I’ve really been struggling to create content lately. There are an infinite number of topics I could write about, an infinite number of directions I could take each topic, an infinite number of thoughts paralyzing my mind as I pace back and forth in my head.

This is what I call existential claustrophobia – the acute awareness of being a boundless creative that’s confined by the limitations of physical reality.

It’s feeling suffocated by your own creative potential – a potential so vast that this physical vessel (supposedly “my body”) feels as though it’s bursting at the seams.

I’m a writer – writing is one of my greatest gifts. But as I’ve gotten better at writing, this gift has started to feel more like a curse. 

I become paralyzed by perfectionism, analyzing every word so deeply that I end up being too exhausted to write anything at all. As Franz Kafka put it: “Doubt dances around every word, even before it is written.”

My eating disorder was a way to retreat from this vastness – like plasmolysis in a plant cell, where the cell shrinks away from its cell wall when placed in a solution that’s too concentrated, pulling all the water out. Except in my case, I was shrinking away from the overwhelming concentration of my own infinite potential.

So when Eva, a member in the Autistically ED-Free Community, mentioned how her giftedness feels like pressure rather than a gift, I knew what we were going to talk about in our weekly group call!

That conversation became one of the deepest I’ve ever had in my life. Being in dialogue with so many kindred spirits at the same time, it was as if we were communicating in a divine dimension. The words were there, but the energy of the conversation was beyond what any words could encompass.

And guess what? You get to listen to the entire conversation because I released it as a podcast episode this week!

In this conversation, we dive deep into how neurodivergent minds experience creativity in other-worldly ways – how we see colors that don’t exist in real life, how we feel music as something we need to become rather than just hear, and how our emotions aren’t single feelings but explosions of every sensation at once.

We explore why traditional labels like alexithymia fail to capture the vastness of what we actually experience, and how the very struggle to express our infinite inner worlds through limited labels creates that existential claustrophobia.

Most importantly though, and what I hope you’ll take away from this post, is the power of authentic connection – which is perhaps the most meaningful form of creative expression there is.

Experiencing Giftedness as Pressure

Livia: There was a really interesting conversation going on in the community between me and Eva about "needing to earn your existence," which I believe connects deeply to experiencing one's giftedness as pressure rather than a gift.

I personally relate to this on many levels because I know I am very gifted, and when I do the things that I know I am most gifted at, I realize that's when I have the most fight-or-flight response within myself, because it feels almost like a demand.

When you mix that fight-or-flight response with demand avoidance, it's like "I don't want to feel this pressure, so I'm not going to tap into that gift." In the grand scheme of things, that's kind of how the eating disorder comes in as this protective mechanism – you don't have to face your giftedness, you don't have to confront the existential angst of not using your gifts correctly, of being "wrong" in the world.

The eating disorder shields you from all responsibility, from the fear of being healthy, from fear that you can't handle being healthy in this world – which all ties back to the giftedness.

Back in 2014, when I was really struggling with my eating disorder, I went to this therapist who was very immersed in the universe and the cosmos. He was one of the first people that said to my mom, "Livia is afraid of her own power, her own potential, her own vastness." At the time I was like, "I don't know what you are talking about. I have no power. I have no potential." But now, more than a decade later, I know exactly what he meant – that's unconsciously what the eating disorder numbed me from.

It made everything so quiet that I didn't have to face my own vastness. And that's where the masking comes in too. We don't only mask to shield our true self from society (because we know we can't conform and we're afraid of what comes with that), but the masking is also a way to hide from our own vastness. It's a way to hide from our own true identity, because that identity is so expansive.

What is Existential Claustrophobia?

Livia: I feel very trapped in this human body costume. I feel claustrophobic in my own body. Nico suggested maybe this is dysphoria, but what I experience doesn't resonate with dysphoria. I actually came up with the term for it yesterday: existential claustrophobia.

I define it as: The acute awareness of being a boundless being confined within finite physical form. It's a profound sense of constraint experienced when your internal expansiveness pushes against the walls of the material limitations of existence. It's the distress that emerges from recognizing that one's potential for creation, thought and experience exceeds what can be actualized or materialized or physically expressed within a single lifespan or physical vessel.

