Funny thing happened to me in between the initial manuscript and the finished novel: I had a stroke, and now I would never be able to finish the novel completely because time and dates in my brain do not register directly anymore. Both are worth reading, and why, in my mind, the museum is key. I have been making art since I was 4 years old. For survival, I just never shared before why.
They say many creative geniuses have high IQ’s and also suffer from different types of mental illness. The closest they got to diagnosing mine was “Racing Brain Disease which was later recategorized, and I lost track but racing brain disease seems to be a proper style of diagnosis. I was too ashamed of it to write about it, and then when I finally build up the courage to share it, my stroke destroyed my ability to finish it.
I hope you will read both. The manuscript and the novel. I think my social network deserves more than anyone to understand why I started making art at 4 and why It has always been a huge part of my life. By necessity to keep me from going insane.
Art didn’t just accompany my story; it treated it, quietly waiting every time I walked away and came back broken, giving my nervous system a rhythm long before anyone named “trauma,” giving me a language that didn’t require spelling anything right, catching panic and grief in abstraction and color when I couldn’t bear to say the words out loud.
What I called “my work” was really a life‑support system, a long, stubborn act of stitching myself back together one image at a time, until the boy tracing lines to calm a mind no one understood, the man turning heartbreak into photographs instead of relapse, the survivor building a whole universe because the real world had become too sharp to touch, all stood in the same light and made sense.
That is why there is a hope for a John Dowling Contemporary Art Museum: not as a monument to talent or taste, but as a roomful of proof that art therapy is not an abstract idea but a force that pulled one human being back from the edge and then asked,
gently, “Who else can we reach?” So that the very system that once nearly broke me becomes the engine that keeps this sanctuary open for others. Art saved my life, and the museum one day will exist to prove it can save others to. Maybe even yours!
Chapter One – The First Lines
My earliest memory is not a face or a place.
It is fear.
Not the loud kind, with shouting and slammed doors. This fear is quiet and total. It lives
in my chest, in the way my stomach pulls tight, in the sense that something in the world
is not as safe as it should be. I don’t have the word “anxiety” yet. I only have sensation.
I am four years old, behind our garage in the late afternoon heat. The air is thick with
the green smell of tomato plants and damp soil. Light is low and long. Shadows don’t
just fall; they stretch, bending across the ground like they’re trying to reach me. Sound
behaves strangely too. A car door shuts at the front of the house and echoes back here
as if the space between is bigger than it should be.
My father crouches beside me between the rows of plants. He is young—too young,
maybe, to understand how much power an image has inside a child’s mind. He is
teaching me something, or thinks he is. To him it’s just a moment in the garden. To me,
it will be the opening scene of my inner life.
He parts a cluster of leaves and I see them.
Worms. Fat. Green. Silent.
They cling to the stems like they don’t belong to this world. They barely move, which
somehow makes them worse. Being still, they feel like intention without motion, like
something waiting. My father plucks one free and holds it up between his fingers. Its
body curls, tightens, relaxes, hangs.
“Look,” he says.
I don’t want to look. But there it is, filling my vision.
This is what people don’t understand about a child’s imagination: there is no reliable
boundary between suggestion and reality. You don’t see what is. You see what it could
be. A worm is not just a worm. It’s a feeling, an idea, a threat your nervous system
paints in whatever colors it has available.
That night, the worms return. Not as garden creatures, but as something else entirely.
In my dreams they are enormous. Bodies the length of buses, thick as tree trunks, skin
pulsing with a sickly green light. They rise up out of the earth and split open slowly, like
wounds. From inside them come other things: legs, joints, eyes, spiders crawling out of
a living tunnel. Movement without meaning. Intensity without explanation………….
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