September and October Reflection

After Storms

It has been a little over a month since hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, and it has taken this long to feel like I could be coherent in a blog post. I cannot accurately articulate the impact of this storm, the way that the mountains themselves have been permanently altered, beloved, ancient rivers shifted and changed. The loss of life, livelihoods, and cherished places is heavy.

And through it all, the communities that live here in these mountains have come together in a tremendous way, creating systems of care and mutual aid that demonstrate the importance of community and offer a glimpse of ways of being rooted in care rather than profit. This is not to gloss over the support that Appalachia still desperately needs to rebuild, both physically and economically, but to tenderly hold the shifts that have happened in the wake of catastrophe.

I feel incredibly fortunate and am grateful to have emerged from Helene with life and home intact. The emotional toll of seeing my chosen home so distraught, of losing many of the places that I used to frequent, of feeling the incredible instability of the moment, has been heavy. Yet, that emotional burden feels less in comparison to the friends, co-workers, and community members I know who have lost so much more. 

As a member of Kinship Photography Collective, I’ve been contemplating the connection between our bodies and earth bodies this year as we explore our Between Bodies call. As someone who often experiences illness, who is often sensitive (emotionally and physically), I’ve noticed patterns and cycles in myself that intersect with patterns and cycles of the world around me. Climate justice and disability justice contain important intersections, our bodies and earth bodies hold knowledge that we will need for the future.

Throughout this month, a tether to sanity (in a very literal sense) was making work alongside participants in Photographing Our Complicated Bodies, the practice group I facilitated this fall for Kinship. As I’ve written about recently, I largely took a break from making work this summer, and I intentionally wanted to explore what self portraits meant to me with this group.

What I learned is that photography is essential to my sense of self. There is something in the practice of sitting for the camera, being present to the light, exploring the images after making them, that holds space for me to connect to not only myself, but the relationships I have with others. I had worried this summer while working with an ill-matched therapist that I was forcing photography into my life, that the thing that feels so central to my world was exhausting me. After this experience of stepping away and coming back, I feel so much that the opposite is true, that photography is a necessary fuel for my life that brings energy back to me.

It is not just the photography, the act of sitting for the camera, or the mindfulness with which I conduct my photographic practice, but it is also the continued sharing of work within a community, the conversations and connections that arise in showing up each week to a Kinship meeting, or to a practice group, and feeling held and safe enough to be vulnerable. As someone who has struggled to connect intimately with others and feel safe in that connection, Photographing Our Complicated Bodies was so personally important because it grounded me in those safe connections.

So much of what we talked about in the practice group was processing shame, shame around our naked bodies, shame around our mental health challenges, our identities, how our identities are viewed in the context of place, the intersections between shame and grief, and more. Although I have often shared very vulnerable stories and information alongside my photographs, I have become increasingly aware of the layers of shame I have built up within myself over the past several years, and this group helped me move through those layers of shame to arrive at a deeper place within myself, and I feel more able to share narratives from within my lived experience.

Through this group, the experience of the hurricane, and some incredible conversations with a number of my photographic community (Barron Northrup and Susan Patrice spring to mind),  I was able to finish the photography portion of Upheaval this month. After 3.5 years of struggling and wrestling with this project, it finally feels complete. I received feedback this summer during a Kinship portfolio review that the reason the project didn’t feel finished to me might be because I hadn’t lived through the ending of it, and I am indebted to that advice (given by Cricket Woodward, a wonderful photographer and artist).

Part of the reason that the hurricane felt so destabilizing to my mental health was not only because it was a major natural disaster with devastating impacts, but because of the realization that my home, a home I came to seeking stability, the first home in which I have felt truly safe as myself, truly at peace, could be so significantly altered by forces out of my control. I’m sure that this is a common feeling by people who have lived through a natural disaster, so I’m not claiming my personal realization as anything particularly exceptional.

Still, the hurricane felt like a completion of a cycle, this shaken sense of home and belonging, of loss in a home that I have come to love more fiercely and deeply than anyplace I have lived before. It felt like a moment of reckoning, a realization that this is my home, and all of the vulnerability and fear of loss that comes with deep attachment. For the first time in my life I feel less like an outsider looking in through a pane of glass and more like a person with my feet in the soil.

Upheaval is, at its core, a project about home seeking, both in body and place. When I became severely ill 5 years ago, I went through several hospitalizations, 3 surgeries in a year, an unexpected hysterectomy, surgical complications, all while navigating severed relationships, complicated family dynamics, and eventually, the pandemic. It was a complete shattering of self, a rending of both tissue and identity in the years where a sense of self as an adult begins to emerge.

With that came the realization that I had lived most of my late teens and early 20s out of alignment with my values, dysregulated and struggling to cope after experiencing immense amounts of childhood stress, on hormones that ultimately were not the appropriate treatment for my conditions, shoving myself into a closet to avoid the complicated relationship to gender that I’ve always had and hiding from what I believed to be inevitable rejection.

The process of making Upheaval was a process of rebuilding a self, and a self that is in relationship to the world around me, a self that feels true and honest to who I am, a self that carries generations of hurt, genetic illness, hard memories, and difficult times, but also the joy of swimming in the river, of a partner’s embrace, the pleasure of eating a watermelon in a sunlit kitchen, of cooking with my grandmother at her dining room table.

I’ve been thinking about brokenness as a complex thing, not only a site of mourning, but one of creation. What happens after the shattering, what opportunities arise in the mending of things? What new acts of creation can come from disruption? I return to questions because their openness makes a future feel possible. 

To end this post, I’d like to list places to support people affected by Hurricane Helene. Kinship Photography Collective is collecting donations to be redistributed to photographers in our community who are facing loss of income and who have need due to the storm. Beloved Asheville and Roar WNC have also been active organizations distributing supplies, volunteering, and in general being community hubs during this time. Nanostead has been continuously supporting clean-up efforts in Marshall, the town that I live closest to which was completely flooded by the French Broad River. I have also been posting individual GoFundMe pages on my Instagram stories and have highlighted them on my profile.

Stay well.