In this reflection, I explore the extraordinary intensity of my sensory experience and how it shapes my relationship with safety, belonging, and identity. A joyful motorbike ride through Bali brings forward deep gratitude for the community, spirituality, and connection I witness in village life, while also reminding me of the belonging I lacked growing up. I reflect on how relocating to Asia has made eight years of healing and survival possible. An unexpected sensory disruption leads me to examine the relationship between autism, hyperacusis, trauma, and nervous system regulation. I recognize that the same sensitivity that can overwhelm me also contributes to my cognitive abilities, emotional depth, and perception. The reflection moves toward reclaiming my intelligence, accepting my needs, and recognizing the transformative potential of neurodivergent community.
| Primary Energy | Radiant gratitude, joy, and embodied self-acceptance |
| Secondary Energy | Wonder, reverence, vulnerability, belonging, empowerment, spiritual connection, and collective hope |
THREADS
1. Sensory Sensitivity as Gift and Disability
Summary
I’m recognizing that my heightened sensory experience is both one of the most challenging aspects of my life and one of my greatest gifts. Sounds, vibrations, colors, emotions, and environmental information can be overwhelming, sometimes triggering intense physical reactions and dysregulation. Yet when I feel safe and regulated, this same sensitivity allows me to experience extraordinary depth, joy, perception, and cognitive capacity. I’m learning to appreciate the fullness of my sensory experience without denying the very real limitations it creates.
Lesson / Teaching
Sensory sensitivity can create genuine disability while also contributing to meaningful strengths. Understanding both dimensions allows for greater self-acceptance and more appropriate accommodations.
Tags: sensory-sensitivity, hyperacusis, sensory-processing, neurodivergent-strengths, disability, embodied-awareness, self-acceptance
2. Safety Unlocks Neurodivergent Cognitive Capacity
Summary
I’m discovering how dramatically my cognitive abilities change depending on the state of my nervous system. When I’m overwhelmed, I can lose access to language, struggle to manage competing thoughts, and become consumed by sensory input. When I’m grounded and safe, my mind moves with remarkable speed and clarity, processing multiple layers of information and accessing vivid internal sensory experiences. I’m realizing that my capabilities have always existed, but the conditions surrounding me determine how much of them I can access.
Lesson / Teaching
Capacity is not static. Creating conditions of safety and regulation can make existing cognitive strengths more accessible.
Tags: nervous-system-regulation, safety, cognitive-capacity, bottom-up-processing, neurodivergent-strengths, capacity-building, sensory-processing
3. Belonging Through Witnessing Community Life
Summary
I’m deeply moved by the sense of belonging and collective care I perceive in the Balinese villages surrounding me. Watching families, children, and communities participate in shared rituals and everyday life allows me to experience something I didn’t have growing up: a visible sense of safety, connection, and continuity. I’m aware that my observations don’t represent the entirety of their lived experiences, but being welcomed into this environment has become profoundly meaningful to me. I feel grateful for the privilege of witnessing and participating in a culture that places such visible importance on community and spiritual devotion.
Tags: belonging-and-community, cultural-observation, collective-care, ritual-and-ceremony, spiritual-connection, safety, gratitude
4. Creating Conditions for Healing and Survival
Summary
I’m reflecting on how moving to Asia became an essential accommodation for my survival and healing. When I left Canada in 2018, I didn’t know that my life would change so dramatically or that returning would eventually feel financially and neurologically inaccessible. Living somewhere with lower expenses has given me the time and space to move through eight years of healing without the demands of a conventional work structure. I’m recognizing that the life I’ve created isn’t simply a lifestyle preference; it’s an adaptation that has made my recovery and continued development possible.
Lesson / Teaching
Healing requires resources, time, and supportive conditions. Sometimes creating a sustainable life means changing the environment rather than continually trying to adapt oneself to an unsustainable system.
