Where happiness lives.
Come + visit.
My mission
My (mis)adventures, my community spirit, my programs
I spent three decades of my life searching for somewhere to belong…
If you feel lost, consider yourself found here…
Hey you fellas!
I am Lou.
These are some of my things.
I am autistic, late diagnosed.
I am a dv survivor and PTSD sufferer.
I qualified as a psychologist over a decade ago, after a decade prior to that of autism being my SpIn and I begun a university degree in year 9 (I am 2e - or what I like to call a Tall Poppy).
I am queer.
I’ve been writing and publishing books since I was in primary school, my mum + Aunty bound my first novels: best friends on an adventure on horseback camping in the wild *Benny + Erin-Violet* and then a thriller called Boo!
I’m raising First Nations children.
So I hold space for a lot of diversity and intersectionality.
I love bats. Fantasise about vampires. Don’t pretend you don’t as well…I see you!
One of my SpIns is nutrition so I trained in that too.
I have an insanely high empathy muscle. I had to ban myself from watching the news because I can literally feel others’ pain in my body.
I also trained as a massage therapist because some people need their mind massaged and some people need their body massaged (I mean, we all need both right!). I am a biodynamic breathworker + bodyworker.
I started out as a Birth Keeper and have caught lots of free birth babies, including my own.
Then I realised I was called to Death Keeping (I still catch babies though! I am very passionate about providing beautiful ceremony for pregnant and postpartum folk).
I built a permaculture farm with my bare hands (and found materials) and ran a wildlife sanctuary. We have majorly downsized to hit the road in a van but we still do wildlife rescues.
I have four children and foster children.
I was studying my PhD in the quality of life of siblings of autistic children. I ditched it because I didn’t trust how the knowledge would be used. I didn’t trust that we were ready to not just shout “see! Autism is a burden on families”. (Or that we were ready to acknowledge the “highly resilient” sisters of boy autistics are probably neurodivergent too…and how could we control for that if we were still under-recognising female ND with the inadequate assessments at our disposal and very inadequate DSM criteria = totally biased PhD results). Also…I was in severe autistic burnout and not getting the accommodations I needed.
I presented my doctoral research at the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) in Utah. Bare foot and pregnant (no literally, to both points).
I published two papers with prominent researchers in neuropsychology, presenting my honours research.
I am a Citizen Scientist and a Bush School Mama Bear. I volunteer my time to run an inclusive program for a diverse mob of amazing families that don’t fit into a box and want heart-based learning in the forest and beach and The Treehouse. We do bird surveys and amateur land management and glitter kindness everywhere we tread. It’s delicious.
Runner up Young Victorian of the Year in about 2014.
I was part of the longitudinal research project on children with Traumatic Brain Injuries in the neuropsychology unit with Royal Melbourne Hospital in collaboration with Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.
I was once on the cover of the yellow pages for my contribution to autism advocacy.
I won the CEO award at a major hospital when I was only a fresh-faced intern, making waves in introducing innovative technology to keep our patients tapped into resources between sessions, a decade before the c-word hit and everything went online.
I wrote a book titled The New C-Word (a memoir about using Curiosity to survive a cancer journey). I presented a workshop on this with Hugh Van Cuylenburg. That was fun!
I published a lit review on autistic sibs all because I had a PDA response to my PhD supervisor saying I couldn’t do it and then reprimanding me because the journal wasn’t prestigious enough…academics, I love it actually.
I love dogs. And cats. Don’t make me pick.
I was bitten by a snake when I was pregnant with my youngest.
I love cheezels.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”
—Maya Angelou.