This post originally appeared here as a Substack post for Neuroqueer Creative. I recommend checking out their courses and workshops.

When I was a kid, I was desperate to grow up and be normal. I carried private shame for all the ways I considered that not to be the case. Whichever plane I evaluated myself on, I fell outside of what I’d internalised as the acceptable range.

Concealing this - and compensating for it - became the primary objective of any creative endeavour I undertook until about the age of 30, when I found and fell in love with collage art. Until then, my practice was never fun or consistent. It was always slow, emotionally difficult work.

Looking back, I can see this started early. My first creative memory is of writing stories, hiding them inside a book to read to my little brother, and seeing if I could pass them off as the work of a well-loved author. After each story, I’d demand an evaluation: is this as good as their other stories? If not, what’s wrong with it?

The essence of this behaviour persisted, but I became more squirrely and private about it. At nine years old, I would open the Notepad app on the family computer and compose fictional letters from the point of view of retired empty-nesters.

There were variations – sometimes the woman had a dog, sometimes she had grandkids – but she would always live a very unremarkable life and be married to a tedious man. TV shows and greeting-card jokes had taught me the appropriate degree to resent one’s husband, and I made sure she resented him no more or less than that.

At a time when I didn’t feel safe to be myself, this fantasy of a boring and acceptable life was a reliably soothing form of escapism.

I grew up and dropped the personas but emotionally was still creating from that place: of performing an identity that was very distant from my own, one designed to shield me from all judgement and criticism.

As a result, I could never find an access point to anything real in my art. This was a source of great turmoil for me at the time, mostly because I was convinced if I just wrote something genius enough, I’d be transformed into someone very cool and lovable.

I took a detour into collage by mistake when the incompatibility of my two goals – needing my work to be good, and needing to stay hidden and safe – effectively destroyed my writing practice.

One day I started sticking random scraps of paper into my journal to make it feel more welcoming. I immediately wondered why I’d never done it before. Very quickly, I moved out of my journal and began collaging on paper, on a daily basis, using anything I could find.

It was the first time I’d felt able to express myself uninhibited without any expectations of the output.

With analogue collage, you have to relinquish some control. Images don’t always fit together the way you thought they would. Often, the first images I cut out don’t even get used in the final piece. You have to let the piece become what it wants to become. It’s a process of surrender and acceptance.

As someone whose creative efforts pre-collage had centred around trying to exert as much control as possible over proceedings, this turned out to be very good for me.

I explored many different styles of collage-making, but ultimately realised that I’m still deeply interested in stories. I love implied narrative and the suggestion of story within collage. The thing happening just out of frame - a moment just before something, or just after.

This has informed the way my practice has developed since, from the way I source materials to how I compose each piece. I find a good narrative collage has a lot in common with a good poem: it suggests a world much bigger than itself and invites the reader to collaborate on the construction of it. It’s a snapshot into a feeling or a moment.

With some art forms, you need an idea of where you’re going before you can start. This is not the case, and is rarely even possible, with collage.

This is exactly why I like it: I have no expectations of my work or its meaning when I start. The highly tactile and mindful nature of the process pulls me into flow state before I’ve realised it’s happened.

I’ve been channeling my creativity in a healthy way through collage art for years now. It’s given me a model for what it looks and feels like to create from a place of intuition and expression, rather than a desire to hide. And for anyone struggling with their own creativity, I think that’s at least worth a try.