Defining My Ws — and the Who might be YOU

A dear friend and mentor recently advised me: define your audience.

Right away, the advice rattled something loose.

The goal of this passion project is to build something that can help pull me out of what feels like an interminable cycle of struggle and survival and crisis and crash and rinse and repeat.

I want to test my theory that for oddballs, weirdos, and neurodivergents, the way to break free from the neurotypical wheel is to start being as fully authentic as one can possibly be. Also, I've tried assimilation every which way, and it feels like time to try something different.

Defining my audience—and really my mission and purpose—feels like its own step toward a bold new world (Star Trek allusion intended). A necessary step, if I want Byrne Alive to take phoenix flight. What I suspect I need is proof of concept. I need to make it plain: who this is for, what I’m offering, why it matters, and why I believe it might actually work.

As for the other Ws: The when is now (duh). And the where—well, that’s an interesting question. The working answer is: wherever I’ve found YOU, or wherever I can think to try.

Let's define this vision.

🧠 WHO

I envision my audience as fireflies glimmering in the dark.

They’re survivors. Seekers. Second-chancers. Neurospicy, soul-tired, stubbornly hopeful. The weird kids who are now growing up, or the tired grown-ups who never stopped being weird.

I’m writing for people who are wired differently—by DNA, experience, or both—who spent years thinking they were broken. I’m writing for students, parents, teachers, dreamers, dropouts, and people who are starting over again for the fifth (or fiftieth) time.

I’m writing for the neurodivergent—and the not-yet-diagnosed. For the curious. For the humans healing from burnout, betrayal, crisis parenting, or just the suffocating weight of a life that never fit quite right.

If you’ve ever asked:

• Why do I freeze when I need to move?

• Why do I feel too much and not enough at the same time?

• What if my differences aren't design flaws, but specializations?

• What if I don’t want to play by rules that hurt me anymore?

…then you’re my people,

and I am yours.

Sure, it can get awkward up in here, but that's how we roll.

🔥 WHAT

At Byrne-Alive, there are no damsels. Instead of waiting to be rescued, we make our own fire because a phoenix has to burn alive before it can take flight. Welcome to Byrne Alive.

Byrne Alive is a growing fire. It’s a space for education and reclamation—for reclaiming your story, your wiring, your voice, your power.

I offer:

• Strength-based tools for neurodivergent learners and families

• Blog posts that blend lived truth, humor, and hard-earned wisdom

• Digital and material products that challenge broken systems with creativity and compassion

• Writing that refuses to pretend the world is fine—but still dares to imagine something better

  
  

And I offer myself: unapologetically weird, woke, and curious—me.

Subject Number One in this experiment to test my hypothesis that the formula for thriving as a neurodivergent is not to mask, but to blossom.

Imagine me as your Temple Grandin—but with Oxford commas instead of cows, and Fibonacci-coded poetry instead of sensory gates.

You’ll also find:

• Vocabulary that opens doors (literally—I teach it like Professor Flitwick, because words really are magic charms)

• Resources for teachers who don’t want to lose their soul

• Unapologetic wokeness

• Undaunted challenges against systemic traps and flaws (or somewhat daunted, but doing it anyway challenges to troublesome systems - we have lots of those, too)

• Sparks of sustainable rebellion, smuggled into everyday life like Prometheus smuggled fire to humanity (because ain’t no self-proclaimed deities gonna gatekeep our fire, bitches. Looking at you, patriarchy)

  
  

✨ WHY

Because I believe truth matters. Because the system is cracked, and the people inside it are bleeding. Because survival is not the same as living—and damnit, I’m ready to live. Because we weren’t made to mask and comply until we collapse.

Because I’m once again clawing my way back from freeze, and I want to build something that helps me succeed—and helps others do the same.

That’s what teachers do. That’s what mothers do. And hear me roar, I am both.

My students and my own kids are now entering a world that is stacked against them, and it is my educated wish (Deadpool callback intended) this project can model a way forward.

If any of this resonates with you, welcome. You don’t have to know exactly who you are yet. You just have to want to stop pretending.

Please, pull up a chair. Bring a friend if you know someone who would enjoy this fire.

Let’s burn alive.

—Meridith Byrne

Founder of Byrne Alive

Proprietor of Smuggled Sparks

www.byrnealive.com