Year 2021, I can't manage my fears anymore, they're invading all my space: family, work, private life. I want to paint a large picture to hang on the wall of my living room. I paint it black. A big rectangle measuring 80 cm by 100 cm. It's the largest format I've found near my home.
I'm on medical leave for generalized anxiety disorder. I'm trying antidepressants. On this black background, I want a mandala, because I’ve worked with mandalas for several years in child psychiatry, as part of my professional activities. I glue pieces of the mandala together, but it doesn't satisfy me. I let it come, as Joelle, my psychoanalytic, painting and work friend, a social worker like me, would say: "I let it dry." Several people came to the house and saw the unfinished work. I get some less-than-enthusiastic feedback: "I don't see how you can do anything with it."
I leave it unfinished in my living room for months. I make attempts, repaint it black, try again. I use yellow spray paint to give it shape. I experiment. There's an intimate, personal quest in this work. I keep the round shape of the mandala. I watch videos on the Internet about acrylic painting techniques, including using a hair dryer, and I want to try it, but I don't dare.
The truth is, I sit on my sofa all day, exhausted and incapable of the slightest movement. I'm in a state of emptiness.
Vacuousness
Empty state
Intellectual emptiness, absence of value
Numbness
I fight the emptiness, I don’t want to face it.
It catches up to me, it captures me, it pulls me into the darkness. Time stands still.
My body lies, frozen in nothingness, imprinting its forms on the sofa. No energy, no desire, nothing to hold on to.
Vacuousness
In an almost mystical trance, a place of eternal expectation
I can't eat, I can't sleep, all I do is wash.
The enemy runs over the door handles.
On all surfaces that the hands can hold, grip or contain.
I can't hold on to anything that hasn't been disinfected.
I wash my hands.
Thoroughly, hands, thumbs, nails, front, back, all the spaces between the fingers.
I ventilate, come rain or shine.
I disinfect the door handles.
I feel dirty, I feel powerless.
I feel repulsive.
The more I clean up the outside as recommended, the more the nameless inside emerges. That inside has been torturing me for a long time.
That inside which I keep silent, which I ignore, and which is now knocking at the door,
It could open, it could swallow me up.
So I clean even harder.
I don't exist. I no longer exist. I am a stranger to myself. Stripped of my substance and my humanity
My heart beats only to ensure the survival of my organs.
The cat purrs, resting his head on my lap. He watches over my dark night. He accompanies the spleen by blinking slowly.
He doesn't leave me alone to face the unspeakable.
"Rest", said the Doctor
"Get of your backside!", said the family
I rest, without peace, without soul, all the muscles of this body that I mistreat. I'm terrified of moving and causing any harm. Do not make things worse.
To deny myself is the only reasonable way out, to avoid doing things wrong again. I wait, I wait until the outcome is no longer death.
Silence settles in, deafening.
Then, one day, 8-year-old Timéo stood in front of my unfinished canvas and said, "Did you paint this? It's beautiful, you should keep going."
Two days later, I put a vinyl tablecloth on my living room table, lay out my canvas and some dish towels around it. I grab plastic cups to dilute the paint with water, knives, my hair dryer, some hardener to vary the texture, and I embark on 4-hour painting battle around this circle. Creative Big Bang.
I go to bed exhausted. My hair dryer is covered in paint. I've named my painting Depression, after the cave in which I'm holed up.
Six months later, my painting is on the wall. My father comes to see me. He says, "Make 10 of these and I can sell them all!” You’re on!