Had you asked me as a kid, I’d have struggled to articulate the world I inhabited at the time. I had nothing to compare it to. It just was. I breathed it in, the said and the unsaid, people’s actions and expressions and behaviours and made sense of it as best as I could. As we all do. I breathed it all in: to figure out the rules; to try to find the shortcuts; to survive.

So time-travelling back to my previous self from my 50-year-old adult (and parent) perspective allows me to have a look around and give words to some of those feelings and experiences. To play them out, to lean in and wonder at them and sometimes to draw them into existence again for a closer look. As ever, humour is my most powerful ally – as it allows me to steal a direct glance at my own human existence.

This story is the second in the series: This is where my darkness lies. The ingredients of which emerged from the Alopecia UK support group that I have found to be so profoundly useful – being surrounded by people who get it. And sitting with these ingredients in a creative posture, I’ve turned them into scenes, wiring them together in a visual story that might even make some sense to people who were not there…

This story was first shared via The Visual Thinker.