This poster offers a reflexive methodological account of the River of Life (RoL) as an arts-based, participant-led approach for researching ageing in culturally and politically constrained contexts. Drawing on an interview study with older trans women in Malaysia (n=29), I exemplify how RoL can be treated not merely as a visual prompt but also as an analytic object in its own right when read polytextually, i.e., an analysis drawn across drawing, interview talk, and fieldnotes. A six-stage River of Life Polytextual Thematic Analysis (RoL-PTA) workflow is outlined, grounded in reflexive thematic analysis, and introduces a polytemporal reading framework that attends to event/biographical time, narrative time, and historical/cohort time as they co-exist on a single page. The poster also examines how the method is shaped by the relational field of research: high power-distance interactional norms, the affective politics of drawing, the researcher’s insider–outsider positionality, and the ethical demands of working with identifiable visual artefacts. Finally, it provides practical guidance on adapting RoL-PTA to global ageing research, particularly for marginalised groups whose life courses are shaped by stigma, legal precarity, and culturally specific relationships to time, kinship, and place. This poster was awarded the 2026 British Society of Gerontology Stirling Prize.