09.09.25

Fall of Icarus: or, how I pushed myself until I broke
Self-suspension at @tankspaceofficial
Wingman @switchyb1tchh
Photos by @mattb.xtra 

After my extremely painful break-up in September 2024, I spent most of 2025 trying to outrun my own pain. If I keep moving, keep performing travelling teaching creating, I don’t have to think about it. I was like the bus in Speed: if I slow down to less than 60mph, I’ll explode. If I focus all of my heart and my brain and my energy on my creative work, if I pour all of  myself into my art, I can disappear and the work will remain. 

Well, we already know. You cannot live a life that is free from pain. Grief is the price we pay for love. When you’re feeling low, no drug will numb that suffering permanently. My drug was art. Specifically, being creative with rope.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but: I suffered a lot. I was hospitalised for mental health in January 2025. Over that year I lost 15kg, or 23% of my total body weight. I could not eat or sleep normally for about 8 months. Truly I owe my life to the love of my friends. I was let go from my day job, after an extraordinarily long and patient period where my manager tried to support me. 

I don’t regret all the art I made and the people I met while I was running away from myself. I’m glad I had those experiences and I’m proud of what I created. A lot of beauty can be made out of grief. But I wish that I could have been kinder to myself and that I could have accepted my own difficult emotions with more care. Alongside my longtime therapist, I started seeing a DBT counsellor and he encouraged me to allow myself to feel pain and to be more accepting of my own weaknesses. DBT stands for Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a type of talk therapy developed to help people with intense emotions and difficulty regulating them. Having support from both of these professionals has been life-saving.

In May 2025, I discovered that I could taste food again. I ate an entire punnet of pears, gave myself a stomach ache and missed a friend’s birthday party (sorry, Olivia). I noticed that I liked the Beth McCarthy song “Hot and Stupid.” I had not actively enjoyed music since the previous September. It was as if I had been frozen in grief at the moment of the break up and I was beginning to thaw.

It is the highest arrogance to think that we can outrun pain. You can push it down, ignore it temporarily, numb it, but it will remain. We have to go through it, to accept it with empathy, to ultimately reduce the sting. Notice I don’t say that it can be defeated – rather, we can choose to face it with kindness so that we can live with it. Sometimes I imagine myself as a tree and the grief as a park bench that I am gradually subsuming with my roots and my trunk. One day, you won’t be able to see it. It will still be there hidden inside, hopefully less powerful if still present.

I’m stronger than I used to be and I’m happier too. It’s a process, it’s difficult and it’s something I’m still working on. In future I want to be kinder to myself. I don’t want to be running to the point of exhaustion. I don’t want to push myself until I am broken. Maybe I can see my grief as being a part of me. Me when I am sad, me when I am weak; this person is me, too. I can embrace her.