Chewing on my hangnails and hangups

Old diaries, relationship practice, and Davy Mahon's DUNGEON.

It’s been a while…I know. My cycle of jumping headfirst into a project and then burning out is as chronically familiar as certain chord progressions in pop songs. Starting this substack last year was a good shout but I bit off more than I could chew far too soon without a dedicated practice of time management and self sustained emotional support to do it. Once my energy was sapped then followed my commitment, confidence and with those; my motivation for doing it in the first place. Perhaps it was the deflation overlapping with the creep of seasonal depression and a chaotic mind that couldn’t decipher my feelings of ennui from the unnecessarily heavy workload I was bearing. I ended up just blaming myself for dropping another promising project and dropping off the radar in general. But here I am, trying again, because it’s Spring and I’ve just climbed out of the silage bed I was rotting in because (despite the recent snow) the sun is shining.

I spent today, Sunday, God’s day, as I normally do; deliberately not making plans and giving myself the space in my week to mooch about and not feel bad for it. This is incredibly healing as the rest of my week I plan meticulously and methodically, the mythologised productivity symptom of my capitalistic generation. I grant myself a get out of jail free card for a day where nothing at all might happen and I won’t feel obliged to do something about it. I had taken the notion on Saturday evening to re-arrange my room, my classic late evening way to burn off some extroverted energy indoors. Back in January my shitty IKEA bed frame gave way under the weight of everyone at my housemate’s birthday going in to my room to do coke. I didn’t mind because I was doing it too, and I knew it was falling apart, I just needed it to be irrevocable. So I dismantled the flimsy frame, remembering the multiple times it fell apart and I put it back together with the determination of a DIY master dad. I was glad to see it go, and even happier now that my room has ample extra space, even if it means reducing my sleeping arrangements to a mattress on the floor. This means at least, like on Saturday night, that when I decide I want my desk next to the window, and my ever increasing book collection to look more aesthetically pleasing, it is much easier to do so without 50 pounds of IKEA chipboard to manoeuvre. 

Later in the afternoon, when finalising the previous night’s changes to my white person excuse for Feng Shui, I came across all of my old journals and diaries dating back nearly 8 years, just shortly after I finished my BA in Wexford. The first few are a bit of a mess; all over the place with different notes, unfinished entries and pieces of writing or information I no longer have any context for. They eventually pick up in consistency around the final months of the MFA in Belfast. I opened them up to see the date of page one to the last inscribed page, and proceeded to label them with scrawled on post it notes stuck down under clear sellotape. I only read a handful of entries, just to see what I was doing or saying or even going through at the time. I can look back on my 20’s and just see a big blurry mess that I wasn’t really paying attention to yet felt unbearably aware of, like an itchy rash on my face I refused to put cream on yet was highly self consciousness of. I read entries from at least five to six years ago about how unhappy I was yet never used the term itself, whether it was my relationship, my jobs, my family or other things, I found myself repeating similar frustrations over and over as the years go by in the pages. I remember having a conversation with a friend about diaries (or “daily pages” as the artists like to say) and how this is not an isolated phenomenon, but that they too found themselves disinclined from re-reading old entries because they noticed how much they repeated themselves. It didn’t deter either of us from still conducting the practice of daily writing, instead we just shamefully avoided going back and reading our previous selves, so finding those journals was like an interpretive time capsule. Days and years spent getting myself out and onto a page and trying to let shit go, was all neatly compiled in an array of multicoloured notebooks. Looking at those pages and thinking about the 12 months I spent in therapy between 2021 and 2022; I laughed out loud at myself. Literally LOL’d like it was the early aughts. It was cathartic and symbolic of forgiving myself. “Repetition gives us rest.” I quoted in a recent performance I did online, and my comfy little diary space perpetuates this claim. The words, my tone and my ability as a writer continue to change (for the better thankfully) but the sentiments were like patterns. The things I wanted that I couldn’t have or felt I could never obtain for whatever reason, decorate my documentation and probably will continue to do so forever - that’s where I forgave myself. 

