Title:
Embracing the Magical Journey of Neurodiversity: A Conversation with Sean Larkin

Subtitle:
A Late-Identified Diagnosis Leading to the Discovery of Community and Self-Realization

Transcript:

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.

Let’s go.

Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia.

Sean Larkin: What’s up? I’m Sean.

Alycia Anderson: Hey Sean. How are you? Welcome to the show.

Sean Larkin: I’m good. Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: I am so excited today to be joined by my friend, Sean Larkin. He is an open-hearted neurodivergent advocate and a musician. I just found out. And him and I first connected several months ago because he reached out to me on my website to book me to speak for an event at his company.

He has been championing disability inclusion and the movement from literally the second that I met him. And I want him to tell us all about his disability, his identity, his talents, and his advocacy. I’m so excited to share his story with our community more than anything because he’s literally one of the best friend allies that I’ve ever met, at work in this movement. And I feel like he can give classes to so many of the organizations that I work with about the importance of advocating for the work that we did together. Sean, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’m thrilled that you are here.

Sean Larkin: So am I. It’s an honor. And just so you know, this is officially my first podcast, so thank you for initiating me this way, and hello to all of your followers and fans. Thank you for making this space and welcoming me into it.

Alycia Anderson: Followers and fans. I think the fans are all yours, but I appreciate you saying that. So, I have a lot of questions for you. You and I have had some really beautiful conversations about identifying with disability and just the path. I actually know that it’s been a journey for you to learn about your disability, peel back the layers of your disability, and then find advocacy in it.

I wanna start off, if you don’t mind, with the word advocacy. Because when I think of advocates, I think of people like you, who are leaning in wholeheartedly to do the good of the work, in a genuine, authentic way.

Sean Larkin: Wow.

Alycia Anderson: So, I wanna ask you what that word and that role means to you, not only professionally, but personally today in this moment, now that you know who you are with your disability.

Sean Larkin: So my neurodivergency has three answers, right? So the first one is like philosopher Sean. And linguistically, advocate is advocation. It’s to add your voice and add your calling. It’s to stand up and speak out for something or someone beyond yourself, right? So when I’m advocating for the disabled, I’m not just saying, “I want Sean to get support.”

I’m saying, “I want all y’all to get the support.” And so for me, it’s the power of the voice and the power of standing up and adding your strERGth to other people. Adding your talents, adding your skills, ’cause I was blessed with a lot of gifts. And I was also gifted a lot of hardships and challERGes. I don’t view them as a curse.

I view them as a curriculum. How do I move through the world with these challenges and how do I actually make them something that makes me stronger? So that’s like intellectual Sean. What you’re getting at though is in my heart space. It’s almost this sense of, “How do I increase the circle of safety and inclusion?” Ever since I was a little kid, just everyone being in the circle together was so important to me. When I was a preschool teacher, I would never let one kid be out of the circle. I would tell all the kids like, “We gotta scoot back, Timmy showed up late.” So I just have the sense that I want everyone to be included and to be given the chance. So much of disability advocacy is getting them up to the baseline.

I want everyone to be able to shine, and to bring their gifts to the world, and to share their power. Because oftentimes, the people that have a harder path that tempers them and their gifts are that much more precious if we make that space. In this moment, what it means for me is this whole aspect of myself that’s always been there, but I didn’t have necessarily a space. And in the disability journey, in embracing my disability and realizing how much there was, I found this community. “Can you go do this stuff?” And I’m like, “Oh, totally. I would love to do that. Let me help people, let me advocate for people.” And so, it’s been this marriage of some of the hardest experiences in my life and some of my greatest gifts are now coming together to benefit other people.

That’s magical, and I’m still in it. It’s still something that I’m in and looking around like, “Wow, this is so big. This is so powerful.” Even this moment is really powerful for me.

