Conversations with Monsters On Mortality, Creativity, And
Neurodivergent Survival
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conversations with
MONSTERS
on mortality, creativity, and
neurodivergent survival
charlotte amelia poe
Illustrated by Tim Stringer
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers
An imprint of John Murray Press
Copyright © Charlotte Amelia Poe 2024
Illustrations copyright © Tim Stringer 2024
The right of Charlotte Amelia Poe to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by
them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress
ISBN 978 1 80501 099 9
eISBN 978 1 80501 100 2
Jessica Kingsley Publishers’ policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable
products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
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For Mum and Dad,
Home is wherever you are.
In memory of Amber,
I miss you every day, baby girl, even after all this time.
Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me,
and I will defend it.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
________________________________________________________
Dear reader,
If this is your copy, take a pen and write your name and the date somewhere
in these pages. I won’t tell anyone. If this isn’t your copy – maybe do it
anyway. It’s our secret.
Contents
author’s note
introduction: doomsday: one hundred seconds to midnight
1: i want to tell you that i am extraordinary and not be a liar
2: 12th january 2022, and the sudden realization of mortality
interlude: at the bottom of the stairs
3: lycanthropy
4: i want to be loved, but not at the cost of my soul
5: the impossibility of you ever knowing how this felt
interlude: a monster, in three parts
6: the only thing inside me is the void where i should be
7: you have to do impossible things, all the time, do you see?
8: wildling, made tame
interlude: this is the plan
9: wolf on fire: a novel
10: i am in love with cities, i am terrified of fields
11: the only thing i know how to do will destroy me
interlude: if i name you it still won’t be enough
12: i am so scared that you do not understand
13: i was here
epilogue: how to stand in a room, a beginning
acknowledgements
Things I like, December 2022:
lonely blue whales, acoustic guitars, girls who recite poetry, the static on
vinyl records, glow in the dark stars, taxidermy, The Amazing Devil (band),
shrikes, blood moons, roller skates, longboards, bad tattoos, trickster spirits,
necromancers, poiesis, the call of the void, film photography, Annihilation
(film), bonfires, haunted books, ghosts, hag stones, bleach blonde hair,
foxes, London, dried flowers, leather jackets, bisexuality, bards, Taylor
Swift (musician), too big hoodies, Tasmanian tigers, boys who paint their
nails, calligraphy, fake freckles, real freckles, the colour yellow,
unexplained bruises, trees with initials carved into the bark, memorial
benches, gravestones covered in ivy, plush axolotls, sunflowers, fairy rings,
singing loudly, deep voices, Sweet Gene Vincent (song), making lists, tie
dye, art prints, enamel pins, tarot cards, chipped mugs, telling stories,
thinking about the end of the world, not writing lists of things I dislike,
monsters that aren’t really monsters at all, forests dark and deep.
author’s note
In 2019, I published my first book, How To Be Autistic. It was a memoir,
detailing the entirety of my life up until the point I wrote it. It was brutally
honest, probably to a fault, and it named people and places that didn’t need
or want to be named. I was, perhaps, a little naïve when I wrote it, never
expecting thousands of people to read it. I felt like I had a duty to write it, to
tell my story and to try to do some good in the world. I still feel that duty,
though now I understand a little more the nuances of storytelling and what
it means to display your life to the public, and how scary that can be.
I have received so many messages from people who have read How To Be
Autistic who could relate to parts or all of it. People have been diagnosed
because of it. It has changed lives. This is such an honour and a privilege,
and I am so grateful to have been a part of it.
Conversations with Monsters is not picking up where How To Be Autistic
left off. Where How To Be Autistic was specific in its honesty, I now want to
write about the things I left out, intentionally or otherwise, with the added
veil of metaphor.
I want you to know that when I call myself a monster, I am only speaking to
my own experience. When I call myself a ghost or a haunting, once again it
is my own experience. All of this is only me, talking about me, for you, as
though we were sitting beside each other at the campfire. It is, best
described, one long prose poem, all of it true, but written as a kind of
fiction.
In this book I talk about trauma, depression, anxiety, autism, suicidality, the
end of the world, and the deaths of family members. All of these subjects
are handled with the care I can ascribe to them, but ultimately, I wanted to
tell you the truth of them, and that might be hard to read at times. I urge you
to take a moment if you need it, or to put the book down if it becomes too
much. One of my biggest fears is to harm someone with my words, so I
want to warn you in advance. Here be monsters.
I am speaking only for myself, and not my family, or friends, or any
community, or any organization. These are my thoughts and my thoughts
alone. I do not make myself an ambassador for anything other than the
work you’re about to read.
Writing is the greatest joy in my life, and I am so grateful that I get to do it
time and time again. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope you
enjoy this adventure. Come, I hear there are thousands of words just waiting
for you!
