SHE WON'T SIT STILL OR SHUT UP

Origin of the fire
This chapter is about a girl whose brain runs on a different frequency,
and used that to turn her broken mind into her weapon,
and her dissociated body, into her sanctuary. 

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The Wiring
Why should I change to fit your box?

No. I don’t think linearly like you.
But quite frankly, I don’t want to.
My mind ain't dimwit fluff.
I don’t follow the normal path 
from cause and effect.
I am complex and chaotic,
designed with intent by my architect.

A non-linear dynamic 
wired with a GoPro in my head
clicking panoramic patterns everywhere I tread, 
catching all the crap you filter out 
- the real stays raw so fuck your clout.

A constant series of existential crises.
Pressure rising up my pathologized cracks.
Magma upwelling in my rift zone with no tracks. 
Just a sudden release 
and a kinetic attack.

Earth exterior. Fire interior.
Scattered…or a laser.
A Structural Engineer with no Structure.
An extroverted solo-backpacker,
dancing on the roof of Africa.

Yeah I’m clumsy and I’m dopey.
A tiny paradox.
Kinetic catastrophe.
Don’t ever underestimate 
the force inside of me.

Stable and unpredictable.
All in… all out.
Untamed and unshakeable
Even when I’m burnt out.

When I surrender to the fireworks inside me,
my hyperactivity becomes my Shakti.
Restlessness turns into rhythm,
expressing everything at once,
the cosmic chaos inside my prism.

My impulsivity took me up Uhuru,
saved my arse outta blackholes
with no one’s hand not even you.

You tried to shrink me into some cupcake —
but whole time you was scared of my earthquake.

I’m just a rebel with integrity
refusing systemic suppression,
because your afraid of my intensity
so you keep us enslaved
inside your fabricated cage
designed to dim us insida your oppressions.

A glitch in your matrix,
A misfit in your metrics 
I found my fire 
when I owned my instincts.
I burnt your cage into ash, 
so there is no more box
and there never was.

My ADHD was never a fucking disability.

It is my ART ATTACK.

---

ADHD is an outdated survival code on foreign terrain.
A hunter’s mind built for movement.
For scanning horizons. For sensing the unseen.

A raw intelligence with quick reflex, adaptability,
an ancient operating system awaiting a life of wonder.

A kinetic catastrophe
locked in a tiny paradox.

---

Restless Rhythms
Dance saved my life in ways I cannot express with words. When the lights turn on, the crowd starts roaring, and my beat drops- I'm telling you I literally escape this universe! At that moment while dancing, I am FREEEEEEEEEEEEE AF.

Dancing on Stage is my eruption.
Instinct. Impulse. Ignition. 

---

Think Like An Engineer
I was never a natural at maths.
Spatial awareness? Flop.
Parent evenings in STEM?
Embarrassing.
Design & Technology. Writing. Drama?
“Exceptional.”
Nobody cared about those subjects.

Life steered me into Newstead-Wood
because of all the aunties cackling about it being the 'top' route.
I didn't care.
I wanted to please my parents.
I was petrified of doing otherwise.
Newstead-Wood is an Engineering school.

I failed a lot.

But one glistening A* in the Engineering Diploma worth shitonnes of GCSEs,
shot me to Brighton
to study Civil Engineering.

Not because I loved it.
Because I wanted to escape the restrictions, and start again
inside self-agency.

Then second year hit:
Structural Stress Analysis.
Soil Mechanics.
Failed both.

They made me repeat the entire year.

Ashamed in front of my family.
Worse —
Ashamed in front of myself.

I didn’t cry for hours.
I cried for years.
Little did I know that was exactly
what needed to happen for my comeback.

I went on to do an MSc in
Earthquake & Structural Engineering.
My thesis:
protect the most ancient Pyramid of Egypt from earthquakes.

Covid, MATLAB, and a fogged up brain.
Over a year,
beyond maxed out deferral requests,
I spent recreating the
1992 Cairo earthquake with a
Power Spectral Density function and Ground Motion graph that should have been impossible to reproduce.
I couldn’t crack it.
Nearly lost TfL.
Nearly lost the MSc.
My mind became a prison I stayed in willingly
because obsessing over impossible code
was less terrifying
than sitting with my reality otherwise.

My brothers dragged me to Scotland, and forced me up the first of many mountains to come.
Academic Stress and
Chandramukhi breaths.
But at the summit of Ben A’an,
something shifted.

When I came home,
I cracked the code.
in fiveminutes.