Alycia Anderson: This is why I wanted you on the show. That entire answer that you just gave. Because you’re having this beautiful experience, not only your own lived experience and disability, but also your community around you and beyond, that is magical. That is beautiful. That is this cool thing to explore and you exude that, and I think a lot of disabled people have a really hard time connecting in that way. And I think the word magical is a really good word for you to depict your journey because that’s how I feel every time I speak to you. You’re in this like magical, whimsical state of being disabled, and I love it.

I love it.

I want to bring that to our community ’cause I love hearing that, and I want to be humble. My neurodivergency and my disabilities. There are many hardships, but mine also have these trade offs, so I have some beautiful gifts. When I sit with my disabled allies in spaces, I interact with people that, for them, it’s like a net minus. And that humbles me so much ’cause I know that feeling when my PTSD was incredibly bad and I had agoraphobia and I couldn’t leave. I know that sense of, “I was crippled on the inside and there wasn’t any magic.” So now that I’m at this space in the journey, I have this deep sense of, ” I gotta bring it to our people and share this.” ‘Cause for some of them, it’s just a struggle to get through the day. And so there’s this deep pull for me to bring positivity to them, because a lot of our population just doesn’t want to address it ’cause it makes ’em uncomfortable.And it doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I can sit with them and say in my own way, “Me too, but also I don’t know, and I’m comfortable not knowing. And I can sit with you and not know and not be uncomfortable and just hear you.

Alycia Anderson: I love that.

Sean Larkin: But then that’s magical too.

Alycia Anderson: It is. In the first seven minutes of this episode, you’ve talked about the beauty and the hardships of your disability, and I want you to talk a little bit about when you decided to turn the hardships into purpose. And maybe walk us through, like you have with me, the creating of a relationship with your neurodivergent.

And also the other pieces that come with it, the ADHD.

Sean Larkin: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Can you give us a little stroll down that path?

Sean Larkin: Yeah, like a historic rap sheet. Yeah. So I’m 38 now, so I was born in 1987. So as a kid in the nineties, I was eccentric, I was quirky, I was daydreaming too much. I talked too much. There were all of these assessments. Every report card ever was like, “Sean is a joy to have in the class. Brilliant and kind. But he should really work on his homework more, even though he does well on the tests.” And I would read it and I was like, “This doesn’t make any sense to me. What’s the problem? Why do you want me to waste time on homework? I’m lucky enough that I can just learn.” But as I got older, there was labelings of sensitivity. I was so smart as a kid. I remember in third grade, this government guy. I sat in a room with him, and I could tell he was taking notes and assessing me. And they had messed with my brother. It’s not my space to tell his journey, but they got to him and I didn’t like what the pills they gave to him did. And I was like, “I’m not telling this guy anything.” And I look back on that and I’m like, “I could have gotten help, or they would’ve just dumped Ritalin in me and told me to shut up.” Not that Ritalin’s bad, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want that to happen to me. I get into high school, I’m struggling to focus.

I get into college, I fall apart. And it really wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I was like, “There’s a problem. I have these incredible gifts, but I cannot achieve.” And so I got diagnosed with ADHD. I kept trying at school. I can look back now, and it was very obvious I had PTSD. It was very obvious I was having panic attacks. But I’m so good at masking, and I’m so good at not letting people know where I’m at if I don’t want to. I’m very open to you and I’m very open to people now. I was very guarded before because I didn’t want them to know how much I was hurting. ‘Cause I came from a culture where if you’re hurting, that’s a problem. That’s not an invitation to get help. It’s like, “Why are you hurting? That’s not okay.” Eventually, I had a mental breakdown, and I was diagnosed with PTSD, OCD, anxiety, depression, insomnia, on and on it went. And I joke with my therapist, I was like, “It sounds like you guys are saying my nervous system is like at a 15 out of 10, and it doesn’t fit in this culture.” My therapist was like, “Basically.” ‘Cause I was like, “When I sit with children, I know how they’re feeling and I help them find their truth. When I sit with people in healing spaces, I can feel what they’re feeling, and I can help them come to their point of transformation. They seem like really important skills.” And she was like, “Yeah, no one’s gonna pay you well to do that.” And that was the beginning of me realizing, “What if I am not the problem? What if my nervous system is part of some evolutionary branch that served the tribe, that served the village, that serve the sacred spaces, the healing spaces, the creative spaces, the inventive spaces? But I don’t serve the modern capitalist agenda. And so I’m described as mentally deficient or disabled. I’m just not well adapted to the modern environment. And so I did a healing journey. Then because of my involvement with the disabilities ENG at work, I found out that I’m autistic and I got diagnosed, like we talked about. Actually, since we met, we had a talk.

