2024 Studio Reflection

The end of the year, the start of something new.

2024 was a year that surprised me. I’m not one to forecast too far into the future-I often experience time as “now” or “not now” (thanks ADHD!), and my life thus far has been a series of unlikely events more reminiscent at times to a DND campaign than a logical progression of life choices, so I don’t typically have much of an idea about how years are going to go. Regardless, this year was a year that wholly fell outside of expectation.

I remember entering this year feeling incredibly career oriented, ironic now as I look back and realize that I have done much less “professional work” this year than I have in the past several. How many residency and grant deadlines have I let pass by? To the 2023 version of me, this would be some form of failure, evidence to chuck onto the pile of “I’m not doing enough” that I’ve cultivated over the course of my 20s.

Now, at the end of 2024 however, I find myself sitting in a much different place. Instead of writing this reflection yesterday like I had planned, I sat and watched 9 hours of Critical Role while tending to a migraine. And I enjoyed it (not the migraine, but rather, doing nothing).

At the end of the year, I like to reflect on the most important lessons that I’ve learned throughout the course of the year. This year, I learned not only the value of rest, but how to actually sink into it, how to let my nervous system slowly unfurl against pleasure, how to recognize a day spent wrapped in blankets listening to stories as not only beneficial in allowing me to continue my work, but as needing no purpose at all.

As a chronically ill person, rest comes with a loaded weight. As a child, I rarely had the energy levels of my peers and was often accused of attention-seeking if I demonstrated the childhood signs of fatigue. As a teen and young adult, I found the accusations shifted to that of laziness, entitlement, and naivety about “how the world works.” When I did take rest, I’d be told how lucky I was to be able to take time off, not realizing that a missed shift at work meant a heavy sacrifice to my already bare minimum grocery list, and that missing classes grieved me-I knew how much I was borrowing in loans for my education.

So, I operated for so much of that time in high levels of burnout, utilizing energy drinks and copious amounts of sugar to get through my days, inevitably crashing every six months when my body begged for a day off. I’d lay in bed, body crushed with pain and fatigue so thick that drawing breath felt like weight lifting, and feel so guilty, so angry at my body, feeling like a failure despite the amount of work that I was accomplishing.

I’ve been working on my self judgement around rest since 2020 when I began reading Disability Justice writers like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasina who writes, “It's not about self-care - it's about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there's food at meetings, people work from home - and these aren't things we apologize for.” I began to see myself less as an individual struggling in a sick bed alone, and more as a person in connection to others inside of a system that was failing to support us, in a culture with values of individualism and hyper-productivity that wasn’t resonating with my experience of being alive in a body that requires non-normative things.

2024 was the year for me in which I saw these small seeds of interest grow into the structures defining my life. In that quote from Piepzna-Samarasinha I can see the ways that being a care worker, working with Kinship Photography Collective, and my own photographic practice intersect. It feels like the disparate threads of my life have coalesced into a path that centers care, and I’ve finally managed to extend that care to my own body.

I had three powerful photographic experiences this year that are rooted in this idea of collective and self care. I facilitate practice groups through Kinship Photography Collective and was working with our theme “Between Bodies” over the past year. The idea of a complicated body is at the center of my practice, stemming from my own often contradictory experiences within a body that is both strong and weak, flexible and spasmed, sensitive and resilient. I’m also a self portraiture photographer, and this year in particular I wanted to explore the ways that self portraiture can be a tool of connection outwards, rather than a tool to tunnel inwards.

What better way to explore connection than with other people? I am indebted to the participants of the first practice group I facilitated this year, who endured a semester’s worth of information over the course of 6 90 minute sessions, and made amazing, experimental, courageous art. We explored the edges of bodies, each of us bringing our particular practice to the material, whether collage, landscape photography, self portraiture, or alternative processes.

In that group, I remember one image I made in particular with my friend Kaoly Gutierrez, who was also participating in the group. On a crisp February day, we scrambled down the steep slopes of the creek that winds its way around my house, dodging the early sprouts of nettles, and passed icy cold mountain water between us. Making these images inspired me to continue to explore self portraits with others, something that had always been a private practice for me, or one I’d do with family.

