About Jonty
23 years of misophonia. 305,000 words of personal writing. One path from surviving to thriving.
The cereal fort
At ten years old, Jonty built a fort out of cereal boxes at the breakfast table. Not for fun. For survival. Because the sounds at the table.. chewing, breathing, the everyday noise of a family eating together.. made his whole world shake.
He didn't have a word for it. He just knew something was wrong with him. That's what he believed.
He shoved earplugs in as deep as they'd go. He sat in the back left corner of every classroom. He snuck one headphone into his left ear and hoped no one would notice.
He stopped eating with his family at eleven. He barely spoke to his father for seven years. Not because he didn't love him. Because the sound of his breathing made his body feel like it was dying.
He wished he was deaf. Some nights, he wished he was dead.
But he kept waking up.
The search for ground
At 25, he left banking. Left New Zealand. Took a year off alcohol and watched the depression and anxiety lift. He didn't know where he was going. He just knew he couldn't stay.
He found a gym. He found that when he pushed his body hard enough, the sounds got quieter. Not gone. But quieter. And that was enough to keep going.
He found a yoga mat and felt out of place.. a young man in a room full of older women. But at the end of class, lying in stillness, he felt peace for the first time in years and didn't know why. So he kept showing up.
He found breathwork. Qi Gong. A mountain in Nepal and walked it for sixteen days. A monastery in Thailand where he sat with silence long enough to hear himself. A Shaolin Temple in China where he spent three months training.. and one full month without earplugs.
His response existed on a dial, not a switch.
The phone call that changed everything
He found the courage to call his father and say the thing he'd carried for twenty years. He cried on his knees for ten minutes afterward. And something shifted that can never shift back.
He learned a mantra. Six words. “I am safe. It is just a sound.” He said it ten thousand times. Some days it didn't work at all. Some days it opened a door he didn't know was there.
He learned to ask his body questions the way you'd ask a child you love. “What's happening, buddy? Would you like to share?” And his body, after years of being hated, started to answer.
He learned that he was never broken. That his nervous system had been protecting him from something that once felt like death. And that the same sensitivity that wrecked his world also made him someone who could read a room, hold space for two hundred and fifty people breathing together, and feel what others couldn't feel.
He called it a superpower. Not as a bypass. As a truth he earned.
The breakfast table
Recently, Jonty sat at the same breakfast table where the cereal fort used to be. Same house. Same family. Opposite seat. Very little to no triggers.
Not a cure. Not a switch that flipped. A dial that turned, slowly, over years of showing up. Breathwork. Somatic awareness. Meditation. Writing. Community. Understanding his nervous system instead of hating it.
305,000 words of personal writing across five years. An 800-hour yoga qualification. A Shaolin Temple. The Annapurna Circuit. Cacao ceremonies for 110 people. Breathwork sessions for groups. And the world-class app he built.. MisoCalm.. with sacred geometry, solfeggio frequencies, and the therapeutic language he learned along the way.
This is why I built this
Now he sits down to write. Not for himself this time. For the kid in the back corner with one headphone in. For the teenager who thinks they're the only one. For the parent who doesn't understand why their child won't eat at the table.
Join the CommunityThe boy who ate alone upstairs is building a world where no one has to.