I was like, “Hey, Alycia, good news. I’m autistic.” And it was really the autism and I own it. There were so many things that didn’t make sense about me until I learned about type one autism. And then it was just describing me like a book. And the more I read about it, I was like, “Yeah, I think Nikola Tesla was autistic though. That dude was amazing.” I think Isaac Newton, Hildegard Von Bingen, like some of these incredible historic figures that were so outside the box. I’m honored to be among them. The disability is the mismatch of the beauty of my nervous system to this society. My spiritual mentor, William, would tell me, “You’re an outlier. You have to find out how to make your outlier ship help the other people that are more in the middle. ‘Cause if you don’t, they’ll be afraid of you and judge you and hurt you. But if you can find a way to be of service to them, it’ll be celebrated.” That’s been that journey, and now I’m doing it in corporate America with the disabilities ENG. But to me, it’s how can I make what’s unique about me a gift, and how can I support that uniqueness, even if this culture doesn’t understand it?

Alycia Anderson: I want you to talk a little bit about the work that you’re doing with ENG, because I think that other employees need to understand how those groups can really help you, like you just said. You found your neurodiversity through those groups, and I think it’s because you’re finding community and you’re learning about things you didn’t know.

You just gave me a flash of when we were talking one day and you said, “Oh my God, great news. I’m neurodivergent or whatever.” Exactly how you just said it. Again, that is the essence of you and why I wanted you to come on the show because it’s magical for somebody to be able to find a space. And not everybody’s gonna be able to do that with their disability, but to find some sense of acceptance and empowerment through it, whatever level you can get to is quite freeing.

Sean Larkin: And it starts with the work within, right?

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Sean Larkin: My family’s going through a whole thing where we realize there’s all these people that are autistic. ‘Cause my cousin’s kids got diagnosed first, and now we’re all doing the work. When we do the work within ourselves to say, ” Regardless of what’s going on, if I can find acceptance for myself exactly as I am,” now we’ve created that safe space within our own heart and our own mind where we’re no longer judging, we’re having compassion. We’re no longer rejecting, we’re accepting. And that inner work can be very difficult ’cause of the messaging we’ve been getting for most of our lives. If you’re a disabled person, you’ve been getting toxic messaging, unless you’re in the most incredible community ever. And if you are, reach out to Alycia and tell us about it. We want to hear those spaces, because most of us have had a pretty bumpy ride. And I find forgiveness for that. I keep reminding myself, “We can’t judge people for not knowing.” So then with the ENG at work, the employee network group, I got involved with the Disabilities Employee Network group, ’cause I had ADHD and I have disabled people in my family. One of my mentors is disabled.

So I was like, “What are y’all doing?” And as I got involved, I met other people. I’m not gonna name them.

There were a few friends that see this podcast, they know who they are. That for almost two years have been talking with me via Teams chat about autism.

