Original Painting: Bed Rot; Make

Throughout 2025, my social media algorithm brought me recurring themes: ambient anxiety, emotional burnout, existential dread, hopelessness, and collective rage. To capture this year’s frenetic emotional landscape and my attempts to cope beyond doom scrolling, I turned to the distress-tolerance skills from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). I relayed my personal use of them conceptually through six abstract pieces in a body of work titled "Opposite Action"—a DBT skill that involves acting contrary to an emotion’s urge when that emotion doesn’t fit the facts or when following it would be harmful. When anxiety tells us to avoid, we approach. When anger demands we lash out, we intentionally do something to soften. When shame drags us down to hide, we show ourselves, even if begrudgingly.

In this piece, Bed Rot; Make, I was drawn to explore how "rotting" could be reframed as steeping in fecundity and then like an amateur cartographer of internal terrain charted paths out of it. Use of alcohol ink collage building upward explored how progression through physical and material space can create the conditions for a different emotional state. Like each work in "Opposite Action," this represents both the complexity of our inner experience and the deliberate practice of choosing a response that moves us toward what we value rather than what we fear.

Acrylic and alcohol ink collage on canvas