Welcome back.
This probably ain’t your first rodeo with me here on The Pickup Truck Diaries, but to be honest, I don’t have enough horseback riding experience to know much of a difference!
I mean, that’s largely because I’m used to running machines several magnitudes larger in size, with no mind of their own to get in my way when I used to run the game as a joystick jockey. When you get acclimatized to moving twenty-five tonnes as your regular every-day grind, a single horse with 1/1000th of the power seems a bit paltry by comparison, honestly. Granted there’s a sort of love and affection towards riders from their steeds that my old excavator Ernie couldn’t ever provide.
Ernie and I were definitely a one-sided sort of romance…
Which is ironically a sort of brilliant segway in a sense.
That’s because today we’re talking about art and the vision that must always come with any act of creation. So buckle up kiddies, because we’re going to be talking about the intersectionalities between neurodivergence and art!
Of course there’s nobody more qualified to chat about such a thing as making dope art than a roughneck trauma-riddled ex-logger redneck, right?!
I hope you can see the irony here. If not the humor, at least.
As many of you can recall, I’ve used this series to chat about disability before, but this time we’re getting into the nitty gritty bits and pieces of why it is so often that folks with disabilities make excellent creators and artists.
Am I going to ramble at you about the famous painter Van Gogh for an hour, justifying why he cut off his ear and then up and offed himself? (Or honor killed himself for a friend, whatever legend you want to sit with?)
Hell no.
But one can hardly deny there haven’t been some extremely strong correlations over the past several millennia on how neurodivergent thinkers are often grossly misunderstood by their associated societies, and even in their acts of seeing the world differently, they push the boundaries of what art can be.
Think about a couple folks we consider to be modern day auteurs in their fields: Wes Anderson, Hideo Kojima, Jay Electronica, or even that complete douchenozzle Kanye West. (I used to be a fan up until Graduation, but FUCK, WHAT A NARCCISISTIC ASSHOLE!)
The concept of the auteur is that a vision for a project can be so singular in scope and so holistically connected to a piece of art, that the director or creator of that work is recognized as having a unique or distinct style that shapes the entirety of that piece.
A few examples, you say?
Fine, whatever.
Let’s start with Wes Anderson, as the film medium is well-connected to the idea of the auteur.
For Wes, it’s punchy jump cuts, long-shot cinematography, surrealist-abstraction style dialogue, and oddball characterizations. Why else could he have such a hard-on for Bill Murray, who literally wanders around crashing house parties for fun?
Of course, there’s also the willingness of Wes to leave dead air or awkward pauses in the middle of scenes, to drive home the human nature of the characters themselves as falliable.
In most of his movies, Wes encapsulates the bizarre hilarity of the human condition, and does so with a flair for acknowledging the parts that most movies gloss over. That willingness to break out from classic directing conventions is what brands him as an auteur. You could say the Coen brothers or the Wachowskis are similar in this. Singular vision, and detail-oriented storytelling, all fitting into a meticulously crafted aesthetic.
Make sense?
Similar vibes come through for the other celebrities I cited up above. Kanye West was obviously a producer long before he ever did much of his own hip-hop, and started citing himself as the new black Jesus or some such bullshit. He proved that when it came to music, he was able to insert himself into his work in such a way that the overall quality of the albums he made was quite high, and that it was distinctive for the time by speaking to subject matter that had been largely neglected by the mainstream hip-hop community since De La Soul. Hideo Kojima perfected the use of live-actors rendered into CGI to portray characters in games more realistically, and this was after he deep-dove into the philosophies of war and the war economy. Jay Electronica fused cinema with hip-hop by using movie soundtracks as his backing beats to rap to.
If you know anything about these folks, you know that their style and artistic vision is extremely independent and clear-cut when compared to the majority of their fellows in each industry niche.
Obviously we know that at least some of them are neurodivergent already. Go do some research if you don’t believe me! (Jay Electronica has a fascinating backstory with homelessness, for example.)
But we’re not here to talk about individual auteurs, we’re here to talk about how neurodivergence can factor into the creation of these sorts of visionaries. And as I cannot speak for every neurodiverse person out there on the planet, we’re going to stick close to my own hell in a handbasket, which is punctuated with everything from Major Mood Disorders, to Dyscalculia, to Attention Deficit Disorder. (Go read my “Who Dis” page if you want the full yadda yadda on who the hell I am.)
See, I have the “Inattentive” subtype of ADHD, of which there are three dinstinct subtypes.