My vibrating-barrier system buried beneath soil,
choreographing structural-soil-structure interaction,
produced perfect Von Mises stress distributions
and peak acceleration responses.
Aka my model fucking worked.
I solved how to protect the Pyramids and its tunnels from destructive earthquakes,
with an innovative technique that's never been used before.

Type-2 Happiness.
I cried like a baby released from a cage.
My broken mind had performed a miracle.
My broken mind had become my weapon.

My non-linear dynamic system of a brain was never my rock bottom;
It was the scaffolding of my comeback.

---

Metamorphosis
It was suddenly my turn to enter the Cypher:
“Palms sweaty, knees weak, arms heavy”.
The fear in my eyes mirrored the wound of wings once cut.
Frozen mid-air -
A cocoon.

Cracked,
by a heart pounding louder than
Drum & Bass.
A shy caterpillar.

I crawled into the circle, anxious af.
But this time,
I let myself feel it.
Feel all the crap my soul had been drowning in.
No holding back.

Heart pounding out of my chest,
totally off-beat from the slow rhythm.
I paused.
Forget about them 30 strangers encircled around me waiting for a performance.
I closed my eyes.
Listened.

I rose up slowly.
Eyes still closed.
Head tilted towards the ceiling.
Sunlight pulsing through a gap, spilling down onto me.

I let my body feel.
Everything.
Inside and outside of me.

Then the music slowed,
calm into my bones.
Wings beginning to flutter…

I entered the music.
I became the music.

Waves rose through my arms until they opened up as wings.

Dissolve into the sound.
Disappear into the rhythm.

I spun, slowly.
No room, no audience - just breeze.
The air of my inner child's first breath in a fucklong time.

The music stopped.
I opened my eyes, slowly, calmly.
No claps.
Silence.
Just eyes that said:
I felt that.

They didn't see my performance.
They felt my truth.
My metamorphosis, in real time.

---

Flow
Choreo never spoke my language,
Steps stacked neatly for others,
while my ADHD slipped through cracks.
They clicked on all count 8s, 
while I was still catching echoes of step 1.

"I don't want to dance like him. 
I want to dance like me."

I want to dance for self-expression.
For meditation and self-regulation.
I want to dance to my own dopamine
and restless rhythm.

Not technical perfection and polish
just kinetic truth.
Unfiltered. Untamed. Unapologetic.

Choreo never spoke my language,
but Freestyle did. 

No perfection, no performance.
Just flow.

---

Problem-Solver 
Fuck the feelings. 
I’m the one that solves your problem. 
If you cry about some shit in front of me? 
I won’t hug you. 
I won’t wipe your tears. 
I’ll probably sit there awkward af. 
But once I catch your signal, 
I will give you a guaranteed solution.
That’s what my closests always count on me for. 
I don’t fit the expectations. 
But if you dig a little deeper, beneath my unconventional exterior, you’d find an engineer imprinted into my soul. 
Because once my ADHD switch flips 0 to 100, I lock in. 
Pattern recognitions. 
Non-linear dynamic systems. 
That’s my terrain.

---

A Benign Incongruity

The root of most genuine laughter is when something is unexpected, harmless, and deeply character-revealing.

Such as when he cracked up at the absurdity of my deadpan delivery,

I went and danced in the park.

---

Like a Tiger Strike - Eelam Tamil coded
I hit my ultimate pain threshold and mentally, collapsed.

I dissociated.
Mind-body disconnected.
When I looked in the mirror I saw a stranger.

I lost everything.
I lost my 'friends' - good riddance, now looking back.
I lost my family - due to my own selfishness and immaturities.
I lost my flow.
I lost myself.
It was so painful to be inside of myself. For years.

But one thing I've learnt about me is that I never quit. I always get back up, and keep moving forwards. Maybe I have my wiring to thank for that. 

One day, i decided, FUCK THIS SHIT. I'm claiming back my broken arse mind, and I'm turning it into my weapon.

That's about when I was randomly scrolling and found 'MSc in Earthquake and Structural Engineering' and applied for it before my thoughts could catch up. I was the one person in that entire course.

I have a (flopped) BEng in Civil Engineering, and when my coursemates were freaking about lack of jobs in Covid times - honestly nothing is more debilitating than facing 100+ rejections. But when they suggested the idea of doing a 'masters' degree I looked at them in horror like, WHY would you put yourself through such academic hell again? Well, it turns out, that a degree covering endless modules on 'soil mechanics' and 'concrete' ain't my cup of tea. 

Where is the innovation in following the rules of your set guidelines and Eurocodes?

But to build a structure that can withstand mother nature's EARTHQUAKES? 
FUCK YES. Bring it on.

Because yes my brain IS a scattered dimwit with a memory life of a plastic spoon - when it comes to topics I find mundane af. 

