I hope that if you’ve made it here, something in these pages has made you feel seen. If any of this resonates with you, I hope you’ll follow this journey — and perhaps become more open to speaking about your own experience. You are not alone in this.

The title of this research — Seasons, Not Symptoms — came from somewhere personal. It means seeing my body through a different lens. Appreciating what it is doing for me instead of going against it. It means seeing myself as something more than a form in pain. A phenomenal form, with connections beyond what we see physically. And understanding that aligning with that can help us navigate the world and get the very best of ourselves.

What follows is the formal research proposal I am developing. It is academic in structure, but it was born from lived experience — from every post in this archive, from every moment I stopped pushing and started listening.

I invite you to read it with an open mind. To see more of yourself in it. To look through a different lens. Because everything we need to know is already within us.

Seasons, Not Symptoms:

The Nervous System as Knowledge in Black Women’s Lives

Introduction

At the centre of this research is a question medicine has not yet asked seriously: what if the body was never broken — just unheard? For Black women, the nervous system is not simply a biological system. It is a site of accumulated knowledge, shaped by race, gender, trauma, expectation, and survival.

It holds what could not be spoken. It processes what was never validated. It signals long before the mind finds language. Yet within medical and psychiatric frameworks, these signals are routinely misread. Sensitivity becomes disorder.

Cyclical energy becomes inconsistency. Hyper-vigilance becomes pathology. The capacity to absorb, sense, and read environments with extraordinary precision becomes a list of symptoms to manage.

This research proposes that this misreading is not accidental. It is structural — and it is costing Black women their health.

Background and Rationale

Medical research has historically excluded Black women. The diagnostic frameworks currently applied to our bodies and minds were not built with us in mind. The result is a system that identifies deviation from a norm we were never included in constructing. Neurodivergence in Black women is underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and frequently identified decades later than in white counterparts — if at all.

Conditions affecting the nervous system, including sensory processing differences, functional neurological disorder, ADHD, and autism, are assessed through tools that do not account for the compounding effects of race, gender, and chronic stress.

What is missing from existing literature is not more data on symptoms. It is a fundamentally different question: what are these nervous systems responding to?

Hypervigilance is not pathology. It is encoded survival — an ancestral intelligence developed across millennia when reading environments accurately, sensing threat before it arrived, and remaining alert to subtle shifts in the world determined whether you lived or died. This capacity did not disappear. It lives in the body, carried across generations in ways that predate conscious memory. The modern world has largely lost the context that made this intelligence legible. What was once survival is now a diagnosis. What the body still knows how to do, the clinic calls disorder.

Masking — the chronic suppression of natural neurological responses in order to appear acceptable — is not a quirk. It is a survival strategy with measurable physiological cost. The “strong Black woman” archetype, celebrated culturally and demanded socially, requires the sustained suppression of distress signals. Held over time, this is not resilience. It is a nervous system in permanent survival mode, with long-term consequences for health, cognition, and hormonal function that remain under researched and under acknowledged.

This research also asks a larger question: what if neurodivergence in Black women is not developmental error, but evolutionary adaptation? Heightened sensory perception, pattern recognition, environmental attunement, and deep focus on areas of meaning are characteristics that ensured survival across generations of profound adversity.

The problem may not be the nervous system. The problem may be a world built for a narrower range of human experience than actually exists. The body does not operate on a linear schedule. It moves in cycles — hormonal, seasonal, and rhythmic — and for many Black women, those cycles profoundly shape cognition, focus, motivation, and creative capacity. Ancient systems of knowledge understood this.

Contemporary medicine largely ignores it. This research brings these cycles into the frame as data, not disruption.

Theoretical Framework

This project sits at the intersection of four bodies of knowledge that rarely appear together in Academic literature.

Neuroscience

Particularly polyvagal theory and somatic approaches to trauma, providing the biological grounding for understanding nervous system states, regulation, and the body’s survival responses.

Black Feminist Epistemology

Drawing on the work of Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, this framework establishes lived experience as a legitimate and rigorous site of knowledge production. Black women’s knowledge is valid epistemology, not anecdote.

Decolonial and Ancestral Frameworks

Including Vedic systems for understanding individual temperament and sensitivity, and the work of Resmaa Menakem on ancestral trauma held in the body across generations. These frameworks offer readings of the self that predate and challenge contemporary diagnostic categories.

