The Long Detour Back to Doing It for Myself

On unmasking, reclaiming joy and no longer turning what regulates me into currency

Photo by Apolo Photographer on Unsplash

I’ve called myself an artist for over twenty years, even labelled myself a professional in the sense that this, and only this, was the way I endeavoured to justify my existence and, in a small way, make some kind of living for a lot of years. Yet in spite of all those years of experience under my belt, I still carry so much imposter syndrome when I am around other artists. I’ve sold my work in galleries big and small, licensed it worldwide and yet, somehow, I still don’t believe I belong in that room. None of this made any sense until I started to unpick it and examine its parts through the eyes of neurodivergence.

Because at some level just below the surface I also don’t seem to believe I’m an actual adult, a proper person, even a legitimate human since I don’t overly identify with the race. All of that seems to stem from a lifetime of comparisons with other people through eyes that, for the most part, had no idea about neurodivergence, but which could sense all the profound differences between me and others, going back to my very earliest memories. So whether that’s all to do with how I regard myself, measuring myself against what’s “normal” or more to do with how I sense others judging me, I really don’t know…only that I don’t feel legit at any of it, not even at life itself, where responsible adulthood and income making has largely confounded me.

And I’m a walking wound of rejection sensitivity in this domain of art, perhaps more so than any other, because this is where I make myself most vulnerable, most exposed for all to see. Well, that and my writing, but that came along later and feels different somehow; less open to a world of comparisons that can be so strongly dictated by the latest fads and a whole lot of pretentiousness.

I see now that a big part of the problem is that I have been using what was meant to be self-regulating as currency and as some sort of token effort at “joining in” with what I don’t often understand; turning something inward and private into something outward-facing, a way of buying a place in a world where I have always felt like such a misfit. So, of course, it has left me feeling painfully exposed, as though I am constantly rolled onto my back, offering my underbelly to the world while hating every minute of it; really, wanting to stand up and walk off with my head in the air. But then, in a practical sense, it was the most obvious thing to offer forward, because art was my gift and it gained me, by and large, positive attention, and that wasn’t something small in a paradigm in which I was largely ignored or despised for no reason I could easily pinpoint until my diagnosis.

As most artists know, every artwork goes through its ugly stage, especially when it’s oil paints, which is what I primarily use. My difficulty is getting past that stage to something I am prepared to call finished. That last leg can take everything out of me and sometimes take months, even years on occasion. Until that twitch to keep on perfecting and perfecting again has run its course, I can never call a painting finished, even after it has been hung on the wall for months or kept in storage for years because just seeing it again could ignite some itch to tweak it some more. I’ve come to see this as an externalisation of how I continuously scrutinise and work on myself like I am some sort of self-improvement obsessive; when, really, it’s all been about survival and feeling better about myself in the poor-comparison situation called life that seldom puts me at an advantage. Perfectionism in art is like the manifest spotlit version of an underground trait that runs through the very core of me, directing that twitch at something visible, tangible, worthwhile…lest I continue turning it back on myself, which gets brutal and exhausting.

Because in art, no less than anything else in my life, I tend to think a task isn’t worth doing unless it is done to perfection. Yes, I see all too clearly how this belief system has been the scourge of a lifetime that has seen many burnouts. Ironic really, since I turned to art as a full-time occupation after I was forced to give up more conventional work due to the massive health burnout I went through in my late thirties. This was meant to be the rest, the letting go of that particular white knuckle ride but it only turned into the next one.

At that point, I hadn’t painted in years, had barely had anything I could call an art practice in decades, even though it was the thing I loved most growing up, yet paints came to rescue me exactly when I needed them most, just at the point I needed to find purpose and outlet. Something that was as much a case of mindfully slowing down and staying present as it was about anything to do with being gainfully productive, at least initially. In fact that whole productive thing had pushed my nose to the grindstone and worn me out by that point; this was supposed to be the antithesis, which it was, for a time.

The thing is, once my AuDHD traits got on board with it, I couldn’t just be a worthy amateur, I had to be an accomplished professional. The autistic part had to make a special focus of it, to hone and perfect for hours on end and the ADHD factor added excitability to it, that need to get way beyond the mediocre, to experiment and feel the thrill of constant variety or new mountains to climb. So I worked at it and worked at it; oh how I worked at it, driven and a little bit obsessive to the point that, when I wasn’t painting, I was staring at the day’s work contemplating what it would take to “fix it”, my husband always tracking my eyes to some corner of the room where the canvas was surreptitiously propped up in my peripheral, quite deliberately, so I could continue to noodle with the problem when I was ostensibly watching telly. Actually, so much of art was about problem solving; how to get from A to B, how to turn this unholy mess into something worth looking at. My mind loved it, while my nervous system relished the calming effects it had, the soothe and the stim, in equal proportions.

For a very brief time, I attended some workshops, did some group practice with life study but it was anathema for me. I was there for technique but found I didn’t acquire any I couldn’t have developed for myself, far quicker, at home with less chatter (almost nobody taught in oils anyway, and acrylics just weren’t the same). Teachers took an irrational dislike to me because I was so independent-minded and other attendees sidled off into their cliques; the exact same issues I’d had at school and the awkward masking part over coffee was exhausting. I didn’t really need the courses they ran, my biggest issue being that I lacked self-belief in what I already had (the one rare oils teacher I did a one-to-one with point blank said “go home and practice, you have the natural ability, all you need now is studio time”).

So pretty soon I gave up with all the art classes, using a new puppy that couldn’t be left alone for hours as my excuse to myself. With a huge sigh of relief, I began painting in earnest at home, intensely happy to be alone once more and no longer feeling quite so wrong for claiming this, like it suggested depression or anxiety, because I had tried the alternative and it hadn’t worked out or made me happier. My life pretty much turned into the daily school run, a dog walk with camera (hunting for inspiration) then painting all afternoon, and remained like that for years.

