Open for business and thoughts about spectrums

This site is officially open for business. Now I’m just hoping that the traffic will come. Like any decent garden, it will take time for people to figure out that I’m trying to do something good here. Hopefully by coloring my images, it’ll help with a sense of peace or at least calmness. We’ll see how this garden grows. As I told a good friend when they were starting their online community, you have to keep serving the vegetables until people can start to understand how nutritious they are. The internet is filled with a lack of nutritious, life-giving, life-sustaining content. When you come across a good one, it is hard to understand why you feel better that you went there at first.

The best part of having the foundation in place is that now I can start generating and working on more art and stories. I’ve started working on a piece I’m calling The Flame Queen for now. I’m not sure how I feel about it right at the moment. It’s saying something to me, but I feel like I can’t quite… hear it properly.

The thought I have been having for a little while now is how spectrums seem to have been misrepresented. I want to do a piece on this notion. It’s playing around in my imagination. I’ll probably put it to work in some dreams tonight and see what comes up.

The basic idea is that I think spectrums should not be represented by a horizontal line. I know it’s all based on standard deviations from statistics, but I feel like… well, at least in psychology, that a line feels way too objective. For instance, on the autism spectrum, you have a range from low-functioning to high-functioning. There’s nuance in between, but this linear distribution completely ignores perspective.

I think a spectrum should be illustrated as a circle. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, there is a point opposite of your point in terms of perspective. If you’re at the top of the circle in what was considered low-functioning autistic & developmentally disabled, that would be only the opposite perspective from the high-functioning neurodivergent on the bottom of the circle. Before this gets everyone riled up, I’m not saying that one group of autistic people hates on or defines another group. I’m saying, the idea of high-functioning and low-functioning is coming from an observer of these two groups and what that observer has defined as functional.

This is kinda why I hate words sometimes. I can try and describe this idea a million times and never quite get it across. I draw it into an image that you can feel and resonate with, and it communicates it so much better.

This is definitely going to be something I’m putting into my dream work tonight as well. I have a vague image of the symbols for this concept coming together, but I haven’t been able to picture the final piece just yet.

Until it comes to me, I better get back to my Flame Queen before she tires of waiting for me.