Soft Hurts, digitised zine, 2023. 

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Soft Hurts is an accompanying text to Residual a show with Bea Buckland-Willis and Cailyn Forrest exploring

Feminist performance. Through this context, the darkroom can be embodied and in doing so images produced are not a record of factual evidence, but a gestural trace.

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Transcript:

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It all comes back to the body.

 

Frightened of the figurative?

The body keeps the score but also if one more person asks me to read a book about the nervous system I just might scream.

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Why is the onus on the individual?

I'm so tired of being an advocate.

I wish I could be apathetic but it doesn't feel like an option during all those sleepless nights.

I'm tired of talking about it, of being difficult.

a difficult patient.

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Sometimes I feel like we've been set up to fail, but in the end, that kind of thinking only sought to immobilise me.

Know that it's not you.

Or. At least?

 

It's not on you.

 

Nothing about suffering is kind.

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Pain and suffering get lumped together but they are not the same.

 

I am always in pain but I am not always suffering,

Joy exists in the spaces I create for her.

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It annoys me that religion has the monopoly on spirituality.

I'm not religious, but joy is spiritual.

And in its strangeness,

Pain can feel spiritual too.​

 

The nervous system is incapable of malicious intent.

God, I would love to write a self-righteous book that healthy people can use to recommend to their fucked up friends.

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I'll be honest I don't do much reading on the topic anymore.

If anything it feels like a moot point,

and rarely comes from the suffering.

Maybe I should be more learned.

But can you intellectualise away discomfort?

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Being 'self-aware' feels like a covert insult now.

Anything enigmatic is easy to blame as a fault of the mind.

As if mind and body were separated.

The mind is the body and the body is the mind,

And I sought treatment for both and none.

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I'm not sure where I'm at now, But I'm here.