Dealing with Worry In Paint

Sometimes, my mind gets punctured by irrational thoughts which want to be perceived as legitimate concerns but are actually trap doors into underlying fears which thrive on obsession. Like quicksand, the harder I try to reason with and escape the thought, the deeper my perception is distorted by its contents. In the same way someone has an obsessive thought such as 'What if I didn't turn the stove off?' and then repeatedly performs the compulsion of checking the stove in order to ward off the constantly amplifying question 'What if I didn't turn the stove off?', I systematically revisit the instrusive thought in my mind just to make sure it isn't an actual threat. Usually when replaying the thought, I must utter a word or phrase as though it possessed magical powers to exorcise my mind of the original intrusion. I liken it a spiraling staircase and decided to create a piece that uses a spiral staircase as a motif rather than just expressing my anxiety in the form of raw abstraction. A piece I'm currently working on shows a man crouched in fetal position at the most distant vortex of a spiral staircase we are lookin up. Each step in the staircase represents the obsession repeating itself. This will definitely not be thee last time I employ this symbolism. I plan on letting this composition evolve and let the symbolism of the stairs perhaps become something more visceral, but this piece the beginning of an interesting series I am exited to see evolve.