In the last couple of months I gathered quite a few updates and scattered notes in form of comics, but for some reason I haven’t felt like it’s enough to share it here. With the first half of the year behind us, I think it’s finally time to put all these scattered thoughts together in a new post. I’m hoping that putting all of this together will make me see it’s all part of the process and not just being stuck!

This post will be a bit unhinged, so please bear with me. First, updates and then a few comic ramblings born out of an inconsistent creative practice.

Academic conferences

This is the time of the year most academic conferences happen and that’s exactly what I’ve been up to. I’m a little exhausted, to be honest.

This is me at a linguistic conference in Lyon. This photo is maybe a bit much for me, it’s not usual for me to turn out looking this professional or almost neurotypical? There were many other versions of this photo where I am forcing a smile and don’t know what to do with my arms. This photo made me laugh and reconsider my life choices, maybe I should be a LinkedIn influencer after all.

This week, I am participating online at the Cognitive Science Society conference with another paper on comics! In this paper, we compare the two main types of symbolic lines used for motion in comics.

Long story short, we find that circumfixing lines that go around the characters don’t really mean much. They just say something like “look, this character is moving back and forth”, while motion lines show the path, direction, speed, and are used more often with objects that are not animate (alive). I will stop here for now, but I might write a longer post about this paper, once it’s out.

Comic Invasion Berlin 2026

In May, I also participated in Comic Invasion, our yearly comic festival in Berlin. And it was the first time I got to sell new printed copies of my comic “Different”. You can also read it here for free:

Every year I leave this festival feeling grateful and reinvigorated. Selling your art can feel very vulnerable, but I met so many interesting people and connected with them over all kinds of life experiences. Regardless of whether someone buys my comic, I get to see that my art can be a vehicle for that kind of connection. Thank you Comic Invasion!

Lonely Hearts update

Last year I shared the cover for my “upcoming” Lonely Hearts comic (here) and it turns out that my fear of whether I was going to deliver on this comic was totally justified. For a variety of reasons, including the difficult topic and getting swallowed by a new job, I didn’t get far with this comic, except for this one page that I really like. Since I had shared the cover with you, I thought it was only fair to let you in on my process (or what is left of it).

I don’t know if this page is done, but for now it feels right just the way it is. This scene happened in 1995, when I saw a tank and asked my grandma why it was there. I felt a little bit insane being told about the war that was still going on or ending and I had no idea what they were talking about.

What I remember well is the horizon of the fields and the mountains. This summer I will go back to this landscape and hope it inspires me to get back to this comic.

Comic ramblings

These are some of the comic/visual notes I’ve made recently. I guess one of themes for my creative rut has been distraction. And while reading Heated Rivalry fan fiction has been therapeutic, drawing and writing are the only ways I can find a way back to myself. So, thank you for being here to read it!

Have a nice summer!

And if you liked this, leave a like and a comment!

Ana

Since my last post, I have been busy with work, holidays, rewatching Heated Rivalry, and finishing the new comic “Different”! In November, I participated in a 24-hour-comic-challenge organized by Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. As you can imagine, creating a comic in 24 hours is kind of insane, so I was happy with having finished at least a workable draft back in November. After on-and-off work of improving the comic, I am ready to share it here!

The topic we were given for our comics was “monstrosity”. When I started working on this comic, I thought I had finally come up with a completely original character that had nothing to do with my real life. But as I neared the completion of the comic, I realized the main character was just like me. I’ll stop here before I spoil anything.

Enjoy the comic and let me know what you think in the comments.

Thank you for reading!

Ana

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I am internally screaming! It’s been over a week since I watched and re-watched Heated Rivalry oh-so-many times. I think I am finally ready to talk about it.

Taking a deep breath.

PART I. The journey to self-discovery and gratitude

First, there was Heartstopper, and now we have Heated Rivalry. Honestly, I think this time, my obsession with Heated Rivalry is hitting even harder. Ok, let’s get real honest for a second, since I am an open book anyway.

Let’s start with Heartstopper. Watching Heartstopper made me think about my sexuality and gender in all the ways I had never even considered before. I started thinking about who I am in terms of straight and queer categories for the first time. Because I am neurodivergent, thinking about my sexuality and gender doesn’t come naturally to me.

I needed a show like Heartstopper to create a safe space and terminology to talk about things I couldn’t easily understand. If you can’t tell, I’m still pretty confused about what any labels mean, let alone apply to me. What is even sexual attraction? Neuroqueers will understand why this can be so confusing. And yes, “neuroqueer” is a new label I learned about recently and I’m totally using it from now on.

Now comes Heated Rivalry and oh my god! I am screaming.

If Heartstopper helped me understand myself better, then Heated Rivalry made me a new person!

Before I was like “I’m not sure what I feel”, but after watching Heated Rivalry, I felt more certain than ever about what I feel:

All the feelings that a human can feel.

But if I had to choose one word that encompasses all of my feelings about it, it would be “grateful”. I am grateful I got to watch the show and above everything I am grateful for having felt all the emotions, both while watching and in real life.

When I was younger, I got to experience almost all types of relationship situations described in the show. At the time, many of them were painful, but others were otherworldly romantic fantasies. For a long time, I focused on those painful relationship moments thinking they had broken me forever, but now I feel like I just want to celebrate the fact that I got to experience the full spectrum of human connection. And Heated Rivalry reminded me of that.

I am a sucker for romance in both fictional and in real life, so of course my take on Heated Rivalry will be biased. It is not an exaggeration to say that for me, being able to feel romantic love is probably the best reason to be alive. And again, Heated Rivalry reminded me of that.

That is why I chose to “go to the cottage” when I was only 19, and I stayed there, living my fairly-tale romance every day since. (Well, I wish I had such a nice cottage. If you don’t get the cottage reference, please go watch the show and thank me later.) Heated Rivalry reminded me of how it feels when you are just beginning to surrender yourself to another person and feeling seen for who you are…

Grateful.

PART II. Feeling like the other

Heated Rivalry didn’t just remind me of my gratitude for romance (and sex). I could see myself in so many aspects of both Ilya and Shane that cut really deep into this feeling that has been plaguing me my whole life: Feeling like “the other”.

Being different from others can take many forms. In the show, both characters are queer in an environment that would not be accepting of that. Ilya is a foreigner and that status is revealed as soon as he starts speaking. Shane is autistic and cannot pick up on contextual cues and jokes. Omg, do I relate to every single part of that!

When you are constantly contrasted as the other in a society, it is not only about other people seeing you a certain way or discriminating against you. It is also about you. You start hating yourself for being different because that’s the only thing you know. You internalize the same homophobic, racist, sexist thoughts that the rest of society has.

