Harmony SeekerFeb 27

I am so tired of pretending that all nervous systems travel through the world in the same rhythm. Mine does not and never has. And that difference changes everything about what healing is and what safety feels like. And what does "getting better" point towards?

I live inside a nervous system that is constantly tuning it, never quite at rest. I do not move through my day, have an experience, and then sit down later with a cup of tea to think about what happened. Sensation, thought, and question bccome as one, like a dense cluster of notes with no obvious root to tell you where the chord begins. By the time I try to reflect, I am already somewhere inside the next chord. There is no edge between stimulus and response. there is not a gap where I can stand and observe myself from a comfortable distance. The whole system is always already in motion.

For years, my days have been organised around healing. Not the glossy kind that photographs well, with its pastel journals and curated playlists. It becomes exhausting and repetitive. I lying awake at two in the morning, replaying an offhand comment that lit up your body as danger and trying to understand why. or there is a pause in a conversation that felt as abandonment, even when you know, intellectually, that it is only a pause, and your muscles still brace anyway. The kind where a particular cadence in someone's voice can jerk your whole system into red alert as if something terrible is about to happen right now. I have spent a long time sitting with younger parts of myself whose only brief was survival. Slowly, carefully, I have been trying to help them notice that we are not in that life anymore. That this present, while far from perfectly safe, is safer than what came before. That they do not have to keep standing guard every second.

I think of Cage's 4'33" and what it asks of the listener, not to wait for the music but to recognise that the music is already there, in the breath, in the creak of a chair, in the hush of a room full of people holding still. Healing has felt like that to me. Not something I am waiting for. Something I keep learning to recognise in what is already present, in the moments between the noise, in the small, unglamorous evidence that my nervous system is slowly, partially, inconsistently, learning to settle. The clock ticking. The fridge humming. My own breath, still shallow some nights, but still there.

Alongside all of this, I have been studying counselling and psychology, as academic fields but as languages I am trying to become fluent in. I am learning the grammar of attachment, trauma, and neurobiology, and trying to translate it into something that can live in the mouth, not only on the page. Something you could say to a friend at the tram stop, not only write in a reference list. It is one thing to know, conceptually, that a nervous system has a window of tolerance. It is another to feel your own window shrink to a pinhole in a crowded café because of the acoustics, or in a therapy room where the air suddenly thickens because a single word has landed wrong. Those edges are where I keep paying attention. The places where theory brushes against lived experience and something catches. Sometimes what catches is insight. Sometimes it is anger. Often, it is grief for all the versions of us who did not have language, only symptoms.

Van der Kolk writes that trauma is not simply remembered but relived, that it reshapes neural pathways and embeds itself in the body's regulatory systems long before any explanation is possible. I know this not as a proposition I have evaluated but as something I have met in my own body, in the way a particular sound or cadence can move through me before I have named what it is, in the way my muscles carry old information about danger that my mind has already decided is no longer accurate. Healing, he argues, requires reintegration of these systems, not merely articulation of experience. I have come to understand this as meaning that knowledge alone cannot do the work. The body has to be brought along.

Culture sits right in the middle of my curiosity and my discomfort. I understand, intellectually, that culture is constructed. I also know in my bones that constructed does not mean harmless or imaginary. Culture may be built, but it is built out of material that can be sliced. Ideas about productivity, independence, bodies, families, and what counts as a worthwhile life do not stay abstract. They turn up in opaque funding criteria. In buildings I cannot navigate. In services that assume I do not exist. In questions that pry where they have no right to pry. In the soft, everyday violence of low expectations, when people have already decided what someone like me is for. These norms seep quietly into counselling rooms too. I think often about what happens when a counsellor's unexamined sense of normal meets a client whose whole life has unfolded outside that frame, and how easily the room can become one more place where the client has to work to make themselves legible.

Salah's work on trauma and breath holds something I recognise. Survivors breathe differently when they begin to name their experience. Long silences before speaking. Sharp intakes before naming pain. Fragmented breath in moments of distress. These are not hesitations. They are a physiological negotiation with what can and cannot yet be spoken. I have sat in enough rooms, including rooms inside my own chest, to know that the pause before the words is not nothing. It is often where the most honest thing is happening. Learning to respect that pause in others, to sit with it rather than rushing to fill it, has become one of the most important things my training has given me. A form of attunement that no technique can fully teach.

I live at several margins at once. Disabled. Neurodivergent. Moving through a culture that worships visuals and noise, without sight and with limited hearing. Inclusion and accessibility float around in policy documents and strategic plans, appearing in carefully crafted statements on glossy websites. And yet, most days, I am still bending my life around systems that were never imagined with me in mind. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from always being the exception, the test case that proves how flexible a system can be if it really tries. There is also, oddly, a kind of freedom in finally understanding that the centre was never designed for you. Once that sinks in, the pressure to contort yourself into its shape starts to loosen. You can stop performing an idea of normal that was never yours to begin with and let yourself be as sharp-edged or overflowing or offbeat as you actually are.

Music has kept me human through a lot of this. Classical music, especially choral and vocal music, gives me a structure wide enough to hold the intensity that my everyday life does not quite know what to do with. I have spent years learning how to breathe with a piece, how to feel harmonic tension across my skin, how to let my voice become one strand inside something much larger than me. As a chorister, I have noticed that the most profound moments are often not when we are singing but when we stop. That suspended breath after the final chord, the hush that falls like a benediction, carries something that applause never quite reaches. It is collective and charged. Something passes between us in that shared stillness, sung but now moved beyond the sound into the space the sound left behind.

There is a kind of honesty in music that I rarely find in small talk. A dissonance does not apologise for existing. It arrives, sits in your chest, demands to be felt, and only then, maybe, shifts into resolution. My own healing has often felt like that. Long stretches of unresolved chords, strange harmonies that do not quite settle, then sudden, sideways movements into resolution that never look like the tidy closure I thought I was working towards. Di Liberto and colleagues found that the brain stays musically active even in silence, continuing to predict, imagine, and internalise music when it is not there. I think of the silence after a performance and the way my body still trembles with the residue of the sound. The music had stopped, but my nervous system had not. It was still holding it, trying to integrate it, as if the body understands something about completion that the mind has to catch up to.

Writing is what happens when all these strands refuse to stay in their separate corners. The researcher who wants citations and precision. The child who still mostly wants to be held and believed. The clinician in training who is quietly terrified of the responsibility that sits in the therapist's chair, and of the power that comes with being the one who gets to name things. The disabled woman is deeply tired of being turned into either an inspiration poster or a tragedy narrative—the musician who hears the cadences of a sentence as vividly as any melodic line. When I write, I am trying to make enough room for all of them to speak without letting any one voice hijack the whole piece. Some days that balance holds. Other days, the draft is a chorus of competing selves, and I have to trust that this, too, is part of the process. (1/2)

Show threadHarmony Seeker

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)

Feb 27 at 7:10amWeb