A full description of this piece can be found on my Substack. https://substack.com/home/post/p-164579811
This is my Anxiety. She lives in me with such tenacity that she feels like my normal skin. The relentless vibration in my body, as I have offered to doctors and therapists, is like being plugged into a light socket. Singular atoms caught in an endless machine that consumes and spits out the fibers of my being. The world cheers my tremendous patience and calm, but that is not what I feel like on the inside. The more dangerous the world appears, the more I feel her there, waiting for my “life” to be taken from me.

I have had bouts of anxiety about death (not a fear of death - or is it a fear of death?), but that I no longer exist and all that I am is the rubbish of my life. That I am waiting for the door to be broken open and my body turned into threads of fiberglass, painful and fragile. That I will lose autonomy, or lose myself again to the expectations, manipulation, or control of others. That I will no longer be able to participate in the deliciousness of existence without dissolving.

Anxiety stares over her shoulder, the dark tangle of her internal piping obscured, and waves of joy pushed to the bottom. She is vigilant of whose hands are coming, whose words are waiting to be the next stone, if she will be buried beneath the spinning plates, if she is able to come up from the depths for air. She lives in me.

I see her. In some deeply comforting way, I appreciate that she now has a face, that she found her voice on a canvas, that I have allowed her some space outside of me. I feel deep empathy for her, her voice an effort to protect me and keep an eye on all the turnings in my world. Despite my mixed feelings about this piece, I also feel in awe of how my work presents its character and message out of nothing. Out of red paint I felt the need to push around, out of lines and order and layers of black paint.