I had to go through contradictory and violent emotions. I had yellow in mind and painted a cross in yellow with a roller. Then I created spaces around it, a few squares in the background. I wasn't happy with it, I painted and repainted the cross a dozen times. By 2023, I couldn't stand it anymore. I didn't want to make the sacrifice any more, I wanted to live! What sacrifice?
Before my midlife crisis at forty, before the COVID quarantine, I weighed 56 kilos. I was lean and healthy. I supported my body, my body supported me. Suddenly, I lost weight. Nothing medical can be found. I'm hovering around the 50-kilo mark. 50 kilos is my lower limit below which I need to consult with a psychiatrist. I've been through weight-loss phases before, and I know that below 50 kilos, I'm not doing well: my body is sufering and showing signs of anxiety. It no longer wants to keep what I need to function. I sacrifice myself.
Please your mom, please your dad,
Open your mouth wide and eat.
It's organic and good for your growth.
Who am I to deserve the sacrifice of animals and plants?
Choke on your ancestor’s and shut up,
Shut up, you're not you anymore and you never will be. I control, I forget, I erase.
And my body sends me a reminder.
it is the bulwark of secrecy,
It does know.
It knows the pungent taste, it knows the sufocation. It reminds me with every bite,
Every bite I swallow to please Mom.
The body has its reasons that the mind ignores
Why live in an eternal hell
Where everything that passes through the mouth tortures me? At the bottom, near the uvula, stones in every bite,
I spit when the feeling comes, discreetly into my towel.
Then greedily, the body almost inert, nothing but skin and bones, I swallow everything I find that's edible
Quick, quick, to forget the nausea.
Quick, quick, to fool the emotions.
But the stones have migrated and are falling into my belly.
I'm heavy, numb, dirty and rotten.
I can't talk about my mother on the couch. I feel like if I talk, she'll know. I don't feel safe. My mother means everything to me, and I feel like if I talk about her, I'm betraying her, and that's impossible. So I keep quiet. For a long time. I'm talking about my own experience, and by expressing it I hope to be able to get myself out of it.
My childhood was ordinary. My mother is a good mother, but it's hard for me to know, to feel where she begins and where she ends, where the boundaries are between us. So I paint squares and rectangles with a knife to give a framework to this love, to diferentiate myself and to begin to become myself. It's a necessity, because otherwise I live the boundaries physically, through my body, and I make myself sick because I can’t live them mentally and express who I am. I don't do it on purpose, I'm not proud of it, it's just the only way I've found to scream to myself that something is beyond my limits, or has no limits and that I should create some.
In my professional and personal life, I often push myself beyond my limits. Learning to listen to myself and not overstep them, learning to take care of myself and to listen to myself is still a long way to go.
In 2024, I finally talk about my relationship with my mother on the couch, I allow myself to do so. And I resume Sacrifice, my vision of the painting nourished by this inner turmoil. I finalize it and dare to display the cross. I accept my sacrificial part, because it keeps me in touch with the shadow within me, with my “negative” feelings that are part of me and that I need to express in order to put limits on my human relationships. I add a forest of acacias, both living and dead, touching the sky, almost like a dream. I add gold threads to the squares and rectangles of my mind, like mending broken porcelain with gold leaf. I add sand to the lower part of the painting to represent the dryness of my emotional life.