I am walking through a desert, coarse sand smoothing out the soles of my bare feet as I easily slide down countless sandbanks and then struggle to climb up the numerous dune hills on my journey towards recovery…

This is, of course, an allegory, one of numerous allegorical landscapes that exists in those places between memory, fiction and pain, a collage patchwork made up of various experiences and understood references.

For example, I have resided in a haunted house as its sole occupant, rose out of the rubble of a devastated city covered in dust, sat alone head down at Eldon Green as the shattered glass of a broken bottle smashes nearby, finding myself trapped within a ball of sharp hawthorn with a rusted axe, floated face up in Tynemouth bay dressed in sequins, waited in Lewisham hospital feeling as numb as a dead fish as I am tested for HIV, even struggling to write this text… 

Each one, and many more, being part of my own process of recovery, whether it happened in reality or worked through a lens of creative reworking through allegory to oscillate between softly blurring the sharp edges and bringing into focus the more difficult aspects of my own personal history of being autistic, suffering illness and bearing trauma.

The process of recovery is a call to action towards changing one’s present situation to a better one despite the difficulties that one may encounter through circumstances both within and out of one’s control; whether it is a battle against addiction, a renegotiation of the world based on your needs as a neurodiverse/disabled person, treating the symptoms of illness whilst trying to understand the root cause behind it all or even dealing with the aftermath of trauma inflicted upon oneself by monstrous events, the process of recovery often starts from a place of acknowledgement that the present state of things is not good enough for to keep going for the long term.