Unscripted: No Strings Attached

UNSCRIPTED: NO STRINGS ATTACHED (SELF PORTRAIT, 2026)

There are days when everything breaks.

When something happens that can’t unhappen; where you see something you can’t unsee; you feel something you can’t unfeel; you do something you can’t undo, or say something you can’t take back.

Days which mark those points in life where the past and the future are divided:

Yesterday, things were one way. Tomorrow, they are another way, and they can never be the old way again.

Most of us remember more than one of these days. They sometimes came with joy. Usually they came with grief. Sometimes both.

I’m not sure what they are called. The days where the world ends, and a new world begins. This image came to me while I was thinking about them.

I think those days write us. Or parts of us. They become the puppet-strings that move us, and the scripts we narrate to ourselves and others: quiet filters through which we unconsciously experience and move in the world.

This work is more literal and personal than a lot of things I make. To me it’s about searching through the remains of childhood memories, looking for a version of myself that once felt whole. A self that Was, before the first of Those Days. Before strings and scripts were added.

Those patterns and controls that sit beneath awareness guiding what feels familiar, what feels safe, what feels possible. They tug invisibly but persistently, pulling me toward certain ways of being and doing, closing off others. Shaping how I interpret, react, remember, love, laugh, cry. Shaping the who, the why, the what, the how. They became a language I never studied, in which I am fluent, a language I didn’t write.

Was there ever a whole me before that language came?

NM