Rock On! 🤘🏻

The recital is about to start so I put my earplugs in…

Now, before you think I’m just a super rude audience member, this is a drum recital – and it’s about to get really loud. The ear plugs are for hearing protection, and my apple watch validates my choice just a couple of minutes later when it notifies me,

“Sound higher than 90 decibels! More than 30 mins at this level can cause permanent hearing damage!”

Just over 2 years ago, my oldest daughter came to me and said,

“Mom, I want to learn to play the drums”

This was a huge surprise because my daughter has sensory processing disorder and loud noises are one of her biggest triggers… and here she is asking me if she can learn to play the loudest instrument possible.

So, even though I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, I agreed and found her a great teacher.

Here we are 2 years later and I’m watching her rock a Sum 41 song like a pro. And that’s when I realized my daughter is teaching me something about how we can deal with the hard things that life hands to us.

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I’ve been following @raquel_the_capacity_expert on Instagram for a while now (I highly recommend giving her a follow) and I really like how she calls out the ways that we diminish our capacity when we get too protective of ourselves and our stories.

For instance, it could easy for my daughter to say, “I have this condition. It makes life hard. I’m not going to participate in x, y, and z.”

And sometimes, we do have to make those modifications for her. But as I’ve watched my daughter embrace her love of drums, I’m seeing how she took something that could be considered a weakness and has turned into one of her greatest strengths.

You see, it can be really easy to box ourselves in by defining ourselves through the label of a diagnosis. When we do, we can use the struggles of that diagnosis to become the things that define us.  

As I’ve worked with my mentor, Meg Wheatley, she called me out on this type of language and behavior a lot.  Literally, one time I casually said, “I never thought I’d be a yoga person” and she didn’t even let me finish the thought because she didn’t want me to let myself think of myself as any one type of person. She reminded me often that we should try to keep how we define ourselves open to future potential.

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But how do we balance this philosophy with the fact that we will also be given things in life that limit us?

I’m watching my daughter do this and I’m learning from her every day. Sometimes, her sensory processing disorder (SPD) wipes her out. I can’t ignore that, and I don’t want to invalidate it. And yet, if I tried to protect her from everything that might trigger her SPD, then I would never have let her try the drums.

Additionally, I’ve watched her natural ear for rhythm, pacing, and timbre become assets to her drum playing abilities and she has been able to use this to skill up much faster than someone else her age. These are things that her overly sensitive ears pick up on in day-to-day life and she has been able to take control of the strengths within her “weakness” and use it to literally create music.

I’m grateful for the opportunity I have to witness this young woman grow up. And I’m hoping that I too can look at the struggles that life has given me and find the strengths that are gifted within those moments that I cannot get in any other way.

Thank you for reading with me today. I hope you find some music in the chaos of this week.