I feel like my insights, my soul, my being has so many ideas, so many thoughts, so many ways of interpreting things. Even in my writing, every phrase I write, every sentence, every word I choose, it feels like the biggest existential decision. Maybe there's a better way we could write that. Maybe you should use a different metaphor. The infinite possibilities that parallel creativity are so overwhelming to this physical body, to the point where I'm constantly exhausted by how infinite my being is.

The Challenge of Being Healthy in a Body

Livia: This ties back to the ultimate question: How do you handle being in a body? How do you accept weight gain? How do you accept being healthy in a body?

Elma: If I'm starving, I don't have to handle facing my gifts. I don't have to take the responsibility to use my gifts, and I can reduce the overwhelm by engaging with the eating disorder behaviors. I'm healthy now, and it's so hard.

Livia: I'm right there with you. That's why I'm choosing more and more to unmask and share what I struggle with because I'm no sage on the stage. I'm not here to be like "when you recover from your eating disorder, life is magically paradise and wonderful."

It's worth clarifying: life is infinitely better when you don't have an eating disorder! That's why I don't have an eating disorder anymore, because I wouldn't be able to do anything meaningful if I was still engaging with restriction and limitation and fear.

But especially for the neurodivergent being that is constantly reading between the lines, is constantly asking "Why, why? Okay, but why?" to everything – there's no arguing that that is absolutely exhausting and it's really hard. I face those thoughts every single day.

I often procrastinate going to bed because it is too painful to just lay there with my thoughts. But deep down, I trust that I'm going to channel all of this confusion, pain, overwhelm into something meaningful. That's similar to how the eating disorder has now channeled into being able to connect with you all, into me being able to write books, into having a podcast.

Autistic People View the World Through a Magnifying Glass

Anna: I think for neurodiverse people, we're almost trying to learn the lesson of how to pull back from having to understand everything. Our minds are so active and we have such strong emotions for things. It's funny because we're on this earth at the same time as neurotypicals, but we're struggling with the very opposite of each other's lessons.

Our emotions are so strong because we're really living. When we feel happy, we feel like on a high that nobody could ever explain. When we feel low, we feel like the worst feeling ever. Whereas neurotypical people go through life on autopilot, and that's really safe sometimes. But in other ways, what's the point in living if you don't go through really strong experiences?

Livia: What you said about learning how to pull back from all our thoughts – I think that is so well said. Autistic people, neurodivergent people, they walk through life with a magnifying glass on everything.

It's a gift because we are able to read between the lines, we're able to express and see and comprehend details that other people's brains just automatically filter out. That's called sensory gating – neurotypical people's brains are much better at automatically filtering out any information that they deem as irrelevant. Someone can go into a cafe and not notice eight different stimuli at the same time. Whereas the autistic mind is like, everything is coming in at once, and that is so overwhelming.

The Limits of Language and Labels for Neurodivergent Creatives

Livia: Something that just came up for me is about alexithymia. While typically considered an inability to recognize emotions, I think that for neurodivergent people, alexithymia may not actually be an inability or difficulty with emotions at all.

I think that emotions themselves are labels and thus another way to push the complex, infinite, vast, abundant experience into a box that the autistic being can never fit into.

I think that when we say alexithymia is a common experience in autistic people, what we're actually saying is that the emotional, spiritual, intellectual, all-encompassing experience is just too vast and nuanced to be dwindled down to "I feel joy right now" or "I feel happiness right now."

When I feel joy or happiness, it is not even on an emotional spectrum anymore! It is joy mixed with happiness, mixed with excitement, mixed with euphoria, mixed with "I have found my purpose in this life!" And then the next day when I can't write anymore and I dissociate because my brain is tired, it's like "there's no purpose in living." I feel sad, I feel depressed, I feel every negative emotion you can think of – all at the same time.

So it's not that I have a difficulty pinpointing an emotion – it's that I simply can't pinpoint any single emotion, because there isn't one. It's all of them at the same time.

Anna: Words are very restricted because they are a few letters that somebody else invented to make shapes that are stuck together to make sounds. You have these sounds that you're trying to string together to express an emotion that is so beyond these little sounds that we're making with our mouths.

