Hungry for a Song

I have been writing these ‘Year Of Kindness’ essays built around the perhaps radical but core belief that complex ideas require ongoing and regular examination. I write to explore my life as it changes, and it's been a time of extreme and rapid change: From choice theft and trauma to new directions and returning to happiness, I have devoted myself to recovering from CPTSD over the last several months. It's been almost a year, and as I write this, I'm driving the Irish Loop of Newfoundland, a place still alive with the scars of change from 580 million years ago. As I drive the earth and a new life throw themselves open, a new atlas, all bound and unbound. For a few months, I was nothing, and now I am driving down the echoing cliffs where sky and stone and ocean touch.

It seems appropriate to write this while driving through one of the most ancient landscapes on earth.  The rocks here bend and fold and stack in every direction, the earth rumpled like a rug when a chair is pushed over it, warped by the slow suddenness of geology.

Newfoundland is the only place I have ever been where the trees grow sideways, so buffeted by wind that species that stand 20 feet or taller inland grow twisted, pressed against the earth over the ocean, clinging to cliffs by scraps of soil and coiled fists of roots. As I hike the reserve, the best place in the world to view a 565-million-year-old sea bed that preserves the ecology of deep-sea pre-Cambrian communities, a fox follows me for a kilometre or more. It's impossible, on my way in to see the oldest fossils, not to think about all the timelines intersecting around me. Everything has a season, a moment, and that feels true nowhere more than mistaken point, or within a new self.

Nine months is approximately the time it takes to grow a new person. The metaphor is hardly subtle, and my path here, like any birth, involved a good deal of pain, but also remarkable moments of powerful beauty, connection, and growth. And like any birth, it's not a fixed moment. I'm not done now, not healed. Like the earth, this work is never finished.

After a year of other harm, the content and delivery of a callout and the violence and ongoing harassment enabled by its co-option by the alt-right ( what a fucking sentence, you can read that essay here) had a devastating impact on my mental health, in part because the harassment that followed my partner's callout was so familiar and becase trauma is cumulative.

The online harassment I experienced was familiar because my childhood assault resulted in similar threats. I was harassed by friends of the people who assaulted me. They would come to my house and throw things, bang on my doors, call me with voice scramblers and threaten me; they made my life generally miserable and terrifying. In the winter of 2024, confronted with the stark cruelty, receiving SA and death threats, all that the 13-year-old's terror returned with vividness. Like bones in your hand when smashed by a rock, my mental health was shattered. For a little while, I felt like little more than a pile of broken glass. My nervous system couldn't tell the difference between past and present.

I would hear people break into my home, waking every hour from nightmares of past assaults to hear people banging on my door, people walking up my stairs. I didn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I couldn't focus. Honestly, I don't remember most of the winter of 2024/2025. My notebooks and message histories have helped me piece together gaps and I can see in my journals when I decided, sometime late December 2024, to pursue healing from trauma the way one would a brain injury or broken bones: with kindness and compassion, with seriousness and data and determination and a lot of rest.

It didn't occur to me when this started that I had been living with CPTSD tinting my life with it’s colour, or that the shattering impact on my mental health was really the shattering of this lens, or that the work I was just beginning to undertake would tech me how to heal not just the wounds left from recent harms, but deeper ones. I would learn parts of me had been bleeding for decades, but I’d also learn how to care for them.  I mean it when I say I write this as a new person, slick with the blood of birth, learning everything new.

I kept track of most of what I did. Here is what worked for me

singing in the bath

Bathing is my most accessible coping mechanism; it's good for pain management and I sing often for the same reason I take a lot of baths, to help counter the tension of chronic pain flares. Singing keeps you breathing and forces you to relax parts of the body pain, and it turns out fear, want to trap shut.

My clearest memories of this time are of signing. Singing is the antidote to dissociation. It grounds you in your body while shifting your awareness. Something in the system of breath and vibration and sound boosts the release of endorphins and serotonin, and improves mood regulation - all of this can elevate the symptoms of ptsd. Music therapy is a real thing, obviously, but I just sang in the bath, comforted by too hot water and clouds of bubbles, I sang until the water cooled.  

Singing is an antidote to dissociation, and it was this, I think, that offered me the clarity to see how broken I was by what was happening - how far out of my body and mind I'd been shoved and how much I would have to do to crawl back in. I knew I needed to build safety again, and it was singing in the bath that got me started.

therapy until it gets easier, research until it gets harder, therapy until it gets easier...

I started hours of therapy, with two great therapists ( first a crisis worker and now my therapist doing an adapted parts work). My crisis worker first touched on the subject of CPTSD after hearing me detail how my present and past collapsed together. They were also able to explain what was happening to me politically and culturally, as a therpist specialising in sex work and queer community, they knew exactly what online callouts do and had resources ready. I started reading about it.

This was my first understanding of why I was targeted and who was threatening me. I learned the horrible outcomes I experienced were systemic - intentional for some but not all, that call-outs on social media are more likely to generate lies and harm than truth or reconciliation. I learned how they enable both real-world harm and the alt-right to leverage these public online rituals to their immediate and often successful advantage. I learned that many people see these failures not as systemic issues of a flawed methodology but personal failures which support narratives of defeatist, misanthropic nihilism - so in addition to being ineffective at keeping people safe, and breeding lies, and empowering harm within the community, call-outs fuel anti-hope, and poison the movements and goals of restorative justice.

I read about trauma and the brain. I read about activists working on real-world solutions to end cycles of harm. I read memoirs and essays on hope after violence and recovery from mental illness. I read hopeful science fiction by queer people and black women and essays from people who survived genocide and poems by convicted felons. All of it was by turns useful and helpful and challenging, uncomfortable and comforting - sometimes all at once. It was so good for me, these voices in the dark to counter the ones that were flooding my inbox and my nervous system with violence.

