Illuminating the Spectrum: A Journey Through Art, Autism, and Healing with Kat Nelson

Hey there, grab your favorite mug and settle in. It's time for a cozy chat on Advancing with Amy, Mental Health Warrior. Today's episode is a heart to heart you won't want to miss. We're hanging out with the awe inspiring Kat Nelson. An artist who not only paints canvases, but also paints us a vivid picture of life with autism, depression, and anxiety.

From the real deal on love and marriage with a neurodivergent twist, to the raw truth behind her struggles and strides, Kat's openness is like a breath of fresh air. Prepare for laugh out loud moments, a few tender ones, and plenty of ah ha insights as we dive deep. So keep it right here, because you're right at home with us.

On Advancing with Amy Mental Health Warrior. Let's get conversation started.  This is Kat Nelson we're talking to today, and Kat, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?  Um, hi guys, I'm Kat Nelson. I am a  41 year old artist from Utah, married 16 years, and I actually deal with autism, major depressive disorder, and anxiety.

I have bipolar, anxiety, and ADHD. I love those neuro spices. Yes. Hey, we're creative. And I know you're creative, especially. So tell me about how you use your creativity.  So I do acrylic on canvas night  skyscapes,  so basically like landscapes, but focusing on nighttime ones that feature space and the night sky.

I really enjoy it. Growing up, I was really obsessed with NASA and space. My father is largely responsible for that one.

I found out in 2017 that I had a talent for painting it. I just sat down one day and was like, you know what? I have an idea. I'm going to try and paint it. And it was so beautiful and so overwhelming for me. When I saw it, I was like, you know what? Here's my calling. This is what I can do. Wow. That's amazing.

Tell me more about your dad and how he got you into that.  My father is just generally, he's, we also suspect on the spectrum,  but at his age, he doesn't see a point in being diagnosed, but he's always been big on history, but Also a huge space nerd. He was also a science fiction author. Not widely published, so people wouldn't know him.

But he ran a online publication in the late 90s called the Sci Fi Websign. And that was actually the first place I was published as a poet.   Do you still do  poetry?  On occasion, not as much anymore. I'm one of those autistics, where my special interest  changes depending on just factors.

I will super hyper focus on something for a few years and then all of a sudden  I lose interest and I hyper focus on something else. Totally get that. It makes making living hard sometimes. I was looking at your website and your artwork is gorgeous. Can you give us some idea on how to find your artwork? 

Yeah, you can find my artwork.  Online at seeking Nelson art dot com, both to view and to purchase I do have. A web store there where you can purchase originals, or you can purchase things like T shirts, mugs, hoodies, mouse pads with my art on them. So if you see a piece that you fall in love with, there's lots of options.

And if you want something different than what I have on my website, I actually use a very robust print on demand platform for that. So you can always. Drop me a message on the contact form and I can make it happen. I actually launched metal prints and the  listeners won't be able to see this, but I can show you the art.

Look, it just comes alive. So it's a pretty affordable for metal prints. Really? That's great. So tell me a little bit about your journey with mental health and neurodiversity. And how they've maybe played off each other. Oh boy. Boy, oh boy, do they.  So when I was  eight, around eight was my first, I can recall.

Instance of suicidal  ideation. Now that's really young,  but I wasn't telling, I tried to tell people that was what was going on, but it was very much brushed off  because people don't expect  depression to affect a child that young. Turns out I had some PTSD starting because I was horribly bullied in school  as many neurodivergents are.

 By the time I was, I was 15,  I was on.  Backing up a little bit  around age 9 or 10. I was on Ritalin because they believed I had ADHD  because at the time you got to understand this is the  late 80s, early 90s. We didn't quite understand how Asperger's syndrome affected girls.  And diagnoses of girls with Asperger's syndrome was just not a thing. 

So I was diagnosed ADHD instead. And the meds were awful, causing huge fights between my parents and between them and me. Which of course did not help my PTSD.  By the time I was 15, I was on Paxil.  Or depression, because my suicidal ideation was getting extremely bad. It wasn't until I was in my 20s, though, that I was actually diagnosed  ASD. 

Okay. And so I missed out on a lot of the support I could have had through school. So I graduated with a 2. 5 GPA. Not because I wasn't smart, but because I hated homework. At 17, I entered what they call in mental health, a period of decompensation.  I actually had to do my junior, like half of my junior year of high school on homeschool because my body broke down from all those, the stress of trying to  being expected to stay with this neurotypical. 

