What is this sadness? What is this deep feeling inside our bones when we wake, when we walk, when we work and when we wither away into a bath of salty tears after a long day of nothingness?
What is this heaviness that applies itself like a solid necklace constructed by generations of lives and longing before us, choking us in the safety of our own quarantine?
What is this emotional spectrum of good to bad and back again when we still go to sleep warm and loved?
What is this feeling? What is this desperate loneliness, when we have everything we need?
What is this moment of pause and despair that reminds us of the fragility of our spirit? This fragment in time when the guilt of having enough but not doing enough and enough is enough is all intertwined, woven together into a weighted cloak of uncertainty we wear day in and day out.
What is this feeling? What is this desperate loneliness, when we have everything we need?
What is it we need? What is it we feel?
It feels heavy.
The truth is, we don’t know how to feel. We don’t know what this is or how long it’s here to stay. This weight. This sadness. This frustration and anger and hurt and hot tears. But it’s here. It’s within us. It hurts.
Throughout my years as an image making artist, I have been in this place before. Never a place of pandemic, but a place that felt so dark I wasn’t sure how to even look for the light. A place that felt sullen and alone and eventually I started to document it. Shot by shot, I would hear a click and that small sound was the emotional inertia I took comfort in. That push of a button was one step closer to letting it go. It didn’t eliminate the situation and neither does this. But it does something. And sometimes, we just need to do something that allows us to think “this will help.”
The Creative Confessional has always served an audience that was willing to engage in something a little more authentic. A little more real and earnest and raw. A little more emotional. By acknowledging the mess of it all, be it hurt or sadness or sometimes even anger, we can perhaps begin to let a little bit of it go.
If you’d like to schedule a personal session, contact me here.
About the session above
Courtney and I have long been able to connect emotionally, as our lives intertwine and intersect in the most beautiful ways. Her ability to feel, unabashedly, is what makes her a beautiful human, a loving mother, a devoted wife and a pillar of her community. I am forever grateful she asked me to create with her and for knowing that by capturing this heaviness, she lets others know it’s okay to feel it, too.
A heartfelt thank you to KIN for the beautiful borrowed necklace for this shoot.