What Heated Rivalry gives us is an exploration of overcoming this self-hate and moving closer to self-acceptance. Accepting that someone else can love you warts and all leads to accepting that maybe you could also love yourself.

One thing that I often hear is that someone is taking a break from dating to work on themselves, and then once they are ready, they will get out there again. I always thought this was bullsh*t.

When we see that another human being loves us, there is nothing more powerful than that to show us that we can be loved. Personal growth can only be achieved through fostering relationships of human connection. You won’t get far doing it on your own. Again, I’m biased because that has always been my experience. My connections with other people energize me and help me see myself through their eyes.

Anyway, these are the things that have been going through my mind ever since I watched Heated Rivalry. And because I process things visually, the next part contains my cartoons about Heated Rivalry.

PART III. Visual processing: What makes Heated Rivalry so great

And I had to include this last part to be true to myself.

A word of caution for those who are still dating: A guy who treats you like Ilya treated Shane in the first four episodes is most likely not going to commit to a long-term relationship. It is so satisfying that he does in the show, but here is where I draw the line between fantasy and real life. Real committed love is obvious from the beginning! But we can forgive Ilya because of his internalized homophobia…

Thank you everyone!

If you haven’t yet, go watch Heated Rivalry! And let me know about your impressions in the comments!

Ana

I’ve been a bit busy with a bunch of projects, both comic and research related, but while they not all completed enough to share, I do have a new quick cartoon today.

With all the dystopian news and together with my new position as a university lecturer, I’ve been reflecting a lot on AI. And maybe you already know this about me, but I mainly have negative opinions about it. I do use it for coding and help with statistics, but that’s where it begins and ends for me. I want to reserve critical thinking and creativity for myself, thank you very much.

So, here is a comic about that. And read further to see what I discovered about Substack and AI.

I haven’t written a new post in over a month, so you can imagine my surprise when, upon adding my comic images, I discovered that Substack can also “generate” an image for me. Given that my comic is exactly about this topic, out of curiosity, I typed in “a comic about AI” as a prompt, see below. And this is the result:

I don’t even know where to begin. I mean…it’s something! Not a comic for sure, and not in English, in fact it’s not in any language, as far as I can tell. But who knows, maybe this is an AI language?

You could argue that the images look “nicer” than my quick doodles, as one visitor at a comic festival pointed it out to me last year. However, images are worthless if they don’t mean anything. In most of the images above, I can’t even tell what they are supposed to represent. Form needs meaning to be something.

And that’s where AI fails. When occasionally the form gets an interesting meaning in an AI piece of content, it’s by chance (after hundreds of fine-tuned prompts I imagine).

I won’t get deeper into this topic because there is so many possible arguments to go into, from stealing other people’s art to losing inherently human parts of the creative process, etc. The reason I’m not going into these more philosophical topics is because today I just want to celebrate the irony of making AI stuff for AI to parse (while human brains are rotting away), and how spectacularly bad AI is at creating art.

Yes, it might get better in the future, bla, bla. I don’t care about that. Right now, people are “writing” and “creating” slop that is simply horrible and they think it’s great, just because they put zero effort into it. Even Substack, a platform with so many creatives, is generating images. Why? Are we in desperate need of new images? Am I missing something?

Thank you for coming to my impromptu TED talk. I hope you have a nice AI-free creative day.

Until next time,

Ana

This day has finally come. After over a year, I am coming back with my Hearts series. First, we had Bleeding Hearts, then Brave Hearts, and now… Lonely Hearts!

I have just finished the main sketches and the cover, and I am totally rushing this, but I am so excited I had to announce this comic and share the cover with you. Sharing this will also motivate me to keep working on it, so that I have next pages ready for you soonish.

Ta-da! This is the cover:

Lonely Hearts continues the autobiographical story about my family in the 90s, almost exactly where we left off with Brave Hearts, but it also works as a standalone story. This time I am the main character, as a baby! What you see on the cover is based off of a real photo, apparently I was drawing like crazy at 1 year old already.

It’s been over a year now that I’ve completed Bleeding and Brave Hearts and self-published it, and it’s a bit hard to explain why it took me so long to come up with a sequel. The issue with sequels is that the characters might be the same, but the story has to feel like it has something new to say.

While Brave Hearts ended with the message of “love is an antidote to war”, I wanted to come up with an entirely different message this time and it took me some time to find it. What helped me in the end was starting to sketch the comic before I had the whole script planned out. I’ve always seen the advice that you should first write the script and then draw, but trying to nail down the script without drawing was actually holding me back. Now I know that I need to immerse myself in the visual storytelling in order to find the right plot.

This is it for now. As I create new pages, I will share them here. In the meantime, let me know what you think about the cover or about the fact that the main character is a baby? Do you have any tips about drawing/having a child as a main character?

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And of course, needless to say to everyone who follows me, this is all human made, by hand on my iPad and there will never be any AI involvement at any stage of my creative process. After all, this is my autobiographical story to tell.

Thank you for reading!

Ana

Over the last few months I’ve been taking drawing courses with live models, and this has opened my eyes to the power of prompts in creative practice.

This often means drawing a comic about a topic I would’ve never considered otherwise, like yoga below. I learn a lot in the process and the results can be surprisingly good!

This Friday I will share my wisdom on how to use prompts at Medium Day, September 19, 2025, 8 PM CEST. You can register here to see my talk.

My talk at Medium Day, September 19, 2025, 8 PM CEST:

Everyday Prompts for a Better Creative Practice

When we think about writing well, we often imagine beautiful prose and extraordinary themes. In this session, I will argue that all we need for a successful writing practice are ordinary prompts from everyday life. My method relies of actively seeking inspiration instead of waiting to get inspired. I will share the steps I take in my creative process, from finding a scene that can inspire me all the way to building a piece of writing or visual art.

A mindful approach to creativity

Ultimately, this practice of consciously looking for creative prompts allows us to be more present and think deeply about topics and themes we wouldn’t have even considered otherwise. That is the true power of this approach: You begin to expand your creative scope to new areas of life.

In my talk, I will break down different themes and approaches I take when creating something that started with a prompt, from humorous approaches to serious reflections on life and current events.

I want to keep it light today, so here is another example from my comic drawing course.

Hope to see you there on Friday!

Ana

Sometimes we get so caught up chasing the next shiny thing that we forget to be present in the moment. That is what my new comic “Anywhere” is about.

