A ramble. Facing the voice. Speech expression in the context of neurodiversity.
Notes on the current film project and a continued diary of small events of thought.
Melisa and lemon verbena
Something is keeping me jittery this week. I am having my second melisa today.
I have to keep moving, and jumping from task to task. Apply for jobs, look for opportunities, tick boxes, watch a film in selection process, read an article, take notes, tick off, search something up, throw myself onto the floor and exercise.
Melisa is lemon balm tea, widely used in Poland for stress relief and as a sleeping aid. The more I read about rest, the more I’m realising that I have never been good at relaxing. I have to keep doing something, anything. Moving any part of my body. Unwinding is not a word in my vocabulary. Is it because I unconsciously feel that relaxation is a waste of time? Is there guilt involved? I love sleeping. It’s just that when I’m awake, I feel physically and mentally compelled to be doing something.
I used to meditate but lately I have been unable to do even that.
Usually I drink lemon verbena but I’ve run out. Massive bag, from Indigo Herbs, I remember when I met Sam and he told me he knows Glastonbury, where this company is based. It feels like an age ago. Now I climbed the Tor a few times, and saw the bunnies that live in the grass on the way to the top. I smelled the intense incense of all the esoteric bookshops and hippie stalls. I have even been to the festival itself, having bought a ticket with a spring of luck in a resale after the covid-caused gap, bordering on impossibility. At least I believe it must have been, I never really found out how many tickets there were for resale. It felt like I managed to get the only one. Other people are sometimes impressed with my luck. I continue to find four-leaf clovers. Looking forward to the spiring, I prepare myself for the May-June clover season. I dry them between random pages of my notebooks, without keeping track. Someone once mentioned an artist that makes works with four-leaf clovers. There is surely meaning and potential in my habitual findings, but for the moment I like just folding my pages around them, leaving them for rediscovery at some point in the future, when I will be searching for some words, feelings and ideas verging on oblivion, hoping to recover the past from my journals.
The one thing I didn’t like about Paul Broks’ book, The Darker the Night, The Brighter The Stars, is that he despised Glastonbury town. I logically understand his motives, but I thought we’ve become friends over the course of my reading of his book (never met the man), so I think I am allowed to be a bit outraged. I personally love the smell of incense and books on witchcraft and consciousness, sunshine and candlelight reflected in crystals and mirrors. There is a type of intensity of perceptual experience, such as offered to me by glittering objects, swirling light, and strong smells, that engage me enough to become absorbed - absorption is my form of relaxation. Where I can finally stop doing, and I can just be.
Ramble (verb)
To wander around in a leisurely, aimless manner.
To take a course with many turns or windings, as a stream or path.
To follow an irregularly winding course of motion or growth.
This was meant to be a PhD diary, and the goal remains, yet it seems the frequency of weekly writing is what contributes to my inability to stick to one subject. My mind wanders and in weeks which I am not so intensely immersed in my project work, I drift. In a way, I am continuously engaged in my project. Each thing I read, every thing I watch - I draw impulses of light from each interaction with fragments, connecting to my ideas rolling around in my unconscious. But this is also my training in regular writing and publishing (posting), however uninteresting my personal mental adventures are to the potential reader. Uninteresting? Because I hold back. I retreat. I spend days without any access to my feelings, and then read Amy Liptrot’s book in a day and cry for her experiences and her poetry.
I am having my next supervisory meeting next week, and I realise how much I need feedback and comments to re-trigger a re-evaluation. What the next steps will be? Editing of the film has gotten to a point in which I couldn’t get through longer than a few minutes of the material, because my voice was driving me angry. (Sometimes it seems like it would have been more appropriate to use words like mad or insane because that’s the phrase used in English a lot, but I am catching myself being really precise about which words I choose to use. Madness and insanity are not accurate descriptions of confusion and anger, or anything in fact. They are easy to throw around in a conversation because everyone does, but in fact carry a political significance relating to mental health - only now I notice that I intentionally, although thus far unconsciously, avoid using them. How interesting to notice how much of personal values and ethical allegiances are expressed in the choices made in the use of language. On one hand, I was aware of this as a fact, on the other - not in my own way of expression.)
