We all have tells – behaviour that gives away how we’re feeling. Some get a restless leg, others might twitch – in my case, it’s pulling at my sternum. I wasn’t an anxious child, but I’m an anxious adult. It wasn’t a gradual process either.

There’s a divide in my life – the timeline breaks at 21. I lost parts of myself and grew new ones, so I had to relearn simply how to be. “Distakk” means divide. Death comes with many divisions, the obvious divide between the dead and the living, that of who you were before the loss and your isolation from the world, both intentional and not. 

If “Stalletti is a representation of how I cope with grief, “Distakk” is a testament to how I dysfunction. My likeness is shown wearing an iron crown, weighing me down as my inherited duties and tribulations. Much like in “Moħħ ir-Riħ”, the subject is only a facade, and a disintegrating one at that.