Tags: trauma-recovery, self-accommodation, sustainable-living, nervous-system-safety, survival, life-transitions, personal-agency
5. Regulation Through Retreat and Reengagement
Summary
I’m beginning to understand and accept the rhythm my nervous system needs. After spending a week in my quiet home, I’ve experienced a level of regulation I haven’t felt in a long time. That restoration allows me to venture into the world, experience joy, and engage with life, but I also recognize that I need to return home to process, release, and reset. Rather than fighting this cycle or expecting myself to function differently, I’m learning to respect it as part of my reality.
Lesson / Teaching
Sustainable engagement with the world may require intentional cycles of stimulation, retreat, regulation, and recovery.
Tags: nervous-system-regulation, self-accommodation, sensory-recovery, capacity-building, self-acceptance, embodied-awareness, window-of-tolerance
6. Reclaiming Intelligence Beyond Neurotypical Expectations
Summary
I’m reflecting on how profoundly my understanding of myself has changed since recognizing my neurodivergence. For much of my life, I received messages that my intensity, behavior, and ways of processing were wrong, leaving me unaware of my own intelligence and abilities. I’m now discovering that I’m capable of extraordinary things when I’m no longer trying to fit myself into expectations that weren’t designed for me. This realization is changing how I understand my past, my identity, and what I’m capable of becoming.
Lesson / Teaching
When people are consistently evaluated against expectations that don’t accommodate their ways of functioning, they may internalize limitations that don’t accurately reflect their abilities.
Tags: neurodivergent-identity, self-acceptance, unmasking, neurodivergent-strengths, identity-reclamation, self-actualization, internalized-ableism
7. Emotional Intensity as Relational Intelligence
Summary
I’m recognizing that the emotional intensity I’ve experienced throughout my life has given me a depth of understanding that I can now bring into my relationships with others. Having moved through profound pain and complex emotional experiences, I feel able to recognize and relate to feelings that often remain unspoken. I’ve also become increasingly aware of my ability to perceive emotional patterns, expressions, and projections in other people. I’m exploring how these qualities, which once made me feel like I was too much, may be central to how I connect with and understand the world.
Lesson / Teaching
Difficult lived experiences can deepen emotional understanding and empathy. Qualities once experienced as burdens may become meaningful relational strengths when understood and integrated.
Tags: relational-intelligence, emotional-intensity, pattern-recognition, lived-experience, empathy, embodied-awareness, trauma-integration
8. Neurodivergent Community and Collective Awakening
Summary
I’m feeling an increasingly powerful desire to connect with other neurodivergent people who are discovering and reclaiming their abilities. I believe many of us have spent our lives being misunderstood, diminished, or made to feel incapable, and that recognizing our strengths creates opportunities for collective empowerment. I see this process as part of a broader awakening, where people are learning to understand themselves, support one another, and navigate a rapidly changing world. I’m drawn to the possibility that our different ways of perceiving and processing reality have an important place in this collective transformation.
Lesson / Teaching
Shared understanding and community can help people challenge internalized limitations, recognize their strengths, and develop a greater sense of agency and belonging.
Tags: neurodivergent-community, collective-healing, identity-reclamation, belonging-and-community, collective-awakening, empowerment, cycle-breaking
TRANSCRIPT
Wednesday, October 21st. I’m in my happy place.
I started recording before, and I got overwhelmed because I started receiving messages, and it dysregulated my brain. Doing two things at the same time, I could just hear my train of thought going off, thinking about who’s messaging me and what it’s about, and this and that, while also trying to articulate the sentence that I was in the middle of saying while I was recording.
And then realizing that I was jumping between two thoughts and fumbling, and it just felt awkward. I was so surprised.
It’s so funny how our brains can handle such complex information, but sometimes wires cross and you just can’t do two things at the same time all of a sudden. Such unique, wonderful brains we have.
I want to check in. I’m in a great place. Oh, it feels good to express that.
Okay. I’m in such a good place right now.
