About the Artist

Hi! My name is Mike DeFuria, I am unapologetically neurodivergent and queer AF, and I’d like to welcome you along on a journey of healing, mindfulness, exploration, and understanding through music and visual art. I believe we are all artists because we all have stories to tell. So, let me tell you a bit of my story. I am an adult child of an addict/alcoholic; I’ve been battling depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and have always sought out music in particular as a way of healing/escaping the traumas I’ve been through. I have a degree in music education, and taught K-6 music in public schools from 2016-2022. I held on as long as I could teaching through the pandemic, but it took an intense toll on both my physical and mental health. In the spring of 2020, I began having excruciating sciatica nerve pain. I was in such overwhelming, inescapable, invisible pain that I leaned HARD into healing through music so I could stay grounded, patient, and chipper enough for all 475 of my students. Many a night I laid on my floor, tuning out the pain with music.

My healing journey with music started much earlier than my bout with sciatica, though. I grew up in a home where I wasn’t allowed to have negative emotions; in many families with an addict parent, the children take on certain roles to try to cope with the chaos and I ended up taking on the role of the comedian/entertainer. My mother has a lot more going on in her brain than just addiction though, my mother’s mental illnesses distorted reality for the rest of us living with her. Because my mother had no ways of self-regulating, she used me to regulate for her, and because sadness and anger were so demonized and weaponized, I just compartmentalized and buried those feelings. Throughout my elementary years, I oscillated between de-escalating fights with humor/song and escaping to my room and blasting classic rock. The energy of The Who was invigorating; the attitude of The Ramones and The Clash was empowering, the darkness of Black Sabbath was enchanting. In my middle school years, I started seeking out more music with that darkness, the darkness I felt in my heart. One day on the school bus, a friend of mine handed me his earbuds, and the ensuing onslaught of drums (the intro of “The Wolf is Loose” by Mastodon, to be exact) started my lifelong love of metal music. Finally!! The hyperactive motor inside me put to sound (i.e. ADHD), anger that was turned into beautiful, organized chaos.

Metal music allowed me to embrace anger and turn it into positive energy; when I got to high school, I found equally powerful magical music styles for embracing the other negative emotions I had been suppressing for so long: sadness, longing, heartache, the blues. These were emotions I literally didn’t know how to feel; I couldn’t cry, and I had hardened myself from them since they had been inescapable in my younger years. Cue the next life-changing song, “In A Sentimental Mood” by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. We divided into smaller groups for a trip our jazz band would be taking, and I was given the melody on “In A Sentimental Mood”. This melody expressed more to me than I could ever put into words: the tender upward climbing, the lingering and yearning of the high G, the moments you can almost feel the melody pull you up and let you fall again. This lead to a shift where I was able to start feeling/processing sadness, but only through music. I still wasn’t able to feel sadness in real-time with life, but I was starting to be able to let my guard down when I was alone. While I didn’t understand it at the time, I was creating my own form of music therapy for myself.

Fast forward to 2021, when I finally decided to go to doctors for the chronic pain. I was met with a lot of gateceeping and gaslighting similar to the ways I’d been treated by doctors for trans-related care. They did some xrays and told me I had hip impingement on both sides. As I was looking at the xrays, I pointed out my spine and asked why it looked so crooked since I had been laying flat for the xray, and was told I must have been lying in a strange position. Fast forward to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th opinions where it turned out I had a herniated disc, an intense S curve in my lower spine from scoliosis, and a connective tissue disease. I placed a lot of faith in my physical therapist and chiropractor over the next 8 months, but more importantly, learned to listen to my body. I was 4 months into healing, my pain was slowly easing, when suddenly everything went back to square one after one particular stretch my chiropractor told me to push through. When I talked to my PT, he was shocked I was even given that type of stretch, and when I brought up the connective tissue disease to the chiropractor, he told me it “didn’t mean anything” (spoiler alert: it does mean things!).

While all of this was happening with my body, my mental health was being stretched and pushed to its limits at work. I taught at a school where 70-80% of our community lived in poverty, 45% of our students were English Language Learners, and the majority of our students had experienced/were continually experiencing traumas. We were given a new, monolingual principal with zero years of experience and zero trauma-informed practices. She lasted 2 years before transferring to a school in California, and we all had a LOT to say for the next hiring round. I had been leading our school’s Equity committee and was already known at the district level for firing off emails to the superintendent and school board about equity concerns, so it made sense that I be on the interview panel for the new round of hiring. We interviewed a candidate that seemed promising, as she was bilingual and had been in Title 1 schools. She had zero experience as a principal and zero trauma-informed practices (which were the other 2 big requirements we asked for). After we interviewed her, we were told that she was the only person we would be interviewing so we could either take her or start the process over again, but we had to sign gag orders to keep it a secret that we only saw one candidate. I asked them how many people originally applied for the position, they said 10. I asked them why none of the other 9 candidates were being interviewed, they gave me an off-topic anecdote about how one time someone applied to be a principal even though their only work experience was in retail. Spoiler alert: the principal we were given was also primarily experienced in retail!

Next, they also needed to hire a new assistant principal, and we again voiced the need for someone with experience as an administrator and trauma-informed practices (especially since the principal they gave us had neither). They hired someone with neither of those qualifications, who, over the course of the 2021-22 school year made enough of our lives a living hell that 18 of us quit. This man used every tactic in the Emotional Abuser’s handbook, and while I can’t speak for the other 17 folx who left, I can speak to this: I spent time over the summer meeting with this man about our Equity team (that I had been co-leading for a couple years) where he looked me in the eye and told me, “I’m not here for fake-uity, I’m here for the real deal.” Then, about 2 months later when I came to him to discuss my concern over him tone-policing some of our Black students, he flipped his lid at me and made me apologize to him for “calling him a racist”…Naturally, I emailed everyone at the district when I resigned and detailed the things this man did/said and why I believed he should not work with children. Spoiler alert: he got a promotion and is still working with children.

ALL OF THIS TO SAY, I’ve learned a lot about myself and a lot about healing. I’ve learned that my brain simply works differently than neurotypical brains, and that my incessant need for autonomy and individual expression is something I can listen to instead of ignore. I’ve learned that while other people might not understand what I mean when I say that my brain auto-fills in triangles everywhere, I can try to capture that through art. I’ve learned that I don’t have to settle and accept the constant microaggressions woven into the public school systems that seem to persist even after you bring them up. I’ve learned that healing is messy, loud, asymmetrical, fluid, and so many other words that I am realizing could also describe myself. I hope that my self-healing provides you with some healing too, and more importantly, I hope to create a community of self-healers together.