My photography practice often reveals things to me I may not have otherwise noticed about my own life. I spent this year trying to reconnect with an authentic expression of myself after having been rattled to my core by several traumatic events in 2019-2020. Making images with others throughout all of the practice groups I participated in this year gave me a safe space to be vulnerable with others, to be as much in practice of who I am as my craft.

The most recent practice group I facilitated was a self portraiture group, the first group specifically focused on self portraiture that I’ve facilitated in a couple of years. I didn’t know when I set out on this journey with others that a hurricane and a mental health crisis would happen, yet in those dark moments, this group appropriately titled Photographing Our Complicated Bodies was a lifeline. We plunged headlong into the thick of ourselves and each other, discussing and photographing aging, grieving, illness, disaster, trauma, and at its core, living as complicated bodies in a complicated world.

As I mentioned, during this practice group a hurricane devastated western North Carolina. It felt like my entire world was shaken, the first place I’ve ever truly called home ripped apart. It is still hard to see the destruction in town, people are still struggling, still without power in some areas, still weathering through. My mental health was already dangling on a precarious ledge, having been unmoored by trauma work and a lack of internal regulation, and I fell into a very dark place for several weeks that I needed to be pulled out of.

Somehow, in that darkness, as I held tight to my support system, a cycle ended. In 2019 I experienced a mental health episode similar to the one I experienced this year, and it unravelled me. This time, I suddenly became myself again, shattering and reforging all at once. Suddenly, the project that I had been struggling to finish was finished. The work I made in the self portraiture practice group in the midst of external and internal turmoil, brought me back around the bend of a spiral, somehow the same, yet slightly different, to a different time in my life that needed to be resolved.

I think about that practice group and the ways that we came together in such vulnerable ways, and I am filled with gratitude. So much of this year creatively and personally has been fine tuning and discovering a sense of purpose and direction, being curious about the ways I want to move through the world and what I want to build with my time here on earth. When I think about the space we made together, and the work we made together, I hope I get more opportunities to participate in that sort of space.

Returning to care and connection, a really special time for me this year was participating in the Goodall Visiting Fellows program at the Glendale Shoals hosted by Wofford College’s Environmental Science program. I spent nearly 3 weeks in Glendale, South Carolina making photographs and responding to archaeological and ecological findings for what has become an ongoing project titled A Cherished Embrace of Iron and Water.

Reflecting on my time there, I can see the connections I was making between erosion as not only a degenerative force, but as a revealing and generative process, and the personal work I was making in which a breaking down of self allowed for the space to create something new. I love seeing the web of creative processes bringing ideas together in different manifestations and from different angles. While at Glendale, I laid under just bloomed wisteria in an old home site, cold plunged in a mill channel, and made friends with a little black cat who I still see from time to time when I visit.

Another highlight for me this year was spending the summer at my favorite river. Most weeks during the summer I visit my favorite swimming spots at least once. They are places of rest for me, places of healing, places of spiritual energy. I often go alone, though I treasure the moments I share with others at the river. I have the sense that my next project will be river based, judging by the sheer volume of river works that I already have piling in my harddrive.

Post-hurricane, rivers hold different meanings, different stories. Nothing is simple, and as this year has taught me, sitting in complexity often leads to surprising results. As much joy as I’ve experienced at rivers, I’ve also brought a lot of grief with me. As we move into ever more uncertain times, I’ve been thinking heavily about the futures of the rivers I hold dear, and more expansively, our collective futures.

2024 has been a surprising year. I’m not one for resolutions, but I do try to set an intention for the year ahead, even if it is not the same intention that I end the year with. I want to hold onto a spirit of caring as the wheel turns. I think about how easy it is for me to become distracted, scattered, stuck in the mud of my own angst and anxiety. The moments that I treasure the most from 2024 are the ones most filled with care and attention, whether it is being intensely present to a place or a person, holding space in a practice group, attending to a care client at my care work job and sharing a moment of deep connection, emerging from the shocking cold of a river and feeling life fill my lungs, embracing my long distance partner after several weeks apart, or simply admiring the light coming in the window over the kitchen sink.

I hope 2025 treats you well.