Mastodawn

This account, this corner of the fediverse, has become one of the places I let those questions be noisy in public. What does healing mean when the conditions that harmed you are not gone, only rearranged into more respectable shapes? What actually happens inside a counselling relationship when disability or neurodivergence is present but unnamed, or misnamed, or politely ignored? How do we begin to notice the ways power and unspoken norms travel through even the most well-intentioned helping professions? How do we hold culture as something we are constantly creating and being created by, something we may need to grieve and interrogate and occasionally celebrate, often all at once, sometimes in the space of a single conversation?

I keep circling back to the interior labour of this work. The slow, repetitive practice of building emotional regulation when your nervous system's default setting is red alert. The awkwardness of learning self-compassion when sharp self-criticism has been your most reliable survival tool. The moments that feel like failure because you find yourself reacting in an old way, when in reality this is precisely how recovery moves, looping back on itself, revisiting old ground with slightly different eyes. The way trauma and joy can sit shoulder to shoulder in the same hour, the same therapy session, the same breath, and how unnerving and holy that can feel.

Rauch and Ansari suggest that silence can be deliberate and strategic, a form of self-regulation rather than withdrawal, a boundary rather than an absence. I think about this in relation to the freeze response, to the moments in my own history when going quiet was not giving up but holding on. The body stills because there are no safe words yet. Sometimes the silence is the story. And learning to hear it as such, to receive it without rushing to fill or fix it, is one of the things I am still practising, in music and in therapy and in the ordinary, unglamorous dailiness of trying to stay present in a life that sometimes arrives all at once.

I am not arriving anywhere with a finished theory of how any of this is supposed to work. I am coming, again and again, with fragments and questions and a stubborn intention to tell the truth as I understand it in the moment I am writing. That truth is often partial, often shifting. My understanding of myself, of trauma, of disability, of care, keeps moving, and I want it to. I would rather be inconsistent and alive to new information than seamless and rigidly wrong.

If you are still reading, you are already participating in something I care about. A space that treats complexity as ordinary rather than excessive. Where being too much is not an accusation but raw material. Where intense feeling and rigorous thought are both welcome at the same table. Where healing is not a linear journey toward a fixed destination but something more like learning to live inside unresolved chords without pretending they have resolved. Where music is both metaphor and method, both a way of speaking about change and a way of practising it in the body.

True silence does not exist. What we call silence is simply what we have not yet learned to hear. The fullness of life in quieter tones. The heartbeat of thought. The whispered rhythm of resilience. The steady murmur of healing is underway. And when we learn to tune into the music between the notes and into the truth held in breath, we do more than survive. We begin to sing again. This time, in a voice that is entirely our own.

I am not here to introduce myself so much as to keep turning up alongside you. To keep writing from the middle of things, not only from the rare polished moments that look good in hindsight. To keep noticing the small, ordinary, unglamorous ways humans find their way back to themselves, even inside systems that were never set up with them in mind. If any of these threads brush against something in your own story, then you are part of the imagined audience I write towards. And maybe, in a slow, imperfect, occasionally dissonant way, part of the choir that is still learning how to hear itself.

#AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Blind #Deafblind #Disabled #DisabilityJustice #MadStudies #Psychology #Counselling #Therapy #Trauma #TraumaRecovery #Neurodiversity #MentalHealth #ChronicStress #Healing #WindowOfTolerance #LivedExperience #CareWork #Culture #Power #Normality #Access #Inclusion #Ableism #Music #ClassicalMusic #ChoralMusic #Choir #Singing #Writing #PersonalEssay #Silence #LongPost #Fediversea (2/2)

Moriel 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 14

i recently discovered the field of Mad Studies - the study of "mental illness" from the view point of those labeled as mentally ill, drawing attention to the prejudices that underlie most of the "scientific" study of mental "disorders". I read this article

https://imsj.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/imsj/article/view/7389

last night on the way aphantasia - the inability to "see" visual imagery in one's mind - seems to be on a trajectory to be labeled as a disorder and a disability. Since i am aphantastic myself, this caught my attention. Really eye opening to see how something that i think of as perfectly normal and that has never caused any distress or problems in my life is being pathologized by those who consider that their ability to visualize things makes them superior and "normal". Quite alarming even. This trend really needs to be nipped in the bud before it ends up hurting people.

Just now i was thinking more generally about how disability is often created by a society that refuses to accomodate people who are different, like how using a wheelchair is mostly a disability because architects, civil engineers, and others responsible for designing and building public and private infrastructure have to be dragged kicking and screaming into making their constructions wheelchair friendly. Think about buildings with no entrance ramps, no elevators, and narrow halls and doors, something all too common in my new home state.

While thinking about this i starting thinking about other "disabilities", like being deaf, and it occurred to me to wonder if deaf people ever "hear" music in their heads in any fashion. i've never had an opportunity to ask any deaf people about that, but it occurred to me that if they did not have that ability then it wouldn't exactly be a loss to them, would it? And then i wondered if even all hearing people have this ability. i can hear music in my head very easily, but since i can't visualize images in my head, it stands to reason that it's possible there are people in the world who can't hear music in their heads. Are any of you out there like that? Have i been unjustly assuming that everyone can hear mental music?

#Aphantasia #MadStudies #Disability

Disordered, deficient, and dehumanised: How biomedical and cognitive approaches are limiting our understandings of aphantasia | International Mad Studies Journal

Ashley Halliwell Sep 4, 2025

Well, I had therapy yesterday…

this session actually felt productive.

