In the Stillness of Chaos preview: Ode to a meltdown
It’s a quiet Saturday morning, and I find myself once again at my desk, writing the week’s content. As always, writing serves as a form of therapy, a way to process the events that feel too heavy to carry without releasing them into words. The following words are no different—perhaps more necessary than ever. After a particularly stressful eight weeks, I’ve found myself in recovery mode, sifting through the debris of yet another meltdown. The time it takes to pull myself back together, to reconcile the energy expended just to function, feels like time wasted in a world that demands so much of us without care for our well-being.
In my book, Holistic Language Instruction, I discuss how essential mentor texts are for gestalt language processors like me. We gather meaning from the whole, pulling in what we need from the structures around us, often finding clarity in the voices of others. For me, one of those guiding voices has been Ursula K. Le Guin. Her works, particularly her poetry, have been both a refuge and a tool. Through her words, I’ve learned not just to see the world differently but to write in ways that allow me to reconcile my own experiences with it. Today’s poem is an attempt to do just that: to find peace in the aftermath, to reclaim the time I feel I’ve lost as I work through the consequences of living in a world not made for people like me.
“Ode to a Meltdown” is an offering to myself, a way to acknowledge the unseen toll these moments take and to remember that in the unraveling, I am not broken—just healing, piece by piece.
This poem is part of my new collection of poetry, In the Stillness of Chaos, available now.
Ode to a meltdown
The world presses down,
but I’ve learned to hold.
Not in the moment,
no sudden flares of panic.
I am the dammed river,
waiting for the quiet
of safe shores.
I measure the cost—
a weekend lost to silence,
a heart heavy with echoes
of moments stored away.
What others shrug off in passing,
I bear in the marrow,
fingers tight on invisible threads
until time grants me permission to fray.
This is my tax—
the toll for surviving a landscape
not carved with me in mind,
where every word is jagged,
every glance a question
I must pay in pieces of myself.
And when I unravel,
it is not rage but release,
a slow breath drawn from the depths,
too long buried,
too long ignored.
I spill, not to punish,
but to find peace
in the ruins of my held-back flood.
Dystopia is not some far-off place.
It lives in the hum of lights too bright,
the walls that press too close,
the voices too loud,
in a world made of stone
when I am crafted of air.
But I gather,
I wait,
and in the waiting,
there is something sacred:
the stillness before the storm,
the knowing that, in my undoing,
I am whole.
Final thoughts …
As I reflect on the exhaustion that follows yet another meltdown, one memory keeps bouncing around in my head: Mr. Weisman, my high school counsellor, stopping me in the hall just days before graduation. His words, delivered with the weight of a final judgment, still sting after all these years: “You shouldn’t be graduating. You’re a disappointment. You’ll never amount to anything.” It was the late 80s, a time when neurodivergence wasn’t understood, let alone recognised. Back then, I was just the weird kid—different, but with no framework to explain why. There was no place for someone like me in a world that only knew how to shape one kind of mind.
Mr. Weisman wasn’t just speaking for himself. He was an agent of the system that maleducated me, that denied the existence of gestalt processors like me, a system that allowed me to graduate functionally illiterate. His judgment was a reflection of a world that couldn’t see beyond its own limitations, and he spoke it with the authority of someone who believed it was final. Today, I don’t feel anger towards that weak, small man who didn’t care to understand why I couldn’t thrive in a system not made for me. I’m sad. But it’s not him I mourn for.
Like Agent Smith from The Matrix, Mr. Weisman lives on in the system. A system that still hasn’t learned, a system that still fights to maintain the status quo. And now, here I am, working within that same system, trying to change it from the inside. It’s no wonder the last eight weeks have felt like a war—a battle against a system determined to resist transformation. The weight of that resistance is what led me here, to this weekend’s massive meltdown. But even now, as I recover, I hold onto the belief that change is possible. It has to be.