I haven’t written since unmasked was published. I had planned to write a companion piece to each film, but that didn’t manifest.

Life got tough. When is it not? But recently, it was felt like wading through quicksand.

It’s hard to act upon creativity, when so much is swirling and moving within me that I don’t quite know how to express.

I’ve been drawing more, trying to use less words. I’ve also been moving A LOT. In the last month, I went to two five-day movement courses, performed my own work twice, and encountered a new practice. I want to write about all these things, but I don’t know where to begin.

This is why I wanted to write this without a plan. To let whatever needs to fall out to fall out.

Change. Right now, I’m going through a lot of change - deep change that feels cellular and fundamental to my identity in the world.

For a few months now, I’ve been living with the desire to create a new career. To change the way I work, with myself as an artist and as a person. I don’t feel supported by the arts industry at large (I don’t think many of us do). I don’t know how I will go through life living project to project, always wondering when I will next have to prove myself, prove my worth, prove that my work is worth something. I am sick of having to prove myself every single time.

I want to live a life where I feel valued in my work, and supported to bring my creativity with me. I want to work in an environment where I can experience real world impact, without the demand for arts funding and “marketability”. I want to be able to connect with others regularly, and not have to wait until all the conditions are perfect to get people together in the room. I want to know what I’m doing week to week. I want to know I can pay my rent and put food on the table. I want to feel safe.

In a few days time, maybe it’s happened by the time I publish this, I have a trial for an Apprenticeship in Early Years Education.

The core of what I value as a creative lives and breathes within the Early Years world; creativity, play, movement, sensations, discovery, and self-growth. All the movement work I curate for actors, and that I can as a dance artist, has these elements woven through like threads.

I have been deconstructing what it means to have my “dreams”. The ‘name-in-lights’ fantasy where I’m performing on the Globe stage to a packed out crowd, absolutely smashing out famous soliloquies. But this isn’t actually what I want. Not really. It might be a dream, but it’s not what I want - and there is a difference.

If a caregiver of one of my future students comes to me and says; “Charlie is having a really hard time getting to sleep at night. I’m worried because they get very upset when it’s bedtime. I’m not sure what to do.” I am tasked with facilitating a way to allow Charlie to explore bedtime, process what it means for them, and maybe start to discover how they can see themselves encountering bedtime in the future. Maybe we role play with putting a teddy to bed, or the children can play putting each to bed, or something else that I have yet to learn. Then maybe, the caregiver comes back a few weeks later and says: “Charlie is doing a bit better at bedtime, and I am not so worried anymore.”

If that’s not name-in-lights stuff, then I don’t know what is.

I have to reckon with the dreams I had and the desires have now.

It’s not easy as an artist to let go of what you thought you would be doing in the future.

At Drama School, I was told that if there was even a tiny part of me, one iota, one cell, even a hint of doubt, that felt I didn’t want to give everything to this career, I might as well just give up then and there. Because it would be so hard otherwise, that there was no point putting myself through it.

So that’s the mindset I had. Every decision had to take into account the hypothetical space taken up by potential success or opportunities as an actor, a creative, and artist. This strange view that a suffering artist is somehow a moral one. You must suffer for your art, right?

Bollocks. I’m over it.

I make my best art when I am not suffering. When I have space to listen to myself, and express what I need to express. That might be about something uncomfortable, but it might not be. I don’t have to be suffering to access deep and meaningful artistic messages.

I’ve worked a lot of shit jobs. And anyone who is an actor, creative, artist reading this, you know what I mean. I’ve spent my time doing things for money that give me nothing in return. There’s no growth or development. And even though these jobs are flexible, and that hypothetical, potential success space can remain on the precipice of existence, I still spend most of my time, bored, bothered, and unfulfilled.

How long am I supposed to do that for? How long am I supposed to sacrifice my time for things that may never happen?

So, I’m not anymore.

I’m going to try something new, and bring my artistic and creative desires with me.

Some people have questioned whether I can still maintain my creative career through this change. The never quite visible, always shifting space where all the potential for opportunities lie will perhaps slip further away from me. And what if everything I’ve ever desired arrives on my doorstep and I’m too busy to open the door and let them in?

