Tiny Hands. Sex Face.

This is not an easy painting to look at. It is supposed to make you uncomfortable.

The face is intentionally disturbing, almost demonic. The tiny hand is unsettling and absurd. Together, they represent something that was even more disturbing in real life: the experience of being manipulated by someone I trusted, while slowly realizing that what I thought was affection had actually been something much darker.

I painted this in response to a deeply traumatizing experience involving someone I knew through a recovery-based organization that I was, and still am, deeply involved with. We met as participants and gradually became friends. There had been flirtation for a long time, but I had a firm rule that I would never date someone from this community. I didn't want to compromise a place that felt safe to me.

Eventually, he became an employee of the organization. There was a strict policy against employees dating members, and for good reason. The position created a power differential that could compromise the safety of the people the organization existed to support.

I knew the rules. I knew my own boundaries. But I was lonely, and I was receiving a lot of attention and affection. Our relationship seemed to develop gradually and naturally, so I convinced myself that somehow the rules didn't really apply to us. I glossed over the red flags because I wanted to believe what I was experiencing was real.

One of those red flags came in the form of a pair of gloves.

During an intimate conversation, I had told him about an insecurity I had about my unusually large hands. He held his hand next to mine and they were essentially the same size. I didn't think much of it at the time.

Then, on my birthday, he gave me a pair of gloves. With a huge grin on his face, he told me he had tried them on himself to make sure they were the right size.

They were men's triple-extra-large gloves.

They were cartoonishly too large on me.

I gave them to my brother, who is nearly a foot taller than me, and they were even roomy on him.

At the time, I dismissed it as a bad joke. Looking back, I see something very different. The tiny hand in this painting represents the way that moment was used to deliberately target an insecurity I had trusted him enough to share.

The "sex face" is more literal. There was a look on his face during intimacy that disturbed me deeply. His expression was blank and his dark eyes seemed completely devoid of emotion. It felt almost soulless. Even before I understood what was happening, something about that expression frightened me.

Then came the story.

On a hike, he told me about a woman who had a boyfriend but flirted with him. He said he deliberately escalated the flirting until she slept with him, convinced her to leave her boyfriend, and then immediately rejected her and shamed her for cheating. He had orchestrated the entire thing specifically to hurt her.

I didn't understand at the time why he was telling me this story.

Later, after he abruptly and confusingly ended our relationship and began giving me increasingly strange excuses for why we couldn't spend time together, I finally realized what he had been telling me.

He had done the same thing to me.

Looking back, I think part of what made him angry was that I had actually said out loud that what we were doing was wrong. I remembered a conversation we had had earlier, prior to dating, when I told him that I thought it was fucked up for an employee to date a member because it could ruin the member's safe space. His response was, "It's hard for employees too." At the time, I thought it was an odd thing to say and brushed it off. Later, after learning that he had been involved with other members while working there, I wondered if he had taken my comment personally. I had unknowingly called out a pattern he was already participating in, while still continuing to flirt with him myself.

Rather than simply ending the flirtation, he had apparently chosen to lure me deeper into it so that he could eventually hurt me.

Because he couldn't openly explain what he had done without potentially putting his job at risk, he had told me the story and left me to figure it out.

I couldn't.

Not then.

The breakup left me confused, devastated, and feeling abused without understanding exactly why. I had no closure and no framework for what had happened. I wrote pages and pages trying to reconstruct conversations, text messages, and events so I could understand something that didn't make sense.

Eventually, I told another woman in the organization what had happened. She told me about other women who had experienced similar behavior.

That was the moment something changed.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I stood up for myself.

Not just for myself, but for the women who came before me and the women who might come after me.

I reported what had happened. He was ultimately fired from the organization and eventually moved away.

I don't know what happened after that. I hope he learned something. A part of me still worries that he simply took the same behavior somewhere nobody knew his history.

But this painting isn't ultimately about him.

It's about me finding my voice.

It took a painful, humiliating, deeply confusing experience for me to finally understand that my voice mattered. I had spent much of my life minimizing my own discomfort, explaining away red flags, and questioning whether my feelings were valid.

This time, I didn't stay quiet.

The imagery is disturbing because the experience was disturbing. But beneath the grotesque face and absurd tiny hand is a story of triumph.

Sometimes overcoming something doesn't look beautiful.

Sometimes it looks fucking creepy.

And sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is refuse to let what happened to you happen to someone else.