therapy

I don’t think therapy works the same way for me and I think that’s totally fine; I have my art and my knives.

What I struggle with is releasing emotions, not processing things on a logical front. So unless you’re coming at me with a new idea, you’re wasting my time. As a disclaimer I’ve only had counselling and CBT but honestly, for me, releasing emotions has to be tactile. 

2024 I therapised my whole masked life away using art. I sat there and carved into my soul, to find the rot. I focused on the dark and I cut wood, and the dark was released. I managed to open the gates to my unconscious.

This year I am inputting instead of outputting and focused on the knives; something which cannot rushed, has no inherent ‘purpose’ and cannot really be optimised.

Art = expression. I can blarghh onto the page and get sensations out of my body.

Knifes = nurturing. A gradual process of culturing and growth.

With the art I actively focus on the negative, but with the knives I don’t. With the knives I generally have a seed of an idea and then just start polishing, thinking of nothing. Sometimes 30-40 minutes down the line I will feel a strong emotion welling up, or an urge to write, and I’ll either rub it into the steel or type it out here. The processing is behind the scenes, and I don’t know what’s being processed.

But then those emotions are gone. This is how I release them: physically. I need to express emotions with physicality and friction, force and grating tension. I need to grind out the steel, then cross the scratches, deep to medium to light and then finally maybe just finger slurry massaged in for a final pop, but I can’t think about that fluffy stuff yet.

And I feel better for just writing this. A melting of tension in the shoulder girdle. I don’t process emotions verbally; it’s that simple.

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