About Durrantula.

I grew up in an adverse childhood with an ACE score of 9 out of 10. Long before I had language for autism, ADHD, complex trauma, OCD, eating disorders, or dissociation, my body and mind were already showing the signs.

I learned to monitor the people around me, anticipate reactions, suppress my needs, and keep moving through discomfort. Individuality did not always feel safe. Attention did not always feel safe. Being the version of Tanner other people wanted often felt safer than discovering who Tanner actually was.

One of the most effective tools I found was humor.

If I made the joke about myself first, I could take the punch away from somebody else.

That taught me how to read a room, connect quickly, diffuse tension, market myself, and make painful things approachable. It also taught me to abandon myself before someone else had the opportunity.

I am learning the difference between humor that creates connection and humor that cuts me first. I do not have to humiliate myself to earn safety. Sometimes there is a joke. Sometimes there is a wound. Often, there is room to honor both.

By high school, I was living with depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm. I also experienced binge-eating disorder and avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. Food could be comfort, stimulation, predictability, escape, or something my sensory system could not tolerate at all.

I often did not notice hunger, thirst, exhaustion, pain, or the need to use the bathroom until those needs became severe. I could disconnect from my body to complete what was demanded and only later understand the cost.

I did not know that was dissociation. I thought I was inconsistent, weak, dramatic, lazy, or failing. I thought the answer was to push harder.

Woodworking entered my life during my teenage years and remained part of it into early adulthood. The shop offered something much of life did not: a process that made sense.

A sharp handplane could take a nearly transparent shaving from a board. A saw could follow a line. A joint either fit or showed you where more work was needed. Rough lumber could slowly become a box, an urn, a keepsake, or something meant to outlive the hands that made it.

Craftsmanship gave different parts of us a place to exist before we understood that we were parts. Some understood tools. Some could visualize how an object should come together. Some could solve mechanical problems, obsess over details, or stay with a process long enough to learn it deeply.

When something became a special interest, I did not dabble. I dove in. That happened with woodworking. Later, it happened with autism. It even happened with grass—because varieties, soil, irrigation, growth habits, and rehabilitation can become an entire universe when an autistic brain decides they matter.

Before “& Laser,” Durrantula was a woodworker. We were a system of skill, craftsmanship, curiosity, and hope in our heart—even before we knew we were a system.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 21. Shortly afterward, I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder. That diagnosis shaped how my experiences were interpreted for years, but it never adequately explained the whole of what was happening.

The depression was real. The distress was real. The shifts were real. The explanation was incomplete.

Autism eventually became a special interest. I read, researched, compared experiences, and looked backward through my entire life. The sensory differences, social performance, intense interests, executive dysfunction, shutdowns, demand avoidance, difficulty recognizing bodily needs, and lifelong exhaustion had always been there.

So had complex post-traumatic stress. So had obsessive-compulsive patterns: the looping search for certainty, the fear that getting something wrong could make me unsafe or harmful, and the urge to analyze an experience until it finally felt resolved. So had dissociation.

These are not tidy boxes in my life. Autism, ADHD, OCD, CPTSD, eating disorders, depression, and dissociation interact. One can disguise another. One can amplify another. A coping strategy can resemble a symptom from a completely different diagnosis when the person evaluating it does not know the full history.

I spent years applying neurotypical advice to a neurodivergent, traumatized, dissociative nervous system. When the advice failed, I assumed I had failed to follow it correctly.

In the fall and winter of 2023, we began making personalized Christmas ornaments and small edge-lit acrylic night-lights. Adding a laser expanded what we could translate into physical form: names, dates, illustrations, photographs, handwriting, memories, and private jokes.

Durrantula Wood became Durrantula Wood & Laser.

The laser eventually moved to the forefront. It allowed us to keep creating as burnout made traditional woodworking increasingly inaccessible. But “Wood” is not an obsolete word in our name.

There are parts of us who still yearn to return to the shop—to push a handplane, pull a saw, and feel a piece of wood become what we imagined. The laser did not replace the woodworker. It became a bridge when the woodshop became harder to reach.

In 2023, I lost a dear friend to suicide. I had experienced loss before, but nothing affected me in the same way.

