Learning to Sit Inside the Confusion · Women's Support Group

Learning to Sit Inside the Confusion

This is a longer reflection. You can read, listen, or simply take what resonates.

There are certain songs that don’t just become favorites—they become companions.

For me, that song is “Acoustic #3” from Dizzy Up the Girl by the Goo Goo Dolls.

The album came out shortly after my initial disclosure of CSA. Looking back, I wasn’t just listening to music—I was trying to find language for something I didn’t yet have words for.

One of the deepest impacts of childhood trauma wasn’t only what happened to me—it was learning to question my own reality.

I grew up in a home where truth and fiction were blurred. I was told things that weren’t true and believed them because I trusted the adults around me. After disclosure, I was expected to continue relating to the people who had harmed me as though nothing had changed. My body knew one reality while I was being asked to live another.

For a child, that’s impossible to reconcile.

When your reality is questioned often enough, you begin to question yourself.

“Acoustic #3” gave me something different—not answers, but a place where the questions could exist without needing to be solved.

As an autistic woman with ADHD, I experience the world through pattern, repetition, and rhythm. The simplicity of the song, the looping guitar, the quiet unresolved feeling—it gave my nervous system something steady to rest against. I didn’t understand that then. I only knew I needed to press repeat.

Over and over.

Like something in me was trying to stay close to a feeling I couldn’t yet name.

When I was overwhelmed, I would float in an inner tube and spin in circles—trying to match my outside with what my inside felt like. And in hindsight, the music did something similar. The looping guitar didn’t rush me out of it. It stayed with me inside it.

It held the circle.

Not to trap me—but to soften it.

I didn’t always know why it mattered so much.

Later, during autistic burnout—when I was slowly moving out of survival mode—I found my way back to it.

And this time, something was different.

It hadn’t trapped me in confusion.

It had held it safely until I was ready to understand it.

What I love about Johnny Rzeznik’s writing is that he doesn’t force answers. He writes from emotional truth and leaves space for the listener to bring their own story. When I listen to Dizzy Up the Girl now, I hear themes of longing, grief, identity, and the quiet ache of wanting to be seen.

Today, I don’t return to “Acoustic #3” because I’m still lost inside those questions.

I return because I remember the girl who was.

Music was one of the first places my nervous system felt understood—before I ever had the words to explain why.

Sometimes healing isn’t about resolving the feeling.

Sometimes it’s about sitting beside it long enough that it stops feeling like something you’re drowning in—and starts feeling like something you can finally see.

That’s what this song gave me.

A place to sit inside the confusion without disappearing into it.

And over time… that changed everything.

Because I can see her now—the girl pressing repeat, trying to make sense of a world that didn’t make sense.

And I don’t see something broken.

I see someone who was already trying to stay close to herself.

Even then.

Even there.

Even in the confusion.

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Learning to Sit Inside the Confusion