‘Cause I was like, “I think I might have this. You seemed really cool on that call. Can we talk?” They’re very nurturing. When you show up for someone else that is exploring that identity, one or two people not judging and sharing their experience, their strength, their hope can change lives. They made it safe for me to explore this. And then we had a speaker that talked about it. It was really when I did a book club on the Canary Code. It was a very interesting work about disability inclusion at work, particularly for neurodivergence, particularly for autism. I was reading that book and it was talking about autism type one. And I closed it and called my mentor, and I was like, “Yo, Mike, I’m pretty sure I have autism.” And he’s, ” Hey, I’m driving right now. How do you feel about that?” And I was like, “Pretty good.” And he’s, “Okay, I’ll call you when I get home.” And in accepting that, now I do advocacy work to create that space for other people. Because the work of reperceiving ourself in a positive way, you need a community.

You need other hearts, other nervous systems, other stories to make a container where you can open yourself up and move the pieces around. And I don’t think one nervous system is big enough. That’s why traditional cultures, if you look at their healing rituals, it’s always a group of people helping one person transform. And now in corporate America, we found this new expression of that, the employee network group. And at my workplace, what I’m doing is to make this space where it’s safe for people to go, “Wait, I am disabled, and I want to join this.” We can help them find their meaning. And then support them engaging HR and their medical professionals to get diagnosed, to get accommodated. The statistics. 30% of people report their disability to their workplace. Think about that. So two-thirds of us aren’t getting the help that we need. And if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably work near someone with a disability that you don’t know about.

And what can you do to make a safe space for them to own that?

Alycia Anderson: Lots of people doing a lot of work masking, and exhausted from it.

Sean Larkin: Oh my God, it was so exhausting. I have so much more energy and time now that I’m not masking the way that I was. And that is its own kind of inner wound. And then I had to go through the journey of how do I forgive the masking, and who taught me to mask, and why did they think that was necessary, and how far back does that hurt of hiding our authenticity go? I don’t even know, but it’s my job to put it down. It got passed on to me, and I get to put it down and I’m not gonna pass it on.

I like what you just said about feeling guilty about masking, ’cause I feel the same way about myself. It’s not like I could ever hide my disability, but I didn’t ask for accommodations. I didn’t ask for help. And I had to go through a lot of really embarrassing moments at work because I didn’t wanna say, “No, I don’t wanna be carried at work. There’s no ramp.”That made me feel uncomfortable. I’m mad at myself all the time, too. Like, “Why did you do that? That was such a bad representation of what you should be doing.” We’re the product of our environments, too. We’re dismantling all of the bias that we’ve been taught about ourselves.Now I’m gonna flip it around, ’cause I know the answer for me. Was that forgiveness harder for you than forgiving the people around you?

Alycia Anderson: I’ve never even felt like I needed to forgive the people around me because I just feel like they didn’t know, like you said.

Sean Larkin: And that’s like the double wound of the disability is how hard it is to forgive ourselves. But we’ve already forgiven everyone else around us.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Sean Larkin: But we’re the people with a disability. Shouldn’t

Alycia Anderson: I know.

Sean Larkin: we be in the past?

Alycia Anderson: Totally.

Sean Larkin: I’m still in that process of dismantling my own inner power structure and power dynamic and judgment, where like the non-disabled parts of me are judging the disabled parts and they’re front and center.

And it’s so disunifying. It’s so disintegrating. I’m always thinking, “How do I practice wholeness and how do I presence the disability?” Because, again, I have these gifts and these talents and I present a certain way. I’m given, obviously, a lot of societal privilege because of the way that I look and the things that are ascribed.

Alycia Anderson: I have to lean even harder into the discomfort, ’cause it’s easier for me than the rest of our disabled allies. So it’s, “Throw me down the trail first to trailblaze because it’s a bit easier.” Or maybe that’s me being a sacrificial lamb, and it’s my own martyrdom drama. I think that’s up to the person that’s in front of you. For me, I have a lot of disabled people that might be like, I’m air quoting, “able bodied in front of me that have invisible disabilities,” that they can navigate the world maybe on their feet, maybe they think that’s easier. So they minimize what they’re going through because they think that it looks more difficult for me to do what I do.

And I think nobody really needs to diminish their path. It is what it is.