All facts were true at the time of writing. The Doomsday Clock has long
since skipped forward since I wrote this, but I want us to remain in the
bubble I was in as I put this down into words, even if that means messing
with time itself. So, some things aren’t true any more. Isn’t that strange?
INTRODUCTION
doomsday: one hundred seconds to
midnight
I’m a little bit afraid of the world ending. I think there are big ways and
small ways for it to do so. I keep coming back to it, you see?
When I was in high school, an English teacher showed us the first half of
When the Wind Blows. The Doomsday Clock sat at five minutes to
midnight, he said, and I stayed awake, muddled and confused, watching the
numbers tick over in bed waiting for the world to explode. It didn’t. And we
were never shown the second half of When the Wind Blows. There had been
complaints from parents. Too many sleepless nights, too much nuclear
annihilation.
The Doomsday Clock currently sits with heavy hands at one hundred
seconds to midnight. I don’t know what to do with that information. I’m not
sure I’m supposed to do anything, except worry. There’s nothing I can do. I
can think about shadows blasted into walls and pavements, I can think
about a sudden blinding flash followed by a desperate certainty that this is
really and truly it – or.
Or is a very big word for two letters.
I am writing this because you are in the future. It is impossible that you are
not. There is no way I can exist with you and write these words at the same
time. You exist, now. I exist, now. But we both have different ideas of what
now is, do you see?
Perhaps you don’t. That’s okay. I’ve always been different, wrong, my brain
is wired in a way that lends itself to concepts and ideas that follow strange
alleyways to things that cause a vast array of spirals. Neurodivergence, in
my case a rather stunning display of autism, is a gift that will leave you lost
in a forest with some very strange footprints to follow.
And yeah, you’ll want to go home a lot of the time. God, if that isn’t my
life’s great motto – I want to go home. But the older I get, the more I realize
there is no such place as home, not really. I think maybe I had it as a child,
but now there is nowhere that is wholly safe and wholly mine and wholly
unhaunted.
I’m going to tell you some ghost stories. Yes, there’s a campfire in this
forest, and we’re all going to gather around in our different temporalities
and toast vegan marshmallows and shiver our spines as we wonder about
mortality and what it means to even exist at all. How we’re all ghosts, and
how we all haunt places and people, all the time. This book is haunted. It is
our honour as creatures caught within this universe to do this haunting, and
to leave little reminders of ourselves along the way. We are graffiti on walls
and chalk on pavements and sandcastles on the beach. All potentially
temporary, but god, aren’t we beautiful whilst we last?
We all want to be remembered, I think. I think that’s the most human thing
there is to want. No matter how strong or loud the call of the void may be,
we at least want someone to know we heard it. We want to be loved, to have
loved, to have mattered. We perhaps want to change the world – in a way
that is big or small. And we do. It’s impossible not to. We all change the
world all the time, in ways we might not even realize.
I remember sitting in the car waiting for my dad to pick something up. A
stranger walked past. I couldn’t tell you what she looked like now, but I
remember she was beautiful, confident, and unapologetically gay. And god,
I loved her in that minute and I carry that feeling with me still. She doesn’t
know I exist, she never ever will, but I remember her as a few seconds of a
kind of purity and awe that reminded my heart how to pump and my brain
how to spark.
How many people, do you think, have looked at you and felt that kind of
awe? Don’t say none. It’s not true. You have no idea how awe-inspiring you
are. I know this because I know people – brilliant, brilliant people, who
don’t realize that they are woven with magic. And I tell them, over and
over, because I hope one day they’ll believe me.
All of this, I want to call this a kind of letter to you, almost like a telegram
or something, winging its way to you through time and space and being
translated from my brain to yours – this letter, it’s the opposite of the void
calling. You know, when you stand near a railing and realize it’d be the
work of an instant to climb over and feel what it’d be like to fly, or those
lonely nights when your thoughts go dark and oppressive and you want to
claw at your skin until you don’t hate yourself any more – all of this, I am
giving to you as a hand on your shoulder, urging you back to safer ground.
I find myself, again and again, on the edge of all things, wondering when
it’ll get better. I had been promised a life, and yet it seems I get mere
snatches of the damn thing. My brain is a fantastic liar, you see. Perhaps
yours is too. It’ll never tell you the truth of things. Things are bad, often.
But sometimes things are so good. I can never see the good when there is so
much bad, and this past year has been a deluge of bad, but I am promising
you some good. Because I think I need to promise that to myself, too.
When the sky is dark and the night is cold and your skin goosebumps and
you feel more alone than you’ve ever felt, this is when I want to haunt you.
In your past, my present, our future, you know? It’s crazy, right? An attempt
at comfort written across the timeline. I’m going to tell you some stories