Even then, there was lingering guilt or concern around making this choice to be so solitary, until I eventually noticed something, which only fully crystallised in my mind once I finally accepted that I was AuDHD over ten years later, and it was this:

Neurotypicals always seem to think the secret sauce to anything’s success is getting together in groups, comparing, encouraging and collaborating whereas I don’t find that at all; rather, my secret ingredient of success is to go it alone.

For me, those things are interruption and diversion, they’re distraction from focus and dilution of aim. They take me off down avenues of interaction that become the thing rather than putting all my energy on the objective. They scatter my resolve and attention, undermining my confidence and turning the whole point into the collective experience instead of the singular focus, the resolution, I can bring to something on my own, which takes me holding all the threads at once, not handing them out for others to have a go.

And my experience is that these collaborations are never as truly encouraging as they say they will be. People, by and large, bring other agendas and they get hung-up on comparison and competition, their own insecurities. They say the opposite to what they’re thinking and they hold back important things if they feel, for whatever reason, that you don’t deserve the praise or can’t take the criticism. There are so many rivulets of sub-meaning to everything that the interaction takes all the energy of decipherment I have, whereas when I’m hyperfocused on something of my own, THAT is the thing receiving all my attention, the whole of my engagement, as it should be.

In any case, my mind works in spirals, not straight lines, so to ask for an opinion as though the solution is linear isn’t quite correct; it requires holding all the stages of the problem… its very beginning, its ending and all points in between… simultaneously. How could I ask someone else to interject something useful, and expect them to understand where I was headed or had come from, without first grasping the tensegrity that held it all together?

What’s the point of gathering all these half-baked opinions, just to seem collaborative? Why not wheel the finished product out into daylight when it’s finally ready to be seen and not before? This is how I’ve always tackled things since the earliest days…from handling the way I was being bullied to completing school projects, where I never once asked for assistance, always keeping everything close to my chest until I was done…to figuring out my post-divorce mess and navigating chronic health. Any time my situation has been prised out of me unresolved, ostensibly to help, it’s only ever got messier, more diffuse, less directed; that’s my honest experience. And yet there is always judgement in the air, implied criticism at this very idea of not needing or seeking other people’s input, like I am being accused of arrogance, control-freakishness or being antisocial; too full of myself to need the help.

So, in many ways, this lifestyle change represented a shedding of things I now realised that I didn’t need and going back to roughly where I had started before the ways of the world interfered. When I was naturally self-contained and just got on with the absorption of what I was happily doing, as was the case when I was a young enough child to claim this behaviour for myself and not question it. Before it was made wrong by the opinions of others.

To get the whole picture of what art has always done for me, why some part of me reached back in time for it, to steady me after my burnout, I need to rewind the clock back to childhood, when sitting contentedly on my own churning out drawings was something I did long before I could read. From about two or three onwards, I would repeatedly draw the same subject - birds - like I was on a production line, always highly engaged in the task, completely lost in my own little world, making soothing guttural noises in my throat in sync with my hand movements. I’m told this by family members, and I also remember the feeling of it, can actually see myself, my knees and hands, as I sat on the little stool at the low table we had, clutching my colours and working through reams of draughtsman’s paper that dad brought home for me as half-used scraps from his office. I can drop straight back into that feeling of absorption, of contentment, of calm; it’s where I still go every time I do art. From the beginning, I was using it to self-regulate, keeping myself steady in a household that was frequently too stimulating, too emotional, too noisy but this took me out of it and I was perfectly self-contained.

Yet, already, I was learning that art drew positive attention, that it offered me a kind of autonomy that wasn’t otherwise easily come by in our family, that kind of “leave her alone, she’s being creative” mindset that bought me quiet time and aloofness in a highly chaotic domestic environment that could otherwise sweep me up on its tide. It was the start of art turning into something else, something less simply regulatory; more protective and a kind of mask, if you will, because others became distracted by it enough to leave me be and not probe any deeper. The act of it was revered enough that others would step around me in a way they wouldn’t have done if I had been absorbed in anything else.

So not only would it buy me hours of alone time at home but it buffered me at school, where I won favour and accolades through being able to do it, even managed to hide myself under that air of creative eccentricity that surrounds artistic traits, especially as a teenager. There was a sort of respect and mystique afforded me through my artistic gift that none of my academic efforts ever earned me, no matter how hard I tried to succeed at them; it even won the respect of one or two people that might have otherwise bullied me. This was yet another layer, an add-on to the original purpose of the artistic pursuit; almost like a shield or a territory marker, gaining me a little more personal room for manoeuvre into which other people would seldom deign to trespass. It also bought me quiet time in the art room at lunchtimes and breaks. It gave me the so-called cool points of a highly decorated art portfolio that people admired when I carried around with me, when everything else about me was shunned as boring or weird.

So perhaps no surprise that I found myself turning back to it when my adult world fell apart at the end of my fourth decade, at which point the world had become much too much for me to handle and too encroaching to be sustainable; I felt like I had no room left to even breathe. So, in spite of my health cascade, I was desperate to reclaim some personal space again, even from family life; and art provided that bubble, a kind of oxygen tent. Especially during the many hours of alone-time during the day when I no longer worked and might otherwise have just sat there picking over my many failings at adult life, worrying about the way my so-called attempt at a career had imploded because I apparently didn’t have the stamina for it.

Instead, I was right back where I started, immediately engrossed in it, surrendered to the permission it gave me to express myself on a surface, even to make sounds or gestures that nobody else could hear or judge because I was on my own most of the time so I could do whatever came naturally, letting go of all those tightly braced muscles that had apparently kept every nerve and impulse under close control since people had first started scrutinising my behaviours, years before. So art became meditation, vagal stim, emotional outlet, the metaphorical stand-in for problems I was wrestling with, the channel for answers I didn’t even know I was seeking until the paintings themselves brought them to the surface, and it kept other people at bay. In short, it was everything that I needed right then and more.