The story of this comic is based on a real situation I experienced in Taiwan, when I got so caught up in trying to reach a big golden Buddha statue before the temple premises closed, that I completely forgot to enjoy the moment. Later, in analyzing my obsessed behavior, I realized that that whole scene was a teaching moment telling me something important. Together with my trip to the mountains, filled with amazing bird life and surrounded by mist, I was inspired, and this comic started to take shape.

My expertise and interest in Austronesian indigenous cultures, also present in Taiwan, reminded of how in indigenous beliefs birds can be wizards and hold special powers. The bird in this comic is the Taiwanese magpie.

I often get asked whether my travels inspire my art and most of the time I don’t know how to answer this question. I rarely make comics about a specific place. I am usually most inspired by my inner world and my interpretation of what I see around me. Now I think I would say I make art about how different places and events transform me.

The print of this comic is now out and I will have the privilege of selling it this weekend at the Femrises festival in Berlin! Come and say hi if you are in Berlin, Germany.

Thank you and hope to see you this weekend!

Ana

Dear readers,

As expected from a person with ADHD, I recently got into a new hobby. And that is making zines! Zines are short handmade “magazines”, usually with art and text, on any topic your heart desires.

My first zine ever is about ADHD, of course. I made this zine in a workshop led by (thank you!). In a slightly more positive tone than my usual comics, here are a few tips on how to deal with ADHD, from my personal experience!

For readers who are subscribed to Medium, I also published this article on Medium.

1. Start the day with a shot of espresso for optimal efficiency.

It is a known fact that coffee hits ADHDers differently. For many of us, coffee reduces our ADHD symptoms, even if temporarily, to a more manageable level. Instead of making us jittery, we feel calmer and more prepared for the day ahead.

2. Talk to people even when the social situation is awkward.

Social situations can be hard for many neurodivergent folks. There are just too many arbitrary rules that we don’t know how to follow. The secret to neurodivergent success is to just keep being with people anyway.

Neurotypical people will be satisfied that we showed up and neurodivergent people will understand our awkwardness and accept us for who we are. For me at least, that’s the only way to make friends!

3. Play for your daily dose of dopamine

So often play is thought to be a childish thing. For adult ADHDers though, play is essential for keeping our dopamine levels steady. I love all kinds of toys, from plushies to LEGOs. The endless possibilities for stories you can imagine with your toys lead to that extra stimulation that ADHD brains desperately need.

4. Turn your focus on unnecessary details into art

ADHDers are simultaneously good and bad at paying attention. We are bad at paying attention to what is required of us, but we excel at paying attention to random things. It just so happens that observing random things in your environment is the bread and butter of art.

So, I take all my “useless” observations and try to turn them into art. Regardless of how it turns out, it’s something that can help me appreciate the world around me as well as my strange type of attention.

5. Allow yourself to hyperfocus for a bit

Productivity is highly sought after and it’s something ADHDers struggle with the most… or the least! That is, if they manage to get into the hyperfocus mode. The only issue with hyperfocus is that it doesn’t always hit when you need it.

One of the tricks that sometimes work is to keep hyping yourself up about the thing you need to do and the hyperfocus will hit eventually. This only works if you are somewhat interested in the thing you need to do, of course. That is why, I fill my life with things I love to do as much as I can.

6. Crash on the bed for the obligatory recovery time

One of the biggest learning curves for me, since my diagnosis, has been accepting the need for recovery time. After intense social situations or simply a full day, we need to rest more than neurotypical folks. That is simply how it is.

Planning that extra time where you don’t have to do anything is crucial for a healthy neurodivergent lifestyle.

7. Make art about your day and feel better about it

One of my main coping mechanisms for dealing with mental health issues is art. At first, I started creating funny comics about my ADHD experiences and that made me feel better. Then I started writing on Substack/Medium about it, and that made me feel even better. Several years later, I still share these funny observations on my socials and the conversation with my audience truly makes the whole ADHD experience much lighter to bear.

8. Find a support group

Although the zine finishes here, I still have one final piece of advice. I recently joined an ADHD support group. This is a real in-person group, where people share their struggles and discuss what has worked for them. This has been life-changing for me.

There is something about talking to people face to face that makes the whole interaction feel more intimate and human, and makes you realize there are other people just like you, right here in your city. I made this comic to describe my experience with Focus Warriors in Berlin.

Focus Warriors are also on Substack:

Focus Warriors: ADHD Support for Neurodivergent Friends

Took me 28 years to accept my ADHD. Then I started a support group... 60+ weeks later, we’ve built a space for neurodivergent beauties who laugh, cry, overshare — and finally feel seen. Come find out why it works.

By Christopher Peter Hussein

I hope you too can find people with whom you have an instant connection. For that reason alone, it’s worth getting out of the house!

The end

Do you have any tips on how to deal with ADHD, neurodivergence, or life in general? Let me know in the comments!

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, like, subscribe and share it with others!

Ana

Here are a few impressions from Comic Invasion last weekend in Berlin, what a whirlwind of emotions this was!

Crazy thing happened this year with Comic Invasion. In stark contrast to last year’s edition, we had so many people (10,000 in total) that it was hard to keep up! And statistics did its job for us: Me and most artists around me have sold out at least some of their comics. It was truly wild, like we were giving candy for free and not selling serious graphic narratives.🤣

I would leave for a short break only to come back to an empty spot on my table: ADHD comics gone! I had to restock them every hour or so!

And on the last day, 3 hours before closing, Bleeding Hearts got sold out as well. A few weeks prior, I kind of wondered if I should reprint the comic, but I concluded it would be unlikely to sell much more than what I had left in stock, given that last year most of my sales went to my friends (and the total number of sales was 12). This year I sold all of the 17 copies I had to complete strangers!

A great weekend all in all. The only thing that didn’t pan out for me was the Comic Invasion contest “Fact or fiction”. I had submitted a comic on this topic and didn’t win anything.🤷‍♀️ But at least I can share my comic now, so here it is. People reacted quite well to it at the festival and I even sold a few copies despite of its heavier dose of text.

With so many people passing by my table and interacting with my comics, I had many interesting conversations about ADHD, my research, my grandma’s story, and I noticed how this year I could truly appreciate these small moments instead of wondering if someone will end up buying something.

So many people related to my comics, laughed out loud, or got emotional reading Bleeding Hearts that I felt truly seen through my art the way it had never happened to me before, at least not in person. This will be my reminder for why I create comics: for myself and for others who feel the same. Now I know better than ever that they are out there because I met them.

Thank you to everyone who passed by and to everyone reading online!

