In It

Where to start? Should I have an intro? Should I do that artsy thing where you drop the reader during an existential crisis? How do you introduce yourself in a middle of a panic attack? 

How do you introduce a piece of work about panic, anxiety and melancholy to a viewer without alienating the viewer and/or the artist, which would be myself? 

The entire feeling of anxiety is isolation. At least with my mode of working, thinking and moving in the world I slowly work through my personal anxieties. They are rarely bursts. If i do suddenly meltdown, there is something big underlying the meltdown and the big thing rarely has to do with what is really the thing scratching through my organs. 

Where to start?

Do I talk about how death has permeated throughout my entire life?

Or that I grew up having nightmares about my parents dying?

Or do I talk about how I am coming to terms with the precariousness of life?

Most of the time, my panic attacks involve slow moving tunnel visions.

So here I am, in Costco. A warehouse. Full of people. All are focused on themselves. I am starting to move inward. I move inward to detach. To disassociate. To cope with the fact that we are all in a pandemic and have no idea what the hell we are even doing. Everyone is running around as if it is business as usual. Which who knows, maybe everyone else is also having a panic attack and are also disassociating. That would make sense since everyone around me is acting like it is fine, but in a way which something is not quite right. That something is unnameable. The thing in which we fear is unnameable while being aware of its existence. It surely exists. But where? It is invisible, we can’t see it. It isn’t the black bile that poisons us. It is not stark in a visual sense. It is hovering, however. Hovering and buzzing. Much like these fluorescent lights above us in the Costco. 

Uncanny? 

Dead-eyed?

Tunnel vision?

All i remember were the bright fluorescent lights and a guy yelling at me to move to a line that was to full in order for him to move past me. I was off planet earth, so i could not respond. 

I am hovering. I am buzzing. I leave.