Level of functioning  and so that was difficult and it. Sent me back. Now, luckily I had actually held myself back a year in school too, because we had moved from Montana to Utah and I wasn't sure what the difference in curriculum was, so I actually was able to graduate early because I had almost a full extra years of year of high school credits, technically I graduated.

The first quarter of my senior year, which worked out good for me because my body was still trying to come back from that collapse. You needed that rest. Yeah. And I actually didn't fully recover from that collapse for almost five years. Pretty bad. And even then, even now, I deal with some of the health problems that were caused by that collapse,  including an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

I've heard of that. Yeah, it's a pretty common one, but my family is rife with autoimmune diseases. So, by the time I'm in my 20s, I finally, my mother finally is watching, like, Maury Povich one day,  no, Montel Williams,  and she sees him do a spot on autism and Asperger's.  And she's, wait a second, that's my daughter  revelation.

She, she's like, whoa,  that, the Diagnostic  criteria just fits . And it still took me, and I was like 22  at the time. 22, 23, it still took me almost three years to actually get a doctor to diagnose me because women with autism, especially adults have an impossible time getting a diagnosis.

  It's why with  a lot of mental health. Yeah, don't self diagnose.  Autism is a very. Special category for women, then often all we have is self diagnosis, correct?  And so that's the fact that  for the longest time I had self diagnosis and even now I have conflicting diagnoses from two different doctors. 

It's made it very difficult for me to do things like get on disability. I was recently actually denied disability on my final appeal because I wasn't actively seeing a therapist, which for me, I had been dropped. I had been dropped by my last. For therapists, because they had decided as autism specialists, they were not going to continue treating adults.

They were only going to be pediatric moving forward. And so, of course, I didn't want to have to go back into a new therapist and start over and  dig back into all that past trauma because you can't heal if you're constantly going over it.  Correct. But because I was taking that break, Social Security decided that it must not be as bad as I say it is, but no, I'm just sick and tired of the  flippin treadmill.

They do not understand and you're right, diagnoses for females is definitely getting better now than it was years ago. My daughter was  taken in for testing at 5 and told she had all the signs and symptoms, but because she could  keep eye contact, she didn't have autism.  But she was recently diagnosed at 12. 

Yeah.  The thing is that women mask autism much better than boys.  We're able to do things like keep eye contact for short periods of time. We are able to pass as neurotypical,  but it's no less exhausting. Saving Grace was theater in school I learned  functionally how people interact through theater  because A lot of theater training is understanding natural responses, natural body language, natural expression and vocal tone. 

So for me, I could start to understand in like junior high and high school,  and that's when I stopped being bullied because I started seeming normal. Yeah, that's what I said. My daughter found her tribe in theater.  Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We're a bun. Theater nerds are a bunch of nerds. . It just works. And the great thing is that a lot of neurodivergence find their way to theater in their teens.

Wonderful.  And because it helps with the physical need to move, it helps with the conflict in understanding others. This.  Working from a script  gives you that,  hey, wait a second, maybe, especially if you have a really good memory as a neurodivergent, you start to acquire script writing skills for your own brain, or you start creating your own social interaction scripts that you can fall back on. 

When in uncomfortable or small talk situations, there is a downside, you can start imagining interactions that haven't happened or old interactions, trying to play those through your head, and then the anxiety takes over and it's no fun.  But for a while there, actually, I had severe social anxiety  because of the bullying.

I had a hard time  meeting new people and being around large crowds. Eat myself alive when I got home. Oh yeah. My daughter's exhausted when she gets home from school.  So I get it. Tell me, what do you recommend for someone that is going through bullying like that at school?  These days, schools take that a lot more seriously than they used to.

When I was growing up, especially where I was growing up, I was told very much to suck it up, not to react to them because it just gave them fodder, which is true.  The more you react, the more they think they've won. However, asking a child not to react  is unfair. Yes. What you can do is you can get a hold of a teacher.

You can get a hold of your counselor at school or your vice principal and reach out, tell your parents, most parents now I, with experience with my own parents, not all parents are good about this, but most parents will reach out to the school and say, Hey, my child's being bullied.  What can we do about this?

But the other thing I can actually highly recommend to anyone who's experiencing bullying in school is  find a way to take a self defense class.,  good advice. Take karate. One of the things that you will learn there is not only how to hit somebody, but specifically how not to get hit. And that was a lifesaver for me, because I had some kids that were really rough.