I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve been moved to tears while riding my bike around town.
I literally just went for an impromptu bike ride because we had this fuel crisis, and yesterday I was finally able, a week later, to get gas. I didn’t even have to wait in line, and it felt like such a privilege.
Like, I have a full tank of gas. Whoa! A few days ago, that was currency. It was not accessible. People were charging, there was mass hysteria, and now, boom, full tank.
I just felt so good to ride again.
It was midday, and I was like, I’ve done lots of stuff today. I’ve ticked a bunch of boxes. I’ve applied for jobs. I did an interview. I showed up for a call that someone else didn’t show up for.
And so I just drove around with this fucking ridiculous smile on my face. My cheeks actually hurt when I go out and smile.
My favorite thing out here is when people see you smile, they smile back. It’s like a reflex. They automatically smile back, and it’s this beautiful, genuine expression of joy.
Seeing joy makes them express joy. I’m like that too.
It’s one of the reasons I really love it here. You can see and transfer joy.
I was driving through some of these really remote little villages where it’s 10, 12 different families that have all grown up together in this area, sometimes for generations.
They all go to the same school, and they all go to the same temple. The moms know the other moms, and the dads know the dads, and the grandpas and the grandmas. That’s this person’s grandma, and that’s this person’s uncle. Everybody knows each other.
They spend all of their time together, and people are in ceremony constantly.
Their life is a ceremony.
They’re just around each other and supporting one another and doing things in community, like as a unit.
It’s so beautiful seeing how loved these people are and how loved they feel.
I know that’s a strange thing to say, but it’s something that I can feel. My hypersensitive way of taking in the world.
I choose to live here because the energy these people give off is… I don’t feel fear on them at all.
They all feel safe. They are secure. Their needs are met. They have all their basic needs met, and they don’t want. You don’t see jealousy or anger or reactions towards each other or judgments.
It’s like they’re all in this together.
This is such a beautiful thing to experience and to witness and to be around.
And of course, no one is perfect, and things happen behind doors. That is for sure. But the energy of these people says a lot to me.
Life is just so much more simple.
I think that’s the thing I want to touch on, that their life just revolves around the same things: family and ritual and ceremony and celebrating life.
That’s why they’re having ceremonies all the time.
It’s a birth ceremony or a three-month-old ceremony. That’s when they celebrate the child’s first birthday, or it’s like an anniversary of the welcoming of their soul, something like that at three months. I should look into that.
And then as you go up, there’s all these rites of passage, and there’s funerals, and there’s different moon cycles that they celebrate.
So you’re just hearing the gamelan, the xylophones that they play. You can hear it in the distance all the time.
They are constantly in devotion and chanting, and they really believe in this natural world.
They know that they’re a part of Bali, the Island of the Gods. They know what they’re sitting on, and it’s so precious to them.
It’s something that they share very openly with people: the land, the spirit, their customs, their understanding.
They’re so open to sharing all this with you because they genuinely… I’m looking for the right word. There’s a right word for this.
They feel so blessed to be from this place.
It’s like an honor for them to have such a sacred, powerful, spiritual place where they can be spiritual beings.
Indonesia is not like this everywhere. In comparison to a lot of Indonesia that is Muslim culture, this is Hindu and Buddhism here.
They’ve preserved a spirituality and a village life that is from old times.
I’m living in a village that existed this way for a long time, with their cycles and their rituals.
Their life is so much more simple than ours, just in terms of their day-to-day mental load. Mental load! I’ve got to make a few jokes there.
But I’m just grateful to express my love for Bali because I was really beaming today on my ride.
I was really moved because I didn’t grow up with belonging and community and feelings of safety, and having people to turn to that you just run up to and smile.
Everywhere I go here, children are running around laughing. You don’t hear crying. You don’t hear fighting.
I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating from my own observations.
Children are running around with kites and laughing and fishing and playing outside. These are small kids.