Sean Larkin: I needed to hear that. Wow.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. I’ve lived a life with disabled people that are on their feet that say, ” I can’t complain because I’m in front of you.” Which is, you’re in a worse situation because you can’t walk.

And so, those are more societal assumptions about lived paths that we’re still learning.

Sean Larkin: Oh, my gosh, you’re right. That’s still me playing out the same power dynamic, but now I’m doing it to my allies. How humbling. Thank you for teaching me that.

Alycia Anderson: I do that to other disabled people. I could look at somebody with a disability that maybe has a sensory loss or something. I don’t know, maybe that’s somebody that can’t see. And I go, “Oh, would that be more difficult?” So you have to check yourself.

Sean Larkin: That’s what I was doing when I was in denial about autism. ‘Cause people had been asking me since my mid-twenties about it. Even my therapist, when I was really going through a lot of the deep work, was asking me about it, and I was like, “I don’t want to go there.” That’s why I laugh so much about it. I’m continually re-humbled at the absurdity and the beauty of the journey. ‘Cause we’re in this slice of time where we’re doing it. And I think the generation after, we’re gonna make such a smoother ride. The generation before us couldn’t even do this. So we’re in like this bridge generation where we’re doing the work, and it’s awkward and it’s okay. So I laugh at it a lot.

Not ’cause I think it’s funny, but because it alleviates the tension in my heart of how intense but beautiful it is. And I keep beginning again, like I keep going back to being the student.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. It’s cool, but it’s got a lot of layers to it. And you’re right, the last generation. I just had two historic people on this podcast that were very active in the disability rights movement. Tony Coelho specifically, who was the writer of the ADA. They talk about the new generation, the generation today. The 35-somethings, they don’t even know a world before there was laws that protected us. And if we don’t understand the struggle of the past, the historic disabled people that were institutionalized, hid behind walls, lived in their own species. All that stuff to fight for these rights that put us in the forefront of now being able to be the advocates to pave, to your point, the future that’s gonna be the least restrictive, hopefully for the ones that follow. There’s just so many layers of development of this movement in a very short amount of time.

Wild. It makes me think there was that generation that grew up in horse-drawn buggies and saw the moon landing. It’s like that. And what’s funny, just to be really vulnerable. So I was asked to speak for my company for the Orlando, Florida

Amazing.

Sean Larkin: office. And so I did a bunch of research, and that’s when I learned about the big crawl. Disabled people in 1990 crawled the steps of Congress ’cause the ADA got knocked down once.

They did this big protest. I just presented it again today to another group and I was like, “Raise your hand if you knew about this.” And no one raises their hand.

1990.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Sean Larkin: How is this not part of our civil rights history?

Alycia Anderson: Totally.

Sean Larkin: It was a humbling moment for me. Here I am, the chair of the disabilities ENG group and I’m reading the Wikipedia article on this, and I’m like, “Even I didn’t know about this.”

Why is this not part of the curriculum? And that’s part of our task is, how do we get the visibility? It is not just advocating our vision of it, it’s advocating, like you’re saying, really who our elders are. I’m gonna go watch this podcast now with the person that wrote the ADA. I’m so fascinated to hear their journey and to hear what that was like, because I still don’t know our own history. I’m still blossoming into it.

Yeah, it’s the capital crawl that you just mentioned. It’s the protests that happened before the Rehabilitation Act, section 504 was passed, there was sit-ins, and disabled people didn’t leave buildings for a month, and Black Panthers were coming in. Oh my gosh.

Alycia Anderson: The Civil Rights movement for the disabled. The disability rights movement is one of the most incredible stories of history that you would ever know. Like you’re saying, nobody knows about it. It’s right up there with the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, all the things that we know. We don’t study that for some reason. It allots us our freedoms today, for sure.

