Day 6. Talk about music, art, writing, and other forms of creativity. Are you a creative person? What do you create? Do you include autistic themes in your creations? Does your creativity help you to deal with your autism?
I’ve been someone who draws and doodles for as long as I can remember…
Drawing comes as second nature to me … even to the point that it has become one of my stims … If I feel stressed or overwhelmed in class and I think fidgeting may draw too much attention … you will find me manically doodling in my notepad …
Usually its characters I remember from memory … Sonic, Mario, Dragon ball characters, Rayman … I draw these as it doesn’t take much concentration … I’ve been drawing them for so many years.
I can’t remember exactly when I started drawing, but I can remember people telling me my drawing was advanced for my age …
I’d sit at the table drawing characters from my favourite games, tv shows and then I’d want my family to cut them out for me to play with … I’d rather play with pieces of paper than toys … as toy ranges are normally extremely limited and overly expensive … sadly my drawings were always a little to fiddley to cut out … Driving my mother, grandparents and cousin to frustration as they tried to cut out my picky little drawings … Obviously I’d get upset if they didn’t cut it out exactly as I wanted, but would I change the way I drew them, make them bigger, less detailed … that would be the sensible thing to do … Sadly when it came to this … I was far from sensible
I also drew comic strips, I would put myself, or at least the version of myself I wanted to be into my favourite worlds … Steve the Pokémon Trainer … Steve the Digidestind … I didn’t feel like I accomplished much as a child in the real world, but in my comic strip worlds I could do anything I wanted (as long as it made sense in the universe that I put myself in) …
I was told for years to try and make some money off my drawings … so I did for a while … drawing and colouring people and their children … I enjoyed it for a little while … But eventually it took the fun out of drawing for me … and for the amount of time I was dedicating to each drawing I was hardly making any money in return …
As for music, I’m not a singer, I can’t play an instrument …
But what I can do is write songs … I don’t do it as much anymore … But I used to write a lot of songs … It helped having a recording studio on your back doorstep … There was always a reason to write songs … It helped me a lot when I was younger as it helped me to get some of my issues out on paper …
My writing … Well I’m writing right now … and its about me … an autistic so I suppose I include autistic elements in my writing … I’m pretty new to this whole writing idea … but the more I do it … the more I enjoy it … I enjoy twisting established stories … Choosing names for my characters and places that mean something …
My creativity is probably one of my strongest Autistic traits, because I develop obsessions with my creative outpourings. I use them as therapy, a way to release some of the shit.
If the real world gets too much. I just create a new one…
The School Dropout 