Ana

Dear readers,

It is official! I will be selling my comics at the Artist Alley at Comic Invasion Berlin 2025! The festival is happening this weekend, May 3-4 at the Museum for Communication Berlin. If you are in Berlin at that time, please drop by!

You can find more information here: https://comicinvasion.berlin/festival/2025

Here are a few new things I will be selling:

Comic Invasion is a great way to announce my next big news and that is that I moved back to Berlin. So, for all of you Berliners reading this, get back in touch!

I know I’ve a bit absent over the last few weeks, and that’s mainly due to the move and traveling, but now I’m here to stay with some more comics and storytelling. :)

Ana

I recently looked back at my logo and realized it looks a bit outdated for how I would’ve drawn it now, so I decided to give it a makeover. So, here it is! Same logo but with bolder lines and colors.

I moved recently (more on this in my next post) and a few boxes ended up being labeled as “miscellaneous”. This word got stuck in my mind because it kind of sounds funny (and it’s hard to spell beyond “misc”) and it just so happens to be very applicable to the comics I’m sharing in this newsletter. So, here they are.

A comic about a PhD defense

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine (@bienklomberg) defended her PhD and I made a comic for the occasion. She defended the thesis masterfully, just as indicated in the comic!!🎉 The style of this comic was inspired by the Tintin comics, which gave name to our research project at Tilburg University. If you are wondering what paranymphs are in the last panel, they are like your support during the defense in the Netherlands. They stand being the person defending and need to be ready to help out if something goes wrong! And I was one of them, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy to stand behind a defendant without being able to answer any of the questions (because fortunately nothing went wrong).

“I have a question or more of a comment” is a known meme in academic circles. It is usually a sign of a poisoned question, typically hiding a certain criticism or judgment of the arguments provided by the person presenting their work.

Daily comics

The second miscellaneous comic is from a small comic exercise I did at the Visual Voice workshop by Crucial Comix, led by our amazing teacher Joaquin Golez! 😊 The task was to draw 3 panels for 3 parts of the day. It seems that besides working, my days are defined by my favorite drinks, and places (and moods), where I have those drinks. When I find something I like, I become obsessed with it—in this case light-roasted specialty coffee and New England IPA.

I think this is it for now. Next time I’ll tell you all about my move and what’s happening next!

Ana

Dear readers,

I watched Wicked in December and ever since then I can’t get these two out of my head.

I think Wicked is a great metaphor for many relationships we experience in real life. We can (want to) love someone but still be unable to overcome the differences that make us fundamentally different. Sometimes the right choice is to allow ourselves to love someone for who they are and sometimes the right choice is to leave. I didn’t want to make this sad, but somehow it ended up that way. In any case, I hope this Valentine’s you can celebrate your love (or lack thereof) in any shape or form.

Movie recommendations

If you like watching romantic movies around Valentine’s, here are my top 3 romantic movies of all times (out of the ones I watched of course):

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

There is something about this movie that just breaks me. It’s not just about love, it’s also about life, our perceptions of other people, our compatibilities, and our fragile memory. It’s sad and also hopeful that we can make it through the mess of life.

Before Sunrise

The story of Before Sunrise closely resembles how I met my husband, just with a lot of added drama of course, so it will always have a special place in my heart. Also, the dialog of the whole Before trilogy is objectively superb.

In the Mood for Love

The cinematography and the atmosphere of this movie is out of this world. This movie cannot be described in words, it’s all in the visuals. Just go and watch it!

Do you have any favorite romantic movies? Let me know in the comments below!

Happy Valentine’s!

Ana

Dear readers,

Some stories are similar because they discuss universal human dilemmas and archetypes, and others because they reflect the challenges of the same historical period. What happens when two stories do both of these things?

I am a bit of a film buff, so I always anticipate the Oscar nominations with curiosity. Not so much because I believe those are necessarily the best movies of the year, but because I want to know if I missed any great films. One such surprise for me this year was The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent.

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is a short Croatian film nominated for Best Live Action Short Film by the 97th Academy Awards. The nominations have just been announced, so we are yet to see which short film will take the Oscar. If having gotten the Palme d’Or is anything to go by, I think it stands a good chance to win.

The film drew me immediately for its theme and real-life setting, which happen to be the same ones I explore in my comic Brave Hearts. Before I go into any details (and spoilers), I will give you a chance to watch the movie and read (or revisit) my comic. Both are quite short!

Here is the full movie (13 min):

And here is my comic (23 pages):

Let’s get into the analysis and those spoilers!

What are these stories about?

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent tells the story of the Štrpci massacre in 1993 in Bosnia, at the height of the Bosnian war. A Serbian paramilitary unit forcibly stopped a Serbian train passing through Bosnia. The paramilitary soldiers abducted 18 Bosniaks and one Croat from the train, and later tortured and killed them.

The movie depicts the abduction of the passengers, only implying but not showing what happened afterward. We are shown how one Croatian passenger stood up to the soldiers to protect a fellow Bosniak passenger and allowed himself to be taken instead. Based on the testimonies of this event in real life, this Croatian passenger was Tomo Buzov.

Brave Hearts is an autobiographical story about my grandma’s journey from Bosnia to Croatia in 1991, at the very beginning of the Croatian war. She is traveling to come and meet the newborn me and help my mom during the ongoing air raids. Her bus gets forcibly stopped by Serbian paramilitary soldiers who demand to know why the passengers are traveling to Croatia.

My grandma exclaims she is traveling to visit her newborn granddaughter, which prompts other passengers to say something similar. After laughing it off, soldiers let them go and the bus makes its way to Croatia.

The unlikely hero

Even though the two stories take place in different locations in Bosnia and at different times, the plot follows an identical path. Passengers are on a train/bus, traveling from one city to another, when they get suddenly stopped by a Serbian paramilitary group of armed soldiers.

As the soldiers enter, the tension and unease rise. The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent masterfully decides to put us in the shoes of a character who does not dare to say or do anything. The grim admittance that most of us would remain silent is at the core of identifying with the main character.

This silence simultaneously embodies the feeling of wanting to scream and rebel, and the urge to stay silent, to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Do you attempt to get justice for all, or try to save yourself?

In both stories, this tension culminates in one person standing up to the evil soldiers. In the movie, our focus shifts to the hero while we sit in our embarrassing silence. In my grandma’s story, our focus is on her transformation from being afraid to gathering courage and breaking the silence.

Here is where the two stories diverge. The hero in The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent meets a tragic end, while my grandma lives to tell her story.

There is something disheartening about a tragic end to the hero who stood up to the villain. But also, how could the end not be tragic? Under what circumstances would the soldiers let the hero go?