So, the film is a challenge. I muted all speech and watched the edit of the images and background sound design. It turns out to be interesting enough to stand on its own, without the writing. Or am I just so relieved not to hear those voices, the sounds of me at different points of the process, reading through the continuously changing script? I made an experiment in which I just stared talking and recording it, as if I was free writing. I rambled. I can ramble on page as well. But in the notebook, I can cross things off, and on the laptop I can keep changing things as much as I please. Rambling on in a voice recording is different. Even though I can edit it any way I like, it has this different quality of capturing a moment, which cannot be fragmented, erased, deleted with the same ease and without trace that the letters in a word document can. There seems to be another type of vulnerability in the voice recording.
Facing the voice
notes on the current film project
There is something about the monotone/AI-like version of my monologue which feels obtuse and annoying, like the voice of someone stubbornly avoiding the expression of feeling and passion. I have been becoming equally irritated when listening to recordings of my voice filled with urgency, as if ashamed of feeling strongly about something. I think this conflict with voice recordings is a reflection of a disagreement within me. I desperately want to avoid revealing myself fully, in fear of judgement. I notice that I am afraid.
Both slow, monotone and intensely expressive ways of speaking are natural to me, used interchangeably. But I am so used to adjusting my tone of voice to match the other people’s in the conversation, as too many times I received comments on the extremities of my voice. I want to believe I can control and operate the “display” of myself accurately for the situation.
When recording voice, reading from my diaries out loud, I am laying my speech bare. I don’t have any audience, to whom I could adjust the tone. I get annoyed because I am coming up with varieties of my voice that are unattached, lost, exposed.
When performing in front of an audience, whether on actual stage or in casual conversation, I have a better sense of what I “should” sound like. These voices produced for the film are made in a void - or so it would seem - where I struggle to read it all out just to myself.
The essence is written - I scribbled those words in the pages of my diary between May 2022 and January 2023. This was my voice of choice - silent. And now I am attempting to embody the written word, without the immediate context of an audience. I have not performed on stage for a long time, but when I started doing some lectures and seminars, a sort of familiarity washed over me - although lectures feel much more improvised and interactive than performing poetry. Perhaps there is always the need within me to reclaim my voice by live performance. This gives me an idea - what if I performed the text live in a screening, instead of holding on to the recordings? A psychedelic (mind-revealing) experience, different each time the film is shown.
These intensified relationships to voice, difficulties with regulation of speech, which result in being misinterpreted, misunderstood, misjudged, have always been a part of my life. I wonder if I would ever had found an explanation that not only allows for a deeper comprehension, but offers a sense that I am not alone, if I had not discovered that I am autistic. I kept using the word explanation when looking at my life through the lens of autism, but I now think that it is all not so much an explanation as a validation of the sense of otherness. A confirmation that my experiences, which seemed so fundamentally different to those of most people I knew, are indeed a comprehensible part of who I am, not symptoms of mental disturbances that could be changed if only I had a stronger will and desire to be “normal”. There were times when I was so far stretched into willing myself into being more like what’s widely acceptable and expected that I was losing any sense of being, and never did it seem to bear any result. I felt unfixable.
Neurodiversity is a word that describes one the most beautiful, empowering, human, loving concepts I have ever come across, in not only that it allows me to understand and embrace myself, but that it expands the empathy and extends the love to human differences beyond the constant evaluation of traits and behaviours which propels the world we are living in. It is, to me, a radical psychological, ecological, political, spiritual approach, advocating for the right to be. To express as individuals, to contribute to communities, to live in the human society and its place within the more-than-human ecology.
While I can get a little carried away with expression without contextualisation, it doesn’t really matter, because, who really reads all of it anyway. But in case someone does, I’d like to share some references to writers who allowed me to understand the terms in the neurodiversity paradigm early in my research:
Dr Nick Walker: https://neuroqueer.com/neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/
Sonia Boué: https://soniaboue.wordpress.com
I am feeling a bit calmer today than when I started writing this on Thursday. Melisa offered sleepiness, as distinct from relaxation, but reflecting on ways to approach the voice in my film has made me feel like I made another step in the process. A successful start to this grey and quiet Sunday, still before breakfast.