So now I see how the same protective quality applied to art all these years later as before because I was still at the mercy of other people’s opinions, especially as I remained unemployed because of the shambles of my health. Because, by then, I had begun painting on a regular basis, certainly five days a week, and was taking it so seriously that I was able to fend off at least some of the inevitable criticism from certain people, spoken or implied, about not returning to work when, in their eyes, I looked perfectly fit and well, though I really wasn’t.

Again, the mystique and air of eccentricity that hangs around the idea of being an artist buffered me from too much scrutiny, which gave me space and put me at liberty to begin to unmask my neurodivergence long before I even knew that was what I was doing. It normalised spending so many hours alone, withdrawn and hyperfocused in a way that might otherwise have been labelled dysfunctional because I was, in my own way, “working” so it was allowed and tolerated. It bought me so much freedom to be myself again, like the intervening years had never happened, and if I dressed a bit more eccentrically, if I seemed a little bit more oddball than before in ways they couldn’t quite fathom, being an artist helped to explain or excuse so much of it.

In other words, spending copious amounts of time on my own, unfettered and, in fact, encouraging myself to be expressive and experimental, inevitably liberated me to be just as expressive and experimental with myself. It rapidly turned into a time of metamorphosis; a kind of accelerated personal growth (really, an unpeeling of layers) that came out of a disintegration process (my burnout, my poor health) that ended up birthing a completely different version of myself to the one who had gone out to earn a conventional crust. It was the delayed version of me that should always have been allowed to emerge but which, instead of birthing in the usual way, had been interrupted by life and become so caught up in a sticky web of other people’s expectations and demands that, for a long while there, I completely lost myself.

The beauty of it was that I was still being productive but it was far less about making money now, which did happen but not enough to live off; more about producing myself and some way I could possibly hope to continue existing. And yes, I appreciate I only ever had the luxury of this by virtue of having a highly supportive and encouraging partner behind me, struggle though we did to make ends meet at times. It justified me just enough to keep the world off my back while I got to grips with chronic health and finding myself underneath all the morass that life had heaped on top of me, and that was the first real break I ever had.

Just so long as I seemed driven, productive and reasonably successful at it, like I was always just on the verge of getting somewhere, people generally left me alone and counted me out of those otherwise inevitable pissing in the snow contests of who was doing what or earning how much in their midlife careers. My “career” was just weird enough that they knew not to ask. So people learned to just step around me and turn up at my exhibition openings, pretending to know what I was all about but never really quite getting it, yet somehow knowing not to even try. In some small way, I had started externalising my neurodivergence without even knowing it.

Which then made it all the more essential that I not just be some mediocre hobbyist; I had to be good and I had to have provable success and/or income to garner such respect and to be allowed to continue at it. And so, without even formulating this thought out loud, I somehow knew I had to throw myself into it, hook line and sinker, setting up my studio hours like a nine-to-five job and sometimes evenings and weekends, when there was time pressure, almost to the brink of another burnout.

In fact, I eventually reached a point, after a few years of this, when I realised all the joy had been quietly sucked out of this thing I was supposedly doing for pleasure, turning it into the next heavy rock tied to my back; a thing of burden, sometimes dread and stress when I just needed that long-awaited reprieve and the permission to “be” without the constant need to self-justify through busyness. At some point it had turned into yet another job, a pressure, a demand, which was its death knell given demand avoidance is one of my strongest traits and because, by this point, I realised there was no point to anything without the joy to fuel it.

That was my first wobble with the art, somewhere around ten years ago after a decade of doing it; and, being something held much closer to my heart, this time, than my much loathed corporate job, much more of an existential crisis than when I gave that up. I had come to identify with art; it was part of me and I was the artist so to lose my footing with that was to loose my footing with my very sense of self and it felt deeply destabilising, coming as it did right on top of perimenopause turning into actual menopause and the not-so-subtle worsening of my health that followed.

A very big reason for this latest burnout was the continually self-applied pressure of perfectionism. I couldn’t just keep doing what was working so well, rinse and repeat; I had to keep evolving in leaps of accomplishment, refining my craft, inventing new mountains to climb, pushing myself out there more, trying new things such as the digital art spin-off I went off into, or designing fabrics.

I was only ever as good as my latest achievement and none of it, in my mind, ever accumulated; like I had to start from scratch proving myself…and surviving the odds…every time. I couldn’t even begin to understand this need to keep whittling the stick of achievement to an even finer point until I first came to see my own neurodivergence and the odds that had always been stacked against me. This was literally me proving my own point; the point of my existence, over and over again, to survive the persistent sense that I was, in some way I couldn’t yet fathom, less-worthy than everyone else.

I see the link from neurodivergence to chronic perfectionism much more clearly now, though I didn’t for a lot of years. For a long time I regarded perfectionism as a necessary flaw, part and parcel of my driven nature, not as a wound or a protective device. But then I don’t think everyone else turns one thing after another into a mission to prove and protect themselves from negative scrutiny. For me, every effort, from passing exams to making a real go of my various attempted careers (and there have been quite a few), became a kind of survival project; another “thing” turned into self-justification in the eyes of the world, undertaken as though my very life depended on it.

It was around then, as the cracks began to form in the old way of perceiving myself, that I utterly refused to do commission work or to work to anyone else’s timetables or demands, but even the fact of my own internalised pressures and perfectionism began to torture me. Hell, even a new delivery of art materials could provoke demand avoidance because the very fact of them being there called me out if I didn’t use them; and so the lifelong trend of accumulating new materials, only to abandon them in shame when the urge passed me by, became the latest rub as I ventured into new territories of creativity. And this happened more and more as the sense of having painted it all out of myself, of having run out of inspiration, came flooding in with the generalised burnout feelings that were back again. I was ticking the criteria box exactly; things that once brought me intense joy no longer were and I was left bereft.

At first, it simply looked like I was taking a detour when I turned to other mediums but then it slowly became apparent that I hadn’t lifted a brush in months turning into years. I had a swan song of producing new work during the first year of lockdown, painting like a fury in my garden, relishing just how peaceful my noisy urban neighbourhood had become, even the Heathrow flightpath above my house gone suddenly quiet, allowing me to pretend I was in some rural idyl set-up with my easel under my tree. A year later, even this had fizzled out and I finally surrendered to reading books…any book I fancied, trashy novels, favourites from childhood…just anything at all except paint. It was the first time I ever gave myself absolute permission to stop; and it had taken me fifteen years since my last paid employment!

