Doctor Who Taught Me the Beauty of Art
When I was younger, I fell in love with a man. He was charming, witty, clever, exciting, and brilliant. Oh, he was brilliant. He almost always could figure some clever way out of whatever impossible situation he would find himself in. This would happen often, for he had quite the knack of letting his curiosity get the better of him. Could never resist a good mystery. Which is strange, given how closely he keeps his past to his chest. I never knew his name because he always just called himself “The Doctor”. Just “The Doctor”. What I did know was that he was an alien; just like me. We traveled and went on adventures together. He changed fairly frequently as he experienced more of what this world had to offer, and that change terrified him. To change means to die and have another person running around with your name. For most of my life, I’ve dealt with this constant fear of the Future. The BBC’s “Doctor Who” helped show me as a child the importance of art, and how it can be used to make someone immortal. So, let’s talk about that. Together.
My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. Because of this, along with my ADHD, sustaining friendships was a huge struggle. When I was in 3rd grade, I had one friend named “Hayden,” and I remember standing in the playground with him hugging him, and telling him how much fun I had being his friend. We walked around in a circle while all of the other kids played and reminisced over all of the time we spent together. I gave Hayden a big hug and asked him not to forget about me after I was gone. The bell rang, signifying the end of recess, and I finished my last day at that school. My family packed up all of our stuff and moved hundreds of miles away.
To say I was hurting could never even begin to describe all of the emotions I was feeling. I felt meaningless. I felt unimportant. I felt worthless. I fell into a pit of despair and hopelessness, but I found this show called “Doctor Who,” which enthralled me. Doctor Who follows an alien, who ran away from his home planet to explore the universe. He has a spaceship that can travel anywhere in time and space. It’s supposed to blend in with its environment, but it’s old and mismanaged, so it’s stuck as a 1960s police telephone box, and he frequently picks up passengers from Earth to tag along as they travel through time and space, visiting beautiful, wonderous galaxies–but mostly planet Earth. There were so many times I tried to tell people about the show, but because it was produced by the BBC for a mostly British audience, most people I knew here in America in the late 2000’s-early 2010s had never heard of the show before. If they knew of it, they didn’t have any interest in talking about it with me.
In defense of my family, my fascination with this show grew like wildfire. For a while, it was the only thing I wanted to talk about. That’s not even an exaggeration. I didn’t talk to my family about anything other than Doctor Who for at least two years. I was obsessed. I can’t even tell you how many Halloweens as a kid I dressed up as “The Doctor.” This is what most psychologists refer to as a “hyperfixation.”
Royce Flippin, a freelance health and medical journalist in New York City, talked about hyperfixation in a post for ADDitude in August 2023, saying “Hyperfocus refers to an intense fixation on an interest or activity for an extended period of time. People who experience hyperfocus often become so engrossed they block out the world around them. Children and adults with ADHD often exhibit hyperfocus when working intently on things that interest them.”
For better or worse, ADHD disables one’s ability to regulate focus. Most people have a sliding scale for focusing on different tasks and can choose where the sliders go and how much focus is given to different things. With ADHD, it’s more like a series of on-off switches, and the person with ADHD can’t control which switch is being flipped. Some days, I may focus on writing a blog, while other days, I’m only thinking about starting a new video project. For two weeks, I may be stuck watching a new anime and be unable to do anything else until I get done with it. ADHD hyperfixations can be very useful. Adults can learn to train their hyperfixations, but kids/teens don’t have those skills yet, so while it can be really useful if you happen to be fixated on something productive, it can be very disabling if you don’t know how to cope when it’s not.
Making friendships was incredibly difficult, and having to start all over again and again became exhausting and demoralizing. It’s been very well documented that ADHD causes difficulty with social interactions and maintaining healthy relationships. Mark Bertin, a developmental pediatrician who specializes in child development with developmental disorders like ADHD, autism, and other learning disabilities, wrote a post for the ADD Resource Center, where he talked in great detail about this.
ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, acts to impair someone’s executive function. This means that our brains are naturally not built well for tasks involving regulating focus, impulse control, the ability to plan things out, volume control, staying on task, and more. Children and teens with ADHD, especially, deal with this struggle because they tend not to develop the skills required for making or maintaining connections with people.
“…Children with ADHD showed increased volume and variability in pitch when talking, along with particular patterns such as increased number of vocal pauses…Even without specific delays, because of distractibility and related ADHD symptoms, they are more likely to get off-topic when speaking. They also frequently struggle to find the right words and put thoughts together quickly and linearly in conversation.” – Mark Bertin, M.D.
