The Drama of the Deaf Mother
Musings on the compulsion to write, the longing to be seen, growing up neurodiverse, and the danger of playing "Look, Mom!" all your life.
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more…- Pink Floyd, “Brain Damage”
My mother is almost completely deaf.
Though this might sound insane, I often forget my mother’s deafness. It’s something so ubiquitous it doesn’t register, like the solidity of inhabiting my own body. You know that feeling where you step out of a deep bath, or a swimming pool, and for a moment the heaviness of flesh and bone feels alien and shocking? That’s what it’s like when I notice my mother’s deafness.
It only really happens when we’re out somewhere public, somewhere with lots of layered, complex sounds — a restaurant maybe, or a store. Someone will ask her a question, and she’ll smile and nod warmly but give no response. I repeat what was said in her “good” ear, smiling apologetically at the waitress or the cashier — saving them the awkwardness of having to explain again, and her the shame of being confronted with her limitations.
I am used to functioning as a filter, an extended hearing aid. Those of us who know and love my mother do it unthinkingly, automatically, a dance of little unremarkable moments. We know which side of her to walk on. We make exaggerated movements when we enter a room early in the morning, making sure not to startle her before she puts her hearing aids in for the day. We know the sound of a beer can opening will enrage her as the tearing metal screeches directly into her eardrum, artificially amplified to the roar of a car crash by the tiny microphone. We know (to our collective shame) the fine, bitchy art of saying something under our breath that’s just loud enough for the rest of the family to hear, but not her.
The story of how my mother came to get her hearing aids in the first place, at astronomical expense back when the technology was new, has become amusing family lore. Being the subject of the tale, I find it somewhat less entertaining. In short, her own mother — my granny — came to visit one day, and was watching us together. Me, not quite two, precocious and painfully verbose. Her, cleaning the kitchen, pointedly ignoring my increasingly desperate stream of chatter until — inevitably — I fired up into one of my legendary tantrums, screaming incoherently, writhing and kicking and hitting the floor. Granny sighed.
“Well what did you expect, if you’re going to ignore her for that long?”
“What?”
“Hold on … you can’t hear her, can you?”
“What? God, Mom, stop muttering”
I wish I was making this up.
Songs for the Deaf
So my mother got hearing aids, my tantrums diminished in frequency and intensity (though I remained, as she likes to remind me, an uncommonly difficult child), and all was well in the world.
And yet.
I’ve written before about the link between neurodiversity and creativity, and identified a number of reasons why an ADHD or ASD mind might be one that lends itself well to artistic expression. Innate sensitivity and curiosity are natural strengths in creative conceptualising, and neurodiverse people tend to have both (usually to their detriment in terms of functioning in a neurotypical framework).
But I also wonder about what it is to grow up longing for another mind with the capacity (or willingness) to help you make sense of your own. What that does to you. My own life offers a particularly extreme example, but I also wonder if this experience isn’t something shared with many — perhaps all — who grow up neurodiverse, even if their mothers can hear perfectly well.
You are different, and you don’t have the language to explain how even to yourself. All you have is the experience of difference. To not be heard, known, psychically held, is (to a small mind) to not exist. What I think the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion might have meant when he talked about early psychic breakdown. A sense of “falling forever”.
Perhaps some of us never stop searching for the right words, the magic incantation that will save us from the void, which proves we aren’t mad, or bad, or wrong. Just different.
A lot of us get really good at words.
What’s it all for?
Irvin Yalom, in a collection of tales drawn from his psychotherapy practice, opens his book Momma and the Meaning of Life by recounting a dream. Yalom dreamed he was a child, on a fairground ride, looking for the face of his mother as the ride slowed to a halt. “Momma!” Yalom cried out. “How’d I do?”
Upon waking, Yalom reflected on the dream. With growing dread, he wondered if the dream was the truth of his life, the truth of all our lives. In addition to being a famous author, Yalom was a master psychoanalyst and a respected theorist, who blended psychotherapy with philosophy. He noted how existential threads concerned with death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness permeate the consulting room, threatening to tangle up both therapist and patient as they contend with what it is to be alive and human in the world. What he achieved, who he became, adds up to something extraordinary in any system of accounting (whether you agree with his ideas or not).
