Inner Selves

Inner Selves is an exploration of the solitude induced by chronic pain, and the haziness brought by the use of heavy medicine. These pictures were all shot with close friends of mine at my house, where I am obliged to stay sometimes for weeks. This is also a story about building, or preserving your own imaginary and safe spaces, when aching makes it difficult not to sometimes feel a loss of your identity, as your power to meet the outside world diminishes. Along with the exhaustion, it becomes a necessity to tell yourself soothing stories that keep you dreaming.

These pictures are therefore also about sisterhood, about those rare persons who can, and want to enter this new world of yours - that less glamorous, and more vulnerable boredom that sometimes, though, pushes you to invent. At some point in the experience of illness, relationships to your closest ones and to your dreamed independence can become, I believe, more sharp and raw, and thus more true.

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Photo Journal submitted by Aude Nasr.