Creating again, on generator power.

Welcome to The Neurocomplex Creative, a podcast exploring creativity, burnout, recovery, and the realities of making art when your brain and body don't always cooperate. Part of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Hosted by Vicki Peterson—screenwriter, educator, late-diagnosed autistic person, and proud everything bagel—the series is a living record of rebuilding a creative life after burnout and finding sustainable ways to create. Through honest conversations with writers, artists, educators, and other creatives, The Neurocomplex Creative explores accommodation, inspiration, creative practice, and what it means to keep making things when the traditional advice no longer works.

✍️Subscribe now to hear future episodes.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Learn more about the network at AutisticCulturePodcastNetwork.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this solo intro episode, host Vicki Peterson introduces herself, the show, and the question she's sitting with this season: how do I create again — in a way that actually honors who I am — after spending decades doing it in a way that was slowly taking me apart?

Vicki is a screenwriter, educator, late-diagnosed autistic person, and recovering perfectionist living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and its many comorbidities. This episode is her origin story — the Hollywood years, the diagnoses, the collapse, the grief, and the decision to rebuild. Out loud. Imperfectly. On generator power.

It's also a note on process: why this show uses scripted monologues alongside interviews, why AI tools are part of the workflow, and why the best this host can do today is enough.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Lindsey Mackereth — therapist, researcher, and founder of the neurocomplexity framework. The term "neuro complex" comes from her work.

Lindsey's Substack: https://lindseymackereth.substack.com/

The Ehlers-Danlos Society — for more information on EDS and its comorbidities:

EDS Society: https://www.ehlers-danlos.com/

Hat on a Hat on a Hat (Substack): https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

SUPPORT THE SHOW

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it.

Hat on a Hat on a Hat (Substack): https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

Donations are gratefully accepted and help keep this show going at whatever pace is sustainable.

Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/vickipeterson

✍️ Subscribe now to hear future episodes.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Learn more about the network at AutisticCulturePodcastNetwork.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Vicki sits down with her aunt Sabrina — PhD in Theatre, lifelong arts educator, and the person who first showed her that big feelings weren't a problem to be managed but a gift to be expressed.

Sabrina spent her career creating safe containers for young people's big feelings through theater — including a production called SECRETS that addressed the AIDS crisis for teenagers in the 1980s when almost nobody else was willing to. This conversation is about what that work looked like, why it mattered, and what the arts do for people who feel everything.

It's also about what it means to have one person in your life who has known you for 45 years and never once told you that you were too much.

ABOUT SABRINA

Sabrina holds a PhD in Theatre from UC Berkeley and spent her career as an arts educator and theater director in the San Francisco Bay Area. She created educational theater productions for Kaiser Permanente including SECRETS and Nightmare on Puberty Street — work that used the stage to address the things nobody else was saying to young people. She is Vicki's chosen family.

SUPPORT THE SHOW

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it.

Hat on a Hat on a Hat (Substack): https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

Donations are gratefully accepted and help keep this show going at whatever pace is sustainable.

Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/vickipeterson

✍️ Subscribe now to hear future episodes.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Learn more about the network at AutisticCulturePodcastNetwork.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Vicki sits down with her longtime friend and collaborator TJ Berden — filmmaker, producer, and one of her people — for a conversation twenty years in the making.

They talk about finding your people in Hollywood, what it means to have big dreams and a big heart in a town that wants to know if it's sellable, and what it looks like to stay true to your values across two decades of an industry that keeps changing the rules. They also talk about neurodivergent creatives — what TJ calls pearl divers — and what it means to make work that goes to the depths of human experience.

This is a conversation about traumedy, friendship, identity, and why the stories that are hardest to tell are usually the ones most worth making.

ABOUT TJ

TJ Berden is a filmmaker and producer based in Michigan. He has produced films distributed by major studios and made documentaries on subjects ranging from prison reform to education reform to faith. His current project is Cinderella Nun — a documentary about Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the 106-year-old nun and New York Times bestselling author who became one of the most beloved figures in college basketball.

Cinderella Nun: https://www.cinderellanun.com/

SUPPORT THE SHOW

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it.

Hat on a Hat on a Hat (Substack): https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

Donations are gratefully accepted and help keep this show going at whatever pace is sustainable.

Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/vickipeterson

✍️ Subscribe now to hear future episodes.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Learn more about the network at AutisticCulturePodcastNetwork.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Vicki sits down with Marissa Mosunich — neuro complex career coach, founder of Operate Well Consulting and Brave Zebra Work Coaching, and someone who is living the same questions on a slightly different timeline.

Marissa was diagnosed AuDHD at 34, just last year. She's taken her background in organizational management and her own lived experience and built a coaching practice that helps neurocomplex people navigate career pivots, workplace challenges, and the slow, practical work of building a professional life that actually fits.