So just as suddenly as I had first taken up painting with a vengeance when everything else fell apart, I had now ceased doing any at all and didn’t take it up again for two or three years of dry spell, still spluttering on and off ever since. It was my everything and suddenly it had all but dropped off the scene in that way others read as uncommitted or mercurial when yet another ADHD fixation flies out the window. It really shows that I was down to questioning everything about myself by this point, right down to the bare bones of how I had spent nearly all my time for years, thinking this was me from now on; that I had found myself, defined myself at last… and yet even this primary thing had suddenly gone and left me standing there back at ground zero.

This new apparently under-motivated period, more like an identity crisis than an actual loss of drive, happened to coincide (quite unsurprisingly, in hindsight) with the point when I finally came to accept my dual neurodivergence, like I had finally caught sight of myself in the peripheral mirror. I’d been calling myself autistic since 2019 but ADHD took far longer to land because I was resisting the truth of it. Suddenly I was forced to see it there so I eventually looked it straight in the eyes and didn’t look away again. That’s when everything began to fall into place. Instead of art being my number one fixation, neurodivergence now took that place and it consumed my every waking hour; it was almost like I had no time for anything else.

Because I was starting to question absolutely everything I was about during this phase, “artist” got caught in the crossfire. I wasn’t even sure if I had natural talent any more, or if my output was the inevitable product of years of obsessive hyperfocus combined with very close attention to detail; a sort of ritual performed so repeatedly I became inevitably adept at it.

The thing is, surprisingly successful and enjoyable as those first few years had been, it had never really come easy to me, had always felt just as uphill as every other “career” iteration, and I was never quite convinced of my own abilities. It mattered not how many people bought or admired my work; when I was put side by side with other artists, I still felt like they were the real ones and I was the fraud. I was always expecting to be exposed one day as the wannabe that I was; a case of more luck than talent, more clever technique than giftedness. As the whole persona I had presented to the world for decades came under close scrutiny, this also got picked apart, because wasn’t this thing I had applied myself to just another attempt to normalise; to present a palatable demeanour to the world, something to curry favour and hide behind? Wasn’t the art I made like some sort of peace offering; here, look what I made, now please don’t hurt me? When it came down to it, this was the very same tactic I’d used at school to keep bullies off my back, bartering for every inch of space it afforded me and the very right to exist in it.

Once I had this niggle in my mind, I really don’t know what it would have taken to make me see otherwise because it simply lodged there in my thoughts. None of my past achievements would do it. Not the fact of making the shortlist of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters exhibition at the Mall Gallery (which, of course, might have been followed by more if only I hadn’t registered it as failure and profound rejection sensitivity when my work wasn’t hung after all, and so never submitted work again as a matter of self-protection). Not the fact of seeing my artwork featured as a three-quarter page in the Vogue magazine culture section, in books and campaigns, and on posters and cards worldwide. Not all those artworks shipped overseas to collectors on three continents, nor a clutch of awards won online. Not the array of respectable galleries accepting my work, nor the agent approaching me, the world’s biggest licensing agency inviting me. Not the fact I had taught myself to do all this from scratch at the same time as tackling burnout, chronic pain and an unresolved overlap of several complex health issues; none of it would convince me.

But then I hear this so much about those of us who are neurodivergent…that none of what we offer ever feels like it’s quite enough or really real. Perhaps it’s something in the reactions of other people when they actually get to meet us, like the profile doesn’t quite fit their expectations. Perhaps it’s because everything we achieve feels triply hard-won and not quite sustainable, no matter how well earned. Perhaps we are so accustomed to feeling like we are presenting a facsimile of ourselves to the world just in order to survive that we start to doubt the whole construct of our outward-projecting persona; as though we are fake through and through, held together by such flimsy scaffolding that one modest wind could blow us right over.

Perhaps our belief in our ability to take part in the world, or to have access to the same currency of good fortune that other people so readily transact in, is so insecure that we keep on expecting the bank of life to foreclose and to be stripped of everything we have achieved, no matter how hard we worked for it. Perhaps it’s this sense that we were never really invited to the party; that we gatecrashed and are about to get found out and shown to the door.

Whatever it was, I had this constant unnerved feeling that I was getting by on a wing and a prayer, that one day people would wake up and tell me to my face that I was rubbish, that my art was rejected and despised. That whole rejection-sensitive layer of me felt exposed every single time my work was on display, be it in a gallery or online, always expecting the rudeness, the negativity that never came. Every silence that came back to me, when social media does that thing where it feels like you must have been muted because nobody apparently saw your post, I would crumple in the lingering belief that all my worst fears were obviously true and I was better walking away from it all without making a fuss.

And then, conversely, given my lack of self-belief, I would get really bitter (then hate myself for it) when I saw artists whose work I honestly couldn’t fathom doing really well because they were so much better at social media and putting themselves out there; two things I absolutely loathed, long before I realised the neurodivergent reasons why. I carried such fury that so much of art success was about charisma and marketing, knowing the right people and having the kind of personality to front the whole thing with confidence, self-promoting and communicating in ways that were way outside my abilities. I hated all the artifice around it, the expected bubbly persona I was meant to project as though I came as a package with my output rather than it speaking for itself…or rather, for me, so I didn’t have to.

So in fact I was almost fully reliant on other people, on galleries noticing me, other people doing that intermediary work that I wasn’t capable of doing or, when I did, I was forced straight back into a degree of masking that killed my creativity stone dead. For instance, the run up to an exhibition could involve so much distractionary marketing and people engagement that I would be drained dry and thus unable to rouse a single creative urge for weeks on end. These were two completely different parts of my brain and the use of one would preclude the other; I certainly couldn’t just timetable my day into different parts and switch between the two.

