Hello! I’m Anika Aarons, a neurodivergent artist and educator who loves science. I tested as gifted as a child but never knew about neurodivergence until the COVID-19 pandemic. The change in pace of the pandemic allowed me to acknowledge my disabilities and lean more into self-care. I knew the exhaustion I was feeling was more than just depression as I stopped doing the most basic self-care tasks such as showering, brushing my teeth, walking my dog and more. I felt like such a failure until I came across Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) as a diagnosis and learned about autistic burnout.
I spent a lot of my 22 years of schooling shutting down the vulnerable and artistic parts of myself in order to achieve academic success. While I am very proud of my PhD in Oceanography and Ocean Sciences, the nonstop grind led me to major burnout. Learning I had PDA led me to finally stop following the routine and advice that wasn’t working and lower my expectations and demands.
As you can imagine, going from being a perfectionist to embracing doing the minimum led to a very difficult battle with myself. When I felt overwhelmed I found it easier to process my thoughts and emotions through visual art. I discovered that painting is a very calming stim for me. I realized there was a lot of new research on autism and how it presents in females that was only available in academic jargon and I wanted to visually translate the complex concepts I was learning.
I consider myself an abstract expressionist because every shape and color choice has some significant representational meaning to me. I tend to use contrasting colors to emphasize the differences between the tangible, immutable elements of being and the fluidity of thoughts and emotions. I use darker colors to represent physical space, obstacles, or beings while the brighter colors represent feelings, inner thoughts, or auras.
My first piece, called Unmasking, is a visual representation of the beauty and pain of freeing oneself from a mask that helps a neurodivergent person to navigate a neurotypical world. Some of the process is light and easy with the feeling of floating away while sometimes it can feel very heavy, like chunks breaking off and falling away. There are even masks over masks, representing what you hide from society and what you hide from yourself. The outermost mask must stay at least partially intact to survive in a society that rarely grants us the accommodations we need.
Meeting of the Minds is about being open-minded and forming new connections with others from different backgrounds. Neurodivergence means having a unique experience of the world with our differences in sensory and mental processing. I believe the greater our curiosity about our different experiences, the more connections we can form. If you aren’t having empathetic conversations with diverse people then you can become very isolated in thought. There will always be more things that unite us than separate us as humans. Being receptive to hearing others’ perspectives on life is how we build more supportive, inclusive communities.
Survival is a piece that is very personal to me and helped me to process the major trauma of an externalized meltdown this year. As an internalizing PDAer these kinds of meltdowns are quite rare and surprising when they happen. I think this painting captures the duality of turmoil and peace I felt during that meltdown. I let out a lot of emotions I had been suppressing, mostly anger, and I felt so much relief just giving in to them. My lack of control over my nervous system, and being a Black, disheveled woman, led to me being perceived as a dangerous threat. Medical professionals and police resorted to violence to restrain me. My instincts of self-preservation took over and I put a mask of calm on to survive in what I unfortunately realized was an unsafe environment.
Burnout, my latest piece, captures the different phases of fluctuating energy levels and skill regression I experienced. I had so much dissociation and alexithymia and almost zero interoception at peak burnout. I would often be pushing myself too hard during bursts of energy and then needing long spans of recovery time. It took years to shorten the cycle and I am still working on finding balance to this day.
All of these pieces are for sale. I hope you will check out more of my art and musings on my website and Instagram page (@my.divergent.life).
