Being a Neurodivergent Artist: Living Between Categories

As an autistic and ADHD artist, I've spent much of my life feeling slightly out of place in categories that seem to make perfect sense to other people.

Not dramatically. Not painfully. Just... slightly disconnected.

One of those categories is gender.

I've never felt strongly connected to being a woman, but I haven't felt like a man either. In many ways, I simply feel like a person. While I'm comfortable in my body, there has always been a strange distance between myself and the idea of womanhood.

As a child and teenager, I didn't have the words for that feeling. I only noticed little moments of dissonance.

Wearing dresses often felt more like putting on a costume than expressing who I was. Even now, saying "I am a woman" can feel oddly foreign, despite the fact that I know it is technically true.

When boys had crushes on me, I sometimes felt confused in a way I couldn't explain. There was an underlying feeling of, "Why would he like me? I'm not really the kind of person he's supposed to like." Not because I consciously thought I was something else. It was simply a disconnect between how other people perceived me and how I experienced myself.

I experienced something similar in social situations.

At university, socially confident and conventionally attractive women would often approach me first. From the outside, I looked like someone they would naturally get along with. But after spending time together, many quickly realized I was different.

Not better. Not worse. Just operating from a different place.

I often struggled to understand social hierarchies, unspoken rules, and the things that seemed important to everyone else. I was interested in honesty, ideas, strange questions, and deep conversations. Small talk felt like trying to speak a language I never quite learned.

The same feeling extends to adulthood.

I'm married. I have children. I own a house. I pay bills. I carry responsibilities.

Yet I rarely feel like an adult.

When people talk about "grown-ups," part of me still imagines somebody else. Someone more certain. More official. More naturally suited to the role.

I often feel like the same curious person I've always been, simply moving through different stages of life while collecting more responsibilities along the way.

Over time, I've learned that many autistic people describe similar experiences. We often seem to stand slightly outside the social categories that other people inhabit so naturally.

And maybe that's one of the reasons I make the art that I do.

I love contradictions.

I love things that aren't supposed to belong together.

Cute animals and mortality.

Bright candy colors and decay.

Pizza-loving pigeons.

Happy little creatures surrounded by skulls.

Sweetness and darkness.

Life and death.

The world often wants things to fit neatly into categories. We like clear definitions. We like knowing what belongs where.

But reality isn't always like that.

People aren't always like that.

I certainly am not.

My art is a place where contradictions are allowed to exist together. A place where strange things don't need to justify themselves. Where sadness can sit next to humor. Where death can coexist with joy. Where cute things can be unsettling and unsettling things can be beautiful.

After experiencing a carotid artery dissection in 2026, I found myself thinking about mortality more than ever before. My artwork became one way of processing that experience.

Not by making dark or frightening images.

Quite the opposite.

The cute animals, bright colors, weird food, and absurd little characters are part of that process.

They help me place death into the larger picture of life.

They remind me that mortality exists, but so do pizza, pigeons, strawberries, laughter, friendship, curiosity, and beauty.

The existence of death doesn't cancel out the existence of joy.

Both can be true at the same time.

Maybe that's what Candy Decay is really about.

Not choosing between sweetness and darkness.

Allowing both to exist together.

In my strange little art world, everything is welcome.

Nothing has to fit perfectly.

Things that don't belong together are free to sit side by side.

And perhaps that's why it feels more like home than the real world sometimes.