Original Painting: Scroll; Stroll

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.

The physical process mirrors the digital experience: In this painting I employed automatic upward brush strokes with my thumb, mimicking the habitual swipe through Instagram feeds, across a vibrating horizontal band almost cutting across the canvas. These gestures form the foundational layers, then become overpainted—some layers depicting numbing and dissociation, others dripping with anxiety and anger, and many others numbed out with white. Organic hues in the background suggest that, despite our devotion t0 social media's siren song, nature's balm is always waiting.