The Candy Decay Apartment: A Look Inside My Brain

This is what my brain would look like if it was an apartment.

Colorful, crowded, nostalgic, slightly chaotic and full of things that probably shouldn’t make sense together, but somehow do. The Candy Decay Apartment is one of those artworks that feels especially close to me because it isn’t really about a room. It’s about what it feels like to live inside my head.

There is a lot happening in there. Objects, colors, memories, little jokes, things that feel comforting and things that feel slightly wrong. That part is intentional. My brain rarely feels quiet. I have ADHD, which means there can be a thousand thoughts happening at the same time. Ideas connect to other ideas, tiny details suddenly become extremely important, one thing reminds me of something completely unrelated and somehow I end up somewhere else entirely.

At the same time, my autistic brain loves familiarity. Things I already know. Objects I remember. Certain colors, textures, toys, games and visual details that feel safe simply because they have been with me before. That is probably why so much of this apartment feels like the late 90s and early 2000s. I collect old toys and objects from that time in real life too. There is something incredibly comforting about them.

But nostalgia is weird. It’s comforting, but it can also hurt. Because you can’t actually go back. You can recreate the colors, find the toys again, listen to the same songs and hold the same objects in your hands. But the world they belonged to is gone. I think that is part of where the slightly unsettling feeling in this artwork comes from.

At first glance, the apartment looks fun. It is bright, colorful and filled with familiar things. But the longer you look, the more little details start to feel strange. There is “Play Again?”, like life is some bizarre game that might offer you another round when this one is over.

There is a book on the table called “How to Be Nice.” For me, that is partly a joke about autism and the feeling that everyone else received some kind of social instruction manual that I somehow missed. There are all these invisible rules people seem to understand automatically, while I sometimes feel like I am still trying to figure out what the rules even are.

And then there is the tooth. A giant tooth sitting in the middle of this colorful little world. It reminds me of those dreams so many people seem to have where their teeth suddenly become loose or start falling out. I find those dreams fascinating because they are so universal and so deeply uncomfortable. Nothing explicitly terrible is happening, but your whole body seems to understand that something is very wrong.

That feeling is important to Candy Decay. Things can be cute and uncomfortable at the same time. Something can feel safe while also reminding you that safety is temporary. Nostalgia can make you happy and sad in exactly the same moment. Beautiful things can decay. Familiar things can disappear. Maybe that is part of why we hold onto them so tightly.

The Candy Decay Apartment is a place I would probably love to live in. It is colorful, strange, full of objects I love and completely overloaded with tiny things to discover. But I also think I would eventually want to escape from it.

Which is probably a pretty accurate description of living inside my brain.

Welcome to The Candy Decay Apartment.

If you want to know more about why I collect and hold onto these little pieces of the past, you can read Things I Wanted to Keep here.

If all this busy, crowded detail sounds familiar, I wrote more about why a little too much can feel so good in More Is More: Why ADHD Brains Love a Little Too Much.