The way people with ADHD process language is, in itself, completely different than people with more neurotypical brain chemistries. He says children with ADHD use a lot more word fillers. For example, “A response in the classroom may be along the lines of, “It’s a story abou … um… a story… um… um… it’s about … akidwhofliesakite… um.” This can cause a lot of frustration and misunderstandings, as other children may not have the same patience as adults do.
People with ADHD also have trouble managing distractions, noisy environments, or keeping track of conversational threads. They may fail to handle large clumps of information at a time. While a neurotypical eight-year-old may be able to handle remembering 12 words in a clip, a kid with ADHD may only hear 7 or 8. Over time, this adds up. There is no hearing problem. The information goes in, he says, but the executive function impairments mismanage it. People with ADHD also sometimes will interrupt the person they are talking to in an attempt to respond to an idea before it gets mismanaged, but it often can come across as rude.
In short, people with ADHD often struggle a lot with forming connections with others, especially in childhood. One thing that helped me was finding people who I had similar interests with, that way I didn’t have to worry about trying to remember every bit of information. I could just soak up some of what the person said and figure out the rest from context clues. It would sometimes take a while, especially with the constant moving around, to find someone who could connect with me and also had the patience required to deal with my ADHD. Because finding friends was so difficult, it hurt so much more when I had to move away.
When I was in 4th grade, my family once again told me I needed to pack up and say goodbye. I’d only been at the last school for about a year. The last week before the move, I was into an all too familiar forced to reminisce with my friends who would soon be nothing more than a memory. We ran around the playground playing tag, trying with all of our might to outrun the inescapable future chasing after us. Scared of leaving my friends and my home behind, and terrified of what the future had in store for me next, I watched as the 10th Doctor, played by David Tennent, also battled with the inevitability of the future. I watched as the Doctor shot his regeneration energy into his own hand to prevent change. I watched as that decision permanently destroyed his friend, Donna’s life. I watched as the 10th Doctor faced the consequences of his mistakes and realized he couldn’t run anymore without more people getting hurt. I felt the pain in his voice when he cried out in his final moments “I don’t want to go.”
Even the Doctor, try as he might, can’t outrun the future. It was time to say goodbye and start a new journey in a new place with new people, once again. By sheer coincidence, it was around that same time that Matt Smith took on the role of the newest incarnation of The Doctor. He was young, exciting, and witty–And he wore really cool bowties! Series 5 also took on a new showrunner, a brand-new storyline, and a whole host of new companions. Even the TARDIS had a makeover. I thought, “If the Doctor can endure so much change and keep smiling, maybe I can too.”
Two weeks later, I walked into the new school scared, but ready for whatever challenges I might face because that’s what The Doctor would do. A few weeks went by and I found out that a classmate of mine was also very interested in British culture. It turned out, he was more of a Doctor Who fan than I was. He had books and comics and invited me to come over and read them with him if I wanted. We bonded very quickly and soon took on the title of “best friends”. I’d go over to his house several times a week and we would write fan fiction about the Doctor’s next adventure, theorizing how the plot holes in the show could make sense within the established canon. We even dug holes in the backyard so that we could use our toy sonic screwdrivers and pretend to adventure into different time periods together. We faced Goblins, Weeping Angels, Vampires, Daleks, and so many other creatures together, defeating them with nothing but our superior intellect. Protecting planet Earth, from my own backyard, through the power of childish imagination, and friendship.
In the words of Sarah Jane Smith, “The Universe has to move forward. Pain and Loss, they define us as much as Happiness or Love. Whether it’s a world, or a relationship…Everything has its time. And everything ends.”
In 6th grade, we moved again. For those of you keeping track, that’s three moves in three years. This time, however, I was prepared. I got all my friends’ contact information ahead of time so we wouldn’t have to say goodbye. This time, we moved back to my hometown, which is about five hours away by drive. I was excited about the new possibilities ahead of me, and I was familiar with the area, so I already had a pretty firm understanding of where I was going and who would be there. When we got there, however, I found out that Hayden had moved away about a year after I did. “Oh well,” I thought, “Maybe I can reconnect with some of the other kids I used to talk to when I was younger.”
They had all forgotten me. Every single person I thought I’d been friends with, had forgotten I’d existed at all. “Did I not matter?” I wondered, “Did I not make enough of an impact?”
