Cut Up Angels

I have a lot to say about this one and I think it’s because everything is still so fresh. This painting vomited out of me so fast and I could just not stay away from working on it. In turn, working on it was healing. I felt a huge pull to paint this.

There is a vast amount of red, mostly because the pain was bright and overwhelming and later the anger started to set in. The black, a sense of hopelessness, apathy, and void. The purples and blue ran alongside these feelings. I tend to associate purples with less sharp pain or wounds that have dulled/healed over time. The blue highlights were cuts of sadness surging throughout everything. 

“If we cut out the bad, well then we’d have nothing left… and you lied to the angels, said I stabbed you to death.” - The Used

If you’re not familiar with it, ‘Cut Up Angels’ is a song by the band ‘The Used’ from the album  ‘In Love and Death’. It was released in 2004 and I listened to that album on repeat when it came out. I can sing the whole thing front to back; it holds such a comforting, nostalgic memory for me. They say music can soothe the soul, and they are correct… whoever ‘they’ are. I have leaned heavy on music a lot in my life.

You might be wondering what this song has to do with this painting and I’m getting there, trust me. I have to give you guys some context on this one. 

Upon research, the meaning of this song was essentially a broken relationship built upon heroin use. While it certainly wasn’t this drastic, it WAS a relationship built on the substance abuse of two broken people trying to drown their pain and find peace. 

Cut Up Angels’ is essentially a heartbreak painting. When I first started this, I was freshly out of a breakup. I wasn’t prepared and it quite literally knocked the breath out of me.  I guess I should have seen it coming because I watched him pull away from me for weeks but I honestly thought we were trying to heal, grow together, and build something like we had talked about. 

All of a sudden I was scrambling for any semblance of reality, confused, hurt beyond words, and feeling like a failure because I’d tried so hard. Was I perfect? No. I didn’t always show up in ways I was proud of. There were disagreements but I thought the hard conversations would repair cracks in the relationship. That did not end up to be the case and I didn’t realize this until the end when all the peices started to fit together for me.

Now for the disclaimer: As I write this, it is close to four months after the fact. I still have not been given the respect of an actual conversation or honesty and he’s canceled every plan to come get his belongings since.  I don’t know for sure what the truth really is. This is just my own experience and a series of educated probabilities. This is just how it felt like for me and how it relates to the painting I created to cope with the devastation.

Anyway, I was dating a man with behaviors so confusing to me that I lost my head a bit. Which plays into the part of the song that says, “I lost my head, you couldn’t come.” While dating, I have never experienced some of these behaviors before in my life. I started recognizing his specific patterns but I had no idea what they meant, they were just becoming predictable. They still had to be deciphered and I have an incessant urge to figure out what doesn’t add up. If someone can’t give me the truth, I’m kind of forced to make educated assumptions until proven otherwise or given more data. Ambiguity doesn’t work for me. Now the bigger picture has become more clear.

What was interesting is the fact that while I was working on this, I lost track of the amount of times ‘Cut Up Angels’ played when I put multiple playlists on shuffle. It was starting to make me feel weird as hell because some of these playlists had hundreds of songs.

The song playing repeatedly on its own was a little spooky because we shared that common favorite childhood band (The Used, of course). This fact is something we had bonded over early because I haven’t met many people who know of the band, let alone were as affected as I was by them.. Somehow this one just kept surfacing. It felt right though, like it fit the overall mood. With this, I leaned into it. At this point I had already decided that the painting had named itself. I mean, how many signs does somebody need? 

On the day that shattered me, many things went through my mind, but the top two conflicting thoughts were ‘Ah, well I kind of saw that one coming’ and the absolute shock of ‘I believed in you and you still abandoned me’. 

It was a relatively short relationship and yet we had so many happy and meaningful memories that I can recall together. The connection felt fast, but strong…at first. It hit me way harder than I logically think it should but the heart doesn’t like to listen to facts and by the point that I had started to question my heart, it was too late. I had already fallen in so deep. I didn’t realize the boundaries I should have set before I became too attached. At the time of writing this entry, it still guts me, but it’s getting a lot easier. At the beginning all I could do was try to yank myself back out of the depression black hole again and, in the process, I realized a few things.

Let me tell you, this time around I was too stubborn and have done incredibly too much painful work on myself to let my emotions continue to consume me.  There was a lot of reflection and processing in an effort to try to soothe my nervous system and find clarity. There was a lot of pure discomfort no matter where I was and all I wanted to do was flee and retreat to solitude. All I wanted to do was drive forever with no destination but I ended up going on 7-10 mile hikes to try to burn off the anger and anxiety. I worked for hours in my studio painting. I was so restless and I still am a little.

In an effort to sit with and cope with my emotions, there was a lot of crying, and sometimes screaming. It was genuinely pure grief as if my nervous system believed he’d died…which, it probably did. One day I was in love and comitted, (although maybe not on the best terms) and the next day he was gone and I never saw him again. Complete emotional free fall.

That is not to mention the low grade embarrassment and betrayal that comes with believing something that didn’t turn out to be entirely true while ignoring red flags and half truths. Living in a fantasy. I felt like a fool. Again.

I have trouble trying to figure out what was actually real because my trust in my own discernment has waivered recently. There were many moments that felt far too real to just fabricate. Maybe I just have an optimistic heart that is capable of authenticity in a world where that can leave you vulnerable, misunderstood, and used. I wanted so badly to be able to be safely vulnerable for once…so I reached out with a wounded, terrified hand anyway. Ouch. 

