Marie’s 2023 in Photos
Art
This year I played a bit more with art. Bought some watercolor pens and enjoyed those making art that reminded me of neurons and synapses as I began to learn about my own mind. Also upcycled my tattoo into a reminder about awareness and attention. As I faced my deepest mental health issues, using art to track the understandings I was gaining (and losing) was a helpful way to keep a semblance of myself together.
career
After being laid off in October 2022, I found a part-time role in February as the Director of Operations at a start-up company that facilitates the funding of other start-up companies. I faced major imposter syndrome as well as other mental health complications. But 10 months into it, now, I am feel much more capable than I thought possible. I’m getting to meet a lot of driven, intelligent, creative thinking, change-making people in my community. I’m not sure what’s next for me, but this has been a safe place to land this year as I have been working on my mental health.
I have also kept up my life coaching work but haven’t heavily marketed it this year due to my own mental health. However, as my mind and body have begun to heal, I’ve seen that what I’m able to offer the clients I do have is something much more profound that I could before. I am hoping to lean more into this work again in the following year.
family
Family was very important this year. There was Adam & Ember as my domestic family until July. Then my domestic family became myself and my two cats. My parents and I kicked up our relationship quality exponentially this year which has been very healing for me. I’m still sorting through where I belong and what family means. My other long-distance partner, Graham, was an incredibly essential support for the latter half of the year as I went through a domestic shift and deep into my own trauma work.
friends
Friends have never been so essential and valuable to me as they were this year. This year I really unpacked what safety, love, acceptance, vulnerability, boundaries, and belonging mean. I’m so grateful for the friends that stayed with my in my darkest hours this year, plunging into the questions of What Am I? I wasn’t able to give as much energy into my community organizing this year as my personality fell apart (still cobbling it back together), but I’m hoping that’s something I can do more of next year, if I want to still.
Mental Health
As inferred directly in the categories above, this year has been HELL for my mental health. The former part of the year, I was living with Adam & Ember but I was profoundly dissociated and derealized, locked inside myself and unable to communicate what was going on with me. When I moved out in the summer, the complications of that decision weighed heavy on me (and still do). Living alone for the first time, I am brutally forced to witness my own mind and make some kind of understanding with my own essence. I have dabbled in all kinds of things, trying to find anything that would help me understand what I was going through, why I was experiencing so much depersonalization and existential shock. After experimenting with more spiritual perspectives, I’ve eventually begun to settle into an understanding that I am not my thoughts,… that humans are incredibly complex in their minds. That we are all qualified to witness the goings-on of our mind and that it is always working to help us if we can understand the nature of human development, attachment, the “whole” vs. “fragmented” sense of self, and how society grooms us to reject parts of our own humanity. I’ve felt for most of this year that I am losing my mind, completely crazy, that my mind is broken. I felt stuck in a prison in the back of my head whilst someone else acted out my personality. It has been ROUGH. My parents and a handful of friends really held my hands in the darkest of those hours and I feel a bit more steady now.
Nature
It’s been about a year now that I haven’t been able to get myself to exercise like I used to. That is to be expected when you lose your sense of self or the protective system that covered it up oh so long ago. But nature has been a grounding element that I am starting to feel more and more connected with. I’m looking forward to more time in nature next year.
photography
Professional photography work has also been minimal this year. With my mental health work, I haven’t really had the parts of my Self available to me to promote my photography and get work. Still managed to get a few fun gigs like my ex-husband’s wedding. Plus, photographers gonna photograph, so I got out a lot and took a lot of my own stuff. Even in my brain reboot, I can tell that photography was never a protective mechanism. It is something that truly gives me joy.
Piano
For the former part of the year, I visited Creator’s Space a lot and practiced piano in the basement. I noticed my mind chattered a LOT and I would always imagine people getting annoyed with or judging me when I played wrong… even if no one was there. Once I moved, I decided to buy my own piano. I have been practicing a lot, improving a lot. It’s something fun to do and it also helps me notice what’s going on with my mind.
Queen Ave
This summer was upsetting when I was informed that my domestic partner wanted a different living situation. It set off a lot of the mental health stuff that I’ve been unpacking ever since. It’s been very scary to move, to live on my own, to be away from my partner. It’s been absolutely horrifying to have to listen to my mind all the time, having little practice being alone my whole life. It’s been hellish. But I’m making my way slowly. I’m feeling a bit more at home, especially as I continue to re-integrate the lost parts of myself that I couldn’t hear before due to the noise I surrounded myself with. I enjoy my roommate, my neighborhood, and I am appreciating the energy of my feline roommates as well. It’s a good experience to finally be able to decide for myself how I want a space to be without asking anyone.
Miscellaneous
Outside of the photo categories above, here’s a few more reflections on 2023.
I SURVIVED. I seriously didn’t know if I would. And I’m fairly confident I will survive next year, too.