Although I’d been a student at this school just a few short years ago, my peers had no memory of me. They labeled me as the “new kid.” I didn’t know social norms and I didn’t have any friends. This made me an “easy target”, in the eyes of my peers, for bullying. For several weeks, for example, if I touched a desk, the students would scramble to try to sanitize it as if I had some sort of plague they didn’t want to “catch”. I, once again, found myself sitting alone. This wasn’t always a bad thing, though, as I found it fairly easy to escape into the fantastical worlds I envisioned in my mind. So many different planets and colorful galaxies out there somewhere in the universe. So many different lifeforms that probably exist in the vastness of the forever black sky. “There’s probably a creature out there, hundreds of millions of miles away,” I thought to myself, “who feels just as alien as I do right now”. There’s an episode in Doctor Who Series 5 centered around the life of Vincent Van Gogh, which made a permanent impact on me when I was a kid.
The story follows the Doctor and Amy Pond as they travel to Paris in 1890 to uncover a mysterious anachronism in time. They seek the help of Vincent Van Gogh, who is surprised and confused by their fascination with him. While he, along with every other townsperson speaks so flippantly about Vincent’s paintings, the Doctor and Amy celebrate the art, praising it for the beauty that it is. People scoff at the notion that Vincent Van Gogh is anything more than a crazy, mentally ill weirdo. The Doctor, even, seems conflicted, saying, “Everyone knows Vincent Van Gogh is a delicate man.”
There have been many attempts over the years by psychologists and historians to use the vast amounts of new information we have about mental health to uncover what type of mental illness Vincent Van Gogh went through in the mid-to-late 1800s. The current diagnosis proposed by the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders is that Van Gogh dealt with comorbidity, which is when a variety of illnesses bounce off and influence each other. He probably dealt with an anxiety disorder, insomnia, seizures, and borderline personality disorder, as well as “an organic psychosyndrome with psychotic and epileptic elements,” according to PubMed. In short, Van Gogh dealt with a lot of mental illnesses that, at the time, the medical field, as well as society at large, were completely uninformed of. There’s a scene in the Doctor Who episode that showcases this very well when Van Gogh realizes that once the anachronism is solved, The Doctor and Amy will leave.
Van Gogh departs to his room to prepare for the trip to the church, but instead spends hours lying in his bed crying. When the Doctor goes to check on him, he says, “When you leave–and everyone always leaves–I will be left here with an empty heart and no hope…I know how it will end, and it will not end well.” The Doctor tries to encourage him to get up and be spontaneous, but Vincent goes into a rage, telling him to leave. He is afraid people will leave, but it’s his intense Fear of Abandonment that pushes him to such an extreme state that he only knows how to cope with by pushing people away.
This is common for people with Borderline Personality Disorder. According to VeryWellMind, people with BPD can form very unhealthy attachment styles where they may cut off relationships first to avoid the pain of being abandoned by the other person. “These behaviors can backfire and trigger the very abandonment that the person with BPD is seeking to prevent.” This can become a cycle because every abandoned relationship enhances the false idea that “everyone always leaves”, which acts as a self-fulfilling cycle to cause abandonment, which further enhances the false idea that “everyone always leaves”. He was struggling with a disorder that he didn’t know he had and that the doctors treating him didn’t know existed. He was confused and frustrated and scared. Most of all, he was very misunderstood. He probably felt incredibly alone.
Vincent Van Gogh was considered by his family, his church, and the rest of society, to be crazy. The majority of the artwork he created were self-portraits because he was so lonely, the only face he saw frequently was his own. He was a madman. A fool. A man who never paid his bills. A man stuck in his own head. He often would paint over his own artwork because the cost of buying new canvases was more than his art was worth. The works of art he created were nothing short of extraordinary, but no one, not even Vincent, saw any value in himself or anything he created. He internalized the beliefs of those around him and often saw himself as useless and unimportant. Vincent painted over 700 paintings but hadn’t sold a single one.
He sent a letter to his brother after being admitted to a psych ward saying, “As a painter, I shall never amount to anything now. I am absolutely sure of it.”
The first Van Gogh painting to be purchased was “The Red Vineyard” which sold for 400 francs in 1890, two years after being painted–and just 4 months before Vincent’s death. Vincent’s brother, Theo, had known how much Vincent had struggled with mental illness and had hoped that the news of the sale would act as inspiration to keep moving forward. Just four months later, Theo would receive word that his brother was in critical condition and on death’s doorstep from self-inflicted wounds. Vincent Van Gogh spent his final night lying in his brother’s arms, reminiscing about old times, thinking back to their childhood when things were simpler. Theo passed away six months later.
