PHOTOGRAPHY
“I am not just capturing moments. This is about seizing emotions.”
Self-portraitAngel in Solitude
Loneliness. Their greatest enemy. Isolation creeps in so slowly they hardly notice, until one day they look around and realize they are not being seen. Not being heard. Not being felt.
At first, they fight it by filling the emptiness with short-lived pleasures: Chemically pumped foods, substances that feel like magic, casual sex they convince themselves is enough. Who needs true intimacy? Anything is better than the void inside their hearts.
They go out to be visually seen, but that only deepens the loneliness. The contrast cuts sharper than they had expected. All these eyes glued on them, and yet, still unseen. Just a fantasy. A full crowd, empty of meaning.
The more people they meet, the more they learn about betrayal and heartbreak. As children they were warned not everyone is kind but as they grow older, they begin to see the real darkness within people, and it hurts.
So how do they escape this painful realization? Most choose distraction. But there are some that choose silence. They retreat, take a step back and carry it alone. Too afraid of more pain they won’t let anyone close. They feel as if no one truly understands what they are trying to express so they give it up and let stillness take over their hearts.
Doll Babe
Inspired by the song “The Doll People” by Sofia Isella I have taken some time to think about the topic that is touched upon in the lyrics.
We hear it all the time: The struggles women* face daily to survive in a world like ours and yet, nothing changes. We are only respected and treated nicely when we are pretty. But even then, we face new problems. Suddenly all that matters is how “fuckable” we are and not our souls. Commitment? Of course not. Why bother with love and care when quick, disposable satisfaction is so close?
We live in constant danger of being harassed, objectified, and reduced to nothing more than art that can be fucked (lyrics reference). Being desired is much more important. Set your own desires aside if you want to make it.
So, we learn to play our part. Be a doll. Always available when wanted. Quiet when convenient. Put away when the novelty wears off.
The most disturbing part is where violence itself is eroticized: “Take the screaming one, because a woman who doesn’t want it is much hotter than one that does.” Consent is dismissed. Control becomes the fetish.
I want to acknowledge that I am aware that men* also face harassment, and the men* that part of my life would never harm me nor any other woman*. But it is undeniable that women* face more violence. I carry memories of what my body has endured, moments when I thought my life could end because men decided it was their choice. I couldn’t be more grateful to be safe now. Stay safe, keep loving.
Rockstar Princess
The idea of having to have only one identity makes no sense to me. There is no point in trying to truly find oneself, it simply is impossible because there is no true self. Every experience that includes another person will automatically attach to one’s personality and becomes part of it. I think to prevent that, one would have to be isolated from birth on but even then, the genes from our biological parents will define us. No way out of this hell of individualism.
What makes us truly different is the fact that we all interact with different individuals for different time periods. There can be similarities and individuals can get categorized based on the fact, that they spend their time with the same type of people and shape themselves unintentionally into them.
And in the end, I am backstabbing myself by inevitably morphing the reflection of others into my own.
But maybe that’s the only way to exist at all. I have become a collage of everyone I have ever met; the people who hurt me, the people who loved me, the ones who looked at me like I was a mirror they could not understand. Maybe that’s what identity is: not a single truth, but a thousand small contaminations we learn to arrange into something coherent enough to live with.
I no longer search for a pure version of myself. Purity has always been the illusion. The more I tried to isolate who I was, the more hollow I became. Now, I prefer the noise, the overlapping voices, the borrowed gestures, the faint echoes of others that still hum beneath my own.
There is a certain freedom in admitting that we are never untouched. It removes the pressure to perform individuality, to prove that we are original when, in reality, we are all extensions of each other. I find comfort in that blur, in knowing that my contradictions are not failures, but evidence of being alive.
In the end, maybe the point isn’t to find myself, but to continue dissolving and reforming, to let the version of me that exists today coexist with all the others I have been before.