Free creative workshops for neurodivergent adults
A guest post from ADHD coach Melanie Carr, founder of Diverse Perspectives.
Medway River Lit and I will be running a series of three workshops for neurodivergent adults. I'm a coach who specialises in working with neurodivergent dults and I'm neurodivergent myself. I understand how life felt before diagnosis, the journey to get diagnosed and what to do after that point. Getting diagnosed or realising that you fit the profile is the first step in your journey to working out how to build things around how you work.
As we grow up, we are taught how things should and shouldn't be and how we should or shouldn't behave. A lot of neurodivergent folk have spent years trying to fit standards that were built for someone else, and there are good reasons why that takes so much out of us.
Creative people are more likely to be neurodivergent than the population at large. Around one in ten students on creative arts and design courses in the UK is neurodivergent, compared with about one in twenty across all subjects. A room full of people making things is often a room full of people who think differently, whether or not anyone has said so out loud.
This is the thinking behind Made This Way. In each of the three standalone sessions, we make something with our hands and talk about how our brains work: our strengths, our challenges, and what we would most like people to understand about us.
Workshop 1: High Ground is about the "spiky profile", the peaks and dips that explain why doing some things can be easy while other things can feel like climbing Everest.
Workshop 2: Room to Work looks at the settings that let us do our best, and we will be making banners and placards to get those views on record.
Workshop 3: Worn Words is in memory of the Medway poet and artist Rosemary McLeish, making wearable pieces from the bits and pieces she left behind. See some examples of the wearable pieces and other assemblages that she made below.
Rosie McLeish wearing her Diego Rivera inspired piece Walk Whitman assemblage wearable piece Lacemaker's Collar Safari Dreaming
You are welcome whether you have a diagnosis, are waiting for an assessment, or have worked it out for yourself. Everything is provided, and you can join in the conversation as much or as little as you like.
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, as part of our Access and Engagement Project.
The sessions run in October, for full information:
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