And so I started taking karate, specifically a style from Okinawa.  Next time, somebody actually came at me. I actually managed to block the punch in close and grab their hornet's jacket, which if you know anything about the 90s, the hornets were the team to own a jacket from.  And so my bullet was so focused on the fact that I had a hold of their expensive 120  hornet's jacket.

They didn't even realize my face was on it. Oh wow.,  But  martial arts also gives you a confidence and security in knowing that when somebody comes at you,  you can get out of the way, or you can knock them out of the way now you don't want that to be your first,  you want to be able to just  get away and get to a teacher.

Yeah, don't they have a code of ethics? Yeah, a lot of times martial arts.  Defense 1st offense 2nd always defend it. Martial arts is for defense, not for attack.  That's great. And so I, I definitely recommend kids who are experiencing bullying, maybe look into self defense classes. If for no other reason than.

If you have a really good teacher, a good sensei, a good sifu, you will find that your confidence comes back and you feel like you can go to the teachers. You feel like you can get away. You feel like you can get around other kids who may not allow the bullying to continue.  Wow, Kat, such great advice, dealing with anxiety and other things as an adult, now that you've grown up.

What do you find is helpful? Do you journal?  What do you do? So for me, I don't do a lot of journaling, because personally with the combination of depression and anxiety, if I spend too much time In my thoughts, it's not a healthy place for me and journaling tends to have me go over and over the things that happened during the day, the things I could do different.

Now, that's not true of everybody. I know a lot of people who see a lot of success with journaling. 1 of my best friends, started journaling every day recently, and he's doing a really good job with it. And I'm really proud of him, and it's helping him with his anxiety. I just. Never have had much success with that. 

And if, that's a big one, guys. If something, somebody suggests you don't have success with, that's okay. Find something you do.  For me,  my anxiety thing is, I play video games. I don't play a lot of this first person shooters.  That's because I get motion sick. The communities can be really toxic.

 I don't need that. No. Oh, you play online? Yes, I do. Okay. You get some community out of that as well. Absolutely currently, I'm playing fairly heavily in Final Fantasy 14, which is an MMORPG. . But when the anxiety gets bad, I really turn to Sudoku other puzzle games because it engages a part of my brain.

Different from where the anxiety is happening, and I can focus on that logic, progressive, sequential,  pattern rather than the chaos that is anxiety. Yeah, I love that. That makes sense. And I have hyperphantasia. I have, basically, it means you have a hyperactive imagination. There's  A condition where you don't make mental images, this is the opposite of that.

Oh, so you're very visual. Exclusively. Yeah.  Okay. And so you're almost exclusively visual and image based in your head. Which, let me tell you, makes it very difficult to find the words sometimes.  You can see the picture, but you can't come up with the word.  Exactly, but Sudoku and other similar puzzle games, especially number games,  force me out of that realm because numbers are one of the areas where I don't depict pictures.

I actually, I see the number, I'll give the number three. I actually see the actual number three in my head. Three items or anything like that, unless I'm specifically talking about  there are, you know,  five thumbtacks on my board. I'll see five thumbtacks on my board  but when I'm playing Sudoku,  all I see is the number.

 And that shuts down a lot of the imaginative cycles.  That caused me to really break down with anxiety.  That's great advice too, because I'd never thought of activating a different part of your brain to get out of the place that's stressing and making you anxious.  It's actually a really common treatment for autism.

Change what you're focused on. Same with PTSD. If you can shift, because autism lives in the amygdala, basically. It, it lives in your sensory and animal brain. The problem a lot of people deal with. Is that they have to figure out how to engage their higher brain functions in order to get out of that place.

I just happened to find it worked really good with my anxiety and my depression, when my therapist had suggested it for my PTSD and my autism.  Okay, so I'm curious because you talked about earlier how you don't want to go through therapy to  the trauma based and go through all of that. Again and again, which I completely get the regular doctor.

You don't want to go through your health conditions over and over life coaching. Have you ever tried that? Because that focuses on the here and now. I've done a little life coaching.  The struggle with life coaching  for a lot of people with post traumatic stress disorder is that PTSD is a disease where you live in the past.

Whether you actively are living in the past, or it's just in your subconscious that you're constantly there, it's why we call attacks flashbacks, because it can put not only your current situation all of a sudden, for some people, they hallucinate and they literally are there, but for most people, they're just emotionally back there, having difficulty with, it's  To give an example, I sometimes have difficulty with cleaning the house and so  my sweet husband will point out to me that this is happening.