Sean Larkin: It’s funny you say that ’cause when I brought it up in the speech I was given, we were talking about it. I was an organizer in Occupy Portland. I’m not here to get political. I’m gonna be civic. In 2010, we were aware where the economic trends were heading, and we see it now.

We don’t need to go into it. So we engage in advocacy, seeing what it takes just for an able-bodied person to show up to protest. It’s a lot. It’s sacrifice. Then I’m seeing people that are paralyzed from the net down showing up for a protest. I’m like, “They had to have a whole support team around them.”

This wasn’t just a thousand people, this was at least 10,000 people, and all the families and friends and support networks. I didn’t know, I was like, “Why don’t we know about this?” And this person raised their hand and said, “‘Cause it makes people really uncomfortable to see disabled people doing things that they refuse to do.”

Alycia Anderson: You gotta go look up the sit-in that was in Berkeley. They were protesting for a day, and there was hundreds of disabled people that didn’t leave for a month. They didn’t have medical supplies. We’re talking about feeding tubes, catheters. And they would not leave. They would not leave.

Sean Larkin: It’s like this reminder, we forget how close we are to it being that intense. I always remind myself. My grandmother, Sally, and my grandmother, Mary Agnes, when they graduated college, they didn’t have a checking account. ‘Cause it was before 1970.

Alycia Anderson: Unbelievable.

Sean Larkin: And I’m like, “That’s not that long ago.” But that fire. I remember when I saw your TED talk when I was looking to get a speaker. That fire in you about all of this spoke to a fire in me that hadn’t found an outlet.

I didn’t feel called out. I felt called in to do something with that fire, not just sit there and burn. And that’s been really good for me because I think part of my masking was not doing something about it. I was always that person that wanted to do something about the injustice. And now that I’ve found this identity and a community that wants to do work, I’m like, “Okay, let’s go for it.” “Let’s make great things possible,” as my company says.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. The one thing that I think sets you apart from most actually, is you not only wanna do something about it. But to not go into major details, I’m not a cheap speaker. You didn’t want to minimize what my value is. And instead of trying to get the deal or whatever, you went internally and fought for the value of what bringing in experts can do for a company, and all the things that you did.

And that’s a shift. I’ve worked with 200 companies, and there’s not very many companies that have come together like you did in your organization to get the resources and understand the value. So, you’re not only wanting to advocate, but you’re wanting to educate on value, on progress, on community, without minimizing or getting the discount for the disabled thing. And that is powerful because disability is oftentimes minimized in a lesser value.

Sean Larkin: Right. I couldn’t do that. I went back and I talked to my leadership. And actually, it was our ID&E manager, Lydia White, who was just like, “Sean, we’re in this together, reach out to our corporate sponsor.” So I reached out to Doug Wignall, the head of the entire architecture for my 14,000 person company. I sent that email to him on a Friday. He emailed me back in 15 minutes from his phone being like, “This is important. We’re gonna figure this out, Sean, I’ll get back to you Monday or Tuesday.” And when I saw that, there was this moment of huge gratitude and huge responsibility. ‘Cause I was like, “I have a company that is serious about this.”

And it was in this moment of calling where you can have all the fire you want, but when you’re given all this kindling and you realize that you have a circumstance that can realize greatness, that you have buy-in from your company at all the levels, there’s a sense of responsibility of how fortunate I am to have them. And that means, how much harder do I want to work to make something amazing happen, and make my company raise the banner and become a leader in this, and model to other companies? Because we’re an employee-owned company. That’s a very unique thing. We just got ranked the fifth largest employee-owned company.

I think we’re the largest employee-owned engineering and design firm. Our values are represented at the highest level, ’cause we’re not beholden to shareholders. The employees are the shareholders. And the employees said we care about this inclusivity, we care about belonging, and that’s reflected at the highest levels of our leadership. So to see it not be talked, but to see it be walked was powerful. And then to see you give the amazing keynote, and all of the positive feedback I got has just been so beautiful.

