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Buchanan’s digital art and blog explores what it has been like to feel different while growing up, to leave and then return to rural Herefordshire.

Growing up, I was always on the outskirts of things. When you live in a place like this, you don't have a choice in the people you meet or grow up with, and I think I got unlucky. The few people I knew were nothing like me, weren't interested in things I was interested in, and they were the only people I knew, so I found solace in other places. Books, artwork, video games, anything I could do alone. I'm sure I did myself no favours with that choice, but it felt like the only choice I had.

They were also ways to escape. The countryside is beautiful, peaceful, quiet and stifling. Everyone here knows everyone and even if you don't know them, they know you somehow. If you can't drive, you're trapped, unless you enjoy walking two hours through fields risking the ire of farmers in order to find the nearest shop. At school, you see people you've known since you were in nappies grow up and find themselves and broaden their horizons in every direction except yours, if you're unlucky.

It also probably didn't help that mentally I've not always been at 100%. Whenever doctors ask me how long I've felt this way, I can always trace it back to primary school, and they always seem to have a solemn look on their face and inevitably say "that's a long time to go without any help". I've heard from old secondary classmates that people didn't like me because I was always in a foul mood, when internally I was in the closet, trapped in my own head (daydreaming about being anywhere else or lengthy ideations about other more extreme ways out), and otherwise just utterly miserable all the time. I don't think I can describe the depth of it without making you the reader uncomfortable, or maybe making you think I'm using the state of my truly horrible mental health as an excuse to be unlikeable.

I guess my main point is that if you aren't like everyone else here, one way or another, you're doomed. Be it fashion, mood, weight, occupation, hobby, sexuality, personality, intelligence, whatever. I think people can tolerate maybe 2 or 3 of those being different before you start being nudged towards the outside. If you drifted of your own accord you were branded a loner.

I do understand though. I wasn't just a bit quirky or peculiar. I think I was weird in the scary, concerning way. A foul-faced solitary goth that didn't talk much, had weekly meetings with the school therapist and monthly ones with doctors from CAMHS, was overall prickly and dour and– well– unlikeable? I don't blame people for not falling over themselves to be friendly. Humanity is hardwired via evolutionary selection to sort itself out into little clans, and is likewise hardwired to be suspicious of those not inside that clan. It sucks, but I don't blame them. If anything I'm bitter that my shitty mental health got in the way of me making any kind of social progress beyond existing scarily in my classmate's periphery.

My whole life, my only friends have been people who were either rarely just as strange as I was or more commonly people who didn't have any other choice. I can count my friends, past or present, on one hand. Maybe if I had lived anywhere else, somewhere with more people and somewhere I could walk to see people, I could have double that amount.

There's a videogame released in the year 2017, when I was at Wigmore secondary school (still on the outside, still weird, with the addition of now being one of the only people I knew who were out of the closet), called Night In The Woods. It's about a girl called Mae returning home to a tiny town full of people she knew from school, after dropping out of university halfway across the country because of a mental breakdown. She comes home to find old bullies, friends and acquaintances and family who are trying hard not to be disappointed in her for wasting her opportunity, as well as a dark secret and a string of disappearances they have to solve. One song in the game, which sometimes has you play guitar along with Mae's band, was called Die Anywhere Else– a song about living and growing up in little towns and the desire to run, to get out, to die "anywhere, just not here."

Back in 2017 when this game was released, I thought the concept was interesting, and the style of the game charming and esoteric, but I didn't understand. I thought, no matter how bad my issues got, I would never be like Mae. I would never come back to this little place full of people whom I was nothing like, where I had to tell family a week in advance if I ever wanted to go anywhere. I truly thought the moment I left for university would be forever. I was going to leave and be successful, be part of the civilised world who can just decide they want to do something and walk just half a kilometer to do it, and finally be around people who could truly know me and love me all the same even if I was strange.

I understand now. Just like Mae, I'm back. Back seeing the people I grew up around, friends and enemies alike, with family who are trying not to be disappointed in me. I only wish this place had some dark occult secret too instead of endless fields so at least maybe I could do more than be the dropout weirdo. I say this, but even if it still hasn't sunk in yet, I'm just grateful to be alive and at least 90% intact.

For the first time in years, I feel something more akin to hope than desperation. It's buried deep down somewhere in the middle of feeling deep anxiety about people I used to know walking past me and going on to gossip as well as shame that I failed so soon because of something so inconsequential as my own brain. I get to be closer to the people that I got lucky enough to meet who are just as strange as I am, and maybe my old classmates are faring much better than I did away at uni. I hope they are. I'd hate for anyone else to feel the way I did.