Good morning people! Where are we? How are we? How did we get here? I’m in a crazy stretch which will take me from New York to Joshua Tree to San Francisco to Los Angeles on 4 consecutive nights. Riding the highest high from my opening in LA last week and also some low personal lows. 🎢 It really be like that, huh? 🌊
This morning, I’m sharing one of the paintings, “existential kink” and an old writing piece called, “My Kink.” Saucy for a Sunday, I know.
I wrote the following piece sometime in 2021 and performed it at Red Light Literature in 2022. I forgot about it until recently, when I painted this painting. It’s one of the smaller paintings in the show but the title got a lot of notice during the opening. It is titled after the book of the same name, “Existential Kink” by Carolyn Elliott, phD. It is a must read — I share more about it after the piece.
Hope you enjoy. Take care of yourselves this week. Pay close attention to your shadows. xo
My Kink
A few years back I read a book on Habit. The gist of it was, Habits are powerful and they are hard to break.
A couple years back I read a book on Psychedelics. It likened a trip to fresh snowfall on the mountain. Once it happens, any path is yours to choose. Prior to that, you’re likely going down the path of least resistance — hopefully, for your sake, that’s a good one. Likely not.
Lately my therapist has been calling my propensity to catastrophize, “my kink.” I thought kink was choking or a fucked up phrase in your ear, etc. — turns out it is. It’s all true. It is the disturbed emotional pleasure I seem to get from my inducing feelings of deeply distraught pain.
It goes like this: I lie in bed and play over and over in my mind how he will hurt me; I dive into my phone and seek out the past loves, or the suspicious follows, follow the tunnels from post to like to profile and am certain — am absolutely certain — he must be saying exactly what he says to me, to her. Who is she?
I do this, lying in bed, right before sleeping, so that every nerve in my body is on high-alert, over-sensitive, waiting, yearning to be touched by the one like by a name I don’t recognize of a photo that is suggestive enough to catapult me over the edge until I melt into a pool of delicious, delicious pain. I do this before bed so I cannot sleep; let’s stay up all night, shall we?
Don’t tempt me, I will.
As my fingers move I let them take off the last layer of self-certainty left on my body. I try to resist but it is half-hearted, my fingertip so slightly traces the screen to scroll and land on what will unleash a burst of all that I have waited to say, because I knew, I knew, and now I can know that everything he has told me was a lie — how intuitive I am, I get to say. How smart I am. How right I am. How justified I have been in holding back.
I knew I couldn’t trust you.
I knew and that is why I shut my heart and looked at you with suspicion even as you worked to change for me, even as you lay your heart out for me, even as you let all the ways you cared seep out of the edges and betray your own kink-ridden heart, even as you told me and tried and showed me and kept trying even as you, with all your flaws, said maybe perhaps you didn’t know — I knew. I knew. I knew and I knew, I knew it.
I am just waiting to say I knew it to you. I fantasize about saying it every night as I lie in bed, the tips of my fingers scrolling to find the exact spot where you will hurt me, moving down the path of least resistance.
It is hard to break.
On Existential Kink
At some point in the past few years, my therapist recommended, “Existential Kink” by Carolyn Elliot, which I find has become somewhat of a cult-classic amongst Millennial females. The recommendation came after she listened to me complain about (yet another) emotionally-unavailable partner. The main idea of the book is that the negative patterns we find ourselves in (unavailable partners, money problems, victimhood…) may unconsciously actually be pleasurable to us, i.e., kinky, in that they allow us not only to maintain a familiar behavior (pattern) but also to do so in an exciting way.
“Fear,” Elliot writes, “is just excitement without breath.” Fear is the other side of the coin to desire, she posits. Everything we fear, we desire in some way. Everything we desire, we fear. She spends quite a bit of time on love (of course) but also, very interestingly, on money.
On the former: many of us crave intimacy, or think we do, but also deeply fear it, consciously or unconsciously, because of how it exposes us. We say we want big love but are terrified of what a love that big might ask of us. We find ourselves constantly drawn to emotionally unavailable partners and think something is wrong with us, wonder why this is happening when we are “manifesting” love. But deep down, it is our fear that is making itself manifest. Perhaps our fear of love is so great, that we call in or find partners who cannot give it to us. So we don’t have to have it. So we have an out.
Elliot relies heavily on Jungian psychology (i.e. the psychology of the unconscious) which requires a lot of debatably blind belief on the users part, so if it feels like a stretch, that is legitimate. But it is also a legitimately interesting idea — that perhaps the “negative” things in our lives, especially the patterns that repeat, are actually us creating outs for ourselves, creating realities that we want to stay in, even if negative, because they are familiar. Creating safety in lack of exposition.
Change requires newness and newness requires difference. And difference is uncomfortable. Difference requires growth. And sometimes the change demanded can be so daunting that we decide to stay stuck in our own familiar reality, however painful.
Money is another juicy topic. The moment we have money, we are independent, we are free. But also — we are independent, with no need for help. With no one to come and save us. This was a juicy one for me. The book is worth reading, if only for the chapter on money.
Elliot’s approach to shadow work is quite novel and if it intrigues you at all, I highly recommend you read it. Some of these ideas were swirling while painting this most recent show, “did we save the daylight?” — thinking about my own proclivity to melancholy, to darkness, to the softer side of negative feelings. Finding myself in pain again. Wondering if I was calling it in…