The phones are here, definitely here, but there is a sense of freedom and safety and playfulness.
They get to be kids.
They get to be kids. That stage of life is honored here, and it’s beautiful.
Just witnessing it, this is something I’m so grateful for as a highly sensitive being.
It can be such a challenging, painful, difficult thing, but also I can feel stuff like this, where I can drive down a village road and look at all the people that I go past and feel their energy and get a sense of who and where they are.
It’s so beautiful.
I get to experience the sense of belonging that they have.
Of course, here I am saying I know what it’s like to be an Indonesian. That’s not at all what I mean to say.
What I mean to say is that I get to have a lived experience in their world, and I’m so grateful for the privilege of being a guest here.
They’re so welcoming.
I’m traveling down these roads and driving through villages, and they’re waving and they’re smiling. They’re welcoming me here.
That’s something that makes me so grateful to be in this spiritual, sacred place that they value and take care of so well.
I’m so aware that I get to be a guest here.
These people are really, truly kind, caring people who want to share what they have, which is an abundance of love and kindness and karma.
And karma, really. They really believe that you do the right thing and you follow the rules, so to speak.
All right, well, that’s not what I thought I was going to talk about. I feel like I’m going to say that every time.
But it does feel really moving to be in a place like this.
Sometimes I do get moved and realize my true privilege of being able to choose to live here and to have a base where I can devote myself to a couple of years of building my business.
This would not be possible if I wasn’t able to go somewhere that I can afford to do this.
I literally can’t afford to go home.
I never realized this when I left in 2018. It was like, I need to save my life and get the fuck out of here.
It was never like, I’m never coming back. I hadn’t planned that far into the future and never really thought about whether I would come back or not.
I just assumed Canada was home.
And then my whole fucking life changed in a way that made me realize, oh, I don’t know where my home is.
And I can’t afford to go back to the place that I left. I can’t afford to live in that system.
My system personally, my unique nervous system and my brain, cannot keep up with the hustle culture that has been built where I am from.
And so I have had to make accommodations for my own survival, my own safety, for my own well-being.
That has consisted of being able to come to this side of the world.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia, and it has afforded me survival, literally.
The only way I’ve been able to survive and get through healing, this has been an eight-year healing journey. That takes up so much of your life.
It feels impossible to work and maintain business, or maintain business hours, when your whole fucking world is falling apart and you’re picking up all your pieces and doing the inner work.
And the time in integration takes time.
The only reason I was able to do that was because I was able to live in a country where my overhead was super low, my rent was low, my expenses.
I’m able to live minimally because I’ve spent my whole life pinching pennies.
I’ve always lived paycheck to paycheck. This is my hustle. This is easy for me.
I’m now 42 years old and still living the same way that I’ve always lived, which is, look how low I can make my expenses!
I’m so proud of only having, like, $1,200 in expenses. That’s my live-a-good-life, get-by.
I could have been eating very well and going to do more.
There is a motorbike out there driving me crazy.
Go!
It’s when they sit and rev and rev, my body just revs up, and I can feel the anxiety mounting. It just builds and builds.
They have no idea, obviously, that they’re doing this to me.
They’re not doing it to me, but the experience that my body is having is that this anxiety is happening because of the mounting tension of the motor.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk about sensitivity.
I’m in my bath, and that is a motorbike on a path that’s, I’m going to call it a stone’s throw, because I’ve got a good arm and I could throw that far, but it’s about that far.
I just feel this vibration in my chest, and my whole alert system goes off.
It’s just like, nope. I am not consenting to this vibration, this frequency in my chest. Turn it off. I want it off now.
And then I have to reason with my brain and be like, well, I can’t turn it off. It’s over there. It’s not me. It’s out of my control. You need to calm down. We’re going to be okay. We’re not dying.
But my brain’s like, nah, nah. We’re dying. Panic, panic, panic. I have to get out of here.
Sometimes I have real meltdowns.