I’m an avid lover of analogies and metaphors so I’d like to explore this one. I had a bit of inspiration from Edward scissor hands’. While I refused to acknowledge he was cutting me, I also didn’t know I was cutting him, trying to bandage his wounds with scissors for hands myself. I had tried very hard to make my scissor hands act in the way regular human hands do…you know, with care and gentleness and attention to detail…but it seemed like the more that I tried, the more damage I did. All I ever meant was good, so how could I be harming? The confusion was flipping my emotions on their head. Then came the anxiety from so much uncertainty… the distress at trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Why did I feel so disorientated?

I couldn’t understand why I would try to follow through with every way he told me to communicate with him because he swore that was how he could understand, and no matter what I did or how I said it…it was still wrong. There was no wording or timing good enough to discuss certain things. I was lead to believe we could have an emotionally mature range of communication, even if it was clunky due to both of our own wounds. I just wanted him to be there for me in the way that I had been for him in his weaker moments. The ones he was embarrassed about but were perfectly reasonable, he just couldn’t see it through all the internalized shame. The moments he once felt safe enough trusting me with, which was beautiful. While it lasted.

Ultimately, it seemed like my vulnerability set him off as if it were too much for him to handle or something that he had to fix; His behavior told me he had better things to worry about, like himself. I was ‘making things a big deal’ or making him feel like he ‘fucked up’. At this point, I felt so lonely in this relationship. It didn’t seem like there was room for me and my struggles along side his own.

I doubted my intuition at first. I was so hopeful. What I had heard so far had been so promising… I didn’t anticipate how unsustainable it would become for him because I had no idea what his true baseline really was. I only could see what he had showed me so far. I had not realized yet his level of overwhelm, coping, and healing.  I see now that he didn’t have the capacity to show up for me while he was drowning in his own demons. He had admitted to feeling like he was stretched thin and I knew about some struggles. We didn’t talk about all of them though, and I  had a sense he wasn’t being fully honest with me.

I felt like I was slowly being dragged back to unhealed parts of me. I heard somewhere that people who are drowning will more often than not try to pull their ‘rescuer’ under in an effort to save themselves. This isn’t because they want to harm the person that tries to provide aid but because they are grasping at anything that could pull their head above water. All they can think about is the tunnel vision of their own survival. 

This is not to say that I was there to rescue this man at all, he’s his own whole person, but the analogy certainly puts things into perspective for me. I just couldn’t understand why the more I tried to love him, understand him, apologize, reconnect, be understood, or explain… the more I backslid in my healing, the more I felt, essentially, ‘pulled under’. He continued to sink while grasping at my collapsing stability and eventually let go because he no longer felt it was worth being saved. I learned that empathy without boundaries is just self abandonment.

After some thought, I realized something I had never had the language or understanding for about myself. I had recognized my patterns in the past but at the same time there was a part of me that felt shameful for it, masked it, explained it away as how I am, and avoided the thoughts of the impact it may have had on my relationships with friends and lovers. I’m not alway shut down, emotionally unavailable, apathetic, and avoidant, so I forgot what it feels like. But when I am very overwhelmed, it comes back. Especially when high emotion is involved. It becomes too unbearable and I look for things to help block it out. Walls came up and I shut down to socially isolate. I would feel stuck, but every time that feeling would go away I would tell myself I was just better now and I’d healed that reaction in me. I started to see that the reason this man felt like home was because I saw a part of him in me. My heartbreak had me noticing the same behaviors I had found so distressing from him starting to come back to me as well. I really think we were holding up mirrors, reflecting back everything we didn’t want to face about ourselves.

I had flashbacks to conversations with a friend the year before that had always felt so oddly similar to the conversations I would have with this ex, only our roles were reversed. I was my friend in this scenerio, and he was me. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why these discussions kept feeling so familiar. With my friend, I remember being so confused because I had just started trying to heal. I had no idea what I was supposed to do or say and it was super frustrating. I wanted to do the right thing and I felt awful about how I would shutdown. I kept thinking it made me a terrible friend but i felt powerless to it. I started accepting less because I knew I didn’t have the capacity to return the same level of effort. I was practicing baby coping skills that I only knew in theory, not practice. I get it now. I am now feeling what it feels like on the other side of it, and it does damage. My perspective has shifted a bit and I’ve found myself reevaluating a lot of memories throughout my life. I found wounds I forgot needed healing.

I’ve recently hit a level of emotional pain that has made me take a step back and to ask myself… what has made me unconciously abandon myself to prove to somebody that they matter and are chosen? What made me completely ignore the question, “am I happy?” in favor of “how can I make them happy?”. Suddenly it is like someone splashed cold water on my face and I woke the fuck up. Like, wait a minute…what am I even doing here? Why am I behaving like this is even close to enough for me longterm if nothing changes? When did I decide that other people’s needs mean more than my own?

In the end, neither of us could foster the peace we both looked for while we were constantly triggering each other. I'm not going to chase after him for clarity anymore. That historically hasn’t worked anyway. I've reflected and gained closure on my own. He has all the space he wants from me now. I hope that someday he finds what he’s looking for. I’ll be redirecting the energy I spent trying to figure out this mess back into my own life now. Thank you, next.

“Would you be my little cut? Will you be my thousand fucks? Love is not like anything, especially a fucking knife.” - The Used