About me

I had struggled with self-image, depression, and anxiety, but my coping mechanisms had been work and constant activity. I overachieved because I felt at my core I wasn’t good enough. My looks were always the easiest thing to pick apart. A number on a scale is the easiest thing to wrap your mind around. It was always the number I was not. A magical number five pounds away, forever shifting.

I exercised as if my worth depended on it. I ran my first marathon when I was seventeen. It was a constant cycle of running or hugging the toilet after a binge. People will cheer you on too when you work out. Society does reward you for that effort, to some extent. I had backup accomplishments to go with my exercise. Art and then programming. I wanted to show the world how talented and smart I was. It was never enough and it was also usually someone else's dream. A fancy job. A painting commission. I couldn’t sit with myself for more than a minute.

I was in London living a life that looked incredible with a tech job and an aggressive Crossfit obsession. I had alcohol too, to calm down the noise if I ever stopped moving. I can’t remember then if I was happy or sad then. I can’t remember feeling anything really. I stopped painting about five years earlier to learn to code and start this new tech career. I had gotten tired of the commissions, having people tell me how to make art. I thought if I was going to sell out I’d sell out for a lot more–and I did. 

Covid took away my ability to stay in perpetual motion. I lived by myself at the time the world shut down. It was both the best and the worst thing for me. I finally had to face the demons I’d spent my whole life running from. I started with drinking and then with therapy. There was a brief period where I think I joined a life coach pyramid scheme. It was years of me having to do the hard inner work that I did not want to do. 

I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to feel things. Sad and angry felt too big. Paradoxically, they were so big because I wasn’t willing to feel them. While I did therapy and life coaching, I also started to paint. I painted myself crying at first. I showed my ugly face to the world and to myself. It was from a photo I had taken a year before mid meltdown. I painted it on top of a painting I was making for a guy who didn’t like me that much, too. I used to paint things to try to get people to like me. I had to do things for people because me alone was not enough.

There was an artist’s work I had seen a decade earlier who inspired me to do this. Her name was Jenny Saville and she painted giant grotesque nudes. I remember looking at them as a young art student thinking she was a different species. A level of bravery I did not know how to tap into. I’d go on to do dog portraits after graduation, but those images stuck with me. This crying painting was my first step into that world. She painted herself naked, I painted myself naked. After the dam was broken open, I was constantly pushing myself to see how far I could take it. How much of my true body could I show without the world exploding around me. 

In the process, I fell in love with my body as a home I live in. It wasn’t an object anymore. I put the scale away. The exercise started to fall into a healthy region. I let people not like me, including my own family members. All the therapists and coaches taught me how to feel those big emotions and eventually I learned how to feel them on my own. I used my tech money to run an ad in the London Underground with my naked painting. I remember someone asking what I thought of having people look at my naked body like that. I replied, all I could think when I looked at the ad was how talented I was. 

I had tried doing comedy before lockdown to get over my crippling stage fright. I didn’t pick it back up again until after I ran my tube advertisement. I started incorporating my paintings into my routine as punchlines and fell in love with that process. It felt like show and tell. My newer work takes on the patriarchy by cheekily painting men as dicks. I’m a full-fledged, card-carrying feminist now and I love using my art and comedy to get my point across. My life is richer in terms of the emotions I experience and playful in a way it’s never been before. I’m very excited for the future though I have no clue what it will look like. I’m following my passions and seeing where they will take me.