We can talk about this. I’m very open to talking about this because I really want to normalize this stuff for people.
Our systems are just so unique, and they need to express energy and move energy sometimes.
So with this disability, literally, I’m going to call it a disability because that’s how I experience it, I am not able to live normal, quote-unquote, day-to-day experiences.
Because of this ability to feel sound in my body, essentially what’s happening is that I am vibrating at a frequency where I can feel other things in that frequency.
That’s what’s coming through as an explanation.
I don’t know if that’s truly how to explain it, but it feels like when a motor…
So, kryptonite for JGB: motorbike motors.
Especially when they fuck with the motors and purposefully make them deep rumbles. The pitch really matters because it’s either sharp, I feel it, or it’s like a guttural shaking.
Sometimes I feel it in my teeth, in the back, like the bone-teeth-shake feeling.
Like nails on a chalkboard. That can happen from motorbike motors. Chainsaws are my fucking nemesis.
Whether it’s wood, ceramic is the worst, that pitch, the high… It’s everywhere here.
I literally duck, cover my ears, and run, and people think that I’m insane, and that’s okay. I’ve gotten used to this now.
But that pitch is just way too much for me to handle. And then there’s whipper snippers.
Every time I say something about them, I think that’s what they call them in Australia, and it just stuck for me.
But you know, the weed whackers is what we call them in Canada.
Whipper snipper. That was a bad Australian.
Whipper snipper. Whipper snipper.
Okay, weed whackers. All of these things, I feel it in my body, and it just causes my PTSD. Essentially, there’s a mix of things happening.
There’s autism, high sensory. There’s hyperacusis.
I actually have a condition which means that I hear 10 times, let’s say, more than the average person. I’m taking in too much sound.
That only developed in the last two years.
I have a hypothesis of how that might have happened, but I really don’t know. That’s a story for another time. If you want to hear it, let me know.
So autism, sensory, hyperacusis, and PTSD.
Because the experience of sound is so intense for me, for my system, for my body, for this fucking meat suit, this highly sensitive meat suit.
Or what did he call it? An astronaut suit? Ram Dass.
Anyway.
My brain gets tripped. The wire is tripped.
And this is developmental trauma, that my brain has developed in such a way that the amygdala, the threat response detection system, gets triggered, gets set off by this rumbling.
This sound that my body is experiencing is too much.
And then my brain convinces me that something that isn’t happening is happening.
It just dysregulates me and burns up all my energy.
I can’t access language sometimes. Sometimes I… a lot of things can happen.
I don’t need to go down that path right now.
But it’s a lot, my friends.
Whew! This life.
But now that I understand these pieces, it’s so much easier for me to maneuver through things.
And for me to give myself grace and to be like, whoa, okay, today was a day where we experienced severe dysregulation.
That’s okay. Every day is a new day.
I didn’t do anything wrong. Is that my fault?
All I can do is just keep moving forward with awareness that I have to protect myself and take care of my needs.
But it’s going to happen that we’re going to get tripped up and we’re going to get challenged, and we can move through it.
That’s what I’m learning, is just to be with it.
And there are times where that’s impossible. Virtually impossible.
Window of tolerance. I have zero tolerance, and I can’t.
And then there’s other times where I’m like I am right now, and I’m in alignment, and I’m grounded.
I’ve spent literally a week in this cabin without any interference.
Even just that motorbike that just happened, that rarely happens here. I’m very blessed.
I’m so regulated, probably more regulated than I’ve been in a long time, because I wasn’t able to go out because of the gas catastrophe.
And so I’m in such a good place.
Now I can go out into the world, and I can have experiences, and I can make the most of it.
But then I’ve got to retreat and come back and ground and process and release and reset.
That’s my reality, and I accept it as it is.
Because there’s so much I love about it.
I’m really grateful for everything I have access to.
I’ve been tripping on this thing lately where I can’t believe that I’m able to experience life the way that I do.