Ok. Maybe. Maybe that happens.

But that’s not happening now.

The only way to know is to do it.

I have to try.

My therapist said something a while ago that has always stuck with me.

You don’t need to know how.

I don’t need to know how I’m going to make it work if something creative clashes with my new job, schedule, or life. I don’t need to know how to balance my creative work with my new career. Because I won’t know until I’m doing it.

Again, how long am I supposed to keep sacrificing my fulfilment, purposefulness, and safety, so that I can snaffle for crumbs of attention from an industry that doesn’t have the resources to support me?

The making of my art cannot depend on the industry any longer.

I’m going to find a way, and this is all part of the process.

Some may see it as giving up, I see it as taking back.

Taking back my power, my voice, my time, my art, my life.

And whatever comes next, we’ll just have to find out.

last night, i completed a week that included a five day workshop, and two performance days for some beautiful, but very personal work. (more to come on that soon)

but it has brought up a lot of thoughts about whether or not i will ever fulfil my artistic potential.

will i ever be able to covert the bursts of momentum into a steady flow?

what if i can’t make anything else ever again?

what if my art disappears into the ether, as if it was never really there?

what if i don’t have enough in me to satisfy the economy of attention that seems to be the only way i could allow my art to be more visible?

the potential that others have told me i have - what if it remains only that, potential?

photo taken 09/03/25 - Wye Downs

i was walking in Wye, a little village in Kent, at the start of this month. i took the train out of London and did the Wye Downs walk, and it was beautiful. as i was walking along a flat field where the ground was dry and a bit cracked, i wondered what it meant to fulfil my potential.

it suddenly struck me that my potential will never be something i can hold, touch, smell, taste, or be with in the present moment.

as a child, i was put into gifted and talented groups. the fact that i could mask my neurodivergence effectively enough at school meant that, while i was considered fragile and overly emotional, i was destined to do something of note. whether that meant trying to become a successful performer, or going to oxbridge, or excelling at whatever i was interested in at the time, adults around me bolstered that.

which isn’t inherently a bad thing. there’s a part of me that is grateful for the adults around me encouraging me to do the best i could, but i realise now how damaging it was to my sense of self-worth when i was unable to maintain my performance of neurotypicality. when i was unable to complete assignments on time without melting down. any slight imperfection in my school work would cause me to spin out of control. when my interpersonal relationships at school would burst into flames, i would storm out of classrooms.

my potential was this fragile and ever-at-risk thing, made of glass, only one tiny movement away from shattering.

and when i did achieve things and those achievements were praised, rather than being able to absorb that to find resilience and self confidence, i wondered “how did i get away with this?”

how could no-one see that i was ripping myself apart to meet the expectations i felt everyone had of me?

it got even harder at drama school, and still now as an artists trying to make work that it true to myself for the first time. and the stakes are even higher, because this is something i really care about.

and as i was walking on that dry cracked field, all this rushed through me. i tried to pin down what my potential actually was and what it meant to me. what was the point of trying to reach my potential if all that has ever done is cause me to self-destruct from the inside out?

when i was making the second part of unmasked, it was a dark December evening in Ipswich. i was a resident as part of Dance East’s Winter MakerSpace.

it was my first time in the studio completely solo, and i had no idea what to do with myself.

i started to move, feeling all the self-doubt pulsing through my body - the same thought “how did i get away with this?”

how did i get there? why did they let me use the space here? i have to show that i am worth this opportunity. the tangled, sticky web of my own self-doubt wrapping my body up in knots.

i often wonder how many other neurodivergent people feel a permanent state of dissatisfaction. the challenges that come with trying to meet external expectations when everything in your body-mind seems to fight against that.

that no matter how hard you try, you can never quite get all the pieces to fit together so that the puzzle comes together - and perhaps you feel people come to expect that of you. oh, Amy has another idea again, we’ll see how long this lasts! and even if no-one is thinking that, i think it about myself. because i feel the peaks and troughs of my own desires, dreams, and perceived failures so keenly.

i don’t know how it explain it, even as i’m writing this, it doesn’t feel good enough.

i turned all the lights off in the studio. i was enjoying the calm of the dark, and the sound bleeding in from the studio next to mine.

i wanted to move this dissatisfaction - i want to try and communicate this feeling of perpetual jolting in and out of being closer to reaching my potential, and then suddenly falling away from it.

the repetition of these patterns, all the way through school, drama school, my artistic career and even until this very moment.