Art-Based Research

Non-verbal, embodied practice as methodology — a way of making knowledge visible that the body can access before language arrives. The artwork is not illustration of the argument; it is the argument.

Research Questions

• What is the physiological and psychological cost of chronic masking for Black neurodivergent women?

• How does the “strong Black woman” narrative function as a nervous system stressor, and what does sustained survival mode do to the body over time?

• What becomes possible when neurodivergent traits in Black women are read through ancestral and evolutionary frameworks rather than deficit models?

• How do hormonal cycles and cyclical rhythms interact with nervous system sensitivity, and what does this reveal about the limits of linear, productivity-based models of healing and capacity?

• How can art-based, non-verbal practice make embodied and cyclical knowledge legible — without reducing it to pathology or therapy?

• How do we create conditions of safety — and what does safety feel like in the body when it has never been the baseline?

“Can ancestral connection be regulation, not just history?”

Methodology

This research adopts a practice-led, auto-ethnographic approach — a methodology that positions the researcher’s own body, experience, and creative process as a primary site of knowledge production. This is not a peripheral or anecdotal choice. It is the only methodologically honest response to a research question that centres embodied knowledge. A purely observational or clinical method would reproduce the very problem this research seeks to challenge: the removal of the Black woman’s subjective experience from the frame. The research will operate through three interconnected methods:

Autoethnographic Documentation

Ongoing health journalling will track the relationship between nervous system states, hormonal cycles, sensory experience, and creative capacity over time. This documentation will move between the physical and psychological — recording not just symptoms but sensations, energy, perception, and the body’s own signals across cyclical time. This living archive becomes both data and evidence: a record of what the body knows, in real time.

Arts-Based Research

Art-making is not separate from the research process — it is the research process. Drawing, mark-making, and visual practice will be used as non-verbal methods of inquiry: ways of accessing and externalising knowledge that exists in the body before language arrives. Each artwork produced during the research period will be documented as evidence, accompanied by reflective notes on the conditions, states, and cycles in which it was made. The resulting body of work is not illustration of the argument. It is the argument.

Qualitative Interviews

To move beyond a single lived experience, the research will engage other late-diagnosed Black women through in-depth qualitative interviews. Participants will be invited to speak about their diagnostic journeys, their experiences of masking, their relationship to their own bodies, and — where relevant — how creative practice has functioned as a site of processing, understanding, or resistance. These conversations will be analysed thematically, with particular attention to patterns around nervous system experience, survival strategies, and what safety has or has not felt like in the body.

Together, these three methods produce something no single approach could achieve alone: a research practice that is simultaneously rigorous, embodied, culturally grounded, and creatively alive.

Significance of the Study

Medical research has historically excluded Black women. The diagnostic frameworks currently applied to our nervous systems, hormonal cycles, and neurological differences were not built with us in mind. The consequences are not abstract. They are late diagnoses, mismanaged conditions, and years spent in bodies we were never given the language to understand.

This research matters because it refuses that exclusion — not by asking to be included in existing frameworks, but by building a different one.It matters to academia because it introduces auto ethnography, arts-based practice, and ancestral cosmologies into a conversation that has been dominated by clinical and deficit-based models. It argues, with rigour, that lived experience is a legitimate epistemology — that the body is a site of knowledge, not just a site of symptoms.

It matters to Black women because it offers something the medical system has not: a map. A framework for reading what the body is doing, on the body’s own terms — cyclical, sensitive, ancestrally intelligent, and not broken.

And it matters culturally because it asks a question that extends beyond Black women’s health into something larger: what happens when encoded survival — the heightened perception, the attunement, the capacity to absorb and sense far beyond the norm — is finally read correctly?

Not as disorder. Not as inconsistency. But as exactly what it is: intelligence the modern world has not yet caught up to.

This research does not seek to fix Black women. It seeks to offer a new way of reading what we have always already known.

Expected Outcomes

• A substantial body of artwork produced through and as the research process, forming part of the final submission alongside the written thesis.

• A framework for understanding nervous system sensitivity in Black women that draws on neuroscience, ancestral knowledge, and cyclical embodied experience.

• Academic contribution to debates in Black feminist epistemology, practice-led research, and decolonial health frameworks.

• A publicly accessible archive documenting the research process in real time, through the BlackButterfly platform — making the work legible beyond the academy.

• A foundation for future work in regulated financial access and advocacy for Black communities through the parallel development of Wynter Financial.