The Story of the Peaceful Hangman
I used to be scared of flying.
The fear of flying is a very specific kind of fear. It is not the actual, literal fear of the plane crashing or something going wrong. It is not a thought. It is an entirely animalistic, primitive feeling — a terror that seizes you for seemingly no reason, a sickness that rises within you and takes over your body.
And in those moments of fear, sitting on a plane and watching the world recede beneath me, I always found myself wishing the plane would crash. Not because I wanted to die, or because I was suicidal, or because I didn’t love my life. I wished it would crash because I wanted the terrible feeling of panic to end.
It is the same with anxiety attacks. Sometimes, on a beautiful, completely ordinary day, the overthinking will begin. It will seize me, grip me, tear at me, catapulting me into a state of inexplicable physical panic. And in those moments, I hear myself mumbling under my breath: kill me, kill me, kill me.
Again, I do not want to die. I do not want my life to end. What I want to end is the all-consuming feeling that will not leave me. And somehow, in that whispered wish, I find quietude. I find calm. The thought of everything stopping, even for a moment, gives me somewhere to go when my own mind becomes too loud.
The Hangman is precisely that place.
The Hangman is where a panic attack ends. Where the overthinking ends. Where anxiety leaves the body and the lungs begin to breathe again. He is not death. He is the quiet that comes after the fear.
At first, I painted him for myself. I wanted to put this wish, this longing for quietude after a panic attack, onto a canvas. When I painted him, I felt at peace. I felt calm. My thoughts could roam freely without constantly stumbling into something unpleasant and sending me spiralling. There was nothing to solve and nothing to fear. There was simply the Hangman, his tree, and the world around him.
Over time, I began to paint him again and again. Sometimes he appeared beneath the last light of sunset, when the sky turned from yellow to orange to red. Sometimes he appeared beneath the deep blue of night, with the moon shining somewhere above him. Sometimes the sky was almost empty; sometimes it was full of colour. But the Hangman remained the same: quiet, still, and completely at peace beneath it all.
And slowly, his world began to grow.
What had started as something I painted for myself became a place I wanted to share. I want to share this space with you — a quiet space, a peaceful space, somewhere to go when the world becomes too loud. A place where, for a little while, worries, fears and grief can be left outside.
A place where nothing is expected of you.
A place for those moments when you simply need everything to be quiet.