There’s the Hyperactive subtype, which you see grossly exaggerated in the mainstream media all the time. The kid running around a room touching everything and acting as a localized parody of the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes. Then there’s the Mixed subtype, which is a fusion of that and the Inattentive. And finally, there’s that Inattentive subtype, my own little piece of beachfront hellscape.
What these three subtypes all have in common is that they’re all in league with several of the markers that denote autism, which is why I believe ADHD was recently kicked onto the DSM-5 down stateside. While markers can change and shift, (which is why there is so much spread in regards to neurodivergent presentation across the world,) the biggest markers for ADHD are a gross dopamine deficiency, a marked lack of executive function, and the hyperfocus or hyperfixation that comes with that executive dysfunction as an attached “freebie.”
See, the clever amongst you will have noticed some elaborate metaphors in much of my poetry, referring to some sort of strange “hunger.” When I speak of that hunger, I’m referring to the constant craving for dopamine that most ADHD folks suffer from. It’s like living as a literal energy vampire.
Your Endocrine (Hormone) system is literally broken.
Which is why the stereotypes exist! Lacking the dopamine levels of other neurotypical bodies, it’s like an endless void in your brain you try to fill with anything and everything that could possibly perk you up with enough dopamine to not feel like absolute garbage at all times.
It’s also a sad factor in why folks with neurodiversity are so prone to having problems with addiction, as most drugs tend to juice you with more than enough dopamine to feel great for the first time in a very long time! Of course, coupled with our lack of disability and mental health support in Western society, it means that this sort of “self-medication to addiction” loop is grossly out of whack, when some proper psychiatric care could solve a lot of this healthcare issue!
Now, as where folks with the Hyperactive subtype tend to run around touching things or become really good at extreme sports to get that sweet, sweet dopamine flowing, with Mixed subtype folks joining them to some lesser extent, Inattentive subtype folks like myself have historically been daydreamers steeped in the unreal.
By that, I mean that we get most of our dopamine kick by creating worlds in our heads that are much more engaging and thrilling than our own lived reality. Lucky for you bastards, who get to reap the joys of Something Wicked’s Karnifexia or the vast intrigues of the Central Universe for your own entertainment. Only after I’ve spent decades fabricating them as separate realities, worlds, and universes outside our own inside my head, though.
The smarty-pants folks amongst you will already see the correlation – ADHD, at least regarding the Inattentive subtype, creates people that are always dreaming, brainstorming, problem solving, and fantasizing about things beyond the pale, often operating completely outside the normative box of society’s wants and desires.
“Freed from the real” in a sense.
As I’m more concerned with making cool shit than acquiring wealth or power, my artistic vision is also hilariously enough uncompromised by outside influences when it comes to creation, because making art provides more of a sweet, sweet dopamine kick than getting paid to make art for somebody else!
And this is merely one of many nuances that leads to the creation of auteurs!
Now, I’m not quite an auteur myself yet, not for lack of trying. I’ve been dabbling in the creative arts and diving right back into new media after a decade hiatus, and hot DAMN have I been juiced on dopamine! There really is no greater thrill than the act of creation, which I’m sure is why art therapy is often so successful for neurodiverse kids. Instead of toxic self-destructive behaviours to get that sweet sweet hormone boost, it comes from the facilitation of creative endeavours instead.
I’ve never participated in formal art therapy myself, but I can see the appeal, as a result of what I know now.
But living your life as a literal energy vampire isn’t the only “Sword of Damocles-esque” boon that allows folks like me to craft our various creations. (Although it is indeed why I detest vampires and werewolves as tropes, for obvious reasons…)
One of the hallmarks of many types of both Autism and ADHD is a little thing called hyperfocus or hyperfixation. And it comes from that executive dysfunction that tags along with the disability, meaning your executive function is grossly impaired.
But what the hell is an executive function?! So many new words! Whew!
(Never fear, I hear the dummies asking from the back!)
Executive functioning, in layman’s terms, is the ability of somebody’s brain to switch from task to task in a natural order or progression. When you wake up, you go from task to task in order, knowing that after you eat breakfast you’re most likely going to go brush your teeth and take a shower before you leave. If you DO possess executive function, your brain is capable of putting several different tasks in order and determining when to start and stop those tasks.
For folks like me with executive dysfunction? Everything gets jumbled up into one big fat ball o’ stuff! So you tend to be chronically starting, yet never finishing tasks, as you flit like a hummingbird from one task to the next with the flow of dopamine, half-finishing some before getting bored and moving on. Then perhaps you’ll get around to completing a few things that were definitely NOT priorities, and fail to finish any of the actual tasks you had on the agenda for the day!
