Hyper-vigilance, Childhood Dreams, Chaos and Compliments

Most people don’t know this… because I’ve held it quietly, almost protectively… but I am in college now. I’ve just begun a new chapter at Salt Lake community college, working toward an AAS in Commercial Music with an emphasis on Performance. For me, this isn’t just coursework… it is the slow, steady unfolding of a dream that has been stitched into my soul since childhood. Oh I’m stressed and crying frequently … but I’m excited… My classes will immerse me in songwriting, music theory, sight-singing, education on artist management and promotion, even the craft of creating jingles and scoring for commercials, and eventually an internship that will place me directly in the living current of the music world.

This dream has been with me since I was ten years old. I can still see myself running around, dancing or sitting on the floor, leaning close to my father’s old computer speakers… the kind attached by tangled cords to a worn desktop… 

(… don’t judge me, if you got beef, take it up with whatever God you serve or think you serve lol…

Anyway… I grew up with a predominantly white family, I was born with one of the darkest skin colors, but everyone else was whiter than me- that’s a whole other essay that I actually wrote…. Growing up a darker skin color and being merely 25% Mexican raised by whiteys was weird, disassociative and yet chaotically memorable for its own reasons for me and others towards me.

Also I in public settings, I was too dark to be considered white and too light to be accepted as Mexican… I was born in the middle…)

…while voices of Joan Baez, P!nk, Taylor Swift, Selena Quintanilla, Jewel, Enya, Rich Mullins, and Bruce Springsteen filled the room… Their music wasn’t just sound… it was something sacred. Their voices carried rebellion and tenderness, sorrow and radiance, fragility and fierce conviction. To me, they embodied what it meant to live wide open… unafraid, deeply human, able to transform pain into art and art into hope.

I remember daydreaming then, aching with a child’s impossible hunger to someday be like them… not in fame or grandeur (that’s never been my main fascination of such a life) but in spirit. I longed to carry a heart as fearless, as pure, as unyieldingly hopeful and able to GIVE as much as theirs. I wanted to believe, like they seemed to believe, that music could be both truth and refuge, both question and answer.

Around 10, I began writing songs of my own. They were unpolished, fragile things… poetry… scribbled in notebooks … but they were mine. And once the first one existed, I never stopped. To this day, I carry the same conviction… that my stories matter. Not only because they belong to me, but because they are woven from what I have seen and lived… the fleeting beauty of a stranger’s kindness, the ache of loss, the unexpected brilliance of ordinary days. Beauty that is luminous, beauty that is sorrowful, beauty that lives in the fragile space between the two.

For me, writing and singing have never been hobbies. They are the marrow of my being, the steady pulse beneath everything else. They have been anchor and compass, solace and rebellion. They have carried me through silences, through grief, through joy too sharp to contain. They are not something I do… they are who I am, and who I will continue to be.

And so, stepping into college now is not just about education… it is about finally tending to the dream that has been alive in me for nearly 2 decades. It is about honoring the child I was, the artist I have always been, and the truth that music is not just something I create, but the truest language of my soul.

… this originally started as a text to my mom, but I decided to turn into an actual essay, simply because it would’ve been too long for her to read, and that would be so unkind of me to expect from her in a text.

So enjoy another text-to-mom-turned-into-an-essay:

I’ve been writing back and forth with my academic advisor quite a bit lately. Just this morning, as I was reading something she had written to me, I suddenly realized tears were streaming down my face. At first, I couldn’t understand why. I had to stop, sit still, and let myself sink into the moment until the reason became clearer. Then I remembered that earlier, while standing in the shower, I had been turning over a thought in my head… a thought that shook me once I put it into words.

The realization was this: when I lived with you, yes, I was emotional, I had outbursts, I struggled with behaviors that were “too big.” But what I see now, with new clarity, is that those explosions, those meltdowns (very likely autistic meltdowns) weren’t random flaws in me. They were the desperate language of a nervous system that had only ever known anger, hostility, and dismissal from the people who were supposed to raise and guide me. My father, my grandmother, my aunt, the bullies at school, even doctors and therapists… so many of them carried sharpness in their tone, impatience in their presence, and a refusal to hear me when I tried to speak of struggles.

My brain, my body, my very sense of self were shaped in that constant storm. So when I finally began living in a space where kindness was possible, where someone might actually listen instead of dismiss, my entire system didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t prepared for gentleness. I wasn’t used to safety. Instead of resting in it, I became hypervigilant. Always scanning, always bracing, always waiting for the trap I was certain had to be hidden beneath the softness.

This hypervigilance is so ingrained that I even wrote this line earlier today:

“If I’m not hypervigilant, I feel more likely to be harmed… because my guard slips, my awareness narrows, and danger might slip through the cracks. From what I read, trauma wires the brain this way… the amygdala misfires, flooding the body with constant alerts. I don’t see EVERYTHING, my hyper-vigilance wants me to, just in-case… however, I DO see too  much… I see a lot of it even the possibility of it, daily, every glance, shift, silence, imagined threat. It’s exhausting, yet protective, like living with a smoke alarm that never quiets. To relax feels unsafe… to rest feels like inviting harm.”

