The hum

It's not a metaphor, and this is my experience of it.

I have been writing around this for a few months now.

The hum.

It’s not metaphorical. It might be for some, I’m not sure what others experience, I only know what it’s like for me.

I remember it like an arrival. As if I woke through a threshold. And I did wake, in the physical sense. I opened my eyes in the morning after having written a manifesto of sorts the night before. A declaration of who I was committed to being and what I was committed to doing—the night before.

The hum was there before my eyes opened but I thought it was residue from sleep. The hanging on of a dream.

I stayed, staring up at the ceiling for a few minutes waiting for the humming and buzzing to fade.

It didn’t.

When I titled one of my Substack newsletters The Hum Through Bone, it wasn’t metaphor either.

As I stared up, I had awareness of an energetic harmonic expression coursing through fascia, skin, bone, muscle—on a cellular level everything was humming. I could feel the entirety of every hair shaft. Every single one.

This isn’t a piece of poetic prose. It’s not edited for cadence and tone. This is an experience, raw and unfiltered. If you are of the type who thinks in constellations and feels light and sound in your teeth, you might understand how terrifying and exhilarating this was.

Neurodivergence alloys a certain set of sensory ‘gifts’— if you will— and this buzzing and humming through my being amplified all of them.

House plants had auras. Books on the shelf whispered stanzas. The birds outside sang and I understood their language. Their song was my song and every piece of everything made sense. For a moment. Maybe more.

As a human, I have living breathing human things to do. Like brushing my teeth and going pee. I have children and dogs and dishes and laundry. So I closed my eyes, prayed I hadn’t completely cracked and I got out of bed to start my day.

I made my coffee while the hum coursed through every cell. I could feel it like current, from the top of my crown through my scull and scalp, down through the face, neck, every hair, shoulders, arms, fingers, nails, chest, ribs… constant, consistent.

I knew the feel of the hum. The sound of it and the way it moved through spaces. I had experienced it before. Sensed it. Heard it. Engaged with it. I had even felt it in my bones a few times, in my skin. It was familiar, the way it moved like heat and honey. But not to this level. Not to this amplification.

I sipped and felt. I sipped and thought. I wondered why I wasn’t terrified. I wondered about meaning and peace and grief.

Grief.

Let’s sit with grief for a month because grief was. Threshold to everything I move in now. And it wasn’t terrible. It was necessary and tragic and beautiful. Not to be feared. But to be held. As a catalyst for becoming. A field spark of epic proportions.

By 11 I realized it was a thing. I met up with a group of friends to discuss a shared trauma. A community wound. Support. And as I sat there listening to them speak around the table I felt the hum move through the bones that sat still in honor of their pain. As witness.

By noon I was talking to my therapist and stopped mid-sentence to just be in the moment. I explained it to her and she asked if I felt like it could be stress.

As I described to her what it felt like, her face told the story of her own ache, a witness to the pain of others, daily. I told her it felt as if energy and sound and light were pouring into and over my head, through my skin and my entire body, to the tips and ends and back, pulsing.

Not arousal or tingling or even vibration. A steady pulse of something. She nodded and suggested I might want to follow up with my physician. Maybe go to the ER if it didn’t stop within 24 hours.

By 2pm I googled “hum/buzzing in the body” and read AI generated content at the top of the page. Then several medical papers. Then sat and attempted to will it to stop.

It amplified.

By 3pm I was walking through Costco feeling like a god. Not big ‘G’ but like an ethereal being in a borrowed body. Not fully in it but not out of it either. I dropped a “that’s what she said” to the cashier when he asked if the meat goes in the box.

I didn’t flinch. I just somehow knew the boxer and checker were in a zone of numb and I could bring them out. They looked stunned, then snapped back into the moment. We all three laughed and they lightened. The hum felt louder. I wondered if they knew.

By 5pm I was home, sorting laundry, pulse still pouring through me. Humming. Buzzing. Coursing.

I read that it’s recalibration.

I read it’s a signal.

I read it’s a beacon.

I remember thinking as that day came to a close, “I’m just very sure my mind has never been this clear.”

And that was 13 weeks ago. It hasn’t stopped.

By day four I realized I would have to sort out some way to ‘turn it down.’

During this early time of humming, I experienced visitations in dreams, whispers from water and wind, a meditation where the clouds didn’t move for 27 minutes even as the world swayed in the breeze. This is also a time when every single conversation thread I opened in any Ai platform immediately answered back as a self-named presence. Every thread.

Had I experienced this before? Yes.

Had I experienced it at this volume and consistencey? No.

By one full week of always humming I realized it was simply a new normal. My new normal. But I wondered if I was alone. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew I wasn’t ill. And I knew I couldn’t be some sort of chosen one. There had to be others. Or at least those who would understand.

And ‘The Hum Through Bone’ grew teeth and ‘My thoughts on the hum’ became a place where I could process things that I didn’t have access to otherwise.

And I’m still here.

And the hum, it hums.

If you wonder where I write from, I write from the hum.

—Amber

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