The Coping Cabinet
Examine what is within reach, what actually works and which supposedly simple tools hide six dependencies.
Preview coming soonDispatches from inside the instruction manual
Tools for
complicated brains.
Understand what is happening. Find something usable. Stay curious and keep your sense of humor.
Lived experience, visual frameworks and cognitive UX for neurodivergent and otherwise gloriously high-maintenance nervous systems.
Built by someone who has been redesigning life around her own brain for fifteen years—and kept the field notes.
Explore the site
Choose what you want to read or use.
Each section has a specific job. Start with the kind of material you want.
01
Field Notes
Personal observations and developing ideas about mood, masking, momentum, treatment and complicated systems.
Read the field notes → 02Tools and Worksheets
Interactive tools, worksheets, visual frameworks and downloads—including the Supply Cabinet.
Open the Resource Cabinet → 03Cognitive UX
Examples and experiments for making instructions, systems and support easier to understand and use.
Visit the Lab →Shifting capacity and momentum
What changes when the terrain changes?
A continuous visual metaphor for changing capacity and momentum—where effort, speed and control do not always move together.
HEAVY LOAD
STEADY GROUND
FAST MOMENTUM
OVERLOAD
Cognitive accessibility that does something
The information can meet you where you are.
I think from the details up. I can see the whole system, but I usually get there through specifics.
If your brain has less room, this page can ask less of it.
Accuracy often means preserving more context than a typical website does. Regulation Mode reduces visual competition and shows the most useful context first.
Super Dysregulated goes further: larger type, fewer paths, direct instructions and minimum viable detail. Nothing about that is childish. It is information architecture responding to actual capacity.
Right now
You only need one next step.
- Choose the section that sounds most useful.
- Open one thing. You do not need to finish it.
- Follow any suspicious birds at your own discretion.
Resource Cabinet
Useful things deserve to be reachable.
Terrain, Momentum and Capacity Panorama
A continuous illustration of how effort, speed and control can change as the terrain changes.
Download preview coming soonThis Is Actually Way Harder
A task-breakdown tool for proving that “just do the thing” was never one step.
Preview coming soonA working proposition
The person should not have to become a detective to use the support that was supposedly designed for them.
Good systems carry context, expose dependencies and remain usable when the person using them has less capacity than whoever designed them.
— NBMW // FIELD NOTE 001
The secret room is not furnished yet. This is, technically, a very exclusive preview.