My senior thesis in college was a series of human portraits juxtaposed with nature. In the lead up to the deadline, I was so knotted with anxiety, I may as well have been a crocheted handbag. The resulting diptychs were stilted and unoriginal, because the weighty expectations of the thesis prevented my pushing through to an interesting perspective. After turning in that body of work, I still had one last critique before graduation (this time in front of all the Studio Art professors), so I kept taking photographs.
It was late April and early May in New Hampshire, and the land was just waking up from winter. Golden forsythia bloomed like fireworks and the rhododendrons were a flurry of crushable pale purple petals. I photographed the flowers, leaves, and newly sprouting life, leaving people out all together. The crit was a unanimous success. If only you’d been shooting like this the whole time, said one professor. This is what happens when the pressure’s off, said another. It’s no surprise that the contrast of bold color and fragile petals drew me in as I prepared to graduate. When I return to those photos now, I see a representation of change: how my psychic lens transformed on the precipice of adulthood.
Being in Seattle for the past 14 months has been another important time of change and transition for me. I chose to move here while waiting to go back to Berlin (a place I think I want to live, but can’t truly know until I eventually return, whenever that will be) as a sort of large scale waiting room. Growing up, I’d gone to camp on an island nearby. I remembered the smell of fermenting pine leaves in the damp woods, the crystalline marine air, and the tart early summer blackberries. Maybe I could create a life here, I thought. Maybe I could settle down, find a partner, build a family—give up the dream of another country.
Of course, moving to a new city during a pandemic meant that meeting people was harder than I expected, and dating has been a joke. (See: Nighttime Gabe.) I think, though, that I needed this long season of being alone. It allowed me to wrap my furred caterpillar body in a thick cocoon so that I could decompose into formless goo. I entered this year with a question of how to grow into the person I wanted to be. Had I been busy with friends or a relationship, I might not have committed as much time to fiction workshops, which expanded my skillset and connected me to many wonderful writers. I might have been too distracted to ask myself about what I really want from my life or what my values are, let alone how to live by them.
A year so focused on deconstructing and reforming the self is a luxury, one that is easy to take for granted in the face of loneliness. I suppose it’s natural that only now—as I leave this place and enter new phase—that I can narrativize what at times felt unendingly shapeless.
For many of these months, a sentence banged around in my head, wanting to find its way into a piece of writing: “I am so rarely witnessed.” Until this year, I didn’t realize how often I confirmed my aliveness through other people. When I scroll through my photo album from 2021, it’s almost as though I wasn’t present as a body. Most pictures are either FaceTime photos of my sister’s and parents’ dogs or the explosion of nature that is Seattle.
On Saturday, I collected my favorite pictures to accompany my farewell to this place. Scrolling through the metamorphosis of color from month to month, it became clear: all this time, I was witnessing myself inside the landscape. As the stark silhouettes of winter evolved into to the electric greens of new spring and those gave way to the jubilant hues of summer flowers, I was documenting in a yearlong paysage what it felt like in the cocoon. The plants were me; I was the plants. They too witnessed me, mirroring my entry into the cocoon and now my exit from it. (That paysage and passage are one letter apart is not lost on me.)
I’d forgotten that training the camera on the world is also an act of photographing the mind. Perhaps my body needed to be absent from the images to reflect the necessary privacy of the psychic cocoon. I’m not sure. Since I’m still processing, it’s likely too early to tell the story of exiting the chrysalis. Before spending a year as viscous and amorphous matter, I was spiky black fur and a conga line of feet wiggling along. Now, I am just barely unfurling a set of papery wings. Soon, they will stretch out and beat against the open air of the new year. When that comes, new pictures will call to me. What story will they tell? I can’t wait to see.