What a year

Lemon, it's January

Welcome to February, the trickiest noun to spell other than Wednesday in that part of the Venn diagram.

I have been profoundly changed of late, in positive directions, and yet. Yesterday I got pretty stressed and tried to do too much at once, and my body became Nelson the Simpsons bully for a few moments.

A cartoon still from The Simpsons of the character Nelson the school bully, pointing and saying HA! HA!

Crip Time

Silly Jasper. Thinking you can speed your body up! That’s funny. Here’s what’s gonna happen. And then an almighty wrenching exploded from my right shoulder blade throughout my body. I am off my absolute tits on painkillers, though not unfamiliar with this particular process. It’s ok, I thought, I have the physio tomorrow morning. I gritted my teeth and tried to work out how many pillows needed to be placed where, and what heating pads I could wedge where to get through the night.

Early today I got the text that the appointment was cancelled due to illness and I understood what was going on. Pay attention, please. I’ve learned not to pretend that the expected pacing from some external whirlwind is anything even slightly approaching what I can match. This is not punitive, but a reminder I can’t avoid. I’ve learned this lesson over and over. It’s ok, it takes time and repetition to absorb what’s true when it’s the antithesis of systemic messaging. Be compassionate, pay attention and feel it.

Last week, the second day the kids were back at school, I sat down and tried to remember everything I’m working on or focusing on this year. I recorded a series of short videos talking about it, recording a final video when I realised I’d forgotten a few key things. In there was another lesson I keep learning. It’s too many things. I don’t want less, though. I do want to do and be and feel what is possible.

Once again, I remembered that I set my own agenda, say yes to what I wish to take on, seek out other things I hope to engage with. It’s a mix of writing, action, reflection and creation. I’m not great at emails or remembering things. I try to implement systems to automate things and then forget they exist. It’s not my focus. The work is my focus because it is delicious and exhilarating and generative. Work and life are in the same bucket because they are all meaningful and person centred, community centred.

No matter what my mind is whispering, I’m not behind. I’m working on crip time.

Crip Tax

We talk about crip tax a lot: the extra costs associated with disability. There’s literal financial cost of mobility aids and appointments, then the second layer which comes with honouring our access needs. For example, when I listen to an audiobook that blows my hair back, I order the paper copy so that I can hold it in my hands. Underline and capture the visual memory of soundwaves that flowed through the gaps between my fingers like grains of sand.

I’ve been trying to pause and notice when the panic sets in. What sets it off - often that the author has hit a nerve in a way I need to weave in to my practice. I rage against my own capacity to remember anything at all. Breathe. I don’t need to remember, I can hold it in my hands and refer to it, to them. I do not have to know everything and it’s quite funny to imagine I ever could. Delulu of gralulu!

I’ve ordered quite a pile of books over the last few months, and it takes time for them to arrive, to be in the headspace to return to the subject matter, to have the capacity to read printed words on a page. The undulating soundwave is so much easier for me to understand and absorb. But the paper holds the message I don’t want to lose. I pay for books twice (audio and paper), and I pay for the energy to access them fourfold, at a minimum. My income is much less than my able bodied counterparts. Equity slips away too. It stings but I also don’t mind, it is how things are and allowing bitterness into my system brings inflammation which eggs on the pain and so on and so forth.

I am fortunate to work in a space I care about. The extra costs are just part of it. The plates keep spinning.

Heated Rivalry

Are you as delighted as I am that this gay hockey player romance is in the zeitgeist, that the author and actors and musicians and everyone involved is having their moment in the sun?

Whenever I’m having trouble waking up or moving my hurting carcass around, I put Feist’s My Moon My Man on and pretend I’m jogging in an adorable flirty montage.

It’s been referred to as a sort of psychosis, and Mrs Peach was lamenting yesterday that she can’t stop thinking about it and all she wants to do is consume media about it and the show/books themselves.

Lean in to it, my love, I urged her. I keep hearing from a certain type of person how tangled up in it they are - folks who are deeply connected to what’s happening to humanity, who work in liberation spaces and live with profound care about causes beyond themselves. The delight has come for a reason, because it’s badly needed respite from the darkness and horrors. Let us all fill our cups to the brim and roll around in the overflow.

Two stills from Heated Rivalry - one with a white man in the water requesting a kiss of an Asian man who is sitting on a rock. The second of the two men having a smooch in bed. They are both fully ripped and hot as furk.

I loved this article about Autistic representation in Heated Rivalry, as well as the many depictions in the storyline of outsiders finding warm and loving acceptance and inclusion. I keep hearing Mo’Ju’s track Something Wrong with the refrain “I’m on the outside” echoing through my mind time and again.

How beautiful, how human, to find a place to belong after so much yearning. For something to go right following so much wrong.

This year’s focal points

Here’s what I roughly said in the videos (you can find them pinned on my Instagram).

Hi I’m Jasper Peach and it’s the start of 2026. If you’re new here, I’m a resource creator, author, speaker and broadcaster. My areas of expertise and interest are queerness, disability justice, community building, inclusion, parenting, writing, soundwaves and neurodivergent joy.

Here’s what I’m working on this year

• monthly writing workshops for assorted mutual aid fundraisers, alternating with monthly writing workshops for my own income (both over Zoom)

• finish my manuscript A Thousand Spinning Plates On Fire

• presenting at the Appetite for Change conference

• chairing a panel at the trans book fair

• mentoring some folks in a few different life areas - as writers and as neurodivergent people

• Running some writing workshop for disabled folks

• Completing Leah Avene’s Fieldwork group and building in more community mutual aid, strengthening hyperlocal connections

• Diving into a lot of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work

• Completing Unmasked Families an eight part audio documentary about neurodivergent families, working with Powerd Media, the comumunity radio network, Main FM.

• Corporate gigs with Canva and a few others

• Being part of a monthly queer writing group and a monthly queer reading group

• Rewatching Heated Rivalry on a loop

• Intermittently updating my podcast Slow Reader

• Writing columns and essays

• More spoken word, with a confirmed feature at Assorted Sporks at some stage this year

• Getting jacked for the apocalypse at the cool gym for hot guys who like working out, that’s at my house

• Getting used to using some new mobility aids, gaining confidence with them as an extension of my body

• Having friendships and relationships

• Writing columns and opinion pieces when people will have me

• Smooching my beautiful wife every single day

• Raising our children

• Playing piano clumsily but enthusiastically

• Recording part two of On The Verge (audio project I started in 2016-17)

• Cross stitching most days because it’s a useful stim for my nervous hands

• Launching a children’s book in April

• Creating audio packages for Able Radio on Main FM

• My own disability management, which involves twice weekly physio, a lot of psychology appointments, regular lymphatic drainage and NDIS management

• Updating this Substack regularly (thank you for your patience)

So I’m a busy boy but I’m always curious about other opportunities. If you’d like to work with me, head to jasperpeach.com.au and complete the form on the contact page.

Too much? Too many? I’d like more functional hours but I’ll take what I can get and use them well. Some of these works are time sensitive, others undulate with capacity.

I saw a new paid reader has joined when I scanned my emails earlier. THANK YOU. You keep bread and fruit coming into the house. I appreciate you endlessly. There will never be any paywall to this writing, and those who can support my work and choose to do so… I have only the deepest gratitude. Whoever you are, all of you, thank you so much for being here.

Big love, JP xo