From my perspective now, parts of me had seen—and felt seen by—parts of her that were not seen by the rest of the world. When she died, that connection was severed in a way my system could not simply absorb and move past.

I could have treated the intensity of that grief as another reason to judge myself. Instead, I began learning to treat the disconnect as data.

Not something to shame myself over. Data.

The data said that this relationship had reached parts of me that had rarely felt recognized. It said that my life was not sustainable. It said that I was following in her footsteps unless I made major changes.

To make those changes, I had to turn inward with an open mind—and outward toward a real support system.

One idea I carry from Jamie Marich’s Dissociation Made Simple is that trauma sustained in relationship and community cannot be healed entirely in isolation. When trauma happens in a village, healing also requires a village.

In 2024, after years beneath an incomplete bipolar II diagnosis, I completed my first round of transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS made a night-and-day difference in the depression.

But treating depression did not make me neurotypical. It did not resolve the trauma, autism, ADHD, OCD, eating disorders, sensory needs, or dissociation. Leaves of absence became part of a repeated attempt to recover enough to resume the same unsustainable life.

In 2025, treatment intensified. Hospitalization, intensive outpatient treatment, ketamine therapy, and a second round of TMS helped treat the depression. As the depressive fog changed, the autistic burnout became harder to miss.

I had turned recovery into another performance—another full-time job with expectations I could fail. Even while healing, I was still going nonstop.

During autistic meltdowns, I have broken my hand three times. I have given myself concussions, caused possible lasting harm, and added self-induced trauma to a body and system already carrying too much.

I do not share that for shock value. Autistic meltdowns are not tantrums or calculated manipulation. They can be the catastrophic overload of a nervous system that has exceeded its capacity. The aftermath does not need more shame. It needs safety, compassion, lower demands, skilled support, and curiosity about what the behavior was communicating.

Every shutdown was data. Every period of disconnection was data. Every treatment that helped one layer while revealing another was data.

The question slowly changed from “What is wrong with me?” to “What is my system trying to tell me?”

Before we knew we were a dissociative system, we already spoke about ourselves through Durrantula.

Durrantula was the woodworker. Durrantula was the craftsperson. Durrantula was the collection of skills that could study a tool, solve a problem, and turn an idea into an object.

There are parts who love traditional woodworking. Parts who understand machines. Parts who design. Parts who communicate through humor. Parts who hold grief. Parts who can sit beside another person’s loss. Parts who want to make people laugh with an absurd wallet card, and parts who know why a memorial engraving must be treated with extraordinary care.

We understand that objects carry emotional weight because memory, identity, grief, and connection are not abstract ideas in our life.

A memorial can give grief somewhere to land. An anniversary gift can hold years of private history. An engagement piece can mark the beginning of a shared future. An identity-affirming object can say, “I see who you really are.” A sarcastic wallet card can transform shame into humor—or simply become the exact ridiculous object someone did not know they needed.

When someone brings us a photograph, name, loss, inside joke, identity, celebration, or “okay, hear me out” idea, they are trusting us with a small piece of their humanity.

We do not take that lightly.

For years, I survived by getting ahead of the joke, suppressing the need, disconnecting from the body, performing competence, and pushing through.

Those strategies deserve compassion. They helped me survive circumstances in which being fully visible did not always feel safe. But survival strategies are not sacred obligations.

I am learning that humor can connect without cutting me first. That a need is not a moral failure. That capacity is not character. That a meltdown requires care, not punishment. That grief can be information without becoming a sentence. That dissociation is not proof that I am irreparably broken.

I am learning that every part of us formed for a reason—and that our worth has never depended on how convincingly we could perform being okay.

We are not at the end of this story. We are still recovering from burnout. We are still learning our system. We are still grieving. We are still discovering what kind of life allows all of us to exist safely.

Durrantula Wood & Laser is one part of that becoming. It is where survival meets craftsmanship. Where grief meets remembrance. Where humor meets truth. Where an idea becomes an object—and an object becomes part of someone’s story.

Whatever brought you here, thank you for allowing us to become a small part of your journey through this existence. It is an honor.