They talk about why high-achieving women are so chronically late-diagnosed, what high masking costs over a lifetime, and what it looks like to start recognizing your own needs after decades of performing competence. Marissa also reads a poem she wrote called Outcomes — about the experience of unmasking, layer by layer, the spine finally understanding what it carries.

ABOUT MARISSA

Marissa Mosunich is a neuro affirming work coach and organizational consultant based on California's Central Coast. She founded Operate Well Consulting and Brave Zebra Work Coaching to support neurocomplex professionals in building sustainable careers that honor how their brains actually work.

Operate Well Consulting: https://operate-well.ghost.io/

Brave Zebra Work Coaching: https://operate-well.ghost.io/brave-zebra-work-coaching/

Instagram: @brave.zebra

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Lindsey Mackereth — therapist, researcher, and founder of the neurocomplexity framework.

Lindsey's Substack: https://lindseymackereth.substack.com/

SUPPORT THE SHOW

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it.

Hat on a Hat on a Hat (Substack): https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

Donations are gratefully accepted and help keep this show going at whatever pace is sustainable.

Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/vickipeterson

✍️ Subscribe now to hear future episodes.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Learn more about the network at AutisticCulturePodcastNetwork.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Creating again means going off script — in a lot of other people's stories — in order to claim your own.

In the Season Two premiere of The Neurocomplex Creative, Vicki Peterson reflects on what it actually takes to create while recovering from autistic burnout and living with chronic illness. From working in "low battery mode" to creating from a recliner, she explores what happens when conventional expectations around productivity no longer fit your brain or body.

Vicki examines masking, late diagnosis and the process of stitching together the different versions of ourselves we've developed throughout our lives. At the heart of the episode is the double bind of being a neurocomplex creative: when creating is fundamental to your identity and purpose, but the work itself can exceed your available capacity.

Through burnout recovery, friendship and rediscovering the silly, theatrical parts of herself, Vicki finds something worth building towards — autistic joy, and a creative life designed around who she actually is. Plus, she introduces some of the friends and family joining her throughout Season Two.

📝 Go deeper on Substack:

https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

☕ Support the show:

https://buymeacoffee.com/vickipeterson

🎧 The Neurocomplex Creative is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Visit www.autisticculturepodcastnetwork.com

📲 Follow us on Instagram: @autisticculturepodcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two California girls, one meditation university in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, and a friendship that can only be described as cosmic.

In this episode of The Neurocomplex Creative, Vicki Peterson reconnects with her first-ever roommate, visual artist Summer Love, whom she met at Maharishi International University when they were just seventeen.

Together, they revisit coming of age in an unconventional world of golden domes, mandatory meditation, yogic flying and rules that shaped their everyday lives. They reflect on finding friendship and belonging within that environment, being seen for who they were rather than who they were connected to, and developing a bond built on understanding, shared experience and a lot of laughter.

Summer also reflects on her life as a visual artist, staying true to her own creative lens and finding beauty in the world around her. It’s a conversation about self-definition, creativity and the rare friendships that allow us to be completely ourselves — even when they begin in the strangest of places.

📝 Go deeper on Substack:

https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

☕ Support the show:

https://buymeacoffee.com/vickipeterson

Produced for the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

🎧 The Neurocomplex Creative is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Visit www.autisticculturepodcastnetwork.com

📲 Follow us on Instagram: @autisticculturepodcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He put more care into choosing a corsage than most of us put into ourselves — and that same attention shaped a whole life.

In this episode of The Neurocomplex Creative, Vicki Peterson reconnects with her high school prom date and longtime friend Jesse Keene to explore sensitivity, intuition and the survival skills we carry with us from childhood into adult life.

Together, they reflect on growing up highly sensitive in difficult environments, learning to read the people around them, and how those early adaptations can develop into people-pleasing, masking and losing ourselves in order to feel safe. Jesse traces his own journey through corporate success, meditation and spiritual communities towards a more intentional life rooted in Ayurveda, healing and wellness.

Vicki and Jesse also explore childhood trauma, neurodivergence, recovery and the exhaustion that can come from constantly adapting ourselves to different people and environments. At its heart, this is a conversation about friendship, intuition and what happens when we finally find relationships and communities where it feels safe to be seen.

📝 Go deeper on Substack:

https://ahatonahatonahat.substack.com/

☕ Support the show:

https://buymeacoffee.com/vickipeterson

Produced for the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

🎧 The Neurocomplex Creative is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

🌈 Celebrate autistic voices with early access, ad-free listening, and our full archive at AutisticCulturePlus.com

🌐 Visit www.autisticculturepodcastnetwork.com

📲 Follow us on Instagram: @autisticculturepodcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.