People would constantly suggest that I build more presence, do demonstrations, run campaigns, make videos and I would recoil with such a fervour that I would naturally interpret it as the cowardice of the untalented; a fear of being exposed as the fraud that I was, not what it really was; a lack of basic capacity to take on those very things because they don’t suit me or my neurodivergent communication preferences.

Really, and in typical hyperfocused autistic fashion, all I ever wanted was to focus on the act of making art, that being the whole point of it. Interruptions could be fatal to my flow but they were coming thick and fast now; until I pulled right back from my involvement in “things” and then, for a short time, I had the art back on track but nowhere to show it. As began happening, anyway, when a few of my most comfortable galleries began closing down in what felt like a running theme of business failures, just before covid (which brought its own interruption), a change I found very hard to deal with. The pointlessness of it all was beginning to stare me in the face. There’s no denying, it’s been years now since I was last in a gallery; partly because they don’t exist in the same way and partly because I just don’t want to have to deal with them anymore.

It was funny how I became an exhibiting artist in the first place, because it almost didn’t happen at all. Shortly after finishing my last job twenty years ago, when my health was a mess, I had a session of hypnosis in which I was asked to envision my ideal day. Out of nowhere, I began describing a day in which I went to a nearby favourite art gallery and dropped off a load of artworks for an exhibition before going off to spend the afternoon walking my dog in the woods and fields for hours, completely at liberty to do as I pleased. There were no other people in this imagining, apart from a highly delighted gallery owner, just me fully engaged in this life of quiet absorption and unpressured accomplishment.

This hypnotic daydream came completely from left field given I had been working in a corporate desk job until very recently and, before that, done very little more than dabble with arts and crafts for nigh-on two decades. At the time, I wasn’t working at all and was trying to gain a foothold in my health at the same time as trying to work out what I could manage to do when it finally came to working again. I had barely started dabbling with my paints and my output was still very amateur at best.

Yet quite spookily, eighteen months later, by which time I had produced a lot more paintings since I still wasn’t working, I happened to be in that very art gallery with my then seven-year-old daughter. Hearing our chatter about the exhibition, the gallery owner chipped in and my daughter piped up, “Mummy paints,” to which he said quick as a flash, “Really, do you have a website I can look at?” Before I knew it, he was flipping through my extremely rudimentary online portfolio making appreciative noises and offering me a spot in the next exhibition alongside some quite impressive established artists. Without that leg-up, which was my entry into a long series of exhibitions there and around the south east and London, I doubt very much I would have ever shown anyone my art, being so poor at self-promotion and completely lacking in self-belief as I was. If it hadn’t been for the hypnotherapy session, I suspect I would have gone home and talked myself straight out of it as nonsense but there was something compelling about the way it felt like I had witnessed a premonition coming true; a signpost on the path, exactly when I was most unsure about the future direction of my life, dreading going back to some awful office job.

However, it was far from all roses dealing with gallery owners and not all of them were a great personality match for my sensitive system. When another gallery told me point blank that they only wanted paintings of Venice from now on, since my one Venetian painting had recently turned into a bidding war between two buyers, sending me home with a carload of new pieces they wouldn’t even look at because they didn’t fit the criteria, I just sat in my car and wept with the sheer hurt and frustration of it. I had spent months getting this body of work together for them, at their request, only to be rejected on a stupid condition they had completely failed to mention until this point. They exercised their right to be picky and prescriptive with no thought whatsoever for the labour and commitment that had gone into this latest batch of work, for which I now had to find another gallery at short notice.

Most of all, I was spitting with fury that they were trying so hard to typecast me already, to clip my creative wings for their own commercial agenda. This wasn’t why I had turned to art and having to deal with this was no different really than dealing with a corporate boss when it came down to it, especially when I could see how shortsighted they were being yet they wouldn’t listen to my views, as had ever been the case. The dogged pursuit of money at all costs is something that clouds so many people’s judgement and here it was again, cutting me off without giving me a real opportunity to prove myself as the all-rounder I was capable of being.

I was so hurt, so rejection sensitive after this encounter that I wouldn’t go near that gallery ever again so that was a case of one more being struck off the list; yes, it had happened before because, once my sense of justice is affronted, there is literally no going back. It was one of those absolute autistic door-slams I now recognise for what they were and, to be honest, that was when I first began recoiling from the whole abhorrent gallery scene. So much of it was about who you knew and having the right connections, the best name drops in terms of other galleries you had been in before or where you had trained (when I hadn’t trained anywhere). It was about being placed in unspoken hierarchies with other artists who had a bigger foot in the door and not always about talent. It was always about what they believed would go for the most money. One prestigious gallery that I was thrilled to have an audience with told me they loved my unique style and were prepared to overlook my lack of an art school if I could only scale my work up from bijoux canvases that were part of their charm to the size of a warehouse conversion wall so they could sell them for more (I flatly refused; they were missing the whole point). It was always about how much of a production line you were prepared to be, churning out more or less the same things repeatedly, never mind following your own inspiration or direction of personal growth.

In this one area of life, I was finally daring to unmask for once and lead with my authenticity, the outpourings of my heart, but it wasn’t enough, at least not for the kind of people who were in the art business to make a killing.

On the other hand, the people that actually engaged with my work often connected with it so deeply that I have a whole load of precious anecdotes: The woman who came into the gallery week after week to stare at the painting she was saving up for, laying down minuscule instalments until she was able to take it home. The couple who tracked me down to purchase a particular painting they wanted to be the first thing to hang on their wall when they relocated to a farmhouse in France, taking this precious piece of English countryside with them. The painting put at the top of a wedding wish-list, purchased by means of a whip-round between work colleagues because they knew it would be far more treasured than some domestic appliance. Another woman who was gutted when she found out the painting she’d fallen in love with had already been sold to a medical practice, and how she broke down in tears of joy when I managed to get it back for her, through a very diplomatically handled artwork swop with the other buyer. The person who told me she would never look at trees quite the same way again because I had made her really see them for the first time. The pair that spent two years doing detective work to track me down after falling in love with my painting at an open exhibition and who persuaded me to sell it, even when I’d intended to keep it for myself, because they were so overjoyed at finding it at last, having kept a wall completely blank waiting to find it because nothing else would do. More than one medical setting invested in my art because they considered it comforting and grounding for patients to have around.

