Guest posts from the amazing creatives, supported by our Young Artist Development Programme (YADP), continue, and this week’s spotlight is on Beth Greenwood. Over to you Beth.

Most often, the type of art that inspires me isn’t displayed in galleries or in a physical place.…

It’s the Conservative Party conference this week and it’s been all over the news.

This afternoon Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a speech about ‘levelling up’. I’m not sure what this means for the country and I’m fairly sure Boris doesn’t either, but I do know what it means for my tics:

“Boris Johnson levelling up with stilts made of shit.”…

A little over a year ago the world changed overnight and for many disabled people this meant that the barriers we experience changed too.

For some, this meant new challenges and frustrations, while for others the switch to more online activities opened up new possibilities.…

A couple of years ago I was in Portland, Oregon performing at a festival. We were over there for a couple of weeks and had an incredible time. This was partly because of the place and the people, but also because cannabis is legal in Oregon.…

Last year I wrote about an approach to help manage challenging situations that I’d been introduced to – it had as its acronym: STOP. I created a drawing to go with it to help me and my support team remember it.…

While I was working on a post last night a stream of tics burst into life, so I decided to record them on my phone in case they were interesting. Here’s what emerged:

“I wish I was a duck-face, I wish I was a mule, I wish I was a Haribo bag of undecided yule.…

We’re a year into a global pandemic and it’s disrupted most people’s lives significantly. It’s been a period of sustained uncertainty, with the way our society works repeatedly and abruptly changing.

While this will have been tricky for most people there are some specific new challenges for people with tics, as guest blogger Serena touched on at the end of last year.…

This year it will be a decade since I started experiencing daily tic attacks – these are episodes of intense tics that look seizure-like and need similar management.

During these episodes I nearly always lose communicative speech. This means I can’t choose the words I say, but I still have vocal tics, which range from simple repetitive noises to complicated sentences.…

So we’re in 2021 and the New Year is often a time to reflect on the changes we’re going to make in the year ahead. Eleven years ago it was the New Year that prompted me to start writing this blog, and it will be ten years ago this year that I started being open and honest about the episodes of intense tics I was experiencing.…

For me, Tourettes means I have strong oppositional impulses – the automatic urge to do exactly the opposite of what I want to do. This is why I shout ‘I’m over here’ during games of hide and seek,’ why I shout ‘bomb’ in airports, and why 400 Australians in a theatre knew Fat Sister was pregnant before our mum did.…