There Is Music In The Space Between The Notes Of Our Lives

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It was the end of a long day at the conference I attended last week when an amateur talent show played out on a small stage to about 100 people. A woman walked to the microphone to introduce her act.

“I want to do this song for you because I know you’ll listen,” she said. She adjusted the microphone and straightened herself. “This is for my son.”

Then, from the speaker system, the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” started to play, and the woman began to sign the lyrics to us with her hands. She didn’t sing along but remained silent — except she was the farthest thing from silent. She sang as loud as you can imagine with her eyes, her dramatic arms, with her expressive body.

I started to cry.

It was vibrant love and earnestness emanating from her hands and heart. It was an atypical way to more than effectively sing a rock song.

Others in the audience cried along with me because most everyone there was atypical. It was the close of the first day of the Annual International Conference on ADHD. It was a room filled with people who sing life in a key others can’t hear — but if they did, they’d be awed.

Music kept popping its head into the conference, either as part of a keynote, playing from the open-air lobby bar, or at social gatherings. At one point, someone quoted Debussy. “Music is the space between the notes.” It’s the silent pause, the notes that hang.

Silence is the time that transpires between two certainties — when your heightened attention slams into a void and the emptiness blazes in front of you.

The music is found there because silence is a beautiful or dreadful song. It’s what could be, for better or worse. It’s a chance to experience nothingness amidst everything we know. So, what can we do with that?

Good question.

This was my second ADHD conference. It’s an exhausting three days, but it’s worth it. Tears and laughter, insight and learning flow through the ears and bones. There is always too much to learn. If there were only one thing to learn — that you are enough — then it would be worth it. But there’s far more than that, and I don’t know how there could be more than that.

This single point of learning, that you are enough, is one of many surprising things to be found in the silence Debussy speaks of. It’s a shock to realize this fact after so long thinking otherwise. For me, the tears that ushered in that realization came not from any of the evidence-based understanding presented through the conference, but from the mass of people gathered in one place who internalize this point of silence with seriousness. They are professionals who stake their careers on the simple truth that folks with brain-based differences are not only enough, but in many cases, more than enough. The trick is to tap into that space — or strengths, as they call it.

Strength/ability/passion + scaffolding for weaknesses + persistence = more than enough.

There’s much nuance in that equation, but it can open doors, especially the one to yourself. Sometimes it even opens the door to the inaugural introduction.

“Self, allow me to introduce you to yourself.”

“Nice to meet you. How’d you hide your talented magnificence from me this whole time?”

“Trust me. I wish I knew, but I say let’s go for it. It beats the pants off the alternative.”

While that’s an imaginary conversation, it is a glorious thing to see self-loathing and self-doubt scurry into a dark corner — no pants, butt-naked. Just saying.

In music, when there’s a pause in the notes — or a rest — the silence can be a surprise. This is because we’re so invested in the music to that point — we’re being pulled along its sound trail with the full expectation that more notes will follow the ones being played right now. We assume the sound will continue as it has been.

Then the pause in the music arrives and — bam — our expectation is left dangling. Our assumption for continued sound hits a wall. Then suddenly we float into a new space which is the mind making sense of a whole new relationship to music — the in-between reality we never knew about.

This is how we come to hear the music of our lives. When our assumption about what life is — or about what we are — hits a wall of silence, the surprise can be stunning. It’s a lightbulb moment, an ah-ha, a collision sometimes that might be uplifting or not. And it challenges our assumptions about what is true. This is where our life’s song finds true lyricism rather than knocking its old regular beat of outdated truths or misconceptions — even outright falsehoods.

Sometimes it brings tears of self-acceptance, and sometimes it’s humbling.

Take my assumption throughout my life that I was too sensitive in a faulty way — overly tender and affected, a wimp. I believed this narrative for decades until I learned a new truth, and suddenly heard the silence between my old belief in my wimp-hood and what others out there explain as a biological trait and something to be managed at times and leveraged at others. My sensitivity might not be a fault, but a strength in the right setting.

When that inflection point happens, between what you’ve always assumed and what you haven’t realized yet, that’s where the silence plays out, as Debussy says, and the first inkling of insight — and growth.

It’s the Goo Goo Dolls meets Debussy meets self-discovery.

I learned some new tricks for supporting folks with ADHD at the conference, but that benefit paled compared to the self-acceptance I experienced as part of a giant gathering of others who lovingly accept the way people are — in the multitude of ways that people are who they are.

Every time I have this feeling, I feel empowered to help others discover the truth in their life song. To discover that their children aren’t failures — they just might need more love and consistency than less. That their spouse isn’t a jerk — they just might need to build skills to show up better in the world. That their parents weren’t unloving — they might not have had useful information or a way to handle their struggles. And, that they, themselves, aren’t failures. It just might be it never occurred to them that they are fine as-is and there is good work to be done — and if done consistently — will deliver on the promise that they’ll see better days.

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Hope you're well, friends.