This is a problem. We need to solve this  and I will go back to some of the very damaging. Only with my parents, because I similarly could not keep my room clean, which is a pretty common issue, especially if you're not a virgin  object permanence is a real big problem for us. So we want everything where we can see it, but I'll just there's no reason for me to feel like I'm about to be hit or scream that or any of that.

But I do.  All of a sudden I break down and I'm there emotionally, even though logically, I know I'm 41 years old and it's my husband, not my dad. It's a difficult, it's a difficult challenge. Sometimes one of the things you want to do. is live in the present, but you may not as if you have post traumatic stress, you may not see a lot of results with life coaching until you've had some trauma therapy.

You have a handle on how to deal with and are comfortable, managing your flashbacks. Your brain's not going to want to live today. Your brain is going to continually want to go back to that traumatic event and how you felt. That  makes sense. So let me go delve into a little bit of you talking about being married for 16 years, which is amazing.

Congratulations. At this day and age, that's a rare thing. Can you tell me a little bit about how mental health and neurodiversity has affected your relationship?  Oh, absolutely.  I'll preface it with this.  The key to any relationship, neurodivergent or neurotypical, is communication and commitment. , therapist, friend of mine, not even my therapist.

It's just a friend who is a therapist made a good point to me that the number one reason why marriages succeed or fail is because the parties involved decide it will, that makes sense. Everything else  is icing on the cake. It all comes down to decisions. And my husband and I are both very stubborn.

And we're both neuro spicy. Oh, great. Not always. Understand each other. Yeah, but our neuro spicy does sometimes conflict. Don't get me wrong. It's, it is not all sunshine and roses. In fact, this past week has not exactly been  the most amazing week with us. We have had some real doozies of struggles this week.

But like my friend says in her marriage, she wakes up every day and says, no matter what, I'm committed to this today. Exactly. And it was an absolute mess. And I got into it too young and too stupid.  But I bet you learned a lot. Yes. But I also, the biggest thing I learned was that until I dealt with some of my trauma, I was just going to keep ending up in abusive relationships.

Yeah. I immediately after my divorce went into trauma therapy. Oh, good. And started working on that.  But with With Jason, we have been strong for those 16 years, we ran a business together for  the majority of that, whether it was one business or another,  because people who are neurodivergent are prone to be creative in business.

Yes. And be entrepreneurs, yeah. Yeah.  A lot of times it's because we can't find the accommodation, we need a workplace, and so we try and make our own accommodating workplace. But  it has taken a lot of work,  and we actually ended up having to go into therapy for communication. Our methods of communication are very different.

He's very verbal with his communication, and I communicate better written.  Because I have time to go over what I'm saying, making sure it's clear and it makes it so that  the rapid communication of a normal conversation  becomes a real challenge  for us  and  that's caused some fight. So for the years, and we also come from backgrounds where.

Listening and hearing people out was not a, there was no healthy dynamic in regards to that one. We were growing up. Okay. And so we both had to learn how to listen, not listen to respond, but actually listen and hear our partner. And since we did that, in our relationship has been significantly better.  I'm grateful every day for him because he really is just the sweetest guy.

He was able to do more as a couple, it's not like. We really get to do date nights because we're barely keeping our heads above water. Yeah. Art doesn't pay that great in this economy right now. I know my first.  There's vocal performance and when I got pregnant with my son, I decided I need to find a career that paid a little better, but or not really paid better because I chose social work, but it was steadier  so I could have a regular income.

Yeah, so I understand. Yeah. Going back to what you said about communication and the difference between verbal and written communication. I understand that completely. I like to write things out and my daughter herself who is very verbal requires a lot of processing time. So, if you ask her a question, it might take a good 3 to 5 minutes to get an answer from her.

And it might be a simple question, but she needs to process it.  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.  A lot of times, I know for me, I have with what's called the traffic jam.  In my head,  there are all of the words and all of the thoughts I have about that question you just asked me all want to come out at once. Oh, no.

And it renders me mute. Okay. And nonverbal for a few minutes until I can get the cards in some semblance of order, so that the sentence comes out as something cohesive and coherent. Because otherwise, I'm going to put the words out of order even, and you're going to go, what the heck did you just say?

