26. Progress Report

In my popular KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling course, I include a review of the month task, in which I model reviewing how things have gone without judgement or unkindness and making space to acknowledge what we spent time on that perhaps was not part of our original plan.

LIFE has a habit of LIFING! I feel that instead of feeling bad for not doing what we meant to do, it’s worth looking instead at what factors got in the way; what we actually ended up spending our time on; and whether what we are asking of ourselves is unfair or unrealistic.

I want to follow the same format for this Progress Report and focus on things I’ve progressed that were – and were not – originally part of my #knitsonikbacktoschool purview.

My learning goals: 1. Photography using my big camera 2. Creative Recovery 3. Smartphone Usage Regulation and 4. More Sound & Music.

I planned to do my creative live online photography course which I’ve not managed. I did, however, get the camera and light settings how I wanted them for photos for something fun coming up later this autumn (stay tuned!) Thanks Mark, for taking the pics of me with my setup + settings!

Creative Recovery is slow but with the help of the psychologist with whom I worked through my Collaborative Autistic Identification* process, I realise that for four years I’ve been in AuDHD (Autism + ADHD) burnout and it will take more than doing The Artist’s Way for me to make a full recovery.

Still, Morning Posters are a really good thing – sensory joy, expressiveness, a way to see on the page what’s going on with me – and it’s been incredibly empowering to develop this daily practice. It’s also been an enabling reminder of my amazing ability to adapt things that exist to better fit my needs – knowledge I will be drawing on more frequently in coming months. I am very excited for the next step, which involves listing out Artist Dates that truly accommodate my way of being in the world.

I’m looking for more resources for recovery from Autistic burnout and am excited to see a clear path to feeling better.

Slowly my smartphone usage is dropping; this week’s progress has included discovering the opal app which is an app-blocker I love and getting into the habit of using grayscale as a way to just make the phone less interesting and addictive. This ad from Opal really speaks to me and I very much like the gemstone rewards system for time spent offline.

Sound & Music. Have I logged into my Point Blank Music School portal once a week and revisited my Ableton classes? No. But I did find many important sheepy sound files in attempts to fix the knitted speakers and got brimful of inspiration for working with sounds again at the ((XMTR)) Festival and especially in the wonderful Field recordings but better masterclass by Isobel Anderson / Girls Twiddling Knobs. I honestly have no words for how lucky I feel to have landed in this town, where I am finding so many wonderful kindred spirits.

So I’ve definitely progressed my learning goals somewhat. However, alongside the stuff I was planning to learn, I’ve learnt stuff that I wasn’t. Stuff around better understanding how my brain works and what changes I can make in my life to thrive more fully as an artist and a human being. I want to move forward with more of all of this – more BIG CAMERA shots, more of the tools I developed for myself through KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling, more reduced smartphone usage, more creative and burnout recovery, more sonic joy.

I’m struck by how much longer IN REAL LIFE my goals take than they do in my plans. This strikes me every time I do a review.

What I’m realising is just how much EXTRA TIME a Felix needs to really win in the world.

I am big into symbols that help and affirm us in life, and when I was in Amsterdam earlier this month I discovered a rubber stamp boutique, in which I bought a Tortoise (to honour the extra time and slowness that I need) and a Zebra. I actually had the snail from the last time I did The Artist’s Way and had a similar realisation about me and time.

I got the Zebra because of an instagram post by @omgimautisticaf in which the author writes – of getting an Autism diagnosis – ““Why do you need a label?” Because there is comfort in knowing you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse. Because you can’t find community with other zebras if you don’t know you belong. And because it is impossible for a zebra to be happy or healthy spending its life feeling like a failed horse”.

Maybe the biggest pieces of learning I’ve progressed this September are discovering that yes I am Actually Autistic (and probably ADHD); and yes I want to be a Happy Healthy Zebra. That’s massive, and it’s exciting to think about how everything else can move forward through this empowering new framework.

We are all trying to juggle learning goals with other life stuff. So I’m wondering, how have you progressed your learning goals throughout this challenge – including and acknowledging stuff that wasn’t originally on your list of goals?

*Collaborative Autistic Identification is preferable to “diagnosis” because it is less pathologising.