But in the realm of unpredictability where innovative thinking truly thrives like, 'Dynamics of Structures', 'Random Vibrations of Structures', 'Geotechnical Engineering' in earthquake-prone countries, and my Thesis which was all about protecting Ancient Pyramids of Egypt from earthquakes using vibrating barriers THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN USED BEFORE/YET - An innovative research I was recognised 3 years later for - by the Institution of Civil Engineering's 2024 Emerging Engineers Award in 3rd Place in London's Regional Competition.

LOL Piero my MSc supervisor was having a very difficult time handling this brain during those academic torture years imprisoned to my covid-lockdown-desk without a fucking life outside my MATLAB codes that never RAN...so many 'you are going to fail Kayana I don't know how to help you anymore' - I don't blame him. 

I deferred my dissertation to 2 years of mitigating circumstances (all justified reasons though) but anywho, my guy was fucking proud of me in 2024. 
His innovative ViBa strategy's research got discontinued due to low funding - 
but I made his research known again, to his unexpectedly happy, surprise. 
And with my own Kaj-rooted twist - because whereas his primary research concentrated on Seismic-protection of the Pyramid's superstructure - my research proved that his strategy also works on the Pyramid's substructure (tunnels) - theoretically, according to FEM simulations and MATLAB codes THAT FINALLY WORKED. (BEST feeling EVER #Type2Happiness).

Because I'm the kind of person you look at initially and think - 
how the fuck is she an Engineer? 
And then ima do something out of nowhere that will blow up everyone's mind when they least expect it, striking from 0-100. That's my ADHD weapon. 
Like a tiger strike. 
Eelam Tamil coded.

---

Focused like a laser
Usually when people ask me how I am after some catastrophe,
I humour-dodge in deadpans,
I metaphor in paragraphs or,
I throw sharp facts like an engineer:
"Load capacity exceeded.
Structure currently under refurbishment. Do not re-introduce stress."

When perhaps what I meant —
but couldn’t articulate — was:
"I am not ok. Go away and give me space."

Maybe I don’t use straightforward human language for emotions
because my state doesn’t output in that format by default.

I observe trends.
In people. In myself. In the world.
Unconsciously gathering case studies behind the scenes,
validating a model before I ever speak.

Then when a problem arises —
instant solution.

Like my manager said:
“When she’s focused, she’s like a laser.”

---

Kaj now dances like water.
No perfection, no proving, no performance.
Just flow.
By flow, I mean my wings.

---

Float like a butterfly, sting like Kaj

A sparring buddy once called me a Jack Russell-
tiny body, big kinetic hustle.
Footwork. Rhythm. Timing. Flow.
Improvisation under pressure - go, go, go. 

I love boxing.
What an elite release.
It’s basically like Kuthu dance —
but instead of drumbeats,
you get beats on your face 
if you’re not ready.

And weirdly, 
It's very regulating for my ADHD.
Because you cannot drift.
You cannot dissociate.
You cannot think about yesterday 
or tomorrow.
You are forced into now.

And that, right there,
is the purest form of dance is it not? 
a freestyle.

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Static vs Dynamic
Engineering is the study of systems.
My domain, is Structural.

Static Linear Stationary Systems:
Dead loads and set processes.

Dynamic Non-Linear Systems:
Unpredictable earthquakes.

Static asks: Will it hold?
Dynamic asks: How will it behave?

Hint:
Like neurotypical vs neurodivergent.

Same system.
Wired for different conditions.

For Example:
A neurotypical-coded, linear static engineer
walks the bridge deck span by span.
Step. Check. Step. Check.
One element at a time.
Will it hold?

An ADHD-coded, non-linear dynamic engineer
has a metaphorical GoPro strapped inside the head.
Seeing — all at once —
the entire bridge,
the river beneath it,
the history of why it was built,
the politics that funded it,
the cultural aesthetics shaping it,
the stress paths running through it,
and the way it will behave
in a storm that hasn’t even happened yet.

One big, distorted, trippy AF panoramic shot.

Not because we can’t focus.
But because we’re already focused
on everything.

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Dance archives

Loved every single one of my on-stage performances. But I'm too old for that shit now, so ima continue freestyling for peace. Ima go back to dancing on the streets where streetdance came from. Even if it means I walk away from the groups, solo. #FREEEEEEE

I’m genuinely in awe by how different both Udhungada Sangus felt —
because I’m expressing each from a completely different perspective.
Same Kaj.
Different vantage point.
Not an upgrade.
Not a downgrade.
Just a shift in where I’m standing
when I look at myself.

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