Now, it’s not that you literally don’t know how to swap tasks, but rather that you live in a sort of “time-blindness.” I often joke that time doesn’t exist for me, as your inability to “check-in” and factor in time management often causes you to get stuck in “Hyperfocus” or “hyperfixation.” Self-awareness and reflection is a dangerous thing for somebody who can get lost in it, but this “opposite” is also not so great.
Those two words – “hyperfocus” and “hyperfixation,” essentially mean the same thing – you become blind to time, bodily function, and anything outside the task that can’t rustle your jimmies with enough force to knock you out of it. For creative tasks that don’t have a finite ending point, or which can be “improved” forever, hyperfocus can last a dozen hours or more at times for some folks, with the person snapping out of such a state however long later, realizing that they need to pee reaaaaaaaally badly, and noticing finally that they’re starving and thirsty as all hell! It can also destroy sleep patterns as your body will literally keep working throughout a period of sleep deprivation to keep going insofar as the process of creation blesses you with enough dopamine to keep you interested!
Kind of like a Midas Touch curse, similar to the double-edged sword allusion from earlier. You will work on your art, creating and creating until you often deem it “perfect.”
While this tends to result in INCREDIBLE work, obviously it’s not so great for your overall self-care and well-being. Perhaps you’ll emerge from your dungeon with a fully-edited movie that blows the socks off even guys like Wes Anderson!
But you’ll also likely have peeled several years off your life in the subsequent periods of neglect and lack of proper nutrition, sleep, or damaged bodily function in your kidneys and bladder.
Now, this gets even crazier when you consider that multiple diagnoses can tweak this even further! For example, I have Social Anxiety. The root of that disability is that your lizard-brain – the amygdala at the base of your nerve stem, is constantly cranked up to eleven out of ten. You’re always looking for danger at all times. When your attention to detail is so immense, you never miss a single detail, but literally keep running through life with your brain on “overclock mode,” which has some pretty serious health implications. (And is also why I have a prescription for weed in addition to other prescribed meds, to give me a break from myself being so “dialed up” all the time. (And also to give myself a handicap so I don’t wreck the guys over on “The Brewery” TOO badly every Monday night, heh.)
Insane attention to detail, mixed with a literally “never-ending” work ethic and a constant tendency to daydream and establish new fantastical canon?
Well, it definitely helps one on the track to becoming the Auteur I’d like to be!
Remember, I don’t like to speak for other neurodivergent folks due to the enormous width and breadth of the neurodiversity spectrum. But I can say with some confidence that while the disability factor certainly kicks your ass with deficits, the ability to create with a unique artistic vision is pretty unparalleled.
Unfortunately, for most of my life I thought that I was “broken” because people would give me blank stares when I would begin to explain even the most rudimentary of concepts or idea-chains.
But when you stop to think that they’ve never faced the same challenges as you, nor stopped to even consider some of these concepts, sciences, or belief systems for more than two seconds EVER…
No wonder you can be seen as some sort of revolutionary artiste.
Now, I plan on playing the auteur one day, when I have the time, luxury, and wealth to create art as my full-time gig or hobby. The Marionette Man launching in July 2022 is the beginning of that process, as are my two live shows Something Wicked and The Brewery. I’m sure all of you have checked out those rad highlight reels I’ve been cutting together from Something Wicked over the past few weeks!
But I can never forget that the same disabilities that provide me the hyperfocus and attention to detail to craft incredible artistic works will forever be a thorn in my side for other reasons.
It’s a bit of a journey I’m slowly coming to grips with, as it’s hard to realize that you will never have life as easy as the majority of people around you. Even when I’m rich, famous, and powerful, I will struggle with these disabilities simultaneously with creating incredible artistic works.
But that’s life, right? I may be tough as nails and resilient as all hell, but even I get tired from time to time.
And in addition, so much of the artistic process comes from a lifetime of struggle, that part of me is terrified of losing my edge, or my touch when it comes to writing, directing, and making dope art.
Still, I’m glad people like me can finally stand up, push those boring neurotypicals out of the way, and wake the planet up with some art that really makes them THINK!
Man, I’m so excited for the world to start splashing around en-masse in Central and Karnifexia… But until that can happen, I apparently have to do something called “Marketing” because you need an audience in addition to being able to pump out new projects like hotcakes?
BAH!
I haaaaaaaaaate marketing.
Oh well.
Just wait until I’m a big boy auteur and don’t have to deal with any of the superfluous bullshit outside of pure artistic creation!
Now, for those of you who don’t know lots of those big words I used?
You have some reading to do!
Everybody else?
Now…
Let’s get the fuck out of here!
-McRae
