scary, scary, scary

This week, I’ve started waking up afraid.

Not every day.

But enough that I’ve stopped pretending it’s a phase.

There’s a moment in the morning, before the phone, before the work, where the weight of everything I’ve built folds into my chest.

It’s not a fear of failing.

It’s something less neat.

The fear that it’s working.

And if it works, there’s no excuse left.

In four days, it will be a year since I moved back to London.

I’ve taken twelve days off since I got here.

No weekends.

One Holiday.

Everything else: movement, pressure, output.

A constant effort to keep creating.

Trying along the way to stay honest.

And now, just as it starts to bloom, the voice comes in - what if this isn’t enough?

This is my first year using my real name with my work.

Every other run at this has been hidden behind some project-focused title.

This time, no alias.

No backup identity.

Just me.

And with that, every fallback has disappeared.

There’s no way to walk it back.

And I’m (a little) scared.

Not in a dramatic way.

In a quiet, low-frequency kind of way.

A contraction that starts in the body and ends in the room.

And that’s what this is about.

Not the kind of fear that stops you cold.

The kind that shapes how you move.

How you speak.

What you create.

What you don’t.

Fear isn’t just a feeling.

It’s a structure.

A system.

And we carry it through the body, the image, and the world we agree to participate in.

Body

Fear shows up before the thought of it.

That’s the part no one really talks about.

We like to think fear is a reaction to something we understand, but most of the time, it’s not.

It’s already in motion before we’ve named it.

It shapes the way we move before we’ve even had the chance to think.

We tell ourselves we’re procrastinating, or tired, or just not in the mood.

But if you actually slow it down, you’ll notice something else.

The body’s already folded in.

Your shoulders are pulled forward.

Your breath is shallow.

You’re quieter than usual.

It’s like your body’s trying to disappear.

That’s where it starts.

1) Contraction

The body doesn’t contract because something’s wrong.

It contracts because it doesn’t want to be seen.

That feeling you get before opening a difficult email.

That moment after you share something vulnerable and suddenly wish you could take it back.

The silence that makes your stomach drop.

That’s not you being dramatic.

That’s your system trying to shrink away from exposure.

Not emotionally.

Mechanically.

For me, it’s the dead phone in hand moment.

I read something disappointing or just slightly off, and my whole body just stops.

I put the phone down.

I don't even feel like moving.

It’s like I want to fold into the chair and disappear.

There’s no rage.

No breakdown.

Just absence.

This is the shape fear takes before the mind gets involved.

The breath flattens.

The muscles curl in.

The body makes itself smaller.

Not because you’re weak.

Because that’s what it thinks survival looks like.

You don’t need to fight it.

You just need to notice when it’s happening.

And interrupt it.

Loosen the shoulders.

Sit up.

Take one slow breath that moves low instead of high.

Let the body widen.

Even if you don’t know what’s wrong yet, being less small will help you find out.

2) Distortion

Once the body tightens, your perception starts to blur.

Things that are neutral begin to feel sharp.

A delayed reply feels like rejection.

Tiredness becomes proof that the work’s failing.

Silence sounds like judgment.

You start responding to fear as if it’s the truth.

I’ve had mornings where nothing’s wrong, but I feel heavy and slow.

And straight away the voice kicks in - maybe this means it’s not working anymore.

I’ll go an hour without doing anything and take that as proof that the idea’s dead.

That I’ve lost something I didn’t even realise I’d been trying to hold onto.

But really, I’m just reading through a scrambled signal.

The system’s still jammed from yesterday.

Nothing’s actually changed.

This part of fear is quiet, but clever.

It messes with your interpretation of everything.

And it happens so subtly that by the time you realise, you’ve already made five decisions based on bad information.

The way through isn’t to override it.

It’s just to pause long enough to ask, what else might this mean? Not everything uncomfortable is a warning.

Sometimes it’s just an echo from somewhere else.

3) Encoding

If you let it run long enough, fear stops being a feeling and starts becoming how you move through the world.

It becomes part of your character.

You stop calling it fear.

You start calling it realism.

You start using phrases like I just don’t like risk or I prefer stability or that’s not really my thing - even if it was, once.

And the worst part is, you get praised for it.

You get told you’re grounded.

You’re focused.

You know what you’re doing.

But underneath it, something’s gone quiet.

You stop hearing from the part of you that wants more.

You forget what desire used to feel like before you needed everything to be justified.

I’ve been there.

Performing consistently.