Throughout the year I did deeper and deeper trauma work, sharing with safe people about the secret shit that actually goes on in my head.
Got diagnosed with ADHD, CPTSD, and a very high IQ (“Gifted”); started experimenting with adderall use; got onto Buspar to manage my generalized anxiety
Finally started to become aware of what a safe relationship feels like; made friendships with boys who just like me for being me; trimmed down my obligations and socializing as I began to realize much of my personality was trauma-based; began to disclose more of my full self even at work; processed a lot of family trauma and internalized rejection. My relationship with my dad was particularly notable in how it began deepening in June; had a particularly connective moment on September 4 when he called me his little girl and held my hands as we cried together.
Did some foraging events; some walking meetup groups; started a community group at my old apartment; Did two workshops at MNPolyCon
Did of work on my mental health; became aware of the protective parts of my mind and how I need to honor and not bypass them; through a longer, scary process, became aware that I am not my thoughts but I am the Being around it; began to practice moments of non-compulsion in order to witness the waves of my mind; began to realize that I have been dissociated, derealized, and dissociated for a long time which is a form of extreme anxiety; stopped overexplaining so much; stop being so subservient and fawning so much; dug deep into my childhood and religious trauma and looked into those terrifying voids alone; began to practice talking out loud to myself; began to see myself as multi-dimensional and of many parts; began to really dig deep and share my deep shames about existing; shared with Graham for the first time how my mind feels like a “pool of nails”; realized I’d been doing free emotional labor for everyone in an effort to endear them to me; realized that my personality was based in trauma and that I was repressing a lot of myself while pretending like I wasn’t; learned I had begun to cope throgh hyperrationalizing my emotions; became aware that it’s more accurate to identify as the observer of thoughts and the rest than it is to identify with the thoughts even if that’s the only thing you can perceive at any given moment; realized that there is something core to me, something I had been told was god and so I misplaced it a long time ago, began to re-integrate it; begun to understand and BE what it is to be human; realized that I am not crazy but am a mammal who experienced deficit psychological care and was indoctrinated with false human narratives; learned more about directly communicating about unmet needs instead of projecting childhood wounds; building up resilience to witness my own inner terror; realized that the mental health institution and philosophy is anti-human and individual-blaming; i’ve been developing the ability to stay with my intense emotions, particularly the thoughts that think my mind is crazy and broken; I’ve been deconstructing the “Coked Up Manager” part of me that is hyperproductive; figured out a lot of my “problems” all have shame as the core; figured out that I am not lazy nor broken, but that trauma is absolutely a thing and the work needs to be done internally; I’ve learned how to not live so much inside other people’s heads, to earn value by psychoanalyzing them or caretaking them, but to deeply listen and allow my intuition to respond; learned about different kinds of social conditioning that live in our subconscious, specifically white culture; adopted my aunt’s cat and helped him go from hostile to cuddly; spent more time with my extended family and saw them in a deeper way; identified anxiety as a deep undercurrent to my existence quality; saw Aunty Donna LIVE with Graham!; experienced a situation where I felt how deeply proud and content I was with the effort I put in and said to myself, that was enough, you did a great job, and I meant it in my body; learned what being not only a mind but a body is; finally understood what thoughts were and managed to survive that terror of dissociating from them to witness that which is not them; became aware of my sensorimotor OCD and hyperawareness OCD; experienced moments of thoughtlessness; finally understand what the fuck meditation is and decided I don’t need it right now; I also began to be more open about my sexuality with those I feel safe with; deconstructed the need to be productive in order to be valuable; tried acupuncture!; had my first grounded conversation with someone I had a crush on, to tell them I had a crush on them, which wasn’t recripocal but it was still so safe and loving as a conversation; began a weekly walk with my besties; began to realize I have emotions and needs and began to start communicating them; began to understand the physical/mental impact of my childhood emotional neglect and found myself feeling compassion for my self as a child; by the end of the year, I began to become aware of anger and boundaries and started difficult dialogues with people in my life with the aim of caring for my hurt first and foremost; realized I have emotional trauma and that my psyche has been split violently at a young age. Trimmed down my obligations once living alone; worked very hard to understand myself and create an environment and ritual that works for me
Media I Watched and Loved:
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Dinosaurs
Physical
Slumberland
Somebody Somewhere
Free Guy
Prey
Strange World
Ted Lasso
Nimona
Always Sunny
Letter Kenny
Hot Ones
Barbie
Beef
Norsemen
1670
Anything with Trevor Noah
Happiness for Beginners
History of the World Part 2
John Mulaney: Baby J
RRR
Transatlantic
PK
Matilda
An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou
Centaurworld
Emily the Criminal
The Path
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Secrets of the Zoo
Vivarium
The Curse
Read my 2022 review here.
