‘Art as Ritual: Is art reclaiming the sacred in secular culture?’, I’m investigating how art may be our way of continuing to practice ritual in a culture that doesn’t integrate it directly into our daily lives anymore. I’m interested in the subject because my life and way of being up until my 30s had been incredibly unstructured, my brain is often all over the place. More and more however, we’re seeing books (such as Atomic Habits) and podcasts coming out about the benefits of structure and frameworks in order to keep a healthy mind and body.

Structure is often seen as a force for evil, it has been used, in the past as a way to oppress, to dictate and to marginalise. A very understandable retaliation to this rigidness within society was to break free, worship authenticity and allow people to express themselves as they please. However doing completely away with social ritual has had its negative effects, making us focus more on the self, less on community and forcing us to feel like we need to find our most ‘Authentic self’ whatever that means… It’s led to over self analysis (something I’m very guilty of) and inability to step outside oneself. My paper is suggesting that having a personal art practice or engaging in art, can attend to the biological need of ritual built into us and therefore give us autonomy over what rituals we engage in thus protecting us from outside influences such as political agenda and religious doctrine (or simply not doom scrolling).

Ironically, my main issue when writing this paper, is it’s structure. Which now I’m writing that is beautifully poetic. This isn’t a new thing, my brain explodes on paper, it doesn’t drip out into neat lines. I find it hard to imagine the reader and have realised over the course of my life that I don’t understand WHY I would put the readers ability to understand something over the information I have to share (Something that is apparently very common in neurodivergent folk, and I being ADHD, with a family of mainly autistic people, feel this is possibly the cause).

My supervisor meeting was 30 minutes of critique, during it, it felt like being prodded with pins whilst smiling, after it, I realised I had a load of notes that could now turn my paper into something actually legible. I’ve spent most of this morning just writing a structure, and I mean a very very clear and precise structure, where every detail is described for each sentence. Each citation placement. If I don’t do this, I flitter. It feels the same as my urge to run as a child. Any opportunity I would run from whoever was looking after me and I didn’t understand why I shouldn’t, didn’t get why everyone kept telling me to stop. My mind is the same, it runs down the page until I reluctantly FORCE myself to sit inside a box.

I would say its an authority thing but I was four when this started. If there’s one thing that makes me believe in epigenetics it’s this.

EDIT: I’ve come back to this post after reading it a few times. But it’s linking back to something else I’ve written about previously, referring to my way of learning how to drive. That for some reason I didn’t do it correctly until it’s time for the test. This is similar to the idea that people with ADHD function better under pressure or with deadline. But it feels like something different, like I’m getting to the crux of how I view the world slightly differently and how thats effected me over time. I have to throw words in the air and then let them be free for a while before I pull them into structure the same as needing to be relaxed and focused on one thing rather than pulling my driving into a perfect sequence everytime. The first instance of this I remember was when I scribbled on bits of paper as a kid and turned them into coloured art works by colouring the lines in neatly. My reception teacher told off the class because she just saw the scribbles. Chaos then structure. I used to get mad when people didn’t trust the chaos. I still sometimes do, just not outwardly.

I feel like everything has to be thrown upwards and can be left to float around in the air until the very last moment when gravity hits. It’s not because I CAN’T do it well, its because it doesn’t make sense to do it any other way to me. Whether I’ll ever get to the why, I don’t know. And if I were to listen to my own research paper the WHY doesn’t really matter. Am I hiding it away like a squirrel? Do I want to be accepted even when messy? Am I hating expectations? Am I rebelling against perfectionism for as long as possible? It’s interesting to have finally put into words the ‘strangeness’ I have felt about how my brain works. Like I expect everyone to trust that even though everything’s a mess, I still know what I’m doing.