mute

They asked me to turn it down. The emotion. The urgency. The constant broadcasting. So I painted myself muted. The Volume/Mute notification — lifted directly from a phone screen — sits over the lower half of the face like a mask, like a gag, like a polite social instruction. This is what masking ADHD looks like from the inside: a button pressed over your mouth, volume at zero, while inside everything is still screaming at full capacity. The lavender and deep blue palette makes the face ethereal, almost digital — a figure viewed through a screen rather than in person. Because that is how people with ADHD are so often encountered: filtered, mediated, reduced to what is comfortable for others to see. I painted this to unmute myself.