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)

A quotation from Hannah Arendt

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied — as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels — that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani [enemy of humanity], commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Epilogue (1963)

More about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/42625/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #arendt #clearconscience #commonman #crimesagainsthumanity #criminal #enemy #evil #Holocaust #ignorance #immorality #naivete #normalcy #normality #responsibility #warcrime #wrongdoing

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Epilogue (1963) - Arendt, Hannah | WIST Quotations

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more…

WIST Quotations

New on Philosophics: The Film or the Strip — Freud knew the 'normal ego' was a fiction; Strawson simply refused to pretend otherwise. Some live the film, others the strip. The projector hums either way.

👉 https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/26/the-film-or-the-strip-on-freud-strawson-and-the-fiction-of-normal-selves/

#Philosophy #Freud #Identity #Foucault #Self #Normality #DisIntegrationism #Philosophics #blog #psychology #power #control #fiction

Havna på IKEA. 😵‍💫 Kikker ut. Får med eit kjensla av å vera del av #Normality... https://youtu.be/IKk3t9VKXrg?si=3q1QKyp0aB_Vu-3N
Heroin Addicts Often Seem Normal

At least, they did to me ten years ago

Quaternion Daydream

"A generalized linear model or #GLM consists of three components:
1. A random component, specifying the conditional distribution of the response variable, Yᵢ (for the ith of n independently sampled observations). […]
2. A linear predictor—that is a linear function of regressors,
ηᵢ = α + Σⱼ Xᵢⱼ*βⱼ
3. A smooth and invertible link function g(·), which transforms the expectation of the response variable, μᵢ ≡ E(Yᵢ), to the linear predictor:
g(μᵢ) = ηᵢ"

https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/21121_Chapter_15.pdf

#models #dataDev #logNormal #regression #normality #normalDistribution #gamma #modelling #modeling #AIDev #ML #evaluation

'Europe’s narrative is constructed on the exclusion of colonialism from its history, allowing the ideology of Europe’s racelessness. […] The disremembering of the colonial past shapes the contemporary perception of Europe as a progressive well-intentioned neutral mediator. Moreover, this colonial amnesia produces Europeans of color as outsiders and “aliens” threatening to the liberal continent’s identity.'

'Thus, racialized Europeans are forever “just arriving” and forgotten in the construction of a contemporary European identity. The book gives examples of continent’s Roma and Sinti populations who have resided in Europe for half a millennium and are constantly marginalized as foreigners.'

(1/2)

#activism #culture #identity #norms #normality #Europeanness #whiteness #raceMaking #racialization #ElTayeb #Europe #postColonialism #racelessness #colorblind #raceMaking #colourblind #racism #diaspora #Belgium #France #Netherlands #NL #Germany #Austria #Italy #Spain #Portugal #Hungary #postNational

Feeling a little called out by Nil from Misfile: Hell High in last couple of comics 😅

2025-07-31

Nil: ... I just want to script out some arguments for next time somebody calls me a nothing girl. So far I've only got two.
Aiden: What have you got?
Nil: Well, first call me a nothing girl.
Aiden: Okay. Um, "hi, nothing girl".
Nil: Hi! I'm normal! Do you want to be my friend?! ... Needs work.

2025-08-01

Aiden: Nil, if you're really going to do this, I don't think a prepared list of statements is going to work. It's just going to seem weird... Weird-ER. You can't tell someone you're normal. That in itself ISN'T normal. You have to show them. It takes times.
Nil: Is that what you think I should do?

As somebody& who's scripted conversations and essentially created flowcharts and rules in their mind on how to appear "normal" to most people, and who didn't even truly realise what masking was until relatively recently (within the last 5-10 years), this hits hard 😅

#MisfileHellHigh #Nil #NothingGirl #normality #weirdness #NeurodivergentMasking #neurodivergent #neurospicy #WebComic

Misfile - Hell High - 7/31/25

School is tough. School is tougher when your immortal soul depends on graduation.

Normality is a social construct that changes over time. It's sad how so many people think the parameters for existence are so limited and, quite frankly, deranged!

#poetry #poetrycommunity #normality #socialconstructs #poem #singersongwriter #poison