Why my grandma’s story did not end tragically

Since Brave Hearts is one of my first longer stories, I asked my partner if there was anything I could improve in its storytelling. He thought for a bit and said: “Well, maybe the soldiers let your grandma go a bit too easily. Aren’t they like super dangerous? And they just let her go like that?”

As soon as he said that, I felt the magic of my grandma’s story again. They did let her go a bit too easily, didn’t they? But that is exactly how it happened in real life. How grateful I am for that.

She shouted at the soldiers that she was on the bus because she needed to travel to her granddaughter and, miraculously, they just left in peace. I have always graciously interpreted this as my grandma’s big heroic gesture saving everyone on that bus.

My naïve interpretation of the story has always been that proclaiming your love can break even the most evil of people. How could the soldiers take any passengers away if they were just traveling to visit their loved ones?

I don’t know why the soldiers let my grandma and everyone else on that bus go. It was probably not because her message of love spoke to them. The reason must’ve been something disgustingly bureaucratic. Perhaps they were ordered not to kill civilians that early on in the war.

Whatever the reason might have been, I like more the interpretation where my grandma’s message of love changed the soldiers’ minds. I want to believe in a world where someone like my grandma can be a victorious hero and a story like Brave Hearts can happen.

The one who stood up to the villain

The archetype of the unlikely hero who stood up to the villain is a very powerful one in the human psyche. We want to believe that standing up to the villains is what ultimately defeats them. However, analyzing my grandma’s story side-to-side with The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent showed me another facet of war storytelling.

In war, the hero does not always win, regardless of how courageous they are. This leads me to conclude that a hero cannot be measured by how victorious they were, but only by their acts of non-violence. Non-violence is an active pursuit.

Pacifism does not mean staying silent. Quite the opposite: it means speaking out. It can also mean sacrificing your own safety so that others can be safer than they were before.

Stories like The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent and Brave Hearts remind us that we are not alone in the active pursuit of non-violence. We walk in the footsteps of great pacifist heroes of told and untold war stories.

My heart goes to all the victims of war.

Thank you for reading. If you liked this story, click on the heart below, subscribe and share it with others.

Ana

Dear readers,

Where does my mind go at the end of the year? Instead of new year’s resolutions I know I won’t follow through, I like to reflect on what happened this year and what I have learned from it.

Here are four things I learned this year, presented in a countdown fashion, from funny to more serious lessons. And each lesson is accompanied by my comics that were most liked on social media this year. You can also read this post on Medium.

4. Olympics can be fun even when you don’t care about them

As a fairly non-sporty person, I didn’t even know the Olympics were happening in 2024 until all the memes started. And oh boy, did they deliver. From the gearless Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec to the sloppy moves of Raygun, I laughed my heart out and I would be lying if I didn’t admit these were my favorite Olympics ever.

With the Olympics being the meme highlight of the summer, I also wanted to join in on the social media craze. And I did it the only way I know how: By imagining how my neurodivergent clumsy ass would do at the Olympics. The result was the following comic.

3. Memes about neurodivergence keep on giving

While ADHD and neurodivergence content was trending in 2022 and 2023, I felt like this trend was slowly dying down in 2024. However, the success of my neurodivergent Olympics comic proved me wrong! It did well above my average, which can only mean neurodivergent humor is here to stay.

My newly found self-confidence in creating neurodivergent humor blossomed again around Halloween. Here is the result.

And there is my Substack post that goes with the comics from the last two points:

2. The science of comics can reveal how we think

Now we turn to a discovery I made in my scientific research of comics. And yes, that’s a real job!

Together with my colleagues Neil Cohn and Irmak Hacımusaoğlu at Tilburg University, we analyzed over 300 comics. We looked at motion lines in comics and asked whether they influence how we know what is alive in a comic.

We found that animates (entities perceived as alive) get less motion lines in comics than inanimates (objects perceived as not alive, like a ball). Why is that? We propose the following answer.

If you are curious to learn more about this, or wonder how comics relate to cognitive science, you can read my post below.

1. Love is the only antidote to war

This year I completed a comic about my grandma’s journey through a war zone to come and visit me soon after I was born.

You can read the comic “Brave Hearts” here:

Despite the difficult revisiting of my traumatic family history and grappling with emotions I didn’t even know I had about war, I learned an important lesson that I want to shout from the bottom of my lungs:

Love is the only antidote to war!

There is really nothing else worth saying that could summarize my year better than this message. If you read Brave Hearts, you will know and feel just how love and not violence can be the only way forward.

In fact, this message and Brave Hearts marked my year so much that I also talked about it in my Medium Day talk. So many attendees felt seen and shared their stories and struggles that can only be solved through empathy and love. Thank you for being there!

While I am grateful for all the opportunities and successes this year has brought me, I need to acknowledge the most difficult truth of all.

2024 was a gruesome year. We want and deserve better.

We all deserve peace.

I will finish with my most liked comic this year and plead that humanity does better next year.

I might be a cynical person for most of the year, but when the holiday season arrives, I turn into a Christmas-obsessed character worthy of a Hallmark special. I don’t fully understand it myself, but Christmas magic manages to melt my black (Wednesday-like) heart.

And because of this, over the past few years, I have created many short heartwarming holiday-inspired comics, which I am sharing with you in this post.

If you are on Medium, click here to read the post there.

How can you get into the holiday spirit worthy of a Hallmark movie? Here are 6 heartwarming ways to do just that, which is a sneaky way to get you to read my Christmas comics.

1. Decorate a Christmas tree

2. Write a wish list

3. Send your list to Santa

4. Believe in Santa

5. Don’t worry about the New Year’s resolutions

6. Spend the holidays with the people you love

And that’s pretty much all you need!

Or did I miss anything important? Let me know in the comments what you do to get into the Christmas spirit.

Happy holiday preparations,

Until next time,

Ana

Dear readers,

This week, I made a few comics inspired by one of the past Halloweens where I went as Wednesday Addams. Maybe these situations didn’t unfold exactly as depicted in these comics, but I did feel very much like myself in a Wednesday costume.

This post is also available on Medium and you can read it here. Do so especially if you are a Medium subscriber, thank you!

I couldn’t be satisfied with just making the comics, as you do, so I wrote a piece about neurodivergence. Here are 4 neurodivergent behaviors, explained in comics of course!

1. Just because I don’t behave in a “fun” way does not mean I can’t have fun. On my own terms.

What does it look like when someone is having fun? I won’t blame you if you say the person should be laughing, talking loudly, interacting with people, and dancing. However, if that person is neurodivergent, their fun can look very different (and maybe even involve a funky dance).

