Human Silence

Drawing upon seven years of psychosocial rehabilitation, particularly for youth living with disabilities in the global south, this practitioner reflection explores coping within a binary psyche. The diverse experiences of disabilities guide consideration of non-traditional and personalized communications, under which autoethnographic narratives emerge with therapeutic capacity. Stories of the self, despite rural and remote geographies, are often merely imperfectly isolated, usually resting within the digital and imaginative contextuality of stories of the other. Freirean theory suggests that there exist considerable nuances and complexities via a dialogic positioning of the self among others, including potential solidarities, hierarchies, and difficult-to-explain inactivity. Speculation is mobilized to venture into the metaphysical, towards a consciousness that assesses emotions as interconnected with the disparities persistently documented in psychology, race, health, and poverty scholarship.