I’ve been wondering for a long ass time why I write the way that I do. It feels like I’m possessed much of the time. Once I start on a project, I find it very difficult to stop, and if I’m not working on a project, even if there is no specific creative urge, it induces paralyzing anxiety. I feel like I constantly have to be working on something or else I feel like I go (more) insane, start climbing the walls, what have you. I’m a perfectionist about my work, too – if it’s not up to a very high bar that LITERALLY NO ONE ON EARTH is holding me to but myself, I panic and find it very difficult to share it.

I’m also VERY rigid in other areas of my life. I am severely anxious about a lot. I have a damn near pathological need to know as much as possible, especially if it might possibly involve me, no matter how mentally taxing learning all of this information might be day in and day out. I feel like I have to know. Additionally, I feel like I have to be doing something about what I know, lest the doomspirals begin in that way, as well. I hold people to very, very high standards as well because if they fall short, it makes me VERY anxious, like my life could fall apart at any moment, someone could get hurt, etc..

I’ve been like that for as long as I can remember. We all have.

I talked with my therapist about much of this yesterday and he said that it sounded like I was describing obsessive-compulsive disorder. Initially he recommended seeing a psychiatrist about it, but I reminded him that due to my trauma with all of that (see: all of my posts about my mother DIYing MKULTRA with psych meds, etc.) and the fact that while it does suck to create this way, writing and creativity is my lifeline. I don’t know what I would do without it, and I am processing a lot of my trauma when I write. So ultimately we determined that that probably wasn’t the best idea since it wasn’t necessarily harming me and in fact doing more good at this point in time.

So, that’s my confession for you all. I quite likely have OCD and it’s the root of much of my creativity, perfectionism, and a whole lot of other shit. It feels less like a death sentence to admit that than I thought it would.

Until tomorrow (or the doomspirals will get me, haha),

-Allēna

#MadStudies #mentalHealth #OCD #processingTrauma #therapy #tragicBackstory

tragic backstory – Open Sorcery

FID Anglo-American Culture Jun 14, 2025

Day 2 of #DGAVL 2025 #conference had fascinating talks by Daniel Weidner on confessions in the #autofiction s of KO Knausgard, Annie Ernaux & Sheila Heti, and by Sara R Gallardo on #autobiographies by psychiatrized authors, from 19th c to today #MadMovement #MadStudies

#LiteraryStudies

Ashley Halliwell May 21, 2025

Me whenever someone tells me to “act normal” or “tone myself down” -Allēna

#disabilities #queer #trans #neurodivergence #madstudies #strokesurvivor #queerart

#disabilities #MadStudies #neurodivergence #queer #queerart #strokesurvivor #trans

Ashley Halliwell May 21, 2025

To whomever it may concern….

-Allēna

#disabilities #NEISvoid #madstudies #queer #trans #disabled #dissociativeidentitydisorder #strokesurvivor #queerart

#disabilities #Disabled #dissociativeidentitydisorder #MadStudies #NEISvoid #queer #queerart #strokesurvivor #trans

an_believable May 5, 2025

Buchtipp zum #ProtestTag5Mai
Subjekte der Inklusion
Die Theorie der trilemmatischen Inklusion zum Mitfühlen
von der großartigen Mai-Anh Boger ✊ 💞

"Dieses Buch handelt von dem dissonanten Begehren, nicht diskriminiert zu werden. [...] Es ist geschrieben worden für alle, die (a) sich anders fühlen oder (b) darauf bestehen, ganz normale Menschen zu sein oder (c) sich fragen, ob die Worte ‚anders‘ und ‚normal‘ für sie überhaupt Sinn ergeben oder (d) alles davon auf einmal – in einem manchmal kaum aushaltbaren Gewirr der Selbstbefragung, sowie für deren Pädagog_innen und andere, die dieses Gefühl verstehen wollen."

https://www.edition-assemblage.de/buecher/subjekte-der-inklusion/

#DisabilityJustice #Inklusion #Trilemma #UnSichtbar #Barrierefreiheit #AngryCripples #InklusionIstMenschenrecht #HumanRights #beHindert #BehindertenrechteSindMenschenrechte #SocialJustice #AuDHG #MadStudies #DisabilityStudies #DeafStudies #AbolishAbleism #Ableismus #AbleismusAbschaffen #Neurodivergenz #CrippleFight #WirSindNichtAlle #verRückt

Subjekte der Inklusion – edition assemblage

Mai-Anh Boger - Dieses Buch handelt von dem dissonanten Begehren, nicht diskriminiert zu werden. In seinem Fragen danach, was die Erfahrung von Diskriminierung kennzeichnet, ist es bis unter die Zähne bewaffnet mit Schwäche. Es ist so voller Leben, dass man depressiv werden könnte, möchte es doch so genau wie möglich zu fassen bekommen, wie sich das diskriminiert Werden subjektiv anfühlt. Es ist geschrieben worden für alle, die (a) sich anders fühlen oder (b) darauf bestehen, ganz normale Menschen zu sein oder (c) sich fragen, ob die Worte ‚anders‘ und ‚normal‘ für sie überhaupt Sinn ergeben oder (d) alles davon auf einmal – in einem manchmal kaum aushaltbaren Gewirr der Selbstbefragung, sowie für deren Pädagog_innen und andere, die dieses Gefühl verstehen wollen.

edition assemblage

ACCIUMRed 🍉Apr 24, 2025

De Mad Lit: "Os recordamos: 🗣️ ¿Puede hablar la loca? De la locura como metáfora a las epistemologías en primera persona. Sara R. Gallardo, Universidad de Viena.

📍¿Dónde? Centro Cultural La Corrala (UAM). Calle Carlos Arniches 3-5, Madrid.
🕛 ¿Cuándo? El viernes 25 de abril a las 12:00 h.
ℹ️ Organiza: David Becerra ([email protected])

#Locura #MadStudies