Write Wyrd Stuff: On Writing the Way My Brain Was Made to Think

A meditation on writing, becoming, and the sacred refusal to be summarised.

I didn’t write weird—I wrote wyrd. This piece follows a meme prompt into ancestral memory, autistic process, and the sacred pause before meaning. A love letter to writing the long, slow, spiralling way.

It was one of those mornings where everything felt thinner than it should—the membrane between sensation and overwhelm stretched taut. I hadn’t yet spoken aloud. I hadn’t yet decided if I would. The world outside the window was still quiet, but inside, I could already feel the familiar surge beginning—words rising, fragments converging, gestalts unfurling before I had a chance to ask for them. I never lack for writing topics. If anything, I’m often undone by the sheer volume of scripts and stories my brain throws toward the verbal centre of me all at once, each demanding shape, rhythm, resolution. It’s not generative in the way people seem to mean when they praise creativity—it’s more like being tuned to a frequency you can’t turn off. And on mornings like this, when I’m feeling especially porous, even a simple meme can arrive like a spell.

“Write weird stuff,” it said. @ShannanMania’s work found randomly on Instagram.

And I laughed—softly, to myself, the way I do when something lands truer than expected. I didn’t have to reach for meaning. My brain had already taken the prompt literally. Write weird stuff? I already do. I always have. And yet, the moment lingered, inviting me to sit with it. Maybe not weird, I thought. Wyrd. Maybe that’s what I’ve been writing all along.

There was something comforting in that pivot—from internet whimsy to ancestral echo. A reorientation that didn’t feel like translation so much as remembrance. Wyrd. Not just strange or offbeat, but alive, unfolding, unfinal. The kind of word that doesn’t collapse easily into a caption or summary. The kind of word that opens doors. And maybe, I thought, that’s what I’ve been doing this whole time—following those doorways, one by one, because that’s how my brain was made to think.

Weird ≠ Wyrd: Etymology and Expansion

There are mornings when words land softly, and others when they arrive like a summons. That meme was one such call—and what it called forth wasn’t just cleverness or critique, but a sense of home. Weird, it said. And something in me shifted. Not weird. Wyrd.

The difference may seem slight to some, but to me, it opened a path I know well. It’s a word that doesn’t sit still. A word that breathes. A word that carries echoes older than empire—older than English, even—but that found its shape in my own culture, my own tongue. And so I follow it, like a thread through mist.

Come with me…

We begin, as many such walks do, in Old English. Wyrd—from weorþan, to become. Not a noun in the way “destiny” is. Not a fixed point on a line. Wyrd is the verb beneath the noun, the motion beneath the myth. It meant fate, yes, but not as something etched in stone. It was more like the wind in the heather, or the pattern of birdsong at dusk—something you noticed, something you sensed, something already unfolding, whether or not you’d named it yet.

Later, it would become personified—as in the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, a Shakespearean nod to the Norse Norns. But even there, the meaning flickered. Not just witches, but weavers. Not simply eerie, but early—the ones who arrived before the story began, threading it into being. Over time, wyrd softened and warped into “weird,” now used to mean peculiar, unsettling, off. The shape changed, but something of its breath remained.

To me, wyrd is not oddness. It is threshold.
The liminal. The just-before.
It is the scent of rain before the storm has formed, the hush in a room before truth is spoken.

And as I followed this word further, I began to see its kin—scattered across other languages, other cosmologies. Names for the same ache, the same charge, the same sense of something stirring just out of reach.

In Old Norse, there is Ginnungagap—the yawning gap, the primal void between fire and ice. It was from this space, this neither-nor, that all the worlds emerged. Wyrd feels like that too: not absence, but charged emptiness. Not blankness, but potential. A kind of sacred in-between.

The Greeks called it Chaos, though we’ve misunderstood that too. It wasn’t disorder, not then—it was the chasm from which all came forth. The wellspring. The mother of all things.

In Hebrew: tohu va-vohu. Formless and void. The deep, unspoken state that existed before God said, “Let there be light.” Before speech. Before separation.

In Chinese Daoism, there is wu—non-being, non-doing, the field from which all things arise without force. Wu wei, the act of not acting, of trusting the rhythm beneath things. This too is wyrd: not control, but alignment. Not choice as domination, but choice as attunement.

In Sanskrit: śūnyatā, often rendered as emptiness. But it is not empty of meaning. It is empty of fixity. It is what allows change, emergence, breath. It is the fertile void.

In Japanese: ma, the space between. The silence in music, the pause in speech, the interval that gives shape to motion. Wyrd lives there too—between the steps, between the words.

Even the Akan people of Ghana speak of kra—the soul’s essence that resides outside the realm of language, before birth and beyond death. In Ireland, we had imbas: the poet’s knowledge, that which flows from elsewhere, through dream, through vision.

