Against the Grain ©️

We Don't Fit In. And That's Not the Problem.

In fact — that is your strength.

If you're here, I'm going to take a guess about you.

You've never quite fitted the shape that the world seemed to expect of you. You've had ideas that felt too big or too strange or too something to say out loud. You've wondered whether what you make or think or imagine actually counts as anything real.

It does. I promise you it does.

I'm Karen. A former hairdresser and hair artist based in Nuneaton. I spent years working behind the chair — real clients, real hair, real pressure to deliver something that worked for the person sitting in front of me. But alongside that there was always the other work. The team. The competitions. The shoots. The pieces that existed purely because we wanted to see what was possible.

Our work appeared in national and international hair magazines. We stood in the thick of it at Salon International. We competed. We were credited. For a small salon in the Midlands that meant everything — because nobody handed it to us. We earned it by making things that were worth looking at.

I'm 53 now and long retired from the salon floor. But I still can't help experimenting.

These days I work with human hair wigs when I can and I see what happens. Sometimes there's a plan. Sometimes there isn't. That's part of the point. Sometimes there was little option but to model my own designs — wearing the work, photographing it, doing the best I could with what I had available. The editorial vision I carried in my head — the polished, professional images I could see clearly but couldn't quite reach — stayed frustratingly just out of range.

Then AI arrived. And something shifted completely.

Suddenly I could place my designs onto a model. I could see the editorial I had always envisaged — actually rendered, actually real. For someone who had quietly wondered whether their time had passed, that felt like an extraordinary leap. Like the future had arrived and brought my ideas with it.

I'm not telling you this to talk about technology. I'm telling you this because it's proof of something I believe completely — creativity doesn't have an expiry date. The tools available to us keep changing. The only thing that matters is that you keep trying things out.

Hair has been my special interest my entire life. Not a hobby. Not just a career. A special interest — the thing my mind returns to no matter what else is happening. I recently came across the concept of monotropism — the idea that some minds work in deep focused tunnels rather than spreading attention across many things at once. When I read about it something clicked. Those tunnels that had always made me feel slightly out of step with everyone else suddenly made sense. Not as a flaw. As just the way I'm wired.

You might be wired differently too. And that's not something to fix.

Here's what I actually believe — we are all creative. Every single one of us. It isn't a talent reserved for artists or a skill you either have or you don't. It's the act of having an idea and trying it out. That's it. The medium doesn't matter. Hair, paint, fabric, food, a garden, a conversation, problem solving, a room you rearrange at midnight because your brain won't stop. If you're trying something and seeing what happens — that's creativity. Full stop.

What gets in the way isn't lack of talent. It's lack of permission. We talk ourselves out of trying because we don't think we're qualified, or we don't have the right resources, or someone once told us we weren't creative and we believed them.

Don't believe them.

Use what you have. Try the thing. See what happens. The trying is where the interesting stuff lives — not in the polished finished result but in the moment you thought what if and then actually found out.

Our quirks and our obsessions and our strange particular ways of seeing the world — those aren't the problem. They're the whole point.

We're all figuring it out. We always will be. And that's not failure — that's just being alive.

Let's go against the grain together.

Go and think for yourself. The world has enough copies.

— Karen