Understanding autism has helped me to understand that I am taking in so much data.
But my experience of human life, the sounds are louder, the colors are brighter, the senses are working at level 10, maxed out.
It’s like when I’m grounded and taking in all the sensory data and feeling safe and aligned, and my energy is just moving cleanly through me, holy fuck.
I can think so clearly.
My brain can move between things really fast. I can process multiple things at the same time. I can think 10 steps ahead.
I can be in like three places at once in my inner world.
I’m literally having those experiences. I’m not picturing things. I’m not like a voice in my head.
I’m there. My senses come alive. It’s like a smell will take me to a place. I can also take myself to a place that I created in my mind, and that’s a sensory place.
I’m a sentient being.
That’s my gift, and that’s the suit that I have, the armor or the superpowers that I have, these crazy high-sensory superpowers.
We’re taking in way too much. But also, it’s fucking amazing what I’m able to do when I’m in alignment.
When I’m not trying to fit myself into a box that isn’t made for me, I’m capable of so much. But capable of totally different things.
This is the kind of stuff I want to unpack and explore because I really do believe that we are here with these abilities because this is needed.
Forget the whole rest of the world. We need it. You need it. I need it.
We’re all at this place in Earth’s timeline where there’s so much shifting and changing happening.
We’ve had centuries before us that have never dealt with this level of awareness and connection and demand and fast pace. And now adaptation. Fucking A, it’s a lot. Many of us are cycle breakers here.
We’ve lived through a lot of fucking shit, and we’ve come out the other side. We have this opportunity to look at this stuff now.
I think we’re armed with these intense sensory capacities and abilities, and perceptive abilities, that haven’t been present as much before.
There’s more of it now. We’re all fucking walking each other home. We’re all trying to help one another do what we’re here to do, which to me is elevating our energy.
We’re here to help shift and change this place that has so many complex things happening in the time and space that we’re experiencing it.
And in order to survive this world, this life, we’ve got to fucking ground ourselves, and we’ve got to meet ourselves where we’re at.
We have that freedom, and we have so much knowledge and power in numbers.
My people. I want community so badly because when I spend time with my people, I realize how powerful we are. We have been squashed down and made out to be lesser and weaker and incapable and disabled.
That’s why I have trouble with using that word, but there are certain contexts where I feel I personally choose to use it. But we’re here. We’re waking up.
And as we start to peel away these layers that told us there was something wrong with us our whole lives, as we start to realize, what the fuck?
I’m actually really smart. I’m actually way more capable than I ever gave myself credit for. Oh my gosh, that experience for me has changed the game.
I really never knew that I was smart. I never knew that I had unique abilities.
I was so much, and everything was so intense, and everyone was constantly telling me, not like that. Don’t do that. That’s bad. You can’t be like that.
I didn’t know how to be. And I’m like, oh, I’m just really intense. I get it, people. I know it’s a lot.
Do you know how hard it is to be like this?
This has been a journey of acceptance. I’m just a lot. I feel really intensely. But you know what the beauty of that is?
I have dealt with the depths of darkness in life.
I have been dragged through so many things at such an intensely lived experience that I can really relate with life in the world now.
I really have a depth and a wide breadth of experience, of lived experience, of emotional experience, that now allows me to relate to others because there is so much intensity in the world.
There are so many emotions that are not spoken about.
This is another thing about being autistic, because I can see things that most people can’t see about themselves.
The way they express themselves, what they’re carrying, their emotions, their projections.
I’ve always been able to see this.
I didn’t understand that other people couldn’t.
I call that truth.
A truth is very obvious, and neurotypical people don’t speak to it.
This has taken me a long time to understand, that this is just a part of who I am, being able to see through all the bullshit.
And that’s one of our skills, friends.
It’s a tough one.
Okay, it’s been great processing with you.
It’s time. 7 p.m.
I’m going to go cook my veggies and tuna with the rice I made, and watch some stories.
Okay. Bye!