Every culture seems to have a version of this—this space before structure.
And yet wyrd is the name I know. The name that feels like kin.

It shows up again, too, in the runes—though not in the oldest sets. The blank / empty rune, often called Wyrd, was a later addition. Some scholars scoff at it. Say it’s not traditional. But I understand why it was added. Because sometimes there is a moment when no symbol fits. When the space itself is the message.

And maybe that’s what I’ve always known, in the strange way autistic GLP minds often do—sensing meaning before its articulation, holding the shape before the shape. That’s what wyrd gives us: the room to feel before we explain. To dwell in the silence before the word. To let the not-yet have its moment.

It’s like zero in mathematics. Or null in programming. Not a failure, not a lack. A placeholder for everything that might be. A necessary invention, born not of confusion but of insight—the recognition that sometimes we need a way to name the unnamed.
And that’s wyrd, too.

It is where I dwell, most days.
Not in the formed thing.
But in the forming.

Wyrd as Rune, and Why That Matters

They call it the blank rune, empty. Or sometimes, Wyrd. It’s not part of the ancient runic alphabets—not in the Elder Futhark, nor the Younger, nor the Anglo-Saxon sets passed down through stone and stave. It came later, added in the 20th century by those who felt its absence. A modern artefact, yes—but not a mistake. Not, I think, an imposition. More like a remembering.

Some dismiss it outright—call it an invention, a corruption, a misunderstanding of tradition. But I understand the impulse. Sometimes, when you’re working with a system built from symbols, you reach a moment where none of the existing forms can hold what’s arrived. And so you leave a space. Not because you have nothing to say, but because the meaning has not yet agreed to be spoken.

The empty rune is that space.

Not a gap, but a gesture. Not a silence, but the kind of quiet that hums.

It represents wyrd in its purest state—unfixed, uncollapsed, unresolved. The place where fate is not yet fate, where story is still breath, where meaning is gathering itself in the dark. In a reading, it often signifies that which is not yet ready to be revealed—or that which must be lived, rather than divined. It is the rune of the unfolding path.

And for me—as an autistic, gestalt language processor—it feels like home.

Because that’s how I know things. Not in steps, not in parts, but in emergent wholeness. I don’t build meaning like a ladder, rung by rung. It arrives all at once, like a scent on the wind. Sometimes I know before I can say. Sometimes the answer is already there, but it’s still choosing its shape.

We don’t construct; we gestalt.
We don’t decode; we feel the pattern.
Our minds dwell in wyrd.

There’s a kind of science in that, too—if you know where to look.

In the 1950s, Soviet engineers developed a computer unlike anything the West had built. It was called the Setun, and it didn’t run on binary logic—the tidy 0s and 1s we now take for granted. Instead, it used ternary logic: three states, not two. Negative one, zero, and positive one. A middle space. A neutral, a pivot, a wyrd.

Ternary computing proved, in many ways, more elegant—faster, more energy efficient, more aligned with the mathematics of balance. But it didn’t catch on. Capitalism likes clarity, categorisation, yes or no. It doesn’t have much patience for maybe.

And yet, that zero—that centrepoint—is where everything turns.

It’s the difference between choice and compulsion. Between collapse and possibility.
It is not absence, but potential.
It is the womb of the waveform.
The quantum state, unobserved.
The Wyrd Rune.

This is why it matters—not because it’s old, but because it’s true. Because systems of meaning, whether linguistic or logical or symbolic, need room for the not-yet. Need a space that can say: no symbol fits, but something is still happening here.

For GLP thinkers, that space isn’t peripheral—it’s central. It’s how we think. How we write. How we are.

And perhaps that’s why I carry such a fierce tenderness for the empty rune.
Because sometimes, in a world that demands clarity and compression, I need the sacred permission to say: I’m not ready to resolve this.
Sometimes, the meaning is still becoming.
Sometimes, I am too.

The Deep Personal Resonance

Wyrd isn’t just a word I admire from a distance—it’s the texture of my thinking. The rhythm beneath how I speak, how I write, how I make sense of the world. I didn’t study it into meaning. I recognised it. Like moss on stone, it had already been growing across the surfaces of my inner landscape long before I had language for it.

It’s not that my writing is “weird.” People call it that, sometimes. But that word always feels too flat, too dismissive, too fixated on what doesn’t fit. Wyrd is something else entirely. It’s not the misfit—it’s the shape before the fit was forced. It doesn’t ask to be decoded. It asks to be walked with. And my writing—at its best—is a path shaped by that walking.

Take Awakening in Starlight. That poem wasn’t written so much as revealed. It came during a season where I was, quite literally, learning to live inside my own body again—re-entering it, not metaphorically but somatically, as my transition deepened and my awareness shifted. The language had to come slowly. Not just because of emotion, but because the experience itself was wyrd—liminal, radiant, unnameable until I stood still long enough for it to become. It is a poem of return, yes—but not a linear return. A spiral. A slow orbit back toward something I never fully left, and had never fully known. Each line carries not a message but a vibration. A signal. A glimmer of that moment just before embodiment becomes conscious.