Alycia Anderson: On my side, in a year that these topics have been tough. It was such a beautiful experience for me of validation that I needed too. “Okay, there’s still people out there that are willing to fight for this stuff and they know it’s important.” I will be forever grateful for that experience this year.

Honestly, it was really great for me too. Okay. I wanna move on to creative stuff.

Sean Larkin: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Okay. Are you ready?

Sean Larkin: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Okay.

Sean Larkin: Always.

Alycia Anderson: I wanna talk about this hand pan music that you did not tell me anything about. I didn’t even know what hand pan was until I started googling it before this, and I love it. Hearing you speak with all the spirituality and nervous system connection.

It all makes sense. So talk about your music.

Sean Larkin: Yeah.I come from very artistically-gifted families. I’d always felt that in me, and I could never find an instrument that resonated with me. This is my hand pan. It’s named Ravi after Ravi Shankar. It’s a Rav Vast, and we’re gonna link my music. It doesn’t come over well on my earpiece, so we’ll link the music so people can find it.

It’s Sean Handpan on Spotify, on Apple Music, on YouTube.

Alycia Anderson: Give me a visual description of that in case somebody can’t see.

Sean Larkin: Oh, yes. It’s about a two-and-a-half feet across big metal, circular disc that looks like two dinner plates on top of each other. And then there’s a bunch of notes carved around it, and it’s both rhythm and melody. So there’s a bunch of notes, and I plan it like you play on a drum. But then it’s like a xylophone where each note is its own key. And so then, it creates this very soothing, meditative music or very uplifting, inspirational music. I’d heard them a few times. And in a meditation during the pandemic, something in me was like, “You just have to buy this.” I’d gotten my disability back pay. So I bought it for my 33rd birthday, and I literally pulled it out of the box and just started playing it.

My roommate was like, “Oh, you’ve played this before?” And I said, “I just pulled it outta the box.” Within a month, I’d written my first song. And within a few months, I almost had an album ready. So I did a home recording, which is what’s on Spotify. I have found a studio through a musician friend of mine, LaRhonda Steele. We’ve recorded a duet. She’s a blues singer. And I’m gonna go back into that studio and do more work. So the music, originally for me, was actually medicine. When I was dysregulating, I found that I could play the hand pan and re-regulate my nervous system. And then when I came out of the pandemic and saw my friends again, they were like, “What is that?”

And I was like, “Oh, I learned an instrument and I would play it.” And they would have these incredibly powerful experiences spiritually, and healing, and their nervous system. And they’re like, “What? Who wrote that?” And I was like, “Oh, these are all my songs. I don’t know how to play anyone else’s music on it.” And when your art moves other people to the depth that it moved you to make it, that’s medicine. That’s medicine for the people. I’ve played at festivals. I’ve played at meditation events. I have a friend that we do a new moon intention setting, where I play hand pan for meditation. I’ve played it at my elders’ old folks homes. I remember I was playing it for My Men are Stan, and he brought some of his friends. They’re all in wheelchairs. They’re listening, and someone with Alzheimer’s actually clicked back in and remembered his wife. And was in talking to his son, and his son walked over and he was like, “He hasn’t remembered her name in a decade.”

Alycia Anderson: Wow.

Sean Larkin: And the music reintegrated him because we’re taught in this culture that like we’re matter, we’re this physical thing. But scientifically, matter is condensed energy, and energy vibrates. And that’s why music is so universally powerful. Part of my practice, part of my neurodivergency, there’s songs about healing. I think the one I’ll link is about my healing journey. It’s called the Inward Healing Journey. And when I worked at a treatment facility for troubled teens, that’s the song they would ask for when they were dysregulated. And I would sit down with them and I’d say, “We’re not gonna talk about the trauma for the next five minutes. We’re just gonna have feelings based on the music.” And on the other side of it, they would be okay. One of the things I taughtthe people that I do healing work with is there is the healing work, there is the digging deep, there’s the trauma work, there’s confronting the hardship. Sometimes you just need a spoonful of something beautiful to just balance out. Whether that’s listening to WC or making these beautiful light arrangements I see in your room, doing something that reminds yourself that there’s good in the world. And that’s kinda what my music is about, is to remind myself that there’s good in the world because when you’re lost in flashbacks, you lose track. So I would play the hand pan and the flashbacks would go away, and I would just be left kind of feeling good.