That’s been my survival strategy my entire life… scanning too much, feeling too much, preparing too much. Expecting bad things to happen has been the only rhythm I know, and because it’s the rhythm I’ve lived by, sometimes I wonder if I’ve created my own misfortunes just by being so certain they were inevitable. If manifestation (not necessarily like THE SECRET but whatever helps you understand me) has any truth to it, maybe my constant readiness for disaster has kept me tethered to it.

Not going to college earlier is one of those disasters I’ve blamed myself for. 

However I am now, and participating in ballet as well! I’m excited about that the most.

My journey with ballet, particularly as an adult, has become a pivotal part of understanding and navigating my experience as a high-masking autistic woman (still in the process of finding out) The studio, with its mirrors and predictable structure, offers a unique kind of clarity that is both physically and emotionally therapeutic. The constant, repetitive movements at the barre and the familiar rhythms of the music create a grounding environment where my sensory system can regulate itself without the constant need to process unpredictable social cues and external noise. For someone who has spent a lifetime observing and mimicking, the defined rules and precise movements of ballet feel like a relief. They provide a blueprint for my body to follow, helping me develop a more intuitive and less anxious connection with my physical self.

This improved body awareness has been instrumental in reducing the energy I spend on masking. Instead of constantly monitoring my facial expressions and posture to appear neurotypical, I am focused on my alignment and technique. The art form itself encourages a level of non-verbal communication that is fluid and expressive, allowing me to convey emotion through movement rather than words. This creative outlet is a safe space where I can express the things I have often felt unable to articulate. The discipline and focus of ballet have also become a source of strength, teaching me that my attention to detail is a powerful asset in the studio rather than a quirk to be hidden away.

Ultimately, ballet has become a sanctuary where my mind and body can work in harmony. It has helped me to feel less disconnected and more at home in my own skin, which is a profound and welcome feeling. This practice has not only improved my physical coordination but has also provided me with a sense of calm and self-acceptance that I didn't realize I was missing a lot of. 

But the hyper-vigilance is still there. And that’s not something one semester, 1 class a week, of ballet, can erase.

Back to when I mentioned college,

I thought avoiding college was going to protect me somehow, that stepping away would make my life easier. But it did the opposite. Now, everything is harder. I tell myself I “should’ve started when I was younger, especially with community college, or volunteering, that it’s all my fault”… And in some ways maybe it is. But what makes it complicated is that I still can’t tell when I’m pushing myself in the right ways or when I’m pushing myself past the breaking point. I can’t always tell whose approval I actually need and whose opinion I should let go of. My hyper-awareness clouds everything… it has wrecked my sleep, ruined my ability to trust, and yet at the same time, it has sharpened me.

Because of it, I analyze everything. I have analyzed my life so thoroughly… every loss, every failure, every difficult moment… that I’ve found layers of meaning others might never see. Sometimes that analysis is a gift.

Sometimes it’s a curse. My patriarchal blessing tells me I have the gift of discernment and that I’m highly intuitive … and the greatest thing I’ll be is a mother… I won’t deny that but I don’t feel I’ve hit that point of being discerning, intuitive or motherly enough. I’m almost 30, I’m still young, that’s a fact, I have time… I’m still a nervous wreck at 30% of my life, and that’s not scary… IF I live to 100%. Therefore I’m always terrified of not fitting enough joy, brightness and people in my days, yet often I’m terrified of attempting to!!

My body, my whole being, is conditioned to a very specific kind of chaos. And maybe, in some strange way, I’ve been recreating that chaos unconsciously, over and over, because it’s the only environment I know how to exist within. I could be wrong about that… but it makes sense to me.

This is why compliments are so complicated. When someone praises me, no matter who it is, my first instinct is suspicion. It feels like a trap, like a trick to expose me as arrogant if I dare to accept the kindness. So I retreat to the safer response… self-deprecation. Devalue myself before someone else can do it for me. That reflex has been mine since childhood. And though I want to shed it, I still haven’t figured out how.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve cut people (mainly my family) out of my life recently. Not because I don’t care, but because I never knew who was safe and who wasn’t. I’ve only ever had fleeting glimpses into people’s lives, but never real consistency, never full trust. Everyone hides something. And because of that, I assume too much. I overanalyze until there’s nothing left but suspicion and exhaustion. The result is isolation. No friends. No regular connection with others.

So when people say, “just go with the flow,” I feel the sting of irony. Flow is the hardest thing for me. Hyper-control is what I know, what I cling to, even though it’s destroying me. But I am trying… slowly, painstakingly… to loosen my grip. It won’t happen quickly, but I am moving toward it, even if the progress is invisible from the outside.

