the practice of looking at yourself

on recording pain and entering a new moment

there is a Frida Kahlo quote which has shown up across the internet, been reblogged on teenager’s tumblrs (mine, probably multiple times). she said, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”

for almost ten years, I have been documenting myself. when I say this, I am not directly referring to writing poems or essays, but photography. the camera has been a marker of myself, and in ways, a creator of the self. every photograph can be an illusion - a frozen moment that was designed. what we choose to capture and subsequently hang onto holds weight. what is displayed also contains all that we have decided not to show.

when I was 19, I took this photograph of myself:

I was standing in my bathroom, in suburban north county San Diego. my mom and I just had gotten into a big fight. over what? I can’t remember. what I remember is the sense of panic in myself. the desperate need to escape the moment and my body–to find some way out of my bubbling emotions. the camera provided a way out. impulsively, while sobbing, I began to photograph myself. this drew me out of myself and into a new moment. perhaps, it created a new moment.

I posted this image on my Tumblr blog after. looking back now, this concerns me. posting my very real and raw pain online for strangers to decide if it was worth reblogging? horrifying. yet this has been characteristic of much of the art I have shared online for years. here is some deep and real hurt for your reblogging and visual pleasure. do you like it? does it mean something to you? can you feel my pain? in retrospect, this seems that it was a bandaid slapped onto a deeper need for understanding.

the photo went viral on Tumblr. (the pain was successful! it drew them in!) after the likes and reblogs piled up, the magazine adbusters emailed me. the image had spoken to them (the display of pain was successful again!) and they wanted to use it on their cover. I agreed.

there is something so absurd to me now that an instance of pain I experienced not only became an image shared on people’s blogs, but then ended up on a magazine. festering psychic wounds with a headline above it that said, you don’t need a therapist: just buy this magazine at the top. actually, I think I could have really used a therapist at that time. or at least a friend to talk to, some meds maybe, or resources.

once it was published, my mother, sister, and I were walking around a crafty mall in Orange County. in an artisanal hiking store, a magazine rack lay with a copy of adbusters on it. there were my eyes, staring back at me, asking to be heard. in another fit of absurdity, my mom was proud of the photo. that’s my daughter, she may have said, hoping others would hear. you could not see the reason I was crying in the photo. gone was the fight my mother and I had, the screaming that had led to me locking myself in the bathroom. left behind was an image. pain that was flattened, printed, and consumable. it was easier to look at that way.

I don’t have an end direction for this in mind. this is one of the most exciting things about writing for me. if you give yourself permission to stumble through your own mind, you don’t know what you will find. in this meandering walk through the past, I am encountering some questions: why put your pain on display? is it possible to exploit yourself? does documenting a true moment of hurt you experienced cease to make it true, but designed or artful even?

these aren’t questions I necessarily have answers for. and even if I did in this moment, my answers would likely change, ebbing and flowing as new layers bounced into my head. what has been the result of my sharing highly vulnerable work online for ten years? to unpack this in an email newsletter would simply be another form of intense self-examination, which I seem to really get off on. and I say that with love for myself and admission of how absurd that is. and while I’m at it, how absurd the world too.

looking at the past from the place I am in now, I can see that photographing myself in moments of pain has given me a document. it is not a document of the truth. rather, it is a document weaved with a hopefulness. being able to design a moment through choices of how to photograph it have allowed me to exit moments of pain. they have allowed new moments to be created.

this is not me pushing for people in crisis modes to document themselves as their sole way through. I recognize that this is simply not available to everyone, that access to a camera and the Internet were a blessing. while I am grateful for the way people have shared my artwork online, I think having a respite from my home environment, mental health resources, money to leave, and therapy of some sort would have aided me a lot. I recognize that, and I do not look back on documenting myself through photography with complete romanticization. but I do think that the documentation of the self can give a thread of hope to hang onto. it can create a new moment. there are many times that picking up a camera kept me from hurting myself. and even though that didn’t absolve the pain completely it did help, in the moment.

for much of my life I have hoped for some kind of a witness. for someone who would understand me so deeply that they could take away what hurt me. though I no longer want that nor find that desire romantic, I see now: I provided myself that act of witnessing. the camera has been a tool of looking, seeing, recording and reshaping moments. and I haven’t stopped looking.