Drawing to Breathe

In July of 2022, I was in kind of a dark place with depression and anxiety. My brain was doing a lot of ruminating with too-loud thoughts. I couldn't take in a lot of media, so my days turned into this weird stretch of just trying to fill all the daylight hours before I was "allowed" to go to bed.

I started drawing again mostly because I was desperate for something to help fill those hours.

Once I was actually sitting and working, I noticed things start to shift. While I was drawing, the volume in my head turned down just enough that I could breathe a little, the first non-shallow breaths I'd had all day, like my body was slowly backing away from that wired, fight-or-flight edge. The noise didn't disappear, but it got quieter. More organized. Less sharp around the edges.

At first I could only manage an hour or two before my brain tapped out. Over time, the ADHD "lock-in" showed up, that thing where time stops existing and suddenly it's 2 am and you've been hyper-focused on the same four square inches of paper for hours.

As I got deeper into architectural and perspective drawing, I leaned into a very ADHD way of learning: latch onto a subject, then disappear into it. Drawing turned into this tiny, repeatable ritual: pick up pen and paper, start with a line, then a window, then a brick, and let everything else get a little quieter while my brain is busy counting roof tiles and figuring out where the vanishing point actually lives.

It wasn't a magic cure, but it was, and still is, one of the few things that consistently helps my brain settle. And that's a big part of how I ended up here, making the work you see now.