“but i’m not letting it stop me though, am i?” - that’s from the audio of unmasked part 2: dissatisfaction.

and it’s true. i’m not letting it stop me.

i’m not letting the fear of never reaching my potential stop me from doing and making the art i desire.

i’m trying to learn to let go of the outcome. because what does the outcome really mean if i can never enjoy the process? if i am constantly riddled with fear, eating me away like worms, at the thought of never being enough for other people.

because it’s not for myself. i wasn’t born feeling inadequate.

the ideas of what my potential is have been fed to me. i don’t know how close those ideas actually are to the truth of me.

this amorphous, fragile, glass funhouse mirror that is my potential cannot be what drives my artwork.

i guess now is the time where i start trying to figure out what the truth of me really is.

where that leads me - i don’t know.

but this film exists now.

so hopefully i’m a little bit closer to knowing.

when i look inside myself -

moving, never stopping and

i’ve tried to not be like this, but the truth is that i am.

i always will be like this.

my insides have always worked in a different time-zone to my outsides - the person i tried to be to show other people that i was normal. whatever the fuck that is.

now i’m working on letting my insides be my outsides and it’s pretty fucking messy, and weird, and a little bit ugly actually.

but if i didn’t start doing this, i think i would have started to eat myself from the inside out.

everything decays. that’s a rule of life. there is an inevitable decay and ending to all of this - as much as we do absolutely everything we can to ignore it.

i’d planned to write an essay style, got-all-the-references piece for this, but fuck it because that just isn’t me really. not really, not truthfully.

chaos is the fabric of the universe - it’s the tapestry of my skin, the electric pulses through my nerves, and the pathway of my thoughts. i can’t escape it.

but i’m not “supposed” to be like that.

in a world where the undercurrent of violence, colonisation, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, fear, racism, classism and ableism, still thrums hot in the ground under our feet, we are to told to keep expanding, keep growing, keep quiet, keep making more money, keep propping up the wealthiest at the expense of community, that we alone are responsible for our misery and if only we weren’t so lazy, everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, if they can do it why can’t you, and on and on and on and on

and on.

we pretend that we’re not going to die. we pretend the planet isn’t dying. we pretend that we’re well when we’re not. we pretend that we’re fine when we’re not. we pretend that we can get all that work done when we can’t. we pretend we’re ok with things the way they are, when we aren’t. we pretend there isn’t a genocide happening RIGHT NOW in Palestine and our government are actively keeping that genocide alive.

we believe that what they’re demanding of us, we can achieve. if we can just pretend long enough for it to become real.

because it has to. after all the suffering, surely it has to be real?

this is the delusion.

the performance of neurotypicality prizes organisation and productivity above all else. because the most productive of our society are supposedly the most useful. the most able. yeah, the most able to make money for billionaires who could never spend all the money they had even if they tried. productivity, aside from profit, is every corporation and business’ main aim. regardless of how it affects their workers.

more productivity, more money, more expansion, more productivity, more money, more expansion - more power.

the problem is the universe fights against that.

entropy is unavoidable. chaos and decay eat away at the edges of everything. it’s this beautiful thing where nothing lasts forever, everything is vulnerable, and the transformations are inevitable.

the plants brown, the leave fall, animals die, and energy is slowly seeping out of everyone and everything until the ending arrives.

to actively fight against the natural truth of that - it can only be a delusion.

all this endless growth the government goes on about.

we can’t keep growing forever.

productivity is not a salvation. it is incarceration.

i finally understood that by masking my chaos, i was living in the delusion of neurotypical productivity, whose roots lie in colonisation, capitalism, and ableism. and the only thing to come out of that is suffering, because i could never be what i was “supposed” to be.

and so, i’m trying - trying as hard as i can - to step out of the delusion.

to feel the terrain of my chaos and map it out.

my thoughts, feelings, ideas sprout and decay moment to moment.

