Original Painting: Catastrophize; Ice Dive

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, Catastrophize; Ice Dive, I captured another DBT skill I harness when choosing to arrest patterns of overthinking: an ice dive, or plunging my face into a bowl of ice water for as long as possible in order to shift my nervous system from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state. Raw, charged gestures form the foundational layers, then become overpainted, with textures borrowed from crumbled plastic and paper to form the numbing sheath an ice dive offers the nervous system.

Each work in the "Opposite Action" series 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.