Even with painting, I can have the choice of primary colors – red, yellow, blue, black and white. From them colors, in my head, I could paint anything. But in reality, my mind has colors in my head that I've never seen in real life. So I could never paint what I want to paint because I have never visually seen those colors in real life. It's very hard to express yourself in any way when we don't really have the tools to do that.

The Art of Materializing Internal Experiences

Livia: What you just said about seeing colors in your head that don't exist – well, they do exist because they exist in your mind – that is exactly what I have with my writing! All the books that I want to write are already written in my mind, they already exist in my soul.

What art essentially is: it's materializing the explosions of energy inside you. For me as a writer, all the books that I have already written in my head create the foundation of that tension – that existential claustrophobia. I know that it already exists, but it doesn't exist "out here." And that contrast is so great that it becomes painful to have all of that inside of you and for the physical body to not be able to materialize that at the same pace at which your mind is going.

A metaphor I came up with is the mind feeling like a treadmill that's going at infinity speed, and the body can't keep up with the mind. That's why I talk so fast – I realize that my voice, this physical vessel that allows me to communicate, is trying and failing to match the speed at which my brain is thinking.

What often happens is I'll talk and talk and talk and then say "wait, what? I don't even know what I was talking about" because my brain is already at point Z while my body's like "hold up, we're not there yet!"

Anna: Sometimes we're trying to prove ourselves to others because when you're stuck in your own head with all these colors or words, it's very lonely. Maybe our existence here is to try to get that information out to connect with another soul that can relate, and that's the frustrating part. Maybe what it all boils down to is that we need to accept that we can see it in ourselves and we don't have to prove it to anybody else.

The Power of Authentic Connection

Livia: You people just get me! I think that is what recovering from the eating adaptation and daring to be the artist that you are is trusting that when you create that art, you are going to reach people that say exactly what Nico just said – "Holy crap, I just figured it out. Now I get it!" Care to elaborate, Nico?

Nico: I was getting what you meant about existential claustrophobia over the last few weeks, but I was like "I don't think I feel like that." But then when Anna started talking about art, it just clicked. What about those times when you are listening to music and it feels like you literally need to become the sound waves? You can see what the music sounds like.

I used to dance when I was younger and I'm just like "I need to dance to this." It's like I can see what the sound looks like – not explode out of me, but seep out of me. I'm too small. I feel like something's trying to seep out of me.

Livia: What you just said about not explode, but seep – for me, especially the past few weeks, I feel like I'm bursting at the seams because there's so much creativity. I think because it seeps through the seams, that's what allows it to reach the other person because some of it is going out of you into the other person. That is what I mean when I say energetic channeling – you're letting some of that experience out of you in a way that's actually contributing to another being.

You are not trying to make it go out of you in a way that's coherent and logical, because anything coherent and logical has been predetermined. When you forge your own path, you're working without a map because you are creating something, embarking on a journey that's never been embarked on before.

Creating Your Own Path vs. Following Maps

Livia: What keeps people stuck – first in the eating disorder, and then in what I call the next illusion after an eating disorder, "the recovery identity" – is you are still looking for a how-to, you're still looking for a map. I became so obsessed with watching YouTube videos about how other people were eating and doing recovery. I became obsessed with reading blogs because I needed to make sure that I wasn't doing recovery "wrong."

The only true way to find freedom is when you stop trying to look for the map and you say "I trust my own path and I trust my own intuition and I'm going to walk in a direction that's never been walked before." It's walking into another dimension of yourself that you've never allowed yourself to tap into.

When we create art and have that feeling of connection, I think what you're actually doing is stepping into that other dimension and saying "I trust my being to create and operate from a place that is beyond anything that a logical mind can encompass."

Elma: It feels like I'm going to burst and explode, and I become almost paralyzed because I don't know what to do.

Livia: You literally just described exactly what I feel. I wake up in the morning with 2,500 ideas and then it's like "oh, I could do that one, or I could do that one." It feels like an existential choice because I know that if I make that decision, I'm cutting myself off from all the other decisions. I don't know if that's a worthwhile trade-off. So I need to calculate a way where I can do a little bit of all of them, but that's not possible because then I can't go deep into any of them.