So though I find communication and relationships pretty difficult, having a whole lifetime of experiences behind me to demonstrate the fact, I was somehow managing to communicate with all these people, forming a kind of relationship with them, a quiet network of positive connection and a way of saying things that really mattered to me, all without the need for words.

After a lifetime of struggling to make sustainable connections with other people, art had turned into this very small way of feeling connected in such a way that I could actually cope with it, one which didn’t encroach on my very strong need for autonomy and privacy and which felt wholly authentic to me. It didn’t rely on me having to mask or rehearse, to present any particular version of myself, edited and anxious, but allowed me to go direct to the heart of the matter, “speaking” in such a way that required no further explanation, no making of a case nor the defending of a position. I communicated through the feelings my paintings invoked, and when the right person to own a particular painting came along I could always tell because of the way they responded to it; which made anonymous selling via intermediaries much harder for me to reconcile, even though it was mostly necessary.

So in its way, art felt like an outreach project, a way of communicating in a paradigm where connecting with others has seldom been easy for me and in a world that would otherwise have seen me withdraw completely, especially now I had no other reason to engage with it, not even parenting to keep me attached, in a very lose way, to community now my daughter had grown up. It kept me exercising that connection muscle long after it might have otherwise withered away; whether that’s for good or for bad (the outcome has been very mixed; certainly not cut and dried) but at least it was communication I could mostly tolerate.

Perhaps inevitably, my art also took on something of a mask-like quality; being something that suggested I was far more confident and engaged with the world than I really was. The very outward urge itself (to show the art) was a pretence, something I always had to push myself to do. It forced me out of the shadows into something more visible, much more perceived, which was both necessary and excruciating in equal measure. But at least this was a kind of masking I could just about sustain without too much collateral; as long as I kept it real between me and my buyers; which inevitably directed me away from galleries to making direct sales through other means, be that art trails or online, each of which came with their pitfalls (more on those below) but it felt more authentic selling face-to-face and that mattered. It still required so much masking and this became the trade-off, the part I could have done without and yet, without it, my art would have no point and would have remained unseen in a cupboard.

There was a time I really did much better with the exhibiting side of things and that was because an equally quiet and sensitive, completely unpretentious, gallery owner took me under her wing, putting me in her regular shows, which meant all I had to do was turn up a couple of times a year for the openings. And in fact, in that setting, I would feel alright sitting there next to my artworks talking about my process for a couple of hours to anyone that was interested. Looking back, it’s now so obvious that the reason why is that I was being given permission, for once, to monologue freely about my favourite topic; how brilliant, being so used to people stifling yawns or shutting me down. So this was sustainable for a few years, until the gallery was forced out of business by rising commercial rates and that was the sorry end of that, again.

There were many other, far more formal, prosecco-fuelled, openings where I felt completely out of my depth listening to all the typical pretentiousness going on around me, and I would often find myself becoming too ill to attend because I was so wracked with the absolute dread of them.

Then at one lucky point I was approached to begin licensing my work, which I continue to do, and that was such a break because it involves zero public engagements, marketing or other demands. I simply upload my new work and it’s put out there where I can make some income from it; which is as close to the perfect autistic art outlet as I have ever found.

I also tried to do the whole art guild thing but it turned into rejection sensitivity soup. As ever with these “club” type formats, I clearly didn’t fit in, not helped by the fact I technically lived outside the geographical region and didn’t already know anybody, but then they didn’t have to accept my application and I tried my best to show up. I think because my work was considered to be an asset to the group, I was simply tolerated as a member but nobody knew what to say to me or, indeed, me to them and there was no genuine enjoyment in it. My main objective for suffering it was to take part in the open studios once a year, which involved sharing a space with someone else as I didn’t have the right facilities (bringing its own social challenges).

The few times I volunteered to help out, which would mean partnering with some random other person to man the exhibition space, these interactions would be so awkward and strained for the whole session that we would both be watching the clock. I never could make small talk and even the common topic of art wouldn’t be enough to oil the wheels of these things, most of the time. And I never joined in with any of the workshops. Everybody else wanted to turn art into a social medium, something you did while you chatted which, for me, was the very antithesis of what art was about. A couple of times, I managed to set up a one-to-one demo with someone if I wanted to acquire a new skill but social awkwardness would always dominate the day.

Then there was the time I dropped off my contribution for the summer opening and, in spite of this being one of the most popular pieces I had ever shown online, getting snapped up pretty quickly by a collector, they actually turned it down as not suitable to hang, something that barely ever happened to anyone. You can imagine the RSD that swept in when I turned up for the opening with my family, only to find it was being stored in the broom cupboard; not least because I sensed some sort of politics had been at play here and that I had been dropped for subtle reasons beyond my grasp. I may have been wrong but it felt like somebody had been making a point because of the way I had walked off with the “public’s favourite” award the year before, conducted by secret ballot, in spite of being overlooked for all the official prizes.

There was always some secret sauce that I felt I was missing when it came to getting along with the mentality of the committee there and I eventually resigned because the effort outweighed the benefits. I always felt like I was hovering on the fringes because I wasn’t one of the social in-group, which really should have had no bearing at all but it clearly did. Akin to most social settings I have encountered in my life, the whole thing felt like a game that I simply didn’t know the rules to or have the stamina to learn how to play. I couldn’t be bothered with it any more and put it behind me after five years of giving it some real effort.

