Being a Neurodivergent Artist: Living Between Categories

Feeling Between Categories: How Autism, ADHD and Mortality Shaped My Art

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 or painfully—just quietly 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've simply always felt like a person. While I'm comfortable in my body, there has always been a certain distance between myself and the idea of womanhood.

As a child and teenager, I didn't have the words to describe that feeling. I only noticed small moments of dissonance. Wearing dresses often felt more like putting on a costume than expressing who I was. Even today, saying "I am a woman" can sometimes feel strangely unfamiliar, despite knowing that it's technically true.

When boys had crushes on me, I often felt confused in a way I couldn't explain. There was this quiet thought in the back of my mind: Why would he like me? I'm not really the kind of person he's supposed to like. Not because I consciously believed I was someone else, but because there always seemed to be a gap between how other people perceived me and how I experienced myself.

I noticed something similar in friendships. At university, socially confident and conventionally attractive women would often approach me first. From the outside, I probably looked like someone they would naturally connect with. But after spending time together, many quickly realized I was different. Not better or worse—just operating from a different place. I struggled with social hierarchies, unspoken rules and many of the things that seemed important to everyone else. Instead, I was fascinated by honesty, strange questions, ideas and deep conversations. Small talk often felt like trying to speak a language I'd never quite learned.

That feeling didn't disappear when I became an adult.

I'm married. I have children. I own a house. I pay bills. I carry responsibilities. Yet I rarely feel like an adult. Whenever people talk about "grown-ups," part of me still imagines somebody else—someone more confident, more certain, someone who naturally belongs in that role. I still feel like the same endlessly curious person I've always been, simply carrying a few more responsibilities than I used to.

Over time, I discovered that many autistic people describe something similar. We often seem to stand just outside the social categories that other people move through so naturally. We participate in them, but rarely feel completely at home inside them.

Looking back, I think that's one of the reasons I create the art I do.

I've always loved contradictions. Cute animals and mortality. Bright candy colors and decay. Pizza-loving pigeons. Smiling little creatures surrounded by skulls. Sweetness and darkness. Life and death.

The world often encourages us to sort everything into neat categories. We like clear definitions because they make reality feel predictable. But reality isn't always neat, and people certainly aren't.

I know I'm not.

My paintings have become a place where contradictions don't have to fight each other. They can simply exist together. Sadness can sit next to humor. Death can coexist with joy. Cute things can feel unsettling, and unsettling things can become strangely beautiful.

After experiencing a carotid artery dissection in 2026, I found myself thinking about mortality more than ever before. My artwork gradually became one way of processing that experience, not by creating dark or frightening images, but almost by doing the opposite. The pigeons, strawberries, bees, candy, bright colors and absurd little characters aren't there to distract me from difficult subjects. They help me carry them. They remind me that mortality exists, but so do friendship, curiosity, laughter, pizza, sunshine and beautiful ordinary moments.

The existence of death doesn't erase the existence of joy.

Both can be true at the same time.

Maybe that's what Candy Decay has always been about.

Not choosing between sweetness and darkness, but allowing them to exist side by side. A place where contradictions don't need to be resolved, where strange things don't have to justify themselves, and where nothing has to fit perfectly into a category before it deserves to exist.

Perhaps that's why my little Candy Decay universe sometimes feels more like home than the real world.

I explore this from a few different angles in How Art Helps Me Process Medical Trauma, Mortality, and Anxiety and How a Carotid Artery Dissection Changed My Art. And in I Didn't Know There Was a Word for Me Until I Was 34, I write about where all of this led — including finally finding the word for it.