Redefining Creativity and Meaningful Existence

Livia: You have a way of expressing and drawing parallels in a way that no one else could express in the exact way that you did, which is the definition of art. That's creativity. Every piece of art I create is just that – it's a piece of art, it's a snapshot of this being.

No one ever is going to be able to see the full picture of the inner landscape that is ours. That's our little secret – an overwhelming secret. But every piece of art you create, every word you say, it's a snapshot. That's exactly what makes art meaningful. It's what and how an individual chooses to share at any given moment.

The best art I've made has been created when I've let go of expectations and demands and just allowed it to spill out of my soul. When we speak from the heart, when we speak from the soul rather than trying to have this perfect storyline, that's when the most profound connection is made because that's how other people learn to understand their own stories as well.

Eva: Every day I am unsatisfied at the evening and I don't even know why. I always feel like I haven't done anything meaningful today, and I don't know what it would mean for me to do something meaningful.

Livia: That is the definition of my existence! It doesn't matter if I had this community call, if I wrote a thousand words, if I did a podcast. At the end of the day, I always end up writing in my journal "why do I never feel good enough?" At this point it's become a joke with myself – I intentionally start it with "I don't ever feel good enough" and use that as my prompt to reflect on all the things that make me not only good enough, but beyond anything that can be measured as "good enough."

Something that's been helpful for me is at the beginning of each day, I have one thing that I decide is going to make today meaningful. When you focus on one thing that would make each day meaningful, you take this huge pressure off yourself because then it doesn't matter what else you do.

Finding Meaning in the Infinite

Livia: We can choose to write the story that actually helps us feel good about ourselves. When you tell yourself the story that you only need one thing each day to feel meaningful – even if that's "I was able to get out of bed today" – then all the other stuff doesn't matter anymore because you decided that you are not going to let other circumstances decide for you that you are a meaningful human worthy of existence.

Eva: But a day has 24 hours, so many minutes and seconds that can be filled with so much. When I just choose one thing, why does this one thing give such meaning to my day?

Livia: That comes back to the existential piece. You could pick any one thing or any million things. For me, I could spend my day answering 50 emails and answering 20 Instagram comments – then I would've achieved 70 things! Or I could have this one membership call, which is infinitely more meaningful than doing those other 70 things.

How are you defining "one thing"? Because arguably, numbers are made up stories. There's incredible freedom and power that comes with acknowledging that literally everything we have defined in our life is made up. It's a construct of human consciousness.

At this point, 70 versus one becomes arbitrary because there's no way to attach tangible meaning to this connection to this call we are having right now. To bring this full circle: it's about letting go of the "how" and making space to trust what feels aligned, trusting that the how-to will fall into place.

When I start writing a new book, if I said "I need to know how to organize it first," I won't end up writing anything because I would be so caught up in trying to find a map that doesn't exist. Finding the map is actually the thing that causes us to get lost, because the thing that we're trying to find a map for literally has no map.

The Magic of Unfiltered Expression

Livia: When I write the most meaningful things, I say "that definitely didn't come out of my head. I don't know where that came from, but it definitely did not come out of my head." I say that very intentionally because our minds are just filters. Everything we do is filtered through our brain. But when we speak from the soul and we don't try and filter it out, that's when the meaningful connection occurs, because there's no walls blocking that connection.

When we say "Wait, wait, wait. Before this can flow out of me, I need to decide whether it's worth flowing out of me or not" it doesn't flow out of you authentically anymore because you've placed a filter right there.

The magic happens when we let things flow out of us without blocking it. This is precisely what makes these calls so meaningful – because we connect with kindred spirits fully unmasked. We don't have to censor or block our soul's communication because of the inherent understanding and compassion we have for each other.

Elma: This makes life worth living. This community and connection is so unexplainably valuable for me. This is the one thing I've been needing for so long.

Livia: I feel like it's so hard to say goodbye right now. My gratitude and sense of belonging is unparalleled right now. This is what gives my life meaning.

Do you want true, meaningful, neurodivergent connection? Come join us in the Autistically ED-Free Membership to take part in soul-deep conversations like this one!