How Creativity Gave Me Somewhere to Belong

The gym was bright and loud and felt enormous in the way that spaces feel enormous when you're already trying to disappear into them.

We were playing badminton. I was bad at it, though I didn't understand why at the time. I didn't know I had dyspraxia. That my brain processed movement differently. That the coordination everyone else seemed to access without thinking was genuinely harder for me to reach. I just knew I kept missing and that Abby's face was doing something I recognized. That particular combination of frustration and contempt that meant I had become someone's inconvenience for the day.

"Why are you so quiet?" she asked at some point.

I never knew how to answer that. Quiet was what happened when everything was too loud and too bright and too many people were watching, and speaking felt like it would cost more than I had. I muttered something that wasn't really an answer. She rolled her eyes.

Eventually, she stopped trying and left me to play the rest of the lesson alone.

When it ended, we filed into the locker room to change. I was on one side of the row of lockers. Abby and her friends were on the other. I don't think she knew I was there.

I could hear every word.

The sting came first. Then something hotter underneath it. I changed as quietly as I could, one ear pressed against the sound of my own name being used as a punchline.

When I was done, I closed my locker. Not quietly.

She knew then. I didn't look back. I walked out, found a book, and put the rest of the world somewhere I didn't have to look at it.

Every room felt like that

Not just the gym. Most rooms.

The hallways were sensory chaos. Classrooms required a kind of sustained performance, sit still, pay attention, respond correctly, that felt exhausting in ways I couldn't explain to anyone. Social situations had rules I couldn't always read. I was either too much or not enough, too quiet or too intense, always slightly out of step with whatever everyone else seemed to understand instinctively.

I got good at masking. At watching other people and calibrating myself to match what the situation seemed to require. At being present enough not to be noticed for the wrong reasons and invisible enough not to draw attention.

It worked, mostly. But it cost everything I had. By the end of most days I had nothing left. The version of me that moved through those spaces wasn't really me. It was a performance of someone who fit, held together with observation and effort and the constant low hum of anxiety that came from never quite being sure I was getting it right.

I didn't know then that this had a name. That what I was doing had a name. I just knew it was exhausting and I didn't know how to stop.

Then there was the art room

I don't remember exactly how I ended up there. A friend suggested I try an art class and I did, more out of curiosity than confidence.

The room itself was different before I even picked up a brush. Large windows. Actual sunlight. Bigger desks you could spread out on. Nobody had to sit perfectly still and track a lesson at the front of the room. People moved around. Made noise in a different way, a focused kind of noise rather than the chaos of the hallways. The sensory experience of it was just easier.

And then I started making something and time disappeared.

I don't mean that as a figure of speech. I mean I looked up and an hour had passed and I hadn't once monitored whether I was being too quiet or too much or whether my face was doing the right thing. I had just been somewhere else entirely. Inside something I was building, following it wherever it wanted to go.

Nobody graded me on whether I held the brush correctly. There wasn't a right answer to find. The inner world that felt like a liability everywhere else, the one that was always too big for the room I was in, turned out to be exactly what you needed in here.

I wasn't good at art by any conventional measure. But people found it interesting. They'd stop and look and ask questions and for the first time in as long as I could remember I felt like my existence wasn't an inconvenience to someone's day.

I felt like I was good at something. Like I belonged somewhere.

That was new.

It didn't end when school did

I still look for that room.

Not literally. But the feeling of it. The place where the rules are legible, where the inner world is an asset rather than a liability, where time disappears because you're actually present in something rather than performing your way through it.

I've found it in different places over the years. Photography for a while, until my body made that harder. Digital art when I needed something I could do from wherever I was, on whatever kind of day I was having. Writing. Making things for other people during the pandemic and feeling something travel across the distance between us.

DIYvinci exists because of that art room. Not the specific room, but what it taught me. That there are spaces where the way my brain works isn't a problem to manage but a way of seeing that actually produces something. That belonging somewhere is possible even when most places feel like they were built for someone else.

The community we've built here is the closest thing I've found to those large windows and that particular quality of light. People who are making things not to perform or produce or prove anything. Just to be somewhere that feels like themselves for a while.

That's what I was looking for at sixteen. It's still what I'm looking for now. I just finally have somewhere to find it.

If you've ever felt like you were performing your way through most rooms, like the version of you that exists in regular life is a carefully managed approximation of the real one, you already know what I'm talking about.

Making things doesn't fix that. But it gives you somewhere to put it down for a while. Somewhere the inner world that doesn't fit everywhere else is actually the point.

That's what the DIYvinci Community is. Free, off social media, full of people who understand what it's like to finally find a room where you fit.

community.diyvinci.com