Getting things done.

Building well.

But secretly wondering if this is what it looks like to burn out while still appearing high functioning.

Getting out of that rhythm doesn’t mean becoming reckless.

It just means moving at a pace your body forgot was possible.

A pace that includes space for wanting again.

4) Loops

Eventually, fear builds its own reality.

You don’t apply for the thing because you already know what the answer will be.

You don’t follow through on the idea because it feels too far out.

You don’t say what you want because you’re convinced it’ll push people away.

Not because any of that’s true.

But because you’ve lived the version where it fails so many times in your mind that it feels safer to keep your world small.

This is when fear stops reacting and starts selecting.

It chooses your projects.

It chooses your relationships.

It chooses the version of you the world gets to meet.

And the worst part is, you tell yourself you’re being smart.

You think you’re choosing safety.

But really, fear’s just doing the job before you even get the chance.

The loop convinces you to wait until it feels safe to try.

But it never does.

And the longer you wait, the harder that edge becomes.

You don’t break the loop with insight.

You break it with movement.

You say the thing.

You post the thing.

You open the file.

You act before your body says yes.

Because it won’t say yes.

That’s not its job.

That has to come from somewhere else.

But it’s not just something that happens inside.

You can see fear if you know how to look for it.

It shows up in the mouth.

The posture.

The way someone doesn’t quite finish their sentence.

And once I saw it in me, I started seeing it everywhere.

Image

I went to a Francis Bacon exhibition a few months ago.

One of those late evening visits.

Cold light outside.

That quiet gallery air where you can hear footsteps but not breath.

The kind of setting where everyone walks like they know something about art.

It hit me harder than I expected.

Bacon’s paintings don’t shout.

They don’t ask to be decoded.

They just sit there in the room and pull the silence in tighter.

All that twisted flesh.

The mouths locked in scream.

The bodies collapsing into themselves like they’re too tired to keep pretending.

At first, it felt like chaos.

A kind of rawness I thought I had trained myself out of.

But as I walked, it became clearer.

These weren’t monsters.

They were people.

People who had run out of ways to hold it together.

People who had reached the edge of control and decided not to fake it anymore.

That’s when I started noticing something else.

Not just the paintings.

The people.

The way they stood.

The way they stared.

The way they stayed quiet a little too long in front of certain pieces.

Arms crossed.

Lips pursed.

Shoulders slightly turned away from the canvas, but not enough to leave.

That was the art, too- the effect it had, the atmosphere it created, and the way it changed the shape of the room.

And that’s what I kept coming back to, not just what I was seeing on the walls.

But what the work was doing to everyone who was looking at it.

Fear is usually invisible.

But in a room like that, it takes shape.

You can see it in the way people hold themselves.

The way their faces go blank when something hits too close.

The way they try to stay composed while their nervous systems are doing something completely different.

I do that too.

Say all the right things.

Move well.

Make the work look finished.

But if you zoomed in - my jaw’s tight, my eyes are fixed, my breath’s short.

I’m holding something down.

And I know it.

Fear doesn’t always look like panic.

It often looks like professionalism.

Like a calm voice.

Like a perfect sentence that makes no one uncomfortable.

Like an image that’s been edited just enough to feel smart but not too much to feel fake.

You see it in the art world all the time.

Work that looks right but says nothing.

Installations that carry the correct tone but no real tension.

Artists who know how to get close to the line without ever stepping over it.

And it works.

It gets applause.

It gets collected.

It gets posted.

But it doesn’t move people.

Because it was made to be accepted, not to be felt.

Sometimes I think that is the only line.

Do you want to be understood, or do you want to be real.

Because you rarely get both.

Fear teaches you that being understood is safer.

That you can shape the image to match what people expect and still call it yours.

But something in you will always know.

You cut something out.

You softened the edges. You chose coherence over clarity.

What I loved about that show was that Bacon didn’t do that.

He didn’t clean it up.

He didn’t hold back.

He didn’t even try to resolve it.

He just let the distortion be seen.

The fear.

The violence of being too alive in a world that asks you to be clean.

He painted the scream without the sound.

And somehow, that felt more honest than anything I had seen in a long time.

By the end of the show, I stopped looking at the paintings and just watched the room.

Everyone standing near each other.

Trying not to be seen feeling too much.

Holding their coats.

Holding their breath.

Holding themselves up.

And I thought - maybe the most honest thing we can do is admit we’re scared.

Because we all are.

Every artist finishing something.

