Most of us know what home feels like, even when we struggle to describe it. Your shoulders drop. Your breath lengthens. You can stop watching the door.
For some people, that feeling arrives with the first chord of a certain song. The room around them softens at the edges. They are still in the car, or the kitchen, or the dark of a theatre, and they are also somewhere they belong: inside the swell of the strings, inside the character’s held breath before the high note, inside a feeling that has been given walls and weather and a floor to stand on.
For many neurocomplex adults, music and musicals may be one of the few places that reliably offer this. By neurocomplex, I mean people whose minds work in layered, intensely felt, often overlapping ways: autistic, ADHD, gifted, highly sensitive, shaped by trauma, or several of these at once. For minds like these, music can be a space roomy enough to hold everything they are, all at once, with nothing left at the door.
Living away from home
Much of a neurocomplex adult’s day is spent in rooms built for someone else.
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