#personalessay — Public Fediverse posts

What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-really/

#PersonalEssay #Writing #Research #Productivity #KnowledgeManagement #AcademicResearch #Criticism

Broken Chair

I rescued the chair from outside someone’s apartment with the hope of fixing it and having it become a welcome member of our family.

But, as often happens, it sat around in various places waiting for me to find the time to repair it.

Finally, I decided it was one more project I did not have time for, and so yesterday I put it out on the sidewalk in the hopes that someone would take it home.

It sat out there all through yesterday in the rain and the sun, lonely, awaiting a new friend. A few people paused to look but then drove away. Periodically I would look out my window to see it still sitting forlornly there.

Then this morning I noticed an older gentleman walking past who began to inspect the chair. He picked it up, put it on his back and walked away.

It is a beautiful chair. It just needs to be repaired, and I am sure its new owner will do just that.

I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot like that broken chair, waiting for the gentle hands of someone to put me back together again.

I wait, broken, with the hope that those hands will touch me, I will be healed, and I can have a purpose again.

July 10, 2015

Migraine, Perception, and Creative Flow

Living Inside A Migraine

When pain, perception, and medication reshape daily life

I’ve been dealing with a migraine for nine days. This isn’t just a headache—it comes with aura, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, and persistent vertigo with nausea. My perception gets distorted, my thinking slows down, and basic tasks become difficult. The medication helps with the pain, but it brings its own side effects, and overall, it’s been hard to function.

In the middle of this, something unexpected happened.

A Brief Shift in State

Unexpected focus and creative flow during disruption

While I was heavily medicated, I had a period of intense creative focus. For a few hours, I was able to paint with a level of freedom that I don’t usually reach. It felt like my usual mental filters were lowered. I wasn’t second‑guessing decisions or holding back. I just worked.

The result was different from my normal work—more direct, less controlled, but also more expressive.

This raised a question for me: what actually changed in that moment?

Changes in Perception

How migraine and medication alter access, not ability

Triptans, the medication I use for acute migraine attacks, act on serotonin receptors. They’re not psychedelics, but they do affect how the brain processes signals. Combined with the migraine itself—especially aura, which already alters perception—the overall effect is a shift in how I experience space, color, and thought.

That shift isn’t comfortable. Most of it is disorienting and unpleasant. But within it, there was a brief window where my usual patterns loosened. And in that space, creative work felt easier.

Access, Not Creation

The work was already there—the conditions just changed

It’s important to be clear: the migraine didn’t “create” anything. The creativity was already there. What changed was how accessible it felt. The conditions removed some of the internal constraints I usually work within—habits, expectations, and self‑editing.

That’s not something I want to rely on. The cost is too high. But it does point to something useful.

If a change in mental state can affect how I access creativity, then there may be other ways to reach similar openness without the physical toll. It suggests that part of my creative process is limited not by ability, but by structure—how tightly I control the outcome, how much I filter while working.

There’s also a broader connection here. Decades ago, I had experiences with psychedelics that shifted how I saw the world and myself. Those experiences helped me let go of a lot of fear and rigidity. I don’t return to them now, but the perspective they opened up has stayed with me.

That perspective has been important in dealing with chronic migraine. The pain itself isn’t optional, but my response to it isn’t fixed. Over time, I’ve learned to manage the mental side of it—how much resistance I bring to it, how I interpret it, and how I move through it. That doesn’t eliminate suffering, but it changes its intensity and impact.

The recent experience fits into that same pattern. Even in a difficult state, there was a moment where something shifted—not into relief exactly, but into clarity of a different kind.

For me, the takeaway isn’t about the medication or the migraine. It’s about access.

The kind of creative flow I felt isn’t something external that I need to recreate through extreme conditions. It’s something internal that I was briefly able to reach under unusual circumstances.

Openness and Letting Go

When the boundary between experience and experiencer softens

There’s also a quality in that state that’s familiar from meditation. It’s a kind of openness where the usual sense of separation starts to fade. Instead of feeling like an observer acting on an experience, there’s just the experience itself—no clear boundary between the one perceiving and what’s being perceived. In that space, the need to control or interpret loosens, and the work unfolds more directly, without the usual distance between intention and action.

Working with Pain

Perspective, resistance, and what can shift

Another layer to this is perspective. The difference between being overwhelmed by the experience and moving through it often comes down to how it’s held. I wrote previously about the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path as a framework for navigating chronic pain from migraine and lupus. What stands out to me now is how practical that framework is—not as philosophy, but as a way of adjusting perspective in real time.

When The Pain Takes Over

A reminder that practice isn’t always accessible

Pain is present. That part isn’t optional. But the added weight—resistance, fear, frustration—can shift depending on how tightly I hold the experience. That said, this isn’t always accessible. There are moments when the pain takes over completely. Last night was one of those times. I woke up in the middle of the night in severe pain after my first medication didn’t work. I couldn’t find my stronger medication, didn’t have my glasses, and ended up searching through cabinets, drawers, and bags in a panic. I knew that without it, I might end up in the ER—where the treatment helps, but comes with hours of discomfort and side effects. I was overwhelmed, in tears, and scared.

In moments like that, there isn’t much space for perspective or practice. But experiences like this also make something clear to me: without meditation, without the framework I’ve built from Buddhist practice, I would likely be living in that state of panic much more often. My commotion woke up my husband, who came in—calm, steady, not caught in the panic I was in. He found the medication, and he cleaned up the mess I had made searching as I went back to bed. That contrast stood out. It reminded me that while I can’t always access those tools in the moment, they still shape how I move through these experiences over time.

Returning to Openness

Creative flow, meditation, and another way of relating to experience

It’s not easy to stay open in the middle of persistent pain. In those moments, it’s hard to remember that the pain will pass—that it isn’t permanent. Pain forces attention into the present, but not calmly or intentionally. It can narrow everything down to urgency and survival. At the same time, it can act as a kind of teacher. It shows where resistance builds, where fear takes hold, and how quickly the mind tries to escape what’s happening. When I’m able to step back, even slightly, I can see it less as something to fight and more as something that reveals how I relate to experience.

What I keep coming back to is this: the experience changes depending on how I meet it. Not completely, not all at once, but enough to matter. And in those moments of openness, there is less separation—and a little more space for things to be as they are.

I painted this over six hours while medicated for a migraine, drifting in and out of focus. The haze loosened my usual self‑judgment, and the work shifted into something more fluid and intuitive. It’s not complete, but the evolution itself tells the story.

"As often happens when you say I’ll worry about it later, later happened, and spring brought a bumper crop of dandelions absolutely thrilled to have found a yard owned by an anti-pesticide crusader with no affinity for lawn care." —Maggie Slepian on why you should kill your lawn (on purpose).

https://longreads.com/2026/05/14/kill-your-lawn-maggie-slepian/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

#Lawn #Turfgrass #xeriscaping #Montana #PersonalEssay

The Self

https://ridiculousbharath.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/the-self/

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)

JAPA — When the Grass Looks Greener from the Other Side, Until You Cross Over

“Japa” is not just relocation.
It’s hope stretched across distance—and the truths we only meet after crossing.

This piece is not against leaving.
It’s about what movement doesn’t automatically change.

🔗 Link in the first reply.

#JAPA #Migration #Nigeria #Diaspora #Identity #Belonging #PersonalEssay