Reading was integral to understanding what was happening to me and my partner, but also to understanding the shape of the world around us. I have a more vivid appreciation of the cultural and societal barriers to actual restoration and healing, and the experience instilled in me a deep and passionate commitment to helping all of us break these cycles of harm. The reading and research I have done has shown me what I think are good ways forward.

touch all the parts / be gentle

With my therpist, I set clear goals and we began a modified parts work, which has actually helped me address issues and aspects of myself I thought were core personality traits but were deeply rooted compensations for CPTSD. Life-changing work I had no idea was possible. Discovering parts of myself i'd exiled with coiled certainty that all the pain I experienced as a young person would one day come back for me. A certainty that actually proved, in a way, true. And I survived all over again, which, with the right guidance and care, made it possible for me to be the most free I've ever been.

Through pure happenstance, I found a physical therapist who specialised in myofascial release from psychological trauma. Pairing somatic and parts work therapy helped me make improvements quickly. After therapy, I feel sore, and after PT, I feel emotional - participating in both these practices together has completely changed my life and my understanding of what my body and my mind needed.

Together, my PT practitioner and my therpist have shown me that I needed orders of magnitude more gentleness than I ever thought. Really, 2024 taught me we all need it - every last one of us needs more gentleness than we have ever considered we deserve. I can't say it more clearly. I added gentleness to my life wherever I could.

the after after aftermath

One of the first signs of my reestablishing psychological safety was a genuine return of creative inspiration and my ability to give in to it and make things. Writing, photography, I started painting [I’m teaching myself, it's lovely]. Creativity returned, and it both helped me feel like a self I thought I'd lost and navigate new landscapes and shorelines, new paths into my deepest thinking, new paths to focus and noticing beauty because old ones had been obliterated. My eye is different now, my expression, even some of my mediums.

I also began practising and learning to trust in people and build relationships. I began being honest about what happened to me and my partner. Cycles of harm grow in silence, and I've practised over and over breaking them. I talk about all the parts that are hard to talk about. I know my partner is doing this as well. We have discussed how building on our painful past and blossoming present can shape the future of our relationships. Accounting for our actions and choices, what they did and what was done to us, is part of how we welcome existing and new friends into our life, I have had to be vulnerable about what happened, to myself and others. And almost every single time I am presented with examples of deep compassion and remarkable understanding. In talking with many people, I learned we are not alone, but even when there isn't a similar story to share, almost every single person has shown me compassion and love, and healthy curiosity and genuine understanding.

Before last year, I was planning to become a death dula, and I walk out of this time of change with an even deeper commitment to this future, like the geological shifts that create a landscape, a fold in fate or stone that makes a new kind of life. I want to take what I have learned over the last few years and turn it into something good. Everything that's happened to me I've taken completely to heart, and I want to use it. Restorative justice facilitation training, death dula training - my next few years are going to be very busy, but the more I learn about each of these fields of study and work, the more I can see how they are, like all of us, intrinsically connected.

I have learned there are living deaths, and we can survive them. Not just survive, we can build wonder out of ruin. One of the hardest but best lessons I can offer from this is to keep choosing kindness in a world rife with reasons for despair. To choose risk with hope In the depth of an abounding sorrow, we can barely survive, we can choose to make kindness. Becase like the earth, like music or bread, love and kindness must be made, over and over

.

~

a person is a stone

in the mouth of a probability

who is hungry for song

begin with a single note

low as thunder

soft as pale yellow

rising calm

into the sky of its heart

until you become

a meteor of joy

---

Reading List:

Beyond Thinking - Dogen

Ordinary Wonder - Joko Beck

All About Love - bell hooks

The Will to Change - bell hooks

We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice - adrienne maree brown

The Unreal And The Real vol. 2 Outer Space Inner Lands - Ursula K Le Guin

Healing Justice Lineages And Safety - Cara Page & Erica Woodland 

No Bad Parts - Richard c. Schwartz [I actually hated this and gave up, but it was very highly recommended]

An Orientation of the Heart - Vaclav Havel

Something in the Woods Loves You - Jarod K. Anderson

Loving Corrections - adrienne maree brown

I Hope We Choose Love- by Kai Cheng Thom.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds - adrienne maree brown

Monk & Robot - Becky Chambers 

Hot Allostatic Load - Porpentine Charity Heartscape

...

Playlist

O Valencia! - The Decemberists 

Very Ape - Nirvana 

Gopher Guts - Aesop Rock 

Plateau (Live) - Nirvana 3:39

Summersong - The Decemberists 

Feeling Good - Nina Simone

In My Time of Dying - Bob Dylan

God Hates a Coward- Tomahawk

The Island - The Decemberists 

Song For The Deaf - Queens Of The Stone Age [just the whole album] 

Wolves & Warewolves - The Pack Ad Nina Simone

Shankill Butchers - The Decemberists 

Far - Job's Eyes

Charade - Fantômas. 3:05

Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 3:40

Bad Guy - Billie Eilish

Hum - Ayla Nereo 

On the Bound - Fiona Apple 

Everyone looks like Everyone -  The Pack Ad

The page in my notebook where I kept track of everything I did to try and feel better

the list - saunas a few times a month

- yoga, easy motion, long walks

- lots of embodiment and awareness stuff - reminders to pay attention to progress - staying fed and hydrated, taking meds

- staying connected

- going to therapy

- invest time in things you like - help a friend or your community - make safe intentional space

- wear comfortable clothing - do less of everything

- get more rest than you think you need