A bigger picture

Drifting – image of grasses and leaves

I know I promised insects. You will get insects but not today. Today I want to focus on my mental health. Partly because yesterday my mind was restless like the leaves and stems in the photo above. Yesterday my mind was full of movement but also anchored to the ground making me feel both stuck and motion sick at the same time.

Reflecting on my mental health

I’ve already written a little bit about how my sight affects my photography and also what I gain from digital photography as a way of seeing the world. I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years. I haven’t spent as much time thinking about how my photography affects and reflects my mental health, though until recently. I always knew that taking photographs was a way for me to distract myself for a little while from distressing feelings and also that if I stop taking photos, or no longer want to, its a sure sign that my mood is low. It then becomes a vicious circle: I don’t want to take photographs but taking photographs helps me, but if I don’t take any I feel more depressed, the more depressed I feel the less likely I am to want to take any photographs.

It doesn’t always mean I’m depressed if I’m not taking photos but its a sure sign when I don’t want to if I’m given the opportunity. So it’s an important way for me to gauge my mood but is it something more and do I get more out of it than just a mere distraction from mental distress?

Here’s a little bit about my mental health condition. I have been living with PTSD for nearly 25 years and because it wasn’t treated appropriately for much of that time and multiple traumatic things happened to me over the years it became what is known as complex PTSD. The main trigger happened in 1997 and was work related. I will write about this in the future but for now for those of you who don’t know me the experience was extreme, made the international news and left me feeling helpless and hopeless. Those two emotions contribute a lot to who will develop PTSD in any traumatic situation. If you have agency or are able to do something at the time to make a difference, it helps you deal with the trauma. It doesn’t mean you won’t experience PTSD but helps you cope. I felt as if I couldn’t do anything useful for myself or the others around me who were suffering and that feeling of helplessness meant it was harder for me to process at the time. Another contributing factor to developing PTSD is if you have experienced trauma as a child. Although I have always had a supportive and loving family there were some things which happened in my childhood that they nor I, had any control over and one of the biggest was the fact that I was born blind and how that was dealt with in the 1970s.

I spent frequent periods of time as a baby away from my parents in hospital and had numerous operations on my eyes which were always followed by eye drop treatment which I absolutely hated even as a baby. Later I would have more surgery as a 4 year old. Then there was the battle my parents went through for me to be allowed to attend the local school rather than a specialist boarding school. Even then the local school excluded me from certain activities like learning the recorder because of my eye sight. Meanwhile to stop me form having to go to a boarding school and avoiding the whole family moving to Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles, my Dad who was in the RAF, was posted there for 2 years with out us. We got to see him maybe every 6 weeks for a weekend. What I hadn’t appreciated for nearly 45 years was just how big an impact all this had on me and this all happened to me before the age of 6.

Nowadays thankfully parents can stay overnight with infants and children in hospital (well when there isn’t a covid pandemic.) There is a greater understanding of how hospitalisation and medical treatment impacts on youngsters including their behaviour. My confidence and independence as a very small child most probably was somewhat down to personality but also the situation I found myself in. Little did any of us know back then that it might be a warning sign of emotional trauma. Later in life it would lead to my habit of not opening up about how I really felt, a belief I had to be self reliant at all costs fuelled by a constant fear of abandonment. I have to stress that just this alone isn’t the cause of my cPTSD. But it is the shaky foundation that other traumas and upset through my life was built on and eventually it had to give.

But I can come back to all this later. In the future I want to explore further how my experiences as a disabled child, teenager and adult impacted on my mental health but I’ll have to break it down into manageable chunks or I’ll never get through it all.

Back to photography

Sea spray – Brighton beach May 2021

The picture above is one I took whilst in Brighton in May. I picked it because it is that stereo typical rough sea image for feeling emotional. But stereo types usually have a grain of something if not always truth in them and in this case the sea can be a wonderful metaphor for emotion. For me this photo reflects my state of mind when, like last night, I feel restless and frustrated. The sea spray and mist, the unnatural looking yellow of the light make an atmospheric photo but can represent a confusing state of mind. One where, what I want, which is rest and clarity, is obscured from me.

