I was immediately drawn to Anastasia’s exploration of self-sabotage, mainly because she approaches it from an angle we don’t usually consider when talking about creatureness. Her creatures aren’t brave, curious, or resilient. They hesitate, push people away, make the wrong move at the wrong moment. In other words, they behave in ways we often try to hide in ourselves.

I found particularly compelling how she links self-sabotage to a sense of helplessness. Not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, everyday one: the feeling of being stuck in a loop you know too well but can’t seem to break. Her analysis shows this through two very different works: one stuck in a mechanical trap, the other pushing away the help it claims to need.

The part that stayed with me is the distinction she makes between occasional bad decisions and a full pattern of self-defeating behaviour. In her reading, self-sabotage isn’t simply “messing up”; it becomes an entire operating system. Her description of Round Table and The Helpless Robot powerfully reframes these artworks as portraits of beings trapped in their own internal contradictions. I found this particularly compelling because it shifts focus from “creatures behaving like humans” to “creatures illuminating the things humans rarely admit about themselves.” The result is deeply human, even though her creatures are not.

Together, these examples suggest that self-sabotage has many origins such as fear, pride, confusion, or simply an old habit that has tightened into a cage.