I’ve spent a pretty significant portion of my life being told, in one way or another, that I was too much of something. Too weird. Too loud. Too distracted. Too imaginative. Too talkative. Too caught up in my own little world.

Growing up in the South in a deeply religious Pentecostal environment, even my love for the natural world sometimes felt like something I needed to hide. I was fascinated by the woods, the buzzing of the trees, the stones scattered along a trail, the details that other people seemed to walk right past. But when the things you love can be labeled witchcraft or associated with being the devil, it’s hard to know what parts of yourself are safe to share.

So I learned to hide things.

I learned to mask, to make myself more palatable, to tuck away the parts of me that didn’t seem to fit. In school, I was the kid talking when I wasn’t supposed to, doodling instead of paying attention, and getting in trouble for a brain that apparently hadn’t received the memo about sitting still and being quiet. ADHD was never a question anyone thought to ask. I just grew up believing I needed to try harder to be the person everyone expected me to be.

And in all that trying, I stopped being. Looking back, I wonder how much of myself I had learned to leave behind just to get through the day. It wasn’t until much later in life that I received my ADHD diagnosis. & booooooy is there something surreal about finally being handed pieces of information that help explain a lifetime of experiences you’ve spent trying to make sense of on your own.

I’m still learning. Still unmasking. Still figuring out which parts of me are genuinely who I am and which parts I picked up because I thought I had to. I’m learning to understand my brain instead of constantly fighting against it, to give myself grace where I used to give myself grief, and to let myself exist without needing to explain every little thing that makes me different.

And somewhere along the way, I found my way back to art.