when i came to make the first film in the unmasked series disorganisation i wanted to evoke this. i wanted to show the truth behind the mask of organisation that i put on daily in order to fit in to the neurotypical delusion.

it was uncomfortable.

what if people think this is shit? what if they hate the movement because it’s messy? what if no-one understands what i’m trying to say because it doesn’t make sense?

make sense to who? i was forcing again my own artwork to be organised, productive, to make sense to others in a way that meant i could be accepted.

i had to throw caution to the wind at this point, and give myself permission to work from my chaos - because no-one else was going to do it. i had to do it.

i couldn’t allow this delusion that i was trying to step out of, at least for a moment, continue to rule my decisions.

so i moved.

i let the music play, and i moved. i thrashed, and rolled, and flapped, and rocked, and bounced, and wiggled.

i recorded my stream of consciousness between each take, in order to verbalise some of the sensations and impulses I was having.

one of these recordings ended up underscoring the entire film. i think it was probably the first time i tried to articulate how i felt about masking and the neurotypical delusion.

my neck was hurting at the end. i realise a lot of my chaos lives in my neck and shoulders, it likes the whip me round and thrash about.

i didn’t edit the thing until months after filming.

without looking i split clips up randomly, dragged them around without taking pause to interrogate what I was doing. i just allowed the mess and the chaos to pull the art about.

i watched it, sent it to a few friends, and tried to let the chaos live and breathe in work.

i didn’t allow myself to go back and edit.

i wanted to fall in love with my chaos. i wanted the film to be a love letter to chaos in the making and the content of the work itself. i wanted to let myself know that it was ok to let go of productivity, order, and organisation. because when i do, i get to swim in all the beautiful decay and fraying edges of life that reveal to us the deepest corners of ourselves and the planet.

i don’t know if i quite got there, but it was certainly a start.

so that’s how we got to disorganised, the first part of the unmasked series.

you can watch it now here.

thank you for being here, and see you for the next one.

A x

My experiences of my artistic voice and expression had been filtered through a toxic actor-training culture. I was taught to self-annihilate and ignore my nervous system in order to be praised when creating art with my performing body. I believed that anything I wanted to say or make artistically had to be for the benefit of others, particularly those in control of my training.

So when I decided to train to teach movement to actors, it is no surprise, in hindsight, that my artistic identity went into meltdown. All I had known of my actor-training was now in direct conflict of my new artistic and pedagogical beliefs. While I wanted to give safety, curiosity, liberation, and growth, festering with my embodied history was danger, oppression, silence, and fear.

For the last few years, I have been working in therapy on untethering myself from my actor-training. I am proud to say that I am finally at a place where that time of my life no longer has control over my artistic practice and future. However, with that came the challenge of understanding the fertile ground of my long hidden and ignored artistic desires. I didn’t know what would grow well in this soil. I didn’t know the alchemy of its make-up. I was on new land without a map.

In my lost state, I applied for Siobhan Davies Studios NEXT Choreographers programme. It has been within this programme that my artistic voice, it its rawest and truest form, was given a chance to be heard for the first time. To all the practitioners and artists at Siobhan Davies Studios, thank you.

This brings me to now. Through my learnings at NEXT, I decided to create my first solo dance film series. With my phone, my body, the space I could get for free, iMovie, and help from my friends, I have made 5 solo dance films exploring the lived experience of my ADHD. Unmasked isn’t just about unmasking my reality of neurodivergence, it is an unmasking of my art - the voice and desires that were trampled over and silenced in the past.

The films explore the themes of; disorganised, dissatisfied, distracted, disregulated, and distance. All states of being that I experience as a neurodivergent person. They are imperfect, chaotic, messy, and choppy.

I’d love for you to watch them.

I’ll be posting one each day on the week commencing 24th March 2025. Alongside each film, I will be releasing a companion piece of writing for those who want to dive deeper into the work and my process.

Thank you to Ru Lawrence, Siobhan Davies Studios, Seven Dials Playhouse, Dance East, Andrew Sharpe, James Allen, and Liv Donati Clarke for your support throughout this making process.

Any artists reading this, I hope that this might inspire you to start making something that is guided by your inner compass and artistic truth - even it’s messy and weird like mine.

Amy x

Here is the trailer for the unmasked series: