Welcome to Pesky Plover Studio

Hello!

Thanks for stopping by at the Pesky Plover Studio. I’m so happy you’re here.

Firstly, make yourself comfortable – grab a hot drink, a blanket, a pen to click, and maybe even a little sweet treat. Because why not? It’s a Sunday, it’s a cosy (and surprisingly sunny) winter’s day, and when you’re visiting here, you have my full permission to indulge in life’s small pleasures. Personally, I’ve gone for a peppermint tea that’s already gone cold once, and a chocolate-coated date ball that’s somehow starting to melt. Delightful.

Okay, are you settled? Great. Let’s get to know each other.

So who am I, anyway?

Well, you’ve found my website, so that leads me to believe you either have a very good idea of who I am and are probably my immediate family (hey, Mum!), or you at least know what I do, even if you don’t know me.

Or maybe you just like plovers and stumbled across me in your travels – no judgement here.

But there’s more to me than what I do, I thought I’d share a little bit of myself with you here today. After all, if you’re going to trust someone with something as important as that story that’s been living rent-free in your head for the last gazillion years, you deserve to see a bit of what’s been nesting in mine, too.

Horrid image, sorry. Moving on…

Where it all began

I’m Kat, and I’m a very-nearly-but-not-quite-thirty-year-old illustrator, author and editor from Tassie (that little triangle island that always gets left off the bottom of the map of Australia).

As a pretty anxious kid with an overactive imagination, I often found the worlds other people created – be that in books or movies or whatever else – weren’t quite on the same wavelength as the ones in my head, and so writing and drawing became a way for me to escape into somewhere better suited for me and my brain.

I was super lucky in primary school to have a host of amazing teachers who valued creative living and who really helped shape the kind of storyteller I became as an adult. I had a teacher in upper primary who had us focus for a whole term on Antarctica and marine biology. It's not lost on me that my debut book over a dozen years later was the story of an endangered Tasmanian fish (Diary of a Red Handfish, if you want to check it out 👀).

If you asked me what I wanted to be at any point under the age of 18, I would definitively tell you I was going to be a veterinarian. If you prodded, I’d say if that didn’t work out, or maybe when I was retired, then I would write and illustrate books. In primary school everyone nodded along encouragingly, but in high school and college I found people started raising eyebrows at me on both of those fronts, reminding me I needed another ‘backup plan’, and I started to stop believing in myself for the first time.

A bit of a detour

I flunked out of biology in year 12 and pretty quickly gave up on the vet dreams. I was still writing, but as often happens after years of institutionalised learning, I found my creative cup was getting pretty empty. By my early twenties I had fallen into the world of full-time work and money-making and had little time to dedicate to something as frivolous as creating. I still loved it, don’t get me wrong, and every now and then I would get drawn back in by a great book or a creative guru (any other LG fans here?), but I was quickly reminded that those things don’t make a living, and if I wanted to actually enjoy my life I’d better get on board with ‘working to live’, which sounds better than ‘living to work’ but for me was really just another way of the world saying you have to do the thing because everyone does the thing, so put your big girls pants on and get to it.

I pushed through and found myself amidst a pretty successful corporate career. I climbed ladders, found small ways to bring creativity to my roles, and shaved off little pieces of my soul every day. I was lucky to work with really good people, and happy enough with the satisfaction from being good at my job, but some of that started to change when I became a mum for the first time.

Becoming a mum changed everything

I’m not a mummy blogger so I won’t talk your ear off too much about that part of my life, but it’s a pretty big part of how I ended up here.

In May 2023 I gave birth to my son and immediately knew that everything else I’d wanted to be in life was the wrong answer, and what I actually was meant to do was be his mum. He felt like the missing piece of me that I hadn’t even known to be gone, and I loved every second of my maternity leave.

Except for when I didn’t. Because it was hard. Really hard. And although it was everything I’d ever wanted, it was also the most demanding job I’d ever taken on.

My maternity leave ended just shy of his first birthday, and I trudged back to work, fuelled by the comments of ‘you need the time away’, ‘you’ll get back into the swing of it’ and ‘everyone feels like this’.

It took me about three or four months to realise that maybe not everyone felt like this. The overwhelm I’d had during my maternity leave was still there, but now it was worse because it was coupled with an incredible guilt for leaving my child. Overwhelm turned into angst and more anxiety than I’d ever experienced. I felt like something in me had irrevocably changed and I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was like my mask had fallen away.

Oh.

Unmasking ADHD

You see, it took me the best part of three decades to confirm that actually, it really isn’t like this for everyone. All those years at school of being a ‘competent learner but talks too much’ or ‘really enthusiastic but struggles with initiative’ started to make sense.

I spoke to my healthcare team about what my brain was feeling like and they very kindly nudged me headfirst into an ADHD assessment. When we got to the end and the psychiatrist started talking about medication options and I butted in to ask, ‘So, I might have ADHD then?’, he looked genuinely gobsmacked and responded with something along the lines of, ‘I thought that was obvious.’

Medication has been a huge part of my ADHD management, and I’m super thankful to be in a place both geographically and financially to be able to access it. It helped so many of my symptoms. But I was still really struggling with my day job.

The more I started letting go of the mask and leaning into my ADHD identity, the more I felt like an outsider. Asking for accommodations felt like the wrong thing to do, and it caused a massive internal battle between the parts of me that really struggle, and the parts of me that excel. I felt like a liar or a cheat. Like maybe people thought I’d snuck my way in, pretended to be good at something and then let them down when I got comfortable.

Burnout and the leap

A few months ago I started to feel like I was getting to the point of no return. The burnout was exhausting and never-ending. I was trying so hard to pour myself into my family, my creativity and my job, and eventually I think the cup that had so often threatened to dry up, did just that.

What could have been a terrible blow ended up actually being the nudge I’d needed all this time. Thanks to an alignment of the stars, now felt like the perfect time to say, ‘Why not?’

And so I did.

And now I’m here. And so are you.

I am so genuinely thankful if you’ve made it this far because you being here really is the greatest gift of encouragement I could ask for. My life as a very-nearly-but-not-quite–thirty-year-old (actually it’s in two weeks, holy crap) looked a whole lot different not so very long ago.

I think if you’d shown me this version of me back in January I would have evaporated into thin air. But I have to believe that everything has brought me here right to this very moment for a reason: to hear your stories.

Because if I have learned anything at all, it’s that you should never put your story to the side. Not for love or money, or even for gorgeous little baby boys who are now chaos-incarnate toddlers. Because they need our stories more than anyone.

Your turn

Alrighty, I’m done now. Have you finished your cuppa? You know I haven’t. Into the microwave she goes, not quite sure why I bother, really.

Thanks for staying a while with me. I hope you feel now that this is a safe space, for both you and me. And I hope you’ll tell me your stories, whether it’s a kid’s book, a manuscript, a memoir, or even a really weird dream you can’t stop thinking about. It would be my absolute honour to play a part in them.

Stay pesky,
Kat