Every person trying to be liked without losing themselves.

Every one of us in that gallery holding onto the version of ourselves we think the world will still accept.

But if fear is that common, maybe it’s not a flaw.

Maybe it is just one more texture in the image.

Something to be included.

Not erased.

You don’t have to fix the distortion.
You just have to stop pretending it’s not there.

That is where the real image begins.

Systems

But fear doesn’t just live in the body, or the image, or the room.

It lives in systems too.

Systems that were built to look like ecosystems, but really just function as echo chambers.

Galleries are businesses.

Art networks are pipelines.

Institutions are soft power machines.

Their function isn’t just to support culture, it is to shape it, contain it, and ensure it behaves in a way that doesn’t threaten the existing hierarchy.

That’s why they’re partnered with governments.

That’s why they’re aligned with commercial collectors.

That’s why your tutors always seemed a little tired.

They knew.

The phrase “supporting emerging artists” is often code for “training them to be compliant.” You get fed theory, but not economics.

you’re taught to reference, but not question the ecosystem.

You learn how to package your truth into a digestible form.

Something that looks challenging, but doesn’t bite.

Fear is part of the design.

You teach people to care about legitimacy.

Then you hand them one path to get it.

And make it known - if they step outside that path, they’ll lose access.

Not just to opportunities, but to credibility.

And no one wants to be seen making weird work that doesn’t get picked up.

So people self-censor before the institution has to.

What the system wants is manageable experimentation.

Safety packaged as edge.

Polite disruption.

Something that looks new but still understands how to behave.

And if you do well enough in that game, you become part of it.

You get absorbed.

You get rewarded.

But you don’t change it.

The only thing that changes a system like that is a new set of incumbents.

Ones that don’t ask for entry.

Ones that build their own walls, or take the gates off completely.

Ones that are strong enough to stand next to the old institutions without shrinking.

And wild enough to break the right rules to see what actually matters.

That’s the part I’m stepping into now. The personal risk doesn’t look like an unfunded project or a bad review.

It looks like big legal letters.

Council fines.

Actual interference.

Not from trolls.

From the people in suits who know what a disruption looks like and don’t like it taking up space in public.

It’s already started.

I’ve had the fines.

The letters. The polite threats from polite rooms.

And I know what usually comes next.

The bigger kids show up.

The ones who have been doing this longer.

The ones who want it stable.

They’ll try to push me out.

And maybe they will.

But maybe not.

I just hope I’m strong enough this time to stay standing.

And if I’m not - well.

I’m sure it’ll be a fun little battle for you all to watch.

What’s next

Fear isn’t just something institutions avoid.

It’s something they’ve learned to hold, in doses.

Enough to provoke. Never enough to destabilise.

A scream on the wall. Silence at the private view.

A crisis framed in stainless steel. No room for chaos in the application form.

And that used to be the game.

Learn the codes. Play with the edges. Don’t step over.

Even the wildest artists. Softened.

Early work that unsettled. Later work that aligned.

Not a failure. Just a function of how old systems absorbed tension.

But things are changing.

New institutions are being built. Ones that don’t fear disruption.

That understand danger is part of cultural hygiene.

That trust their audience enough to show them something real.

And in those rooms, something else becomes possible.

Take Puppies Puppies. Or 10Foot.

Artists who move between worlds without flattening.

Who carry the risk with them, even when the room shifts.

That’s the model. Not chaos. Not control.

Precision. Quality. And something sharp enough to survive contact.

That’s the practice I want now.

Not just to provoke. But to build at the edge.

To develop work that doesn’t dilute under pressure.

That holds its shape. Even when framed.

Maybe I’m ready for that.

To become legible without becoming soft.

To bring danger into form. And form into danger.

Because the point was never just to be disruptive.

The point was to stay awake.

To stay honest.

And to stay sharp.

Even in the rooms that say they’re ready.

Poets Corner

Chimney Sweep

At the annual sweep
Of the wood burner’s flue,
The rages of winter
Get scrubbed to ash,
The fear of cold nights is forgotten.

In a living room, loaded
With speckles of dust, floating
On shards of light.
(how I envy the beauty
of the constellation of dust,
let me float like a star
on the constellation of dust)

Now comes the dread:
The burn of the heat of the sun,
The seasons beginning to scare me,
Getting closer each year,
Each time that they come.

- Thomas May

Just know I’m scared. And maybe that’s the best place to build from.

More to come

I love you loads

R