What if all of it — all of it — was only ever about longing to be noticed, to be understood, to be loved? How many of us late-diagnosed neurodivergents know this ache intimately, more powerfully (I believe) than most?
How many of us — perhaps all of us — have been shaped around it, in ways we barely notice unless something pokes at the site of the wound?
How many of us would be here on Substack had things been different around our difference?
Neurodiverse Writers: A Saturated Space
I’ve become painfully aware recently of just how many neurodiverse writers there are out there. That I am part of what’s known in marketing-speak as a “saturated space”. The algorithm dutifully collects the works and wisdom of my fellows, like wildflowers in a field, and deposits them on my porch.
It feels like each day I find it harder to push open the door.
I’m afraid of what I might carelessly crush or miss, what withers in the growing pile. But also what might sting or stain me, and the simple fact that I have no place to put it all, no time to sort it. It simply gathers, and I add my own to it. I find myself more and more lately wondering about why I choose what I do, how I present it. How much is me, how much is a wish to impart wisdom, how much is about writing, how much is about trauma, how much is about the longing to be witnessed.
In Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson named something incisive and darkly brilliant at what appeared to be the twilight of his therapy career (he’d been the 1990 equivalent of cancelled). He takes Yalom’s thinking (albeit not explicitly), and aims it squarely at the self-help industry. He believed that many therapists, perhaps even all of them, are starved for the experience of being seen and listened to, haunted by the lack of it, but so emotionally constricted and afraid that they seek the role as a sad, meagre way to get a measure of connection in a “safe” way. To get close but never truly touch, to relate without risk of being either engulfed or alone, at the cost of being forever on the other side of the glass.
To be seen, but entirely on one’s own terms.
I’m a writer and a psychotherapist, and the two roles are almost identical in this sense.
Both are about being seen but also about remaining at least somewhat hidden, safe in a controlled environment. You can get away with showing only what’s palatable. Revealing only what begs for revealing. What makes you look good, or smart, or enviable.
I think so many of us write not only because of the drive to be seen/heard/understood, to find the words that will allow others to make sense of you (and, more importantly, that will allow you to make sense of yourself). But also because of the shame and avoidance that early experiences of difference can imbue us with. We don’t want to be seen like that. Never again.
I think it’s worth being honest with ourselves about this, but at the same time holding that understanding lightly.
Did my early, frantic, desperate grasping for the right words to get my mother to hear, see and understand me contribute to my overdeveloped vocabulary (and overdependence on words) as I grew? I imagine so. Did my neurodiversity, my unusual way of relating, and the inability of my mother and I to build a bridge of shared understanding compound and intensify the problem? Undoubtedly.
But does it matter?
I don’t think so. As I often tell my therapy clients, knowledge is only as useful as what you decide to do with it.
Seeking (words, knowledge, answers, validation) is a distraction and a trap
If you resonate with any of this, if you suspect your writer’s brain may have been shaped by your earliest experiences with disconnection, difference, isolation and feeling unheard and misunderstood…
Stop writing from that place.
Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. If you’re a writer you know it, and the hardest things to be honest about are the most important things to be honest about. Don’t cheat yourself.
Even when it “works” and you feel like you express yourself well and people “hear” you, it’s a trap. It doesn’t fix what you lost, because nothing can. If you grew up misunderstood and weird, then that happened. It is done. Nothing in the present can change it, nothing can replace that loss. Yalom’s mother didn’t “get” him, no matter what he did, how many books he wrote, how enormous his reputation as a therapy guru grew, and from the sounds of things he never broke out of the loop of validation-seeking.
Worse, if you grew up unheard or unseen, you quickly learn to try and become something else — anything else — as long as that version of you can get the acknowledgement and validation you crave. Look Mom! Look Mom! Watch me jump! Watch how high I can swing! Look at me, saying all the right things. Look at how many hearts I can get, how many follows!
It’s so hard not to write from that place, to let your need for attention direct you to post content instead of creating art (yes, there is a difference). I’ve done it. I still do, on my less good days. But the compulsion to be looked at isn’t easy to conceal in a piece of writing. People know. Even if they give you the heart, or the sub, they know.
Even if they don’t, you know, and that’s bad enough.
