About - Re-Design Your Life: A Softly Wired Journal

This is my Substack journal about redesigning and curating life from the inside out - with capacity, connection and joy at the centre.

It’s for neurodivergent mothers and creatives who are done trying to optimise themselves into someone else’s version of success, and are instead learning how to build lives that feel liveable, nourishing and true.

Here you’ll find essays, notes, and reflections on motherhood, home, creativity, relationships and the slow work of unlearning the systems that taught us to override ourselves.

This isn’t a place of polish - sometimes it’s instructional (when I’ve landed on something amazing that WORKS), sometimes it’s in the messy middle, but it’s always honest, grounded and true.

Hi, I'm Amy.

I’m a New Zealand-based writer, mother, former teacher, and lifelong systems thinker.

Burnout, motherhood, and a late ADHD + autism diagnosis changed everything I thought I knew about life, learning, and myself. What once felt like personal failure revealed itself as a nervous system stretched too far inside systems that weren’t built for bodies like mine - or for many of ours.

When my daughter was just under two, I made a quiet but life-altering decision: we weren’t going to school. That choice cracked open how we live, parent, work, and learn, turning our home into an ongoing experiment in rhythm, connection, and agency.

Softly Wired grew from that same place - the kitchen table, the notebook, the noticing.

What this journal is really about

Softly Wired is for people who are:

At its core, this work is about capacity - learning how to live within it, honour it, and design around it.

I believe:

What You’ll Find Here

Writing on Softly Wired tends to move through a few recurring themes:

Some weeks are longer letters. Some weeks are shorter notes. Everything is written with care, not urgency.

I publish quietly through the week when something is alive to write.

Once a week, I send a gentle roundup - a single email that gathers what’s been shared, so you never have to keep up or check in constantly.

This is designed to be a place you can return to when you have the capacity - not another thing demanding it.

Want In?

All writing is currently free to read.

In time, there will be a paid tier for those who want to support the work more directly and access deeper or slower offerings. Subscriptions help keep this writing going and visible - but there is no pressure here. Being here is enough.

If this feels like your kind of place

You’re very welcome.

Pull up a chair.

Read what calls to you.

Leave questions if they arise - I return to them when I can.

This is a journal for redesigning life softly, deliberately and in your own time.

A Bit More About Me