“Relax, have fun!” and “Smile!” are just some of the things I’ve been told over the years at parties. For the longest time, I thought I didn’t know how to have fun.

But internally, I knew exactly what having fun felt like. I knew it whenever I connected with someone over a deep conversation or watched my favorite movie. You could call that being a nerd, but even that was not entirely correct. I’ve always enjoyed the company of other people, but only if they understood me and did not judge me for being different.

I didn’t have the patience of a science nerd and I could also not follow social rules intuitively like everyone else. That is why the Wednesday dance hits so close to home for me. Whenever I took the advice to relax and have fun and started dancing in my own way, a swarm of social attention and judgment came my way.

Only many years later, I found out I have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) with autistic traits, which can be subsumed under the term “neurodivergent”. So much about my behavior finally made sense.

My fun simply looked different and that’s ok. Fun is an internal feeling and it cannot be determined by others. Only I know what fun means for me.

My special interests propel me to be creative and look for fun in unusual places. One day I might be doing LEGO photography, the next day I am learning screenwriting, and then dancing in a non-neurotypical way… The possibilities are endless.

Contrary to popular opinion, neurodivergent fun can also be had in social situations, with the right people of course, which brings us to the next point…

2. Neurodivergent people ARE social, they just want to hang out with like-minded people.

One amazing superpower of neurodivergent people is being able to spot others just like us a mile away. Because of our social misgivings, we can generally only get along well with other people who don’t mind our quirky bending of social norms. You are into my funky dance? You are my friend.

And just to be clear, we don’t do this because we are being exclusive. We simply don’t know how to engage in small talk or keep a conversation going when there is no deep connection. This often gives a false impression of not being interested in socializing at all, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. We just need to find people who can understand us.

3. Neurodivergent people are not lazy. They just have a hard time interacting with the world around them.

Not being able to pay attention, poor motor skills, and lack of social skills are all hallmarks of neurodivergent conditions like ADHD and autism. Unfortunately for us, these issues are often simplistically labeled as “being lazy”. The truth is, however, far from simple.

Different brain development and chemistry in neurodivergent people can lead to a myriad of issues. Most notably, impaired executive functioning can make it hard to keep attention because our dopamine-thirsty brains are seeking the next exciting thing to focus on.

Somewhat paradoxically, once we do manage to focus on anything, it can be hard to let go and shift our focus to something else. This is known as hyperfocus, often mistaken for productivity. And while it might be productive on paper, after countless hours of work, hyperfocus can so easily turn on you and leave you even more debilitated than before.

Another pet peeve of mine is being called lazy for not being able to deliver in physical activities. Even after training and trying so hard in Physical Education, I could never match the level of my peers.

It turns out that the reason for this was not me being lazy. My poor motor skills were a symptom of my neurodevelopment conditions. As shown in scientific research, ADHD and autism can lead to poor visuospatial processing and thus to poor motor skills (Cummins et al. 2005).

The motor skills performance observed in children with ASD and ADHD is worse than those without a disability on measures of gross motor development as well as locomotor and object control skills. Poor motor performance is highly related to low self-esteem, to higher levels of anxiety and to poor social functioning. (From Cummins et al. 2005)

4. Neurodivergent conditions can be a disability, a superpower, both, or neither.

The discourse on neurodivergence can get very polarized, from discussions on what counts as a disability to people claiming that ADHD is a trendy superpower to have. While these (mostly online) discussions don’t amount to anything, here in the real world, we can see the reality for what it is. All these perspectives are true.

For some people, being neurodivergent is a total disability, while for others it can appear at a subclinical level (and maybe seem like a superpower?). For me, both the disability and the superpower definition describe my neurodivergent experience.

On some days, I cannot properly function in all the tasks that are required of me and I need help in caring for myself. On other days, I am inspired, curious, and driven because maybe something positive has happened that day. My disproportionate emotional response to it makes me feel invincible and truly like a superhero. Having ADHD means experiencing the constant grind of these ups and downs.

At least we have the ups to look forward to (and funky dances that come with it) :)

The end

Wednesday, Halloween, ADHD, autism, it’s a wrap!

What are your experiences with neurodivergence? Have your behaviors ever been misinterpreted through a neurotypical lens? Let me know in the comments!

If you liked this, click like and share the post with your friends.

Until next time,

Ana

Share Ana’s Comics

Dear readers,

This week I have something different for you, an insiders look into my research on comics! (If you are a member on Medium, read the article here to support me, thank you!)

Have you ever wondered why we find it so hard to recognize that corals are alive, but we have such an easy time recognizing other animals?

This is the question I asked myself a few years back when I was snorkeling in Vanuatu. In fact, I was so dumbstruck by it that I kept looking at one of the corals for any sign of life.

You might say that you already know the answer to the question above. Corals don’t move, they don’t express themselves, they don’t seem to do anything other animals do, or at least they are too small for any of those activities to be visible to us. And you would be completely right. We do not pay attention to things that don’t visibly move. But why is that?

It is because of something researchers call “animacy preference”. Humans indiscriminately focus their attention on beings perceived as alive and sentient or “animate”. Everything else is a bit more like a background to our perception. If you had to describe the picture above in one sentence, how would you do it?

Try first before reading the next paragraph.

Did you first mention the diver or the coral? It is likely you mentioned the diver first, even though the coral is bigger and in the foreground. In our eyes, the coral is a part of the landscape and not a live entity, which makes it infinitely less interesting than a human. (This is instinctively and evolutionarily speaking, of course, it’s ok if you find corals more interesting.) In our evolutionary past, other humans and animals posed much more of a threat to our survival, so we learned to pay more attention to them (New et al., 2007).

But what is it about animates that draws our attention? Is it all about movement or something else?

If a coral could move like a rabbit does, we would make no mistake about it being alive for sure. But then again, inanimate things often move anyway, like clouds in the sky or a leaf taken by wind or water, so movement alone doesn’t really tell us much about whether something is animate or not. This question also plagued psychologists who ran several experiments on the perception of animacy (Opfer, 2002). What they found is fascinating.

In an experiment, they found that if a random-looking blob* is moving aimlessly, we (or the participants in the experiment) perceive it as inanimate. But if the blob moves toward a goal, in an intentional-looking manner, we perceive it as alive and sentient. Opfer’s (2002) conclusion is that goal-directed movement is the main indicator of animacy.

*A blob was chosen instead of a real animal so that the visual cues typical of animates, like posture, do not influence the results.