After watching this episode of Doctor Who, I realized that I no longer had to look to distant galaxies to find people who felt like I did. There were probably dozens of people at my school who felt just as awkward and shy as I did. There were probably people online who felt like I did too. I figured that by just living life, I’d find people who I connected with, and I did. I met a person who quickly became my best friend. He was a nerd just like I was. We bonded over comic books and science fiction stories. During school, we would hang out together, and then I’d go home and play games online with my friends from my old school. For a while, everything was good. I finally had friends who cared about me, and I had a family who loved me. My grandparents even started coming over several times a week to have dinner with us. I felt loved and wanted. Then the truth was revealed to me. My parents were getting divorced.
For my entire life, it seemed like whenever life was beginning to head in a positive direction, everything broke around me. Whenever I began to get comfortable with where life was at, a bombshell would drop, and I would realize how wrong I was. I had to remind myself that just because things are bad sometimes doesn’t mean that pain is inevitable. I would remind myself that, though people might not see my beauty right now, that doesn’t mean that they won’t one day in the future. This showed me that my beauty and my value are not determined by other people. Every single person is beautiful and extraordinary in their own way. I would argue it’s your uniqueness that makes you beautiful, and your differences are what makes you so valuable. Every single person has a story to tell or a painting to create. That’s all art is: Someone thinking, seeing, hearing, or feeling something that they find beautiful, and creating an experience so that they can share that idea with the world.
Vincent Van Gogh died believing he was a failure. He died hated by almost everyone he’d ever known, never having the opportunity to see people realize the value of his artwork. His own mother threw away crates of Vincent’s art because, at the time, they were just oversized paperweights, collecting dust and taking up space. Only after Vincent’s passing did people begin to see how powerful and idiosyncratic his perspective on the world really was.
Today, Vincent Van Gogh is considered one of the greatest Post-Impressionist painters to have ever lived. Inspired by Japanese prints, as well as impressionists like Claude Monet, Vincent’s art utilizes bold shapes and vibrant colors to create some of the most beautiful paintings imaginable. His brushwork is expressive and imaginative, and his excessive use of newly-released pigments meant that the colors were less likely to fade as quickly over time. This would inspire artists for years to come to adopt this technique in their own artwork. The distorted forms he painted give the composition a surreal feeling, but the heavily laid-on paint strokes he is known for, work in tandem with his emphasis on texture and vibrant colors to make the piece come to life. The most beautiful part of his work is the symbolism built into every single piece. They tell a story; that pain and loss are just as much a part of the human experience as joy or love. His paintings revolutionized the medium and changed what it meant to be an artist.
At the end of the Doctor Who Episode, Vincent, The Doctor, and Amy are lying in a field. Vincent points out to the stars, and he says “Try to see what I see, Doctor… The sky is not dark and black and without character. The black is, in fact, deep black. And over there, lighter blue. And blowing through the blueness and the blackness the winds swirling through the air. And then shining, burning, bursting through the stars. Can you see how they roar their light? Everywhere we look–Complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.”
Art is wonderful because it allows us to capture those moments that bring us so much joy and share them with other people for hundreds of years to come. The Doctor showed me how grand and exciting the universe is. The Doctor showed me that sometimes you can be brave even when it’s hard to be and that it’s okay to be alien. The Doctor showed me that no matter how violent this world may be, words hold more power than any weapon could ever hope to possess, and that there is no tool more powerful than my mind and my imagination. The Doctor showed me the importance of thinking outside the (police telephone) box. Most importantly, The Doctor showed me the thrill of asking questions and learning new things. But it was Vincent Van Gogh who taught me that I am not alone on this planet. He showed me the joy of sharing what I’ve learned with other people. Vincent Van Gogh showed me how powerful even a single image can be. Vincent Van Gogh helped me realize that I have value outside of what others believe about me; that I am important. My experiences are valid. My opinions and my perspective matter. I am valuable. And you are too.
What is something that you find beautiful around the world?
And what medium of art can you use to share that beauty with others?
Sources:
Vincent van Gogh – Paintings, Quotes & Death (biography.com)
[Psychiatric case history of Vincent van Gogh] – PubMed (nih.gov)
What Is BPD Abandonment? (verywellmind.com)
The Effects of ADHD on Communication – ADD Resource Center (addrc.org)
ADHD Zoning Out: Beyond Focus – Causes and Treatment Insights (theminiadhdcoach.com)
Hyperfocus and the ADHD Brain: Intense Fixation with ADD (additudemag.com)
Vincent van Gogh | Biography, Art, & Facts | Britannica
Van Gogh Art Style – A Look at His Artistic Expressions (artincontext.org)