Alycia Anderson: I think you’re the one that’s something good in the world.

Sean Larkin: What a beautiful thing to say.

Alycia Anderson: You’re like all therapy. This entire episode is just therapeutic for me. It’s so lovely. Wonderful.

Sean Larkin: It’s making medicine for the people. If we do the work in ourselves, there’s an alchemy, and then we can make that available to others and it can be a catalyst for them. And you did that for me with that Ted Talk. I was like, “I want to be like her.” You were the catalyst to me, and now it’s blossoming. The feedback I’ve gotten from you, from other people in my life. I’m launching a website called Neurodivergent Nosis. It’s gonna be all speech-to-text. It’s gonna be me sharing these ideas, these feelings. It’s neurodivergency, it’s healing, it’s spirituality, it’s autism. I don’t know how to separate them. And instead of making them all different things, I was like, “Let’s just do one thing that’s authentically me.”And I made the website last night so I could plug it here. I was like, “I’m not gonna let Alycia down. I’m gonna make the website.”

Alycia Anderson: I love that. And it goes to the theme of you being tired of doing the work, of separating who you are, and just finding the path forward collectively. And I think that’s a great lesson for all of us with our disabilities and beyond. Anybody who has many layers of difference. How do you cohesively move forward? We’re definitely gonna link your new website and blog to the show notes. We’re going to link all your Spotify, we’re gonna try to clip in some of the music.

Sean Larkin: We can do that.

Alycia Anderson: Maybe we’ll put your music instead of the podcast music to start. We’ll see if the editor can do it. I don’t know. I can’t promise anything.

Sean Larkin: Yeah, I have MP3s. I can send you one. I have one that’s designed to be an intro. It’s perfect.

Alycia Anderson: That’d be great. So, did we miss anything?

Sean Larkin: We covered what we needed to. We just authentically flowed, and I feel complete.

Alycia Anderson: I do too.

It’s an honor to be here, and we’re just getting started, Alycia. I feel like this is the start of a whole journey. I know. I’m so grateful for this friendship. From the moment we met, grateful for the friendship, so it’s been really wonderful. Okay, so then I warned you. We’re at the pushing forward moment. Do you wanna give a little gift away to our community and listeners who have soaked in all of your goodness?

Sean Larkin: So I was talking with my career sister, Julia. Giving her a shout out. She’s been a great ally.

Alycia Anderson: Shout out, Julia.

Sean Larkin: And Julia Mackey, a wonderful friend. We were talking about continuing to do good. And I was like, “Julia, there is always another good thing in store for us. We just have to go claim it.” And so to your listeners, “There’s more good out there, and we have to honor the hardship. We also have to go claim that good and celebrate it. So go get it. Go get it.”

Alycia Anderson: Get it. I love it. Great way to wrap up the show. Sean,

Sean Larkin: Thank you so much.

Alycia Anderson: Thanks for all of your wisdom today. This was a episode full of wisdom and magic. Grateful for that. And we’re gonna haveto have you back on, ’cause I really enjoyed this.

Sean Larkin: It would be my honor. Wow.

Alycia Anderson: And two, a good 2026 together. Who knows what else we’ll end up doing together.

Sean Larkin: Yeah. I’m so excited for it. Yeah, let’s go claim our good.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. Okay. And a quick shout out to our community for showing up to the podcast every week. Please share, review, like, all the good things, and we will be back next week. As always, this has been Pushing Forward with Alycia and Sean, and that is literally how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next time.

Sean Larkin: I love it.