Comics

Together with my colleagues Neil Cohn and Irmak Hacımusaoğlu at Tilburg University, we decided to test Opfer’s conclusions on comics, because there artists can visually depict the goal-directed movement with lines. If humans perceive only the goal-directed motion as animate, we hypothesize that they will depict the motion of animates and inanimates differently. But in what way? Let us find out.

In comics, there are two main types of lines that indicate movement: motion lines and circumfixing lines. Motion lines trail behind the figure and indicate the direction of the movement, while the circumfixing lines are placed around the character and do not provide any information about directionality (Hacımusaoğlu & Cohn, 2023). The two images below exemplify both types.

Comparing the two images above, we can tell that the directionality of the movements is clear with motion lines and completely lost with circumfixing lines. In fact, the last image looks slightly confusing, because the character (animate) and the ball (inanimate) seem to be shaking independently from each other and we are not even sure whether the ball was thrown or not. So, what does that mean for our question about how we perceive animacy?

Motion lines indicate goal-directed movement and according to Opfer (2002), that is crucial for understanding whether something is animate. So, we expect that motion lines might be used differently with animates and inanimates. Different how? In a quantitative way, of course.

We took 331 comics from all over the world and checked whether each character (animate) and object (inanimate) had any lines, motion or circumfixing. We then compare animates and inanimates to see which ones have lines more often.

We expect to find the difference between animates and inanimates only in the case of motion lines because they are goal-directed. When it comes to circumfixing lines, we don’t expect to find any difference between animates and inanimates, because they don’t have any feature that might indicate whether something is animate or inanimate.

What we found

What we found is exactly what we expected: There is a difference between animates and inanimates when it comes to motion lines. Inanimates are more often followed by motion lines than animates. With circumfixing lines, on the other hand, there is no significant difference in how often animates and inanimates are marked by them. The figures below show our results.

The only question now is why are inanimates more marked by goal-directed motion lines? Also, if goal-directed motion is perceived as animate, shouldn’t animates have more motion lines?

The basic idea is that humans have expectations about who moves in a goal-directed way. Here is an explanation of our theory in pictures.

Explanation for why animate are less marked by motion lines:

Explanation for why inanimates are more marked by motion lines:

Inanimates moving in a goal-directed way defy our basic expectations about the difference between beings with intentionality and those without it. Since in comics we cannot see the movement as we do in the real world, we use motion lines more often to indicate that inanimates are moving in a goal-directed way, which is unexpected from them. In our study, we call this principle “Mark the unexpected!”.

With this study, we confirmed that humans use goal-directed motion as a cue to determine whether something is animate or not. And we went one step further and discovered that in comics, this leads to the principle of “Mark the unexpected!”. In other words, we depict this goal-directed movement more often with inanimates, which we do not expect to see moving around like animates.

Despite my stubborn attempts at detecting the signs of life in a coral with the naked eye, maybe it’s time I accept my human attention is shaped by the animacy preference and goal-directed movement. Next time, I’ll bring a microscope.

You can read the preprint of our full research paper here, where we also explain how these results connect to different aspects of spoken language and surprisal.

Based on:

Krajinović, Ana, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, and Neil Cohn (all authors from Tilburg University). 2024. Mark the unexpected! Animacy preference and goal-directed movement in visual language, Ms.

Authors:

Ana Krajinović is a postdoc in the TINTIN project at Tilburg University. She is a linguist, writer, and a comic artist working on how comics connect to language and cognition.

Irmak Hacımusaoğlu is a PhD student in the TINTIN project at Tilburg University. She is a cognitive researcher and doodle artist exploring the representation of motion and time in comics in her research.

Neil Cohn is an Associate Professor at Tilburg University and the head of the TINTIN project. In his research, Neil explores the structure and cognition of drawings and visual narratives, like comics, as well as language and multimodality.

References:

Hacımusaoğlu, I., & Cohn, N. (2023). The meaning of motion lines?: A review of theoretical and empirical research on static depiction of motion. Cognitive Science, 47(11). doi: 10.1111/cogs.13377

New, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2007). Category-specific attention for animals reflects ancestral priorities, not expertise. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(42), 16598–16603. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0703913104

Opfer, J. E. (2002). Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: The case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change. Cognition, 86(2), 97–122. doi: 10.1016/S0010–0277(02)00171–3

Ever since I finished my Brave Hearts comic, I’ve been feeling like I am falling behind with my comic schedule. This is mostly because I am still working on the script for my next comic, which is taking way longer than I expected. Meanwhile my ADHD brain is trying to redirect all my attention toward writing the script and away from all the other smaller projects. Fortunately, one smaller project turned victorious this week and I drew this short visual poem.

Breathe

Sometimes I just need to be in nature for long enough to notice its beauty. Last week, I spent hours on the beach, which eventually led me to stop thinking about my anxiety-inducing thoughts and start playing with the sand, shells, and rocks.

With this visual poem, I guess I also learned my lesson: You can’t rush the process, some things simply take longer than others. As a person with ADHD, I keep relearning this lesson over and over, but somehow it never sticks. Wait, I think I have already forgotten it.

You remember how I announced my Medium talk about Brave Hearts and hero’s journey? You can now watch it on YouTube by clicking below!

Thank you for reading!

Until next time,

Ana

It’s been a while, but after a couple of conferences, travels, and summery laziness, I am back with a new comic and an announcement about my upcoming virtual talk (stick to the end to see it!).

In case you are curious about what I’ve been up to in the last 2 months, you can click here to read a summary of everything I presented at conferences about my research on comics.

I also published a more accessible version of Brave Hearts, with textual descriptions, available on this link on Medium.

Another interesting thing was my interview with Le Huffington Post (the French Huffington Post). My appearance in the video is short but sweet:

New comic

Finally, a new comic in a while! I wasn't paying much attention to the Olympics until all the memes started and I'm all here for the social media frenzy. Of course I also want to participate in this trendy topic even though I am furthest away possible from a sports person. So, here is my cartoony contribution.

If you liked this comic, check out my older post about the connection between poor motor coordination and neurodivergence:

Announcement of my talk

If you like my comics, you will definitely like this piece of news. Next Saturday, August 17 (12:30-1PM New York / 6:30-7PM Berlin), I will present a virtual talk on Medium Day about how to battle social media fatigue with stories that matter.

Medium Day is free of charge and you can register on this link and watch my talk live on Zoom. At a later date, I will also release it as a YouTube video. The perks of watching it live include the possibility to ask me any questions you want and engage in a discussion about autobiographical storytelling!

