Art Against Meltdowns

Art is therapy. It is for everyone, but in a more general ambient sense. For me it’s an essential mechanism for managing my tempestuous mental health. It was literally prescribed. I’ve tried many “remedies” for managing my my mental health – physical, dietary, chemical, interpersonal, inadvisable, the lot. Nothing calms, regulates and centres me like my time in my studio, just existing, making, mooching around.

Nevertheless, my mental health remains…variable. Take the last few weeks. Life threw a few shitballs my way, and they hit, pretty hard. Nothing particularly unusual. Nothing apocalyptic. But enough to knock me on my arse, and it sucked.

If art is therapy, then maybe it should all come out serene and zen. But it’s not like that. Therapy is where you purge, you vent, you evacuate. And evacuate I did. The results are what you see here, among others.

When such episodes arrive, often out of nowhere, for me and many autistics like me, they do not result in my retreating quietly, like a wounded animal. They erupt out of my whole body and being like a geiser of broken, frustrated anguish and splatter everyone around me with snotty, salty bile. It’s horrible. This is the meltdown, and they’re often accompanied by panic attacks, periods of being non-verbal, self-harm, all that lovely stuff. After that comes the shutdown, where I am crippled by the storm occurring in my brain, and although this tempest continues, my energy level sap to almost zero, and I experience a bodily electric pain of flesh and spirit. It sucks.

So I hope my autistic compatriots can relate to these pieces. I hope everyone can. Either way, their production provided me with the essential balm that allowed me passage on my road to recovery. And I am recovering, I hope. There will be more works like this, but hopefully they will be only inspired by my recent dramas, rather than because I am experiencing more.