These photos were never meant to be art.

 

They started during a time when I was trying desperately to find ways not to hurt myself.

 

When a feeling became too big, I needed somewhere for it to go. Writing helped sometimes. Sometimes it didn’t. I tried anything I could think of that might get me through the feeling without putting it into my body.

 

Somewhere along the way, I started turning on a camera.

 

I honestly don’t remember why.

 

In the middle of an intense emotion, I would set up my camera and start recording. Then I would try to figure out how to make whatever I was feeling visible.

 

I used my body. My face. The way I moved or held myself. I grabbed things I found around the house and used them however made sense to me in that moment.

 

Most of these photographs are nude. Not to be provocative. Because there was nothing left to hide behind. It was complete vulnerability, and somehow, it felt freeing.

 

I was trying to show what the feeling felt like.

 

Because in those moments, I didn’t just feel the emotion. I felt like I was the emotion.

 

It consumed everything.

 

I wanted to make what was happening inside me visible on the outside. To give it somewhere else to exist instead of keeping it trapped inside my body.

 

I wanted to release it.

 

Then I would watch the videos back.

 

Watching them was strange because I could actually see myself change.

 

At the beginning, I was completely overwhelmed by whatever I was feeling. I couldn’t control it. But as I started trying different ways to express the emotion, I could watch myself slowly calm down.

 

Sometimes I didn’t even realize how much the feeling had changed until I watched the recording afterward.

 

I’d stop on certain moments and take screenshots. I’d go through them until I found the frames that felt right.

 

I usually chose frames where my face wasn’t visible. And when it was, I sometimes distorted it until it was unrecognizable.

 

It wasn’t because I was trying to hide who I was. I never intended for anyone else to see these photographs in the first place.

 

I didn’t want the photographs to be about me.

 

I wanted my body to portray the feeling without the person attached to it.

 

Then I would edit the photographs myself.

 

And all of that gave me something else to think about.

 

Instead of thinking about cutting, I was thinking about the camera.

 

About how to portray the feeling.

 

About which frame to keep.

 

About what to change in the edit.

 

It gave my hands somewhere else to go.

 

It gave my mind something else to concentrate on.

 

And sometimes, by the time I was finished, the feeling had passed.

 

Or at least it had become something I could survive.

 

I wasn’t posing as someone in pain.

 

I was in pain.

 

The tears are real.

 

The anger is real.

 

The emptiness is real.

 

I started doing this before I understood what was happening inside my head, and I kept doing it while I was learning how to manage it.

 

Even after I knew I had borderline personality disorder, the camera still gave me somewhere to put a feeling when I didn’t know what else to do with it.

 

I wasn’t trying to document borderline personality disorder.

 

I was trying to get through the moment.

 

And I definitely wasn’t making photos for a book.

 

Some of the images came directly from those videos. Others came later, from places, objects, or things I happened to notice when something about them felt familiar.

 

I kept them.

 

Years later, when I began putting TRASH together, I went back through the photos along with the writing.

 

They belonged to the same life.

 

Some of them are in the book. Most of the ones here aren’t.

 

They’re here for the same reason everything in TRASH is.

 

Not because suffering is art.

 

Not because any of it was beautiful.

 

Because when I didn’t know what else to do with what I was feeling, sometimes I wrote it down.

 

And sometimes—

 

I turned on the camera.