Back in January I was doing a slow and steady residency at PS2’s project space, which helped me regain a sense of my work after the dark and holed up days of December. Since February of 2021 this body of work that I have been keeping alive with small puffs of air felt like it had momentum again, and so I wrote a text that unpacked the time and experiences around it’s inception and continuation, like showing a group of people through a suitcase I have been carrying around with me. It was part statement, part diary, part trauma dump, part hug, part lecture and a variety of other parts I’m too tired to list right now because to sum it up would only undermine its impact it had on me at the time. I didn’t think I would write it, it literally just happened, and it was the first time in a while I shared something so honest, the personal entwined with the practical. What struck me the most was my voice, in how the impact of the story changed in my own mouth, the medium I chose to share it through, becoming my narrative, a narrative, I could have easily made the whole thing up but would my voice have betrayed me if that were the case? I had conviction, which I was reminded of recently by a writing mentor, yet I am always my harshest disabler, convincing myself it’s not worth it, or that this isn’t the time. A repetition despite the evidence of the opposite happening, I do put my work and myself out there yet consistently have an inner monologue that insists I’ve done nothing worthwhile. Perhaps it’s the typical artistic self-doubt that longs for validation, or just how my brain has taught me to survive and keep going. Either way, the relationship I have with myself and my work I have collected like a literal photo album, and I only share it with myself, and that intimacy and privacy is precious, and it’s only now I can see how important that is.

I wanted to write about Davy Mahon’s Dungeon in a criticism essay I’ve finished for a commissioned deadline recently. I was hoping to compare and contrast it with the other exhibition I ended up writing about solely, but the word count would have been abominable. Davy himself, a wonderful and generous human being, eluded me as an artist, so a solo show of someone I knew that seemed to come out of nowhere with no previous knowledge of their work, truly excited me and I wasn’t disappointed. It being in Ulster University was disappointing, as the new campus building feels like a dull, grey version of a Silicon Valley corporate headquarters filled with Gen Z in lycra gym gear; the art gallery that was part of the new design to support the work of the art school next door has clearly been given the least amount of attention, visibility and care. Davy’s show being behind an equally insipid door in the foyer, was aptly titled Dungeon, a hidden cave filled with the reverie of failure and love. Going off my memory, I was following a trail of work around the room which featured what must have been over 100 drawings, scribbles, notes and acquired objects which told me a story of time, self-deprecation, fears, affections, and musings that take the form of strange and ugly beings, minimal maps and collages of fictional situations. I’m probably reducing it down to its most visible parts but I quickly fell for this show due to it’s brash simplicity of discarded pages stuck up on the walls, their bends and creases adding to their rich and invisible memoir of which I could only get a brief and privileged glimpse. To describe even further in words would be hectic and endless, if you missed it I feel sorry for you (haha) because seeing genuine and self documented vulnerability, in all of it’s human plainness is not something that a lot of gallery’s programme these days.

I took this one photo on my phone and sent it to someone I was seeing at the time. The relationship (if you can even call it that) has since disintegrated into nothing, and it’s only the apps that are beckoning me back with a not so sultry “come hither”. I sent it at the time knowing full well this person wasn’t good news but I did it anyway because I’m conditioned to touch the stove even though I know it will burn me. We slept once together on mattresses side by side on the floor when I missed my train back to Belfast. We didn’t have sex because neither of us wanted to but we fell asleep holding hands across the covers. This exchange of soft and sweet intimacy convinced me to look the other way to my rational instincts, ignoring the red flags that had sprung up like postules all over his face. It didn’t take long after that for reality to dawn and to spend the following month aggressively chewing through the icks and the whats ifs. It was an important lesson to re-learn and thankfully I didn’t tumble headfirst into a committed relationship only to look back and see I repeated myself again. It has associated itself with this drawing, like a thumbnail on my desktop of romantic pursuits and associations. Whether it’s me as the gross and weird alien vying for love or one of the random indivudals that I match with on a weekly basis, it can be all of us and no one, we all feel uncomfortable in our skin when being vulnerable and it takes love to accept our ugliest and most exhaustive parts. I’ve recently chosen to be non-monogamous, because holding out for one person in this shit show of poor communication and ghosting culture as well as acknowledging my history of anxious attachments, is not worth disturbing my peace for. There will be issues, naturally, every potential relationship has them, but I’m going to be experiencing them in a new tone, a different flavour and seeing where the common denominators sit. I may never go back to being monogamous, I may never ever end up in a relationship ever again, I may never learn to not be awkward around people I fancy or stop deluding myself about connections that aren’t real…but I’ll definitely be writing about it.