Although I appear healthy, my chronic illness is not visible, it also comes with mental health difficulties.
Small fibre neuropathy (SFN) can be difficult to live with, the small nerves falsely report pain when there is none. My diagnosis came with frustration, disappointment, sombre feelings and limited treatment options. I lost the identity and social contact that came from my career. My body is like a rechargeable battery that is incapable of fully recharging, always running on reduced energy, with SFN stealing at least of 30% of it.
Using my photography skills to focus on what I can do instead of what I cannot do, expressing my creative side and setting a goal to boost my mental health, a kind of self-help therapy.
This has allowed me to discover a strength that I never thought I had, pushing the limits of my comfort zone by making a series of self-portraits using multiple exposures to create images, where my visibility is akin to the energy levels of my body.
Using the lack of colour in some images reflects my struggles with mental health. My visibility in the images reflects both my good and bad days. On the bad days the noise generated by my brain is impossible to drown out. The making of these self-portraits can sometimes be challenging, my position in the frame is not always optimal.
My illness will always be part of me, but it is invisible, using photographic techniques to make myself transparent, creating the metaphor that the less you see of me the more I am consumed by illness and thus you don’t see the whole of me, my illness and how it makes me feel, is missing from your view.