Below is an image of a beautiful cottage garden in Surrey. We stayed there in May 2019 just before I Started the EMDR treatment, which has had such an impact on treating my cPTSD. At the time I was in a bad way, and this brief holiday was where I made the decision to take some time away from work and to really give the EMDR treatment a shot. The garden was wonderfully healing but this picture also bothers me. It’s full of chromatic aberration (the purple and green fringing on tree branches and bright white things in the photograph.) It’s caused by my cheap 35mm lens and the light conditions. If I try to remove it, Light Room also removes the bright pink of the flowers on the right. I’m sure if I opened up photo shop I could remove it with a bit of time and patience. But because of the chromatic aberration it works as an image representing my mind, or my mental health.

At the time, early May 2019 I would not have selected this photograph to represent my mind or my emotional state. I’d have probably picked something bleak and featureless. I had lost all sense of who I was. I couldn’t remember a time when I had felt like me. Let alone a time when I felt happy or content, other than the odd fleeting moment where I’d feel like I’d glimpsed myself in the mirror only to lose sight of myself again. There was a void where I should have been. That’s how I felt,

What really was happening was this photograph. I was there still – this vibrant messy garden but I was scattered like the light and the various parts of this image. There was so much going on I couldn’t take any of it in. Instead I focussed on one patch of grey white sky in the top left corner. A void, avoiding all the rest of the garden bursting with life. And if I did glimpse the bigger picture all I saw was the chromatic aberration that I wanted to airbrush away but there was so much of it, it would be impossible to do and I was terrified if I succeeded in cleaning up the picture I’d lose those vibrant pink flowers in the foreground. So best not to try just go back to that patch of grey white void and disappear there.

Spring – Surrey Cottage Garden

I’m pleased to say that through my EMDR treatment I have been able to see the bigger picture and not lose any bright and important parts of me. It’s helped me zoom out from that void and not only see myself but accept and embrace all the parts of me that were hurt.

Now I have to take the time to really let myself thrive.

I do love to be beside the seaside – Golden Hour Part 2

Brighton beach at sunset – taken on my iPhone

Earlier in the week I posted about golden hour and how the light just after dawn and just before sunset is the best for photography. Above is an example of a golden hour photograph. I took it in Brighton earlier this year. I’d gone there for a couple of days holiday, staying for the first time in an airbnb.

I was signed off work sick whilst I completed my treatment for complex PTSD. I’ve been having treatment called EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) it’s been in the news recently because Prince Harry has had the treatment to deal with the trauma around the death of his mum, Princess Diana. Although I’ve been having sessions for some time, the pandemic has made the process take longer than usual, as there have been months when I couldn’t visit my therapist due to social distancing. In May we were drawing to the end of my treatment and I was finding it increasingly difficult to work and give myself the time I needed to get well and process the treatment. I was processing trauma going back to my childhood and relating to being visually impaired. Something I hope I’ll be able to post about in the future.

But for now let’s just focus on Brighton. I was there for a couple of days because I needed some time away by myself. I took my camera and I had nothing planned but to take photographs, walk, listen to podcasts and eat some nice food.

I did all these things and on the first night I went out for a walk with my camera at golden hour. It was really cold and blustery. I’ve never seen Brighton seafront quite like it. The sea was really rough. but the sun came out and transformed a stormy evening into something magical. The light in the photo above was enhanced by the sea mist that formed a haze towards Hove. The gull was stroke of luck.

I hope the photo below gives an idea of the rough sea and lovely light. The ruined pier is always a great subject and I was lucky to capture the person on the beach being buffeted by the wind.

Squally sea spray – image taken with my Nikon D7200 camera 35mm f/1.8

So a lucky gull and person helped both photographs be something more than just a landscape shot. Although luck played a part in creating these images, obviously I still needed to be in the right place at the right time, taking photos. It comes back to that, take as many photos as you can tip. Keep snapping and something will turn up.

I remember getting back to the flat where I was staying feeling thoroughly energised from the wind and sea air and by the glorious yolky light of the sun. The next day was warm in the morning and I walked along the sea front for quite a way and then had Japanese food for lunch. Staying in Brighton was like a moment of calm in over a year of turmoil both in the world in general and with my own emotions. When I am out with my camera, that turmoil just ebbs away. The only thing that matters is being in the zone, creating images and seeing things in a different light.