And then there’s Expat from Værensland. A different kind of wandering. A poem about being misfiled in this world—of living with no clear origin, no tidy “from.” The land it names—Værensland—isn’t a place on a map. It’s the place of being rather than having. A country of pause, of echo, of space-before-structure. I didn’t write that poem to explain where I’m from. I wrote it because I couldn’t. Because the truth of it couldn’t be reduced to coordinates or citizenship. It had to be gestured toward—spoken slant, as Dickinson said. That’s wyrd, too. Not direct avoidance, but sacred obliqueness. Myth, not metric.

Both of these poems live in the territory of not-yet. They’re not tidy conclusions. They don’t deliver punchlines or wrap things up with a bow. They unfold. They arrive like weather—changing as you read them, responding to the shape of the reader as much as the intent of the writer. They are more invocation than statement. And I think that’s why they feel true.

To call them wyrd is not to call them inaccessible. It’s to name what they resist: the pressure to resolve too soon. The demand to make sense in the way others expect. They are shaped by becoming, not by category. They are answers only in the way rivers answer thirst.

I don’t write them to be understood. I write them to be felt.
And maybe that’s the most wyrd thing of all.

Wyrd Is Not a Summary

And suddenly—I’m back here. Not in the past, not in memory, but here. The eternal now. This morning. The one I hadn’t planned to write from. The one where I was still tender, still not sure if I could bear the weight of words. But the wyrd doesn’t ask for readiness. It doesn’t knock. It enters through sensation, through the quiet heat behind the eyes, through the half-formed thought that doesn’t wait to be named.

I’d only meant to sit. To sip my tea. To breathe through the softness of being porous again. But the poem had other ideas. It was already forming—coalescing in the backspace of my awareness, pulling threads from everything I’ve ever felt about compression, about gesture, about why I write the way I do.

It wasn’t deliberate. It never is. One moment I was noticing the hum of the fridge, the way the morning light caught in the rim of the mug—and the next, my hands were moving. The words not so much arriving as revealing themselves. I became the Observer. The typist. The conduit. And what came through felt old and true and mine. A remembering. A response. An offering.

This is that poem.

Wyrd Is Not a Summary
(for the ones who take the long, slow, winding way)

I love the word wyrd—
not for what it means,
but for what it doesn’t.

It does not resolve.
It does not behave.
It does not fit neatly
in a bullet point
or a caption
or the hunger for gist.

Wyrd breathes.

It hums like a note
you almost remember,
a thread just out of reach
on the loom of becoming.

It is the moment before pattern,
the inhale before form,
the whisper behind your name
before you ever spoke it aloud.

Compression asks:
What’s the point?
Wyrd answers:
Exactly.

Compression wants a straight line.
Wyrd is a spiral,
a storm held gently
in the hands of someone
willing to wait.

Compression says:
Cut it down.
Make it useful.
Say it faster.
Say less.

But wyrd is not less.
Wyrd is everything
before it fractures into pieces.

I came from that place—
the liminal, the unsummarised.
I carry gestalts,
not outlines.
I speak in echoes,
not conclusions.

My thoughts do not queue up.
They gather like crows
on the wire of the world,
each one bearing
a scrap of something holy.

Let them say it’s too much.
Let them call it ineffable,
unclear, indulgent.

I know what it is:
It’s mine.
It’s wyrd.

And you cannot compress
what has not yet finished
becoming.

Closing: Writing the Wyrd Way

I don’t know how many hours have passed since I first sat down—only that the light has changed. The air feels different. And my tea’s gone cold. But it doesn’t feel like hours, not really. It feels like ein Augenblick—a single, eternal blink. A held breath in the fabric of time. That’s how it always is when I write from this place. From wyrd.

I don’t write for pace or polish. I don’t write to be timely or pithy or easy to digest. I write the way I think—slowly, spirally, through echoes and images, through arrival rather than outline. I write to find the shape that’s already there. To honour it as it lands.

This way of writing isn’t always legible. It isn’t always what the world wants—especially not now, in this age of Super Summaries, of compression culture, of algorithmic clarity, of posts and hooks and thirty-second takes. But I can’t write the quick version. Not without losing something essential. My meaning comes in the not-yet. In the unfolding. In the return.

Maybe that’s what makes it wyrd. Not just the content, but the method. The being-with instead of the getting-to. And maybe that’s also why it resists marketability, resists categorisation, resists neatness. Because wyrd isn’t a strategy. It’s a way of being.

And so I write the way my brain was made to think.
I walk through meaning the long way, the deep way.
Not in a straight line, but in a spiral.

They said: “Write Weird Stuff.”
I wrote wyrd.
And I always will.