Battling social media fatigue with stories that matter

Summary: Many of us feel social media fatigue. Inundated with content, we can easily reach a stage where we feel every shared story is like any other. In this session, I want to talk about how we can recognize and write about stories that matter, to us and to the world. I will focus on the power of autobiographical storytelling, which can reframe past trauma in giving it meaning and purpose, and help us connect with other people through shared experiences. I will argue that some of the best autobiographical stories are those about our role models who taught us unforgettable life lessons that the world deserves to know as well.

Thank you for reading!

Until next time,

Ana

For the last day of this year’s Pride Month, I have a story about my neurodivergent experience with gender. You can also read this story on Medium. And let me know which parts resonate or do not resonate with you. I’m curious about how other people experience gender!

I am 12 years old and one day it suddenly hits me: Girls dress differently from boys. I look in the mirror and I see my boring flat ponytail serving its purpose of taking the hair away from my face. I look at my clothes. They are also “boring”. It’s some random sweater my mom picked up for me. Pants… Are these pants in fashion? All the other girls are wearing bell-bottom pants (yes, this was in the early 2000s!).

“I… I don’t dress like other girls,” I suddenly realized. I was shocked.

But how is this possible, you might ask? How come I had never ever thought about the fact that girls dress differently? Well, I am neurodivergent. Something I know now, ever since I was diagnosed with ADHD and learned about neurodivergence, which has led me to recognize my many autistic traits (no official diagnosis of autism yet).

Neurodivergence is used as a wide term to describe many different neurodevelopmental conditions, such as ADHD, autism, and OCD, among others. It generally refers to any atypical brain functioning. In this post, I focus on my experience with ADHD and possibly autism under the term “neurodivergence”. Having these conditions makes it hard for me to understand and follow social rules and I can only pay attention to the things I like (gender roles not being one of them I guess).

The connection between neurodivergence and gender is a curious one. As a neurodivergent person, I am really bad at recognizing, understanding, and playing into social norms. In fact, in order to be socially functional, these things have to come in this order:

1. First, we need to recognize how a social norm works: What is the rule?

2. We need to understand why people follow it: Does it make sense? Does it bring anything of value to society?

3. We need to decide whether we can or want to follow the said social norm: Does it make sense to me?

When I was 12, I wasn’t even at the first step of understanding the social norms surrounding gender. I hadn’t even recognized the difference in clothing between girls and boys. Sure, I knew girls wear dresses sometimes, but somehow I hadn’t connected the dots of me being a girl and needing to dress differently from boys. Or if I did, I never paid attention to it.* Also, my mom had mostly chosen my clothes up to that point.

*For example, I remember wearing a huge princess dress for my first day of school because I thought it was pretty, but then I realized everyone thought I was overdressed. One fellow student asked me if I was going to a wedding afterwards. Even as a kid, I didn’t understand what clothes were appropriate when and what they were signaling to others.

After my world-changing realization about gender, I went shopping. I bought bell-bottom jeans, I untied my hair, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw a female person for the first time. I came to school and my friends were amazed.

They asked me what had brought about this change and a complete makeover. “Makeover? I just untied my hair, and ok, I bought new pants. That’s what people wear, right?” I still wasn’t quite aware of the social significance of this change. But I got the message. People reacted positively. I needed to continue looking like this.

And I did. I leaned into the girly stuff and tried to mimic the things other girls were wearing. But there was a catch.

I was always acutely aware that I was performing.

Naturally, at this point I had never heard of Judith Butler’s theory of gender as social performance (which was my inspiration for the title, thank you, Judith!). Oh, but I so felt it. I felt it in my bones. Every day I felt like I was parading at a carnival. Did I leave the correct number of buttons unbuttoned on my shirt? I would count them on other girls and compare. I analyzed gender performance as a science.

Little did I know, all this rule-based thinking and hyper-awareness of every move I made was my autistic brain making sense of social rules that seemed so arbitrary. Why do girls have long hair? No reason. Why do boys wear more sporty clothes? No reason. Why do I need to wear a bra when my breasts are not falling anywhere? No reason. It’s all completely made up.

But I had decided to embrace it and play along as much as I could. After all, people really seemed to like it when I followed these made-up rules. So, I did. And if I’m being honest, over the years, some of these performances did get under my skin, especially after I started dating men.

Heterosexual relationships have a way of pushing the gender buttons to the extreme. Mainly because, now it’s not just other girls telling you you look good, but men tell you they love how you look. And you keep playing into it more and more, giving them what they love so much about women.

Just to make it clear, my gender performance was far from perfect. I would make “mistakes” along the way and sometimes people would get a glimpse of my genderless self. They would say things like “Oh, so you don’t shave there?” or “You cross your legs like a man, funny”. Whenever I heard things like that (well into adulthood), it was the first time I noticed them. These were the social rules that slipped my neurodivergent radar.

And when these small things started accumulating, I came to a point where I said “It is enough! I am not going to shave my whole body and I am going cross my legs in a way I find comfortable”. This went hand in hand with me starting to notice and experience the more serious downsides of my female role, like experiencing sexual harassment and not being taken seriously in professional environments.

In a paradoxical twist of human nature, every gender identity is a performance, even when the identity marks the absence of gender. Simply because everything we do to present ourselves in society is a performance. Even if I present myself as non-binary, I am performing the identity we socially constructed as non-binary.

While some people may disagree, the idea of non-binary resides on the female/male dichotomy in the first place, and non-binary people often signal that they are “in-between” in how they dress and behave. My neurodivergent ass is nowhere on the map! We have to invent a new neurodivergent universe for me.

Simply existing in a society inevitably leads to arbitrary rules that just don’t make sense to many neurodivergent people. There is no label that can describe my utter lack of understanding of what any gender identity is supposed to mean.

The paradox I have to live with is having to perform being a part of society while also trying to be true to myself. So far, in my late 20s and now early 30s, this paradox has led me to go a bit contrary to the social norm, whatever that norm might be. Not too much — just enough to get me in the sweet spot of being socially accepted, while signaling some gender non-conformity.

Ultimately, I am coming back to my original self, the one who doesn’t care about petty social rules on what is fashionable or considered beautiful. I am beautiful regardless of what I wear and how I present myself.

Just to make it clear, I fully respect everyone to whom gender means something and, if you feel it describes a part of yourself, that is beautiful. Celebrate who you are!

Thank you for sticking with me to the very end. As a reward, here is one of my comics about ADHD and gender.

What are your experiences with gender like? Let me know in the comments!

Thank you for reading! If you liked this, click like and share with others.

Ana