Okay.  I love that example you gave because I'm going to ask my daughter if that's what's happening to her because I never even thought of that.  Yeah,  it's really a strange phenomenon, but for hyperlexic autistics, that tends to be a real big problem, is what's the right words, what's the right order for those words, and  hyperlexic autistics are  very aware  of  the meanings of words, so the difference between Hyperlexic may have completely different levels of severity.

Okay. It's what makes us very good writers. What are your favorite books out there on the topics we've been discussing?  One of my favorite books on trauma care is the body keeps the score by Bessel Vanderkolk., Dr. Vanderkolk actually was on the forefront of studying post traumatic stress disorder when the diagnosis was being established  in  the years immediately following Vietnam and Korea.

He has been at the forefront of studying the disorder for many years. What he talks about in that book is not just the mental flashbacks that everybody's aware of those mental and emotional flashbacks,  but also physical anchors within your body for those flashbacks, physical trauma anchors.  There is a phenomenon post traumatic stress disorder where the anniversary.

Of the trauma is very difficult,  but even people who don't quite understand.  Or who have been through a lot of therapy for their,  PTSD will still  struggle on the anniversary and he talks about the fact that there are certain physical flashbacks your body will do with increasing stress hormones, increasing certain neurotransmitter chemicals  to try and prepare for this event that's long over. 

And he walks you through methods to repair that, to fix that, to  unanchor all of that from your body. And it's an incredible read, and just the foreword of the book talks about how the PTSD diagnosis came into being. And you learn a lot in that book, and I love it. Does it talk about what to do about that?

Like how to get rid of the anchors ? Oh, yeah. The foreword's about the history.  First few chapters are about understanding those anchors, understanding what they look like. The rest of the book is, okay, here's how you un anchor this stuff, this is how you start to  repair this angle.

 Anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to share with our audience. The  big one is, guys, if you don't seem to fit in the world, it just means you haven't found your tribe.  If you can't find where you fit,  try something new. Doing new things is scary. Doing new things is hard. As an autistic, I buck new. 

I want my routine, but I can tell you 100 percent that if you feel like there is no place for you in this world,  it literally just means you haven't found it yet and it's time to look  of gamer as well as a video gamer, because. That's where I found I fit. That was where I met people that  I literally  had things in common with.

Everything just clicked.  Yeah. And before that I was a book nerd. I was 100 percent a book nerd,  video games and things like that really weren't on my radar, but  my ex husband actually was aft while we were together. I was what was called at the time, a Warcraft widow.

He was doing the game far more than he was spending any time with me. But when we divorced, one of the things I wanted to do was understand why that game had taken so much of his time. And I discovered it was something I enjoyed and something that I could. Do and it was something that was fun and there were communities built around it and through the game.

And so, for me,  I really started to connect because it was  a place where I belong. So,  just because  you're not a sports person as a guy, or you're not into makeup and hair as a girl doesn't necessarily mean.  You can't find where you fit and it doesn't necessarily mean you don't fit.  Just gotta, maybe you're a video game guy, maybe you're an art guy like my husband, in this internet age, it's very easy to find your people. You go on Facebook and look for groups associated with whatever you're interested in and you're going to find your people.  Great advice. So if it all feels overwhelming, if it feels lonely,  start looking some more now. , I love that.  All right. I've really enjoyed today. One more time before we go, would you remind us where to find your art?  Yeah, you can find my art at cknelsonart. com. Also, I am on pretty much every social media platform under The name Nova Lunosis, the artist C. K. Nelson, I recently rebranded this year, so it should be pretty easy to look me up.

 Just look for the moon with the flower growing across it.  As we wrap up another heartfelt episode of Advancing with Amy. Mental Health Warrior. I want to extend a huge thank you to our incredible guest, Kat Nelson, for opening up about her journey with neurodivergence, mental health, and the transformative power of art.

We've been truly inspired by her strength, creativity, and insight. If you felt moved by Kat's story and are interested in viewing her beautiful nightscapes, or perhaps owning a piece of her artistry, please visit her website at cknelsonart.  com.  While you're filling your walls with starry skies, don't forget to rate and share this podcast so that more warriors like you can join our tribe.

Your support means the world to us and helps us to keep bringing these important conversations to light. If you believe in the work we're doing and want to be a part of our mission to destigmatize mental health, consider being a patron. Your contribution on Patreon will go a long way in supporting our podcast.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for listening. And remember, you're not alone on this journey. Until next time, Warriors, keep advancing.