Another time I somehow acquired an agent who was initially really excited about my work, rubbing his hands together gleefully as he took in all my latest pieces. He was clearly of the opinion that I was about to become his latest milk cow, as all of his carefully selected artists tended to be, churning out pieces that were in such high demand that they generally sold even before they were put up on the wall. And yet, in no time at all, following one brief round of the Affordable Art Fair in London, he unceremoniously dropped me, which I think was due to the fact that I lacked charisma when it came to schmoozing with potential buyers. I have always lacked performative gloss and, by this stage, the mask I had polished up just-about well enough for getting by in my working life, dealing with clients, had started to tarnish and I just couldn’t bear to put it on any more.

As for internet selling, I found that the most deadening and disheartening kind of transaction of all and, after a few soulless years of tolerating it, completely gave it up. Treating my art as a commodity, a kind of glorified soft furnishing that people sent back when it didn’t quite match their sofa, shipping it to who knows where, only to be handled in whatever way people saw fit and very possibly returned damaged, was not the experience I wanted it to be and left me feeling hollow.

So there has always been a tension between why I do art and what it is essentially “for”; never quite resolving itself even after all of these years. Since painting has become much more challenging due to the worsening state of my health, especially since Long Covid, I have really started to question the why of it; especially when the labour outweighs the benefits. I already have enough artworks to keep my walls filled for the rest of my days so I really don’t need to produce more for any other reason than because it makes me happy to do it. That part has been under question since it began to equate with much more pain and significant logistical difficulties sustaining the very postures required to engage with it.

If not to market it or even show off and seek compliments, if I hate all the trappings of putting it out into the public domain, why do I need to continue stuffing my storage spaces with ever more canvases that don’t ever see light of day? Even when I do sell a few artworks, as I did last year when I opened up my own studio, in our new location, for the first time (a trial in making the exhibition side of things as real and close to home as it could possibly be, to see if that helped), part of me still feels very unsettled about the experience. It’s an odd thing having dozens of strangers pour into my house hour after hour like its a public domain, some barely saying a single word to me like I am not even there, though to be fair others were very supportive and friendly (and yes, the masking part was intense and felt performative, even during the good parts). That part of me questions the whole point, if it is not entirely joyful and leaves me feeling depleted or even a little bit off.

Ironically, I was persuaded to sell two pieces at that opening that were marked as not for sale because the person in question made their mind up that they really wanted them and didn’t want to take no for an answer. I look back and ask myself what was that all about: why did I capitulate so easily, was I tempted by the money, bowled over by their compliments? The answer is no, I simply fell back into people-pleasing mode, proving to be completely inept at saying no lest I offend these people, dreading them disliking me or labelling me difficult, rude or whatever if I didn’t concede. I was in the full throes of trying to settle into my new village, where everybody knows everybody else, and allowed myself to get swept away in the moment; defaulting to that same tactic I used for trying to get people to like me and leave me alone during my schooldays; saying yes to things when I actually meant maybe or no.

With such mixed feelings, I then handed over the two pieces of art I had previously decided to hold onto and cherish because of the particular memories they held, and then kicked myself hard afterwards. Not because they were such a massive loss; I’ve got over my reservations now, but because of the way I caved in, a pure demonstration of a lifetime’s worth of bad habits just as I was starting to notice them.

In fact, it’s quite astonishing to me that I am still so driven by that first impulse to say yes and agree to things, whether I want to or not, as some sort of safety mechanism learned over many decades of trying so hard not to rock the boat in case I am the first one to fall in. More recently, I have been working so much harder at saying “let me think about it and get back to you” instead of defaulting to the kind of knee-jerk yeses that always give part of myself away for free.

If I struggle this much to say goodbye to the pieces I produce (and I always have to some degree), is there also any point in being a commercial artist? Because when I produce art, it is an absolute labour of love taking many weeks, many emotions, a whole lengthy process of deep inner exploration that the surface level so often belies, and no price tag nor gushing compliment can reflect what that then means to me. A painting is almost like a diary of my internal landscape at the time I was working on it; so there is always an awkward mismatch with the very idea of “price”.

Especially when so many people equate worth with inches of canvas, not what has gone into it. Whereas, for me, it can feel like selling a family member, giving away a part of myself, a very limb, when I send off some artwork to hang in someone else’s domain. The more I allow myself to own that visiting other people’s spaces is a struggle for me (which it really is), the more I realise that I also struggle with the concept of sending my art out there to hang on some alien wall.

I’ve scrutinised this quite a lot and it turns out there is a visceral part to selling art, whereby I can feel quite profoundly connected to it, in a way that goes beyond object personification (a common autistic trait I have in spadeloads), because I actually birthed it. So I can feel fairly uncomfortable or unnerved by the sense that this fragment of myself has now been removed to a new location inside somebody else’s energy field. It’s like there is some sort of quantum connection established with those other people, which can feel perfectly benign when the piece finds its way to exactly the right new owner, as per some of my anecdotes. But when it is some random anonymous transaction, or someone I’m not really sure about, it can feel really “off” and leave my energy feeling scattered, like I am being thinly spread across all these energetic places I don’t necessarily choose to be linked to.

So there is a bit of a u-turn occurring inside of me right now and it’s pointing my art practice right back at myself as its entire objective, not outwards towards other people as it was for so long. I’m not feeling compelled to share it at all right now, not even on social media (and perhaps especially not there…) and I’m increasingly drawn to taking all pressure off the need for perfection and accomplishment. I’m exploring completely different mediums that can be used in positions I can actually sustain, using coloured pencils or pens on my lap for instance, and I’m looking to establish a more or less daily drawing habit that is all about showing up for a few minutes like a wellbeing practice, not performing. Because if I can only get back the regular habit of doing art just for me, I think it can truly get back to being one of the most regulating things in my life, as it ought to be.

This all has some very clear parallels with the way I have turned my whole focus of life around to face what suits and serves me best these last few months since diagnosis; towards what pertains to my health and happiness, what helps me stay present and engaged with my own existence, what puts me at the very centre of the experience. No longer so scattered and forever preoccupied with pleasing others or seeming a particular way so that they judge me kindly, performing some version of so-called normality, I have redistributed my focus in so many ways and am starting to feel so much better for it.

