"Sleepy Hollow, 1998" is coming soon. You can sign up for the mailing list at stampact.co, and you can find our Kickstarter Pre-launch page here. Right now, what would help us the most would be to go to the pre-launch page and click on the "Notify me on launch" button.

The Kickstarter is going to launch...soon. Soonish. We're getting all the pieces together. This whole process has been a real challenge to my maladaptive perfectionism. I vacillate between "omg we need to change everything!" and "it's not perfect but it's fine."

So this feels like a perfect place to unpack what I mean when I say that we're trying to build Stamp Act from a place that accounts for neurodivergence instead of ignoring and pushing past it.

One of the things that happens when you start collecting diagnoses is you discover all these concepts; there are names for things you thought were only happening to you. Ask any ADHD'er what they felt when they first heard the words "Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria." It's a mix of shock ("what, this is a known thing???"), disbelief ("this can't be real. how can you measure this? it's like the emotional equivalent of 'how do i know if we're all seeing the same color blue'!"), and relief ("huh, this sure does explain a whole lot of things.")

After learning about my AuDHD, I got a whole new list of things to examine. A lot of them didn't apply. There's no one set list of traits everyone has, it's a grab bag. As they say, if you meet one neurodivergent person, you've met one neurodivergent person. But there was one that, when I first read it, gave me a cold shock of recognition: the fear of being perceived. It resonated, and quite uncomfortably.

I used to be an actor. My undergraduate degree is in theatre, from the George Washington University in DC. There were some really great performers in the program, like Waleed Zuaiter, who always brought a chameleonic charm to his roles, Dariush Kashani, who combined a laser focus on craft with a wicked sense of humor (not to mention a great Al Pacino impression), and Chas Mastin, who could bring a house down with just a tilt of his head.

I had a lot of fun, but it became apparent to me quickly that I wasn't all that good at performing. I was always in my head, always putting on character as a shield between me and the audience. Play-acting. Instead of real acting, which involves stripping away defenses to allow the audience access to your inner experience. It's one of the reasons I love and have endless respect for actors – it's an unbelievable difficult craft, and to see it done well is to be in the presence of magic.

Then I went to film school, at UNC-Greensboro. I hung out a lot with the folks from their theater department. (Even then, I couldn't stay confined to one medium.) I took an acting for the camera class and appeared in a few of my classmates' projects. And that's when I learned that I hated seeing myself on camera. This wasn't a mild discomfort, it was an adrenaline-spiking, full-body panic. So by the time I graduated and moved home to New York, I'd stopped performing or putting myself in my own projects, even in the background. It wasn't worth the angst.

Jump forward a few decades; when social media became a thing, I gravitated towards Twitter and Tumblr, mediums where words were the primary focus. I have never been a huge user of Instagram, and I've never posted on TikTok; they work on the image, often the self-image. And I just never felt comfortable enough to do that.

It's only now, looking back, that I can see how all of these things can be connected by a fear of being perceived.

"I don't want to be on camera." "Neither do I."

We were faced with a dilemma. A Kickstarter campaign requires a video. And a video means having someone on camera, explaining the story and asking for backers. But I was filled with dread at the idea, and Megan didn't feel comfortable either. We toyed with the idea of asking someone else to be the face of the campaign. But that felt wrong. So I bit the bullet and decided that I would be the one to do it.

The first thing we did to try and make it easier was to just talk about it, and talk about it some more, to each other. To practice saying, "I don't feel comfortable with that," and allowing the truth of it to be there, instead of ignoring it and pushing through.

The next thing we did was to ask for help.

You may have seen Brendan Bradley on your social media during the strikes a couple of years ago, when he was an indefatigable SAG strike captain. Or in a number of other things. I've known Brendan for over a decade, from our time at Pemberley Digital, through the trials and tribulations of the new media landscape, and working on a few things together - like the short I wrote that he produced and directed, which asked the question "What if The Mandalorian, but more Jewish?"

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Brendan made a very generous offer to shoot our Kickstarter video, and we enthusiastically took him up on it. But it involved a difficult (for me) conversation in which I confessed my discomfort with being on camera, and asked for his help in getting through it all. Brendan coaxed me through the day, all while wrangling two cameras, lights and all the sound equipment. It ended up being okay, and I don't think I mangled anything too badly. I can only imagine how much worse it would have been if I hadn't been upfront with what I was feeling.

So thanks Brendan! I can confidenlty say we literally couldn't have done it without you

Now we're editing the piece together, and I am spending way to much time looking at myself on video. I never really understood before when I'd hear actors say that they never watched their dailies or even their finished projects. But now I get it.

Or maybe it's just that I was exposed to this too early and took it way too literally.

So we've got to finish editing this video. We've been getting some very helpful feedback on the campaign from some folks, and will be making a bunch of changes to incorporate them. And then we'll be set to launch. When I have the date, I'll share it here. And, let's be honest, across every single social channel possible.

In the meantime, doesn't that button look enticing?