What I really want to say is this… mom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being slow at being human. Being a decent adult daughter, I’m sorry that the most basic things… trust, flow, belonging, rest… are things I have to learn deliberately instead of simply embodying them the way others seem to. In the ways the world measures success… through work, through education, through social ease… I have always been behind. But behind doesn’t mean incapable. It means I carry weight others might never see. It means I am working through layers of history, survival, and pain that shaped me long before I had any say in the matter.

And maybe that’s not something to apologize for at all. Maybe it’s simply the truth of who I am and the truth of where I’ve come from.

And yet, despite all of the chaos, despite the scars of hypervigilance and the relentless scrutiny I’ve placed upon myself, there is something profoundly miraculous in the fact that I am here at all. That my heart beats. That my brain fires, sending electricity through itself in a rhythm I can barely begin to comprehend.

That my blood flows through my veins, carrying oxygen, carrying warmth, carrying life itself.

That I am not only existing, but thinking, feeling, imagining, creating. That I can move my body across the floor, across the stage, across a moment in time, and know that it is mine to inhabit. There is a sacredness in the sheer act of being alive that cannot be overstated. Every inhalation, every pulse, every thought is an unfathomable gift. It is a privilege that so many take for granted, or worse, forget entirely. And yet, here I am, aware of it, trembling with gratitude and awe all at once.

To be alive is to witness the world in all its brutal beauty and delicate sorrow. To feel both the weight of suffering and the lightness of joy. To taste the sweetness of a shared laugh, the sting of tears, the warmth of sunlight on skin, the ache of a note struck perfectly in a song. Every moment, no matter how ordinary it seems, is extraordinary because it is happening within this fragile, astonishing vessel I call my body.

The miracle of being alive is that we are allowed to move through time with consciousness, with awareness, with the capacity to witness our own existence and choose how we respond to it. Life itself is a canvas, and we are handed brushstrokes, sometimes rough, sometimes delicate, and told… without instructions… to paint a story that only we can tell.

It is worth stopping, even briefly, to remember the profundity of this. To close one’s eyes and feel the pulse in one’s neck, the quickened beat of the heart, the subtle expansion of lungs filling with air. To recognize the orchestration of systems within systems, the perfection of survival and motion, the electric communication between neurons, the mystery of consciousness, the resilience of flesh and mind combined. To feel alive is to participate in a miracle that began billions of years ago, the continuity of life itself flowing through us, unbroken, intimate, tangible. There is no promise of tomorrow, yet each day we are allowed to continue, to rise, to breathe, to try again… this is the sacred grace we carry, whether we honor it or squander it.

And honoring life does not mean it will be painless or simple. To be alive is to navigate chaos, to confront fear, to encounter loss. But it is also to stumble into beauty, to find awe in a stranger’s kindness, to compose music from heartbreak, to write hope into existence when despair threatens to overwhelm. Life is not a neutral canvas… it is electric, charged with possibility, danger, sorrow, and ecstasy, and the only way to truly participate is to lean in, fully, courageously, even when the body trembles and the mind hesitates. To be alive is to accept the full spectrum of experience and to recognize that every pulse of pain, every spark of joy, every unsteady step forward is a testament to our vitality, to our existence, to the unrepeatable miracle that we are here at all.

I want to remember this, even when hypervigilance coils tight around my chest.

Even when fear whispers that I am not enough or that catastrophe lurks behind every corner. Even when the habit of analyzing, controlling, and doubting my every move tempts me to retreat into isolation. I want to stop and feel the gravity of being alive, to sense the miracle of my own heartbeat, to honor the blood, the breath, the fire that surges through me. I want to marvel at my own capacity to think, to feel, to create, to dream, to love. To see that these are not small things. They are not given lightly. They are everything.

This awareness changes the way I move through the world. It does not erase fear, pain, or the weight of history, but it offers a lens of reverence, a lens that transforms the ordinary into the sacred. It teaches me that each step I take, each song I write, each note I sing, each thought I nurture, is an acknowledgment of this incredible gift. To squander life, to take it for granted, is to miss the point of its brilliance entirely. And to fully inhabit it, to feel every pulse, to embrace both fragility and power, is to honor what has been given and to participate in something greater than oneself.

So I carry this forward now, stepping into the world with cautious courage, with a trembling, alive heart…

with a body that knows both fear and grace.

…I carry the child I once was, trembling with impossible longing, and the adult I am becoming, trembling with possibility. I carry the music that has always lived in me, the dance that grounds me, the words that bear witness.

I carry the miracle of being alive.

And in the midst of chaos, in the swirl of uncertainty, in the stillness of reflection, I allow myself this one unshakable truth: I am alive. I am here. I am permitted, even commanded, to see, to feel, to breathe, to love, to create. And in that, there is infinite beauty, infinite grace, infinite possibility.

I am alive.

You’re alive…

And that alone makes you enough.