In short, I would like to say that I am going back to doing it all just for me, only I never really have done it just for myself until now, at least not since those very first efforts I got lost in as a pre-school child. I’m finally doing what I should have done twenty years ago after my breakdown: experimenting, playing, exploring myself through art and not getting all distracted by what other people might be thinking about what I am doing or how much they value it. What a long time to have been taken off on some sort of detour; one that began with the very first compliment and from the very first time those early drawings were used to curry favour with family members or at school, like some sort of barter system designed to acquire for myself the quieter life that I most needed in order to thrive, and which should have been mine for the taking; no trade-off required.

I also believe that, by getting back to art’s original purpose, I can get out of this art-rut.

In a timely way, I happened upon an art mentorship the other day and the woman in this marketing video was trying to tell me that the universal reason most artists stall is because they lack community and connection, that they need people they can pool their ideas with and with whom they can regularly discuss their sticking points.

I could see how this would be a popularly received idea and, at the same time, knew at once that this is not my reality. In fact that, for me, the very opposite is true; that what I most need is to pull back and remove other people from the equation entirely, so that I can get on with exploring what I want to do next myself without that constant need to translate what I am all about, to make it legible, to seek reassurance and proof that I am worthy or doing it right. I want none of that; having had my absolute fill of pursuing it, albeit it mostly subconsciously, for years. And I’ve had my limit of making myself wrong for not craving all that community and collaboration we are constantly told that we need, for not wanting to be a joiner-in-er. What I really want right now is to deep-dive the process on my own and not give a damn what anyone else thinks.

And while I can just about glean the benefit of watching some videos, learning some tips, getting some prompts when ideas have got stuck, as soon as it turns into zoom calls, gatherings and forums, sharing work-in-progress with the group, programs, physical meet-ups and workshops I’m out of there, as demand avoidant as it gets, my nervous system on red alert. One good thing came out of considering the mentorship idea…I knew immediately I could do all this for myself; in fact, it only made me more determined to do it my own way.

So I’ve gone back to basics and started drawing again, at two levels to keep my variable mind satisfied: the slow, concentrated version that is coloured pencils, and the immediate, in-the-moment capture of quick sketching. It’s already providing benefits, filling the gaping hole left where my regular painting practice used to be.

The proof is that I’m waking with that gentle fizz in the pit of the stomach again at the prospect of getting back to what I left off yesterday. With the slower pieces, that feeling comes from holding all the potential of where I can envision the piece going next, but which hasn’t yet been realised, cradling it in my mind until I can get it there. With the quick ones, it’s the excited feeling of unlimitedness that comes from knowing I could draw anything I want today, whatever catches my eye, no limits.

I’m slowing right down, pacing myself, absorbed, even if only for fifteen minutes or an hour, in a way that spills over the edges and calms my whole day down. That interruption to my thoughts is gold.

And it is getting me through the kind of heat wave that normally floors me. Somehow, by holding just enough tension to sit up (legs raised, of course) and wield a pencil, dysautonomia doesn’t feel so utter, so all-encompassing, and I’m finding myself more resilient through this intense weather phase than expected. Keeping my nervous system in check, by tempering the adrenaline I’ve come to rely too heavily on, just to get me moving, is a big part of it. So much of that adrenaline response is anticipatory, and living with chronic health can turn anticipation into a catch-22 when you start to anticipate symptoms. Yet the more I relax back into the art process, the less often those anticipatory responses get fired, which seems to have a knock-on effect, dialling down the dysautonomia before it has quite so many chances to arise. In a week when I would normally be struggling with the most severe kind of POTS, I feel more stable than I’ve felt for two summers and some of that is increased sodium that my body can rely on now I’m dosing properly; but some of it is the art.

Painting used to do this for me; correction, it did when chronic pain was my biggest problem and what I needed most was absorption and distraction, but not once POTS and post-exertional fatigue came along. The all-or-nothing of what it takes to set up oils, to uproot to a different room, sit at an easel, use big arm movements and stretch to work the whole canvas; the non-negotiable of cleaning up just as I get most tired; the sensory assault of it, even with low-aroma, non-toxic materials as far as possible, as I’ve used for years, was keeping me away from my practice just when I needed it most. I would come back from doing it floored, the equivalent of attempting a trip out or exercise, meaning I would have to clear any other demands to leave myself enough capacity for it (which meant doing art at the expense of having a life). Then, the perfectionism involved in oils, the constant striving, the pressure I couldn’t seem to help putting myself under to be doing it for a commercial reason (otherwise why else, when I don’t require more artworks to find space for), added stress to what should otherwise be enjoyable.

This low key lap-tray version feels much more sustainable; therefore, by adapting why and how I do it, I’ve made art possible again. Which isn’t to say never again to oils but that I’ve found a way that reflects the truth that the only viable reason for doing art all is that I’m doing it for myself; as should also apply to everything else in my life. Just like art taught me steadiness and self-containment were what I most needed in the very beginning, and slowing down and staying present was what I most needed when I burned out, when I stop to listen to art instead of pushing it hard, it always has useful things to tell me about where I currently am.

Fifty-odd years of motivating myself using outside pressures, survival imperatives, the desire to please, to be well received and be approved of are a lot to get over and it’s going to take some effort to get back into doing art for art’s sake but I’m already on my way. It’s my chance to let the rest of it drop by the wayside, including the perfectionism. And it’s going to keep taking this little-and-often approach, never forcing it, following the joy impulses and allowing the curiosity to arise, making it more about the process than the end result.

It’s going to have to get a lot like the way I have been learning to reframe just about everything in my life over recent months; peeling back the layers to reveal what is really, authentically, about me and not some outer layer worn to appease others or to make myself seem a certain way designed to keep me “normal” and safe. I’ve already done such a lot of that inner work when it comes to altering my mindset around relationships and how I spend my daily life. Bringing art into the reframe allows me to reclaim what has always been my best-ever regulatory tool and place it right back at the centre of my world, where it belongs.