If you write for the validation of others (and you’re not clear about what you’re doing, no shade to people who need this to make a living), you’ll lose yourself to the algorithm. Substack is still social media. It can, and will, amplify things that are terrible for the human spirit as long as they are good for the bottom line. Fuel for the engagement machine. Meat for the content thresher feeding the AI techbeast that’s coming for us all.
I mean, you do you. Substack is a marketplace, and all. But I despair of how much I read, every day, that feels like one more person yanking at my hands and clothes in a crowded market, trying to sell me something, trying to provoke a response, trying to distract me long enough that I don’t notice the goods on the table are all plastic tat. These are often very talented writers, with small-country sized audiences. I want to scream, you are better than this. You are better than this cheapness, this shadowboxing, this look-at-me-at-all-costs zero-sum game.
Virality is as simple as making people angry, or afraid, and bearing what comes at you afterwards.
I sympathise, you have no idea. I fight this in myself, too. I try to write from the curious, playful, emotional, interested, damaged, awkward, and painfully (perhaps unforgivably so) flawed parts of myself. Not the part that is still two years old, still screaming on the floor because I’m scared I don’t exist, or ashamed that I’m too different to be loved.
You want to know what a normally-developing toddler wants, once they are seen and heard enough to establish a good sense of themselves in the world?
They want to share their experiencing with the world. To contribute. To find meaning in acting meaningfully.
Which, incidentally, was part of Yalom’s central thesis of how to live well.
A prophecy, or a warning?
I’ve thought back to Yalom’s dream often. His very literal interpretation was that coming to the end of the carnival ride represented death.
Yalom saw his dream as prophetic, a truth revealed, that all he had done or could ever do was hopelessly tied with trying to impress his mother. Of mother as the first and last, alpha-and-omega, judge-jury-executioner of one’s worth, based on her ability to listen, understand, and mirror. Psychotherapy research roughly bears this out, it’s very hard to feel confident, spacious, and quietly at peace with oneself and life if you don’t have consistent, empathic connection early in life. Someone who can help you make sense of yourself, to learn you, even if you are an absolute mystery to them due to your neural differences.
By his own accounting, Yalom’s mother remained stubbornly dismissive, unmoved and unimpressed by her son’s accolades and fame. He still felt odd and disappointing to her, right up until the end. In interpreting his dream, he felt this was the fate of us all.
And yet.
My own experience and learning in the psychotherapy field has lead me to side with those who believe you can’t possibly interpret your own dreams. The meaning of a dream, if you believe in such things, is deliberately concealed through the filtering of the dreamer’s unconscious mind. It’s the thing you can’t bear to know, yet.
I wonder if Yalom’s dream wasn’t a prophecy, but a warning:
Get the fuck off the rollercoaster before it’s too late.
You’re going round and round, round and round, and she’s not even watching. It’s not your fault, it’s probably not even hers. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is life, here, now.
Get off the rollercoaster, and live. Put life’s face up to your own, and stroke its eyebrows with your thumbs.
Then tell me what it feels like.
Writing for a Cause
All subscription funds raised by Painting with Lightning go towards funding independent research in psychotherapeutic treatment development. My areas of experience and interest include suicide bereavement, sexual trauma, ADHD, addiction, and the use of AI in psychotherapy.
If you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one, please email me at skyesclera@gmail.com and I’ll grant you access.
This post was written and edited without the use of AI.
Skye, this is gorgeously written, and it is deeply sitting with me, in this moment. Not just the ache of it, but the way you frame that ache as both origin and drive. I recognize it—the drive to be seen not just as emotional hunger, but as structural force. For me, it’s shaped how I build language—less to express the wound, more to map it, make it comprehensible, give it contour and clarity it was never offered. But it’s still exposure. Just… filtered through recursive alignment rather than narrative unraveling.
I say this with full awareness that I’m speaking from outside the clinical world you’ve spent years immersed in. I don’t pretend to match that experience. But from where I stand—autistic, structurally-minded, writing through my own trauma-shaped lens—your writing here feels like a resonance. A deeply familiar one. Like different facets of the same strange reality we’re all just trying our best to exist in, with maybe a little less friction if we can manage it. I’m grateful you wrote this. It helps me reflect on where my own voice is coming from, and why.
"What if all of it — all of it — was only ever about longing to be noticed, to be understood, to be loved?" Yep.