Photography by
JKG | jkgphotography.co.uk
Location: Clapham, London
Part of the reason I've been so MIA from the internet is because it feels like my entire world is crashing down around me and at any given moment I will combust into a million little pieces.
I know it sounds dramatic. And it is.
But its also the truth.
Every January for as long as I can remember I have made a choice to try and make the year ahead, the best one yet. What can I say? I'm always the optimistic I guess.
But at the start of the year, things just felt... different. They just felt off. Alien. Something I hadn't felt before.
Defeated comes to mind.
It was like I had suddenly woken up and everything had changed. One minute things were okay, the next minute they weren't and this has been the theme for the entire year.
Over the last 12 months I've had to make really big, really difficult decisions and life has felt like its been running at 100 mph. And everyday I've been playing catch up and failing miserably. (Picture me as a hamster, running on a hamster wheel).
It's been dark and heavy, and there have been days where I genuinely didn't think I could go on anymore. I have spent weeks and weeks of crying myself to sleep, days lying in bed with no energy to even brush my teeth and the most mundane, simplest of tasks have felt like moving mountains.
There has been a constant grey cloud attached to my heart and the pain of that attachment has trickled down into every area of my life - especially my work.
I guess I realised over time that I wasn't happy with anything. My relationship, my work, myself. And maybe for most of my life I just ignored how I really felt because I was 1. conditioned to do so and 2. because I was scared to choose myself.
Scared of the unknown.
Scared of the calm because I was born into chaos.
You see, trauma really does shape a false sense of reality and over the last year its like I've snapped out of whatever slumber I've been in.
An incredibly powerful and profound awakening, but uncomfortable and difficult nonetheless.
I think I'm grieving too. Grieving for who I used to be and desperately clinging on to parts of myself, parts of my life and parts of people who no longer serve me.
Maybe learning to let go is what this year has been about. Even though its been shit, I hope to look back in years to come and realise that 2018 in fact, was the year that prepared me for life.
The growth has left me speechless, but the pain has left me speechless too. It's just remarkable that we as humans can break, and still breathe. Isn't it?
With everything that's been going on, my work has had to take a back seat. And rightly so because how can I know what I want to do, if I don't know who I am.
To sit in darkness and feel like a failure hasn't been easy, but I had no other option. It got to a point where everything had to come crashing down because I physically, mentally and spiritually could not continue living life the way I was.
So here we are..
I'm broken. But not in a hopeless, please rescue me kind of way. But in a way that says "I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get through this, but I know with every inch of me that I will because I have gone through worse and still risen. Because I know that the plan God has for me is greater than any plan I will have for myself. Because cracks are where the light comes in and I just know, one day soon I will shine"
This is the first post I've put together in months. I'm currently eating flapjacks, drinking orange and pineapple squash and listening to music. I'm here. I'm still alive, I'm still standing - with weak legs maybe but I'm standing.
I can't say what the future has for me and my platforms. I can sense change coming, but in what capacity? I do not fucking know. I'm still a bit scared to let go, but everyday I edge closer and closer to jumping off the cliff and free falling into the unknown. To freedom. True, unfiltered freedom.
Maybe freedom scares all of us?
