Finding Words
Art as the bridge between knowing, feeling and saying it outloud
Sometimes the words just won't come. Or they come out in the wrong order, tangled up, switched around. I might reach for one word and land on something completely different. It can feel frustrating, isolating — like the thought is right there, fully formed, and the route to expressing it is simply gone.
This is something I live with daily, I experience a kind of aphasia — moments where language muddles or misfires, particularly when I'm overwhelmed, fatigued, or mid flare. It usually precludes a migraine, but also stress and anxiety can make it more obvious. The words are in there. Getting them out is the hard part.
Through my practise in therapy; when words won't come through language, they often come through art.
Art is the bridge. It slows the processing down. It brings me back to my body, back to the present moment, back to what I actually mean.
Erasure poetry is one of the ways I process my own thoughts and feelings. I take pages of text — something printed, something I haven't written, a magazine, old books, posters — and I scratch out with my favourite black fineliner everything that doesn't belong. What's left is mine. A clean, short, precise route to exactly what I needed to say. There's something deeply right about that process for a brain like mine: I'm not generating from nothing, I'm finding what's already there and highlighting what feels real.
With collage, I do something similar. I'm drawn to certain words and images without knowing why. I don't analyse it; I follow the pull. And when I piece them together — like fragments of a puzzle — something emerges that finally makes sense. A meaning I couldn't have arrived at directly. That's very much how my brain works anyway: not linear, not sequential, but tangents, dopamine seeking, pattern-finding - all the tabs open at once. Accessing words through this way really scratches that itch of needing to explore, rooting through and finding cuttings, to connect with the brain fog, the cloud of overwhelming thoughts and feelings that are floating around up there, and put them into order, visually, sometimes with an image to really pack the punch. That is is. That is how I am feeling.
Doodling and image-naming work is a different way. I'll draw something instinctively, then sit with what it looks like, doodle it into something understandable then name it, or discuss what metaphor it offers. It gives me a shorthand. A single image that holds what might otherwise take a paragraph of muddled speech to convey. The one or two words name it, totally understandable to me.
All of these practices do the same thing at their core: they ground me. They slow the brain down. They let me be present rather than tangled in the gap between what I know and what I can express and the stress of not being able to communicate it exactly how I want to exactly when I want to. It helps.
This is why I believe so deeply in the therapeutic arts — not as a distraction from therapy, but as a genuine language as itself, and a way to access the verbal language for people who find other forms of expression difficult, exhausting, or inaccessible.
Finding Words — a therapeutic arts group for neurodivergent adults
This autumn, I'm delighted to be co-facilitating a new group alongside Emily Edwards of WithINsight Coaching — a neurodiversity coach based in Salisbury who works with autistic and ADHD adults. She helps you to understand how your brain actually works - and to develop trust in your own experience.
Finding Words runs across three Monday evenings in September, October and November 2026 at Wiltshire Creative, Salisbury.A calm, creative space to explore identity, communication, and inner experience — alongside people who get it, built around the idea that art can take us somewhere words alone can't.
No diagnosis needed. No artistic experience required.
To find out more or join the Waiting List click here
