Melody's Musings

It's been a while since I just simply sat down and allowed the words to flow from my hands and through the keyboard at the speeds of my neurodivergent brain. A lot of people really hate my writing style- that's fine. Consider this your trigger warning for squirrel brain, profanity, and difficult topics. Use your judgement with regard to your continued readership from this point on.

I was thinking a lot in the process of coming up with this post. So much so that I actually ended up taking the perfect picture to accompany it before I even arrived at the name- Stream of Consciousness. It's the writing style of Virginia Wolf that I fell in absolute love with and made me feel seen for the first time in my Women in Literature class I took at RIT back in 2011, back when my positing that the far right was trying to make The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood reality instead of fiction was viewed as an extreme distortion of their platform.  Just 15 years later, I know the collective can see the comparison and it doesn't make me feel any better about having identified it sooner than everyone else. I still remembered being told I was hysterical, ridiculous, overthinking things- that the structure of our country would never allow something like that to happen. This isn't the point of this post- just a neurodivergent detour.

I've been thinking more and more lately about the role of AI in our lives and how to show up authentically amidst a constant stream of curated, perfected, mechanical and broadly appealing branding schemes. The pinterest perfection, the instagram aesthetic. I'm in the health and wellness sphere so I'm inundated with this content that makes me feel downright clumsy in comparison. Of course, the typical advise is to say "don't compare yourself to those people." However, the unfortunate reality is that if your content doesn't appease the content algorithm AI gods, then your content doesn't get seen and if it doesn't get seen, then people don't know what I have to offer or what events I'm working on.  When that happens, my business suffers and I struggle to provide for my family.  Don't get me wrong this isn't a pity post I'm literally just setting the stage for the next step in my unpacking a bunch of complex balls of feelings all at once and this is one of the threads.  If you even read this far, congratulations- you're probably also nerodivergent.

You see, AI (chat AI not generative AI which is an insult to our planet and humanity as a whole) is a tool and in a world where showing up authentically as myself is frowned upon or even sometimes punished by the algorithm, AI can be useful for writing the text for posts. The problem is that when one becomes too dependent on this tool or is using it to move too quickly because they simply have too much to do, it can get sloppy and there will be mistakes from time to time.  The other cost of that is that in a lot of ways, it is sacrificing one's own voice for that of a machine. You might have caught on now that this very post is about reclaiming my own voice and all of the beautiful chaos that comes along with this brain of mine. It is also about how being authentic comes with a certain amount of vulnerability and risk.  If no one responds to or connects to the AI content "oh well, it was written by a machine."  When one has put their heart and soul into writing something they really feel and believe and it gets rejected or criticized, that feels quite a bit different.

And yet, using the machine to write and curate posts does give me back my time also. I have been prioritizing getting outside of the digital walls I've found myself locked inside of for over a year and literally touching grass- which means less time in front of a screen perfecting posts. This being an exception of course because I had a whole bunch of things to get off my mind, heart and chest. I'm still trying to figure out how to actually have everything: time with my family, a career I love and showing up whole and authentic in the world. I suppose this is my way of saying I am trying to feel a little safer in doing that somehow.

Oh and before I lose sight of a whole other thought I had earlier- I remember a couple of years ago a study came out that had explored why women suffer in so much greater numbers from autoimmune diseases than men and that it had concluded that there is a *link* (correlation does not equal causation) between self silencing behaviors in women and the development of autoimmune conditions. I can't help but wonder about my own husband's autoimmune condition being linked to his phase of nonspeaking from the ages of approximately 2 to 10 years old- and whether that was a physical inability to speak or maybe a lack of connection to the words he needed to speak his truth about his reality- had something to do with his development of that condition later in life. And if you look at the neurodivergent population, how many of us are either told to hide who we are, are coached on how to appear more "normal", mask ourselves into illness, depression, burnout, collapse- and how many of us are eventually told we have an autoimmune disease and/or connective tissue disorder. I'm not just talking the EDS/MCAS/POTS trifecta either. I'm talking about Ankylosing Spondylitis, Marfan's Syndrome, SJogren's. Endometriosis, PCOS. How all of these comorbidities seem to cluster and converge and lead to one another. In my internet travels, there are many doctors who would agree with me at this point in saying that there might even be a mast cell link in all of this. What does this have to do with self silencing?

I think self silencing or even masking and self policing one's behaviors, gestures, facial expressions, etc carries a high level of conferred stress. I think that high level of background stress means that we have a whole subset of the population walking around with elevated cortisol, which is triggering more mast cells to be produced- and when you have more mast cells in the brain and gut and skin- you get digestive problems, brain fog, thoughts that race and jump all over the place, rashes, etc. Perhaps even the weight gain could be linked to this.

I've heard said more than once in the wellness sphere that retained weight that won't budge has to do with cushioning yourself from the outside world as a sort of literal armor of protection. I'm hopeful that some day my body will feel safe enough again to drop that armor. Maybe some day I'll be marketable and thin and healed.  For the moment, I'm the imperfect healer conferring to my patients (or trying) the wisdom I've gained along the way. The journey has been a long one and I am aware there is more to do, more to learn, more to perfect. And I keep trying my best because that is all that can be asked of me. The thing about that statement of being the imperfect healer and some day showing up healed is that not only is healing not a linear process- it's not a process with a beginning and an end. I am starting to think that much like grief, healing never really ends. There is just the you there is today and you keep trying to do a little better over time. Sometimes that little bit is posting a meandering stream of consciousness to your nonexistent blog following so that the internet won't drag your SEO into the mud!

Until next time!

Please let me know if you liked this.  If you didn't, scroll along you're not my people- this isn't an airport no need to announce your departure.