Original Painting: Shut In; Reach Out

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, Shut In; Reach Out, I aimed to draw a sharp contrast between the physicality of isolation and the invigorating liberation in doing the opposite—even if resulting in chaos and overwhelm. I drew from scientific articles, including the patterns of brain wave states, to inform brush strokes. Each work 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.