I've never been particularly good at staying in my box.
Which is probably why I've spent so much of my life questioning who put us in them in the first place.
I'm Jools Riddell. I'm an author, speaker and artist, although none of those labels tells the whole story.
I've written a book about rewriting your own life story, created paintings celebrating people who refuse to behave themselves, and now I give talks about the strange things we come to believe about our creativity, our abilities and who we're allowed to become.
Different ways of asking essentially the same question:
Who decided the rules — and why are we still following them?
A life that hasn't followed the instructions.
I've never had a particularly conventional relationship with life.
I've followed different interests, explored different paths, reinvented myself more than once and occasionally wondered whether everybody else was given an instruction manual that I somehow missed.
Discovering that I'm both autistic and ADHD helped explain quite a lot. Not everything, mind you. Some of my decisions are entirely my own doing.
But it also made me think more deeply about the expectations we absorb, the ways we learn to fit in and what happens when we spend years trying to be somebody we're not.
Along the way, I've written a book, created art, built businesses and learned that starting again doesn't necessarily mean you've failed. Sometimes it means you've discovered something worth pursuing.
These days, I'm less interested in teaching people how to fit into the world and much more interested in encouraging them to question why they think they have to.
And if we can have a laugh while we're doing it, all the better.