I feel really sad.
A deep churning sadness.
A very familiar and crushing mix of shame, frustration and exhaustion.

It’s a mix of feelings I can’t remember ever not being present. Experience tells me these feelings won’t last with the intensity I’m feeling them right now, but neither will they ever fully go away.…

Having Tourettes means I’m sensitive to certain sounds. Some noises are uncomfortable for me to hear and make me overreact. There are others that I find really exciting, which make my tics go wild.

One such noise is the sound of people rolling their ‘r’s!…

A couple of years ago I got a great tip from another disabled artist: he told me that he often stays in Holiday Inns because they can often provide the accommodation for essential support workers free of charge.

This is amazing because before I knew this, every trip cost at least double what it would if I was non-disabled and didn’t require 24-hour support.…

Leftwing Idiot’s been away for over a month. We last saw him in New York in April where we’d been showing our film ‘Me, My Mouth and I’ at a film festival.

This morning Jen and I met him at Heathrow but he wasn’t heading home – instead together we were all heading for Bern in Switzerland.…

Almost two years ago something remarkable happened: Fat Sister had a baby, my beautiful, brilliant, hilarious niece, Bean.

I’ve worked with children for about twenty years but they’ve always been five years or older and I had limited experience with younger children, particularly babies.…

Almost a decade ago I had a conversation that changed my life – I was sitting in Leftwing Idiot’s kitchen talking about my intensifying tics and he described my Tourettes as a “language-generating machine” and told me that not doing something creative with my tics would be wasteful.…

I spend very little time on my own. To live an independent, happy, safe, creative life I need other people’s support and a team of personal assistants and support workers help me at work, at home and overnight.

When my tics started to limit what I could do I was quite slow to realise I needed more help, and struggled on for ages, leading an increasingly restricted life.…

I’ve loved drawing for as long as I can remember. In fact when I was learning to write and finding it difficult I used to imagine each letter as a drawing. When I left school I studied art and went on to university to study drawing.…

When I was a kid the soles of my feet were often covered in scratches. I wasn’t a big fan of wearing shoes and I didn’t have the most sensitive of soles either.

Nowadays my leg tics mean I’m not very good at standing up – if I try I immediately fall down.…

My grandad kept a diary for most of his life. In some ways it was very detailed and in others, very general. He noted the wildlife that had visited his garden, the miles the car had done, and who he’d met and chatted to that day.…