I am a late-diagnosed autistic person, therefore it was something I discovered on my own. I used to deeply struggle with my feelings, and often visualised them as an opaque black box of swirling energy inside me. I could feel the intensity of my emotions but not understand what they were. I only had a relationship with the ‘me’ that thinks, not the ‘me’ that feels. So much of my life has been lived only in my head, with a weary distance between my brain and my body. When I became chronically ill at 20, this separation increased. The environment I could safely experience shrunk to the size of my bedroom, and my interior world withdrew further as my sense of self degraded alongside my physical self. 

Gratefully, my symptoms improved with access to disability support systems, but I certainly have not returned to the same level of functioning.

Part of my healing has included clay. I have always explored my creativity, often through drawing, but it wasn’t until I developed myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) that I took up ceramics as a way to connect to both my identity and my body. Any ceramicist will tell you the magic of clay in healing what's broken inside us: something that has been understood by the human race nearly since its beginning. Clay has been transformative for me because unlike drawing and most other artistic mediums, it asks little thinking of me. I don’t need a plan to start making, I just need clay and my two hands. I don’t need to understand my emotions to create art about them, I just need to channel them through my body and into the mud.