible. The Endocrine Society, the world's largest body of hormone scientists, confirms there is a durable biological element underlying gender identity.

So we already share more than we knew.

The same beginning. The same layers. The same need to be seen kindly. The same wish to belong without having to explain ourselves.

You don't need to understand everything about someone to sit beside them. But understanding softens the edges. It moves us from "them" back to "us."

That's the whole point of this series. Not to draw new lines. To find where the old ones were never really there.

Sources: UNSW Embryology, Endotext (NCBI Bookshelf), Endocrine Society Position Statement on Transgender Health.

Part of the Connection Series. 🤍

25/05/2026

We need to stop calling this progress.

When a child learns to dissociate from their body to sit still, they are not regulated. They are gone. They have just got quieter about the place they had to leave to give the adults what they wanted.

Let's name it plainly.

Dissociation is the nervous system disconnecting from the body because staying present is not safe or not allowed. A child who has learned to do this on command has not learned a skill. They have learned a survival response.

Sitting still is not the same as feeling safe.
Compliance is not the same as regulation.
A quiet body is not the same as a settled nervous system.

When a child's only options are "move and get in trouble" or "dissociate and get praised," they will pick dissociation. Every time. Because survival is faster than language, and a child will always choose the option that keeps the adults around them okay.

Here is what does not get said.

Dissociation is not something you switch on and off. The more a child practises it, the more automatic it becomes. It generalises. It becomes the default. And over time, that same child becomes the teenager who cannot feel hunger, the adult who cannot feel exhaustion, the person who only notices something is wrong when their body finally collapses loud enough to be heard.

And then there is this.
Chronic dissociation in childhood is one of the strongest predictors of substance use later in life.

This is not opinion. It is in the research. Over 70 percent of people with substance use disorders report childhood trauma, and dissociation is one of the main pathways from that trauma to addiction. Researchers describe two routes: self-medication, and what is called chemical dissociation, where substances are used to recreate the disconnection the nervous system already learned.

In plain language: a child who has learned to leave their body to cope will, as a teenager or adult, often reach for something that helps them leave faster. Alcohol. W**d. Painkillers. Stimulants. Food. Screens. Anything that takes them back to the only state that ever felt like relief.

The addiction does not start with the substance.
It starts with the moment a child first learned that leaving was safer than staying.

Add to that list: burnout, shutdown, chronic illness, eating difficulties, self-harm, and a deep loss of self that can take decades to recover from. If it is recovered at all.

So when a child tells you they have figured out how to stay still by leaving their body, please do not clap.

Ask them where they go.
Ask them what it costs them.
Ask them if their body got a say.
And then change what you are asking of them. Not the child.

Because real regulation is not stillness on the outside.
It is safety on the inside. 🤍

24/05/2026

Can we please stop telling everyone to unmask.

I know it comes from a good place. I know the intention is freedom, authenticity, and liberation from a lifetime of performing.

For some people, in some spaces, with some people, unmasking is the work. It's the exhale. It's the homecoming.

But "unmask everywhere" is not universal advice.
For many people, it's a privilege.

Because for some, the mask is not self-betrayal. The mask is armour:
- For the Black autistic woman whose stim gets read as aggression.
- For the trans kid whose home is not safe.
- For the q***r person in a workplace that smiles while it discriminates.
- For the disabled person whose visible needs trigger other - people's discomfort or hostility.
- For the abuse survivor whose family weaponises every honest emotion.
- For the person whose neurodivergence has been used against them in custody, employment, or medical care.
For anyone who has learned, through real lived experience, that being fully seen has historically meant being hurt.

For these people, masking is not internalised shame. Masking is threat assessment. It is the nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do.

So when we hand out "just be yourself everywhere" like it's medicine, we miss something important.

Authenticity is not the same thing as exposure.

You can be deeply, sovereignly yourself, and still choose who gets access to which parts of you.

That is not masking. That is discernment.

Discernment says: I will be kind, because kindness is mine to give. But my whole self is not a public resource.
Not everyone has earned the right to see me unguarded.
Not every room is safe enough to put my softness down in.
Not every person who asks me to "be real" wants the real me. They want a version of me that's easier for them to handle.

The goal was never to be performatively unmasked in every space.
The goal was to have spaces where unmasking is safe.
That is what The Nest is.
That is what real community is.
That is what safe relationships are.

Not the absence of a mask. The presence of somewhere you no longer need one.

If you are still masking in unsafe places, you are not failing the liberation movement. You are surviving it intelligently.
Until the world is safer, or your circle is.

Be kind.

But your full self? That is sacred. 🤍

23/05/2026

Well friends… I did it!!

I have submitted my last 5 assignments for this term and got through my 2 weeks of 9am to 5pm pracs for my masters… which means I have completed 5 FREAKING SUBJECTS THIS TERM!!!

And tonight I’m launching our new client portal that I somehow built (no doubt not perfect of course).

Getting it done my friends!

Big shoutout to my friend for my head massage, wash and blow dry birthday gift you booked in for me today. I honestly felt myself start to emerge back into the world again after it xx

22/05/2026

Unpopular, yet accurate, understanding of my neurology...

You weren't lazy. You weren't weak. You weren't dramatic.

You were tired in a way no one could see - because the work you were doing wasn't visible.

While everyone else was just getting through the day, you were also tracking the fluorescent hum, filtering the conversation three desks back, reading every micro-expression to predict what was coming, holding your body still in clothes that felt like sandpaper, decoding social rules nobody explained, and suppressing the you of you because being yourself had already cost you somewhere before.

All of that. At the same time. Every day.

A twice-exceptional, neurocomplex brain doesn't just take in more information. It takes it in more intensely, through more channels, with fewer filters - often while running a second program in the background trying to make sure no one notices.

So by the time everyone else was ready for the next thing, your nervous system had already done a full day's work.

You didn't need more breaks because you couldn't keep up.

You needed more breaks because you were keeping up with far more than anyone realised.

You weren't broken. You were brilliant and depleted at the same time. Your need for rest was never a flaw - it was the truth of a nervous system doing extraordinary work in environments that never accounted for it.

You are allowed to rest now.
Without performing first.
Without explaining.

I see you 🤍

21/05/2026

So many of us were taught to be ashamed of meltdowns.

To apologise for them. To hide them. To get better at hiding them next time.

But a meltdown isn't a character flaw.
It isn't proof you're too sensitive, too much, too broken.

A meltdown is a message.

It's your nervous system telling you:
the lights are too bright
the noise is too much
the day was too long
the mask got too heavy
I have been asking too much of you for too long

Meltdowns are often the moment something bigger than you finally tips over.

The room. The expectations. The pace. The pretending.

You don't need to be fixed.
You need somewhere soft to land.
You need permission to be you - without it costing you your belonging.

The shame was never yours to carry.

🌿 Save this for the next hard day.
🌿 Send it to someone who needs to hear it.

21/05/2026

Is anyone else out there noticing this?
Any other sparkly aliens, advocates, or disability orgs watching the NDIS reforms?

Here's what I'm seeing from my own experience:

1. The NDIA refuses to add an impairment to your record

2. Section 34(1)(aa) of the NDIS Act says they can only fund supports that relate to impairments that ARE on your record. So the supports you need for that impairment can't be funded

3. And because the Notice of Impairments still hasn't been issued to all existing participants, there's no proper way to ask for the impairment to be added back in

It's a circle. They refuse the impairment. The supports get refused because the impairment isn't recognised. And you can't formally challenge what's on your record because the document you'd challenge doesn't exist yet.

Am I the only one seeing this?