ReFrame

She looked up from her clinical results and said, “ You have depression”. Right until that moment, I was absolutely certain she would say I was perfectly fine. No malaise that a robust 3-course degustation of vitamins, water and sleep would not remedy.

Depression was for weak-minded people. Depression was for the delicate waifs with fragile dispositions. Not iron-fortified spines like mine that worked 70 hour weeks. That never complained. That never slacked off. That never shed a tear. Not even when the cold fingers of miscarriage, cancer or suicide pressed in on my heart.

When my doctor diagnosed me with depression, I opened my mouth to protest. To say “NO. You got it wrong. That’s not me.” But instead, to my horror and dismay, the foreign sounds of a sob broke out of my windpipe.

Unbeknownst to me, my body had long been trying to tell me what I blatantly and repeatedly squelched down. Hard. In spite of my will and resistance, my body signature recognised the liberation it had been presented with. It was crying from the sheer relief of finally having a name to the free-falling abyss it found itself sinking deeper into.

At 39, I had felt a slippage. An oiliness that threatened my steadfastness. The more I tried to grasp for a foothold, the more violently it would jolt the core of my being. Ever so slowly and deliberately, my foundation began to unravel. A gradual loss of presence. A subtle loss of identity.

It wasn’t until the diagnosis that I realised I had a deeply entrenched but conflicted part of me that believed I was not even worthy of a diagnosis like depression. That depression was a privilege reserved for the people who have earned that right. War veterans, refugees, firefighters, social workers, paramedics… Individuals who have witnessed the sheer horrors and raw heartbreaks that is the weight of our humanity.

All the things I wasn’t. I mandated every cell in me to stay the course and hold on tightly to any semblance of normality like a lifeline. Even as the pressures were forcing fissures into my finely carved facade, my cells obeyed.

A facade laboriously carved from decades of achieving and striving. Striving to be good enough to take up the oxygen that meant denying someone else of theirs. At times, I feel the diagnosis has robbed me of so much. Friends. Family. A life. In their stead, a barren land of silence, quietude and loneliness. Only the walking dead roam this land.

The understanding of what depression feels like can never be fully articulated. I struggled to talk about it, instead choosing to retreat under the safety of my bedcovers and behind my lens. I convinced myself into thinking, it’s okay. There is no need to speak of it. In fact, was there any need to speak even?

Years past and one day, I am startled by my own reflection walking before me. Except it is in the lanky length of an 18-year-old boy. A 6 feet two inches mass of sullen dullness.

I didn’t think my depression could be any harder to bear but I was wrong. I didn’t want to just bear it and carry it stoically like the life I used to lead. Or rather, I couldn’t. In catching the reflection of my depression in my son, I knew I needed to give it air, that it might inflate and rise away from my loved ones and I. Unspoken, the weight of it had secretly calcified over my heart and then seeped into the arteries of anyone attached to me. I saw the generational burden of it would continue seeking payment of everyone in my bloodline because my silence was infectious.

If there was any possibility that my children could escape a similar fate, I could not look away. I had to walk in and shine the light into the dark corners where I fear to tread.

I set myself to work. I didn’t have to look for happiness, the task seemingly insurmountable. Instead, I only had to look for just one small moment of expression every day. Maybe a deep embrace as I inhale gratitude and exhale peace. Maybe a smile raised from the heart to my eyes. Maybe capturing a scene that felt like the love letters that the universe has strewn all over the world for us to find.

In this way, I discovered that in the briefest of moments before my finger depresses on the shutter button of a camera, there exists a great expanse of space. A wormhole into an alternate plane where I live weightless in timelessness. A dimension where lines are more defined. Curves more refined. Where gradients of colours ebb and flow ad infinitum, in nameless shades my tongue could never enunciate.

Photography gave me a way to express that which words were inadequate to do. It gave me an avenue to own my diagnosis on my terms and not the other way around.

It became my parallel universe. The alternate plane created when the world I live in within collides with the world outside. In that temporal macrocosm between my exhalation and the next inhalation.

For we walk upon this earth but do not truly see.

We speak but we do not hear.

We exist but really, are we living?

It took surrendering my efforts at resisting and embracing my diagnosis to reveal to me the wonder of it was, there was, in fact, another reality available to me.

A reality in which my debilitations could have a purpose. A voice which expresses itself through my creative process and a place in which I could take shape in the world. Owning it would not only bring such joy previously unknown to me but also become a conduit and lifeline to the ones I was stranded from.

The photo I shared was a scene I came across completely by chance on my solitary walks. I had noticed a beautiful brick chimney peeping up in the distance beyond the crown of trees in Colmslie Park where I was. I wondered what it was and with the chimney as my compass, I came across this old derelict building. Telltale signs of an impending demolition were sprawled outside the but within the quiet stillness of these walls, the future had yet been spoken about. Instead, it continued to receive its visitors. A steady stream of sunlight, breeze, dust and leaves found their way into this sanctuary. That afternoon, it welcomed me too and it felt like home.

I wanted to capture this image on my iPhone X because it contained precisely how I was feeling at the moment. I felt that the window to the world outside me was distorted but instead of feeling more disassociated, I felt more aware than I had ever been. The physical window was the norm of society's expectations of behaviour and life. Whereas the diagonal image of the window laid across it was more radiant than the real window. At that moment, the entire scene spoke sharply to me on how reality comes down to how we decide to frame it. That we do not have to follow what was mandated but that we can create our own framework that allows our light to come through.

After capturing this image on my iPhone, I played with the lights and colour on the lightroom mobile app to dull the things that I did not feel captured my sentiment. Then I lifted the elements that resonated powerfully for me. The window, the makeshift temporal light window and the stillness of the space within these walls.

Our internal dialogue matters and finding a way to express our voice is possible. It may not be with our vocal chords but who said that our voices can only be heard that way? Only the world. But what do they know?

So, you follow the little breadcrumbs of exploration gently at your own pace. Look and listen with your ears, eyes and heart. It will come to us when we least expect it. Maybe a little chimney is also peeking out above a canopy of trees hoping you will notice it too.