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Sarah James/Leavesley
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Having been diagnosed with type one diabetes at the age of six, I’ve struggled on and off with body image issues and depression. This includes a distorted perspective on life, a sense of my identity being overwhelmed by my disability, a tendency towards bleakness and not trusting anything that appears positive, as well as a sense that there’s nothing totally stable, not even my sense of self. These ‘self-portraits’ pick up on different facets of my personal mental health experiences.
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Distorted perspectives - distorted perceptions of myself and my mind's distorted perspectives of the world around me.
Cellophaned self - experiencing life at a distance, as if through cellophane, always tinged by melancholy/the blues.
Over-protected petals - life experienced at a distance as the result of over-protective mind, trying to minimise the risk of pain.
blipvert identity (mirror me) - trauma, disability and depression create a constantly fluctuating sense of self-identity and sense of being trapped with the brain/disability's small 'room'. The constant flow of rapidly cycling noisy thoughts can become overwhelming.
NB this image would normally be a lot larger - I've reduced the size to meet the maximum upload size (though actually the smallness of the image at this size does reflect the sense of life and self being diminished/constricted).
blipvert identity (age of diagnosis as the elephant in the room) - trauma, disability and depression create a sense of being trapped with the brain/disability's small 'room'. Life experience is haunted by the self at the age of diagnosis with diabetes/a disability - the age at which everything changed. This child perspective/experience of trauma lives on into adulthood - as if frozen into my identity. The constant flow of rapidly cycling noisy thoughts can become overwhelming.
NB this image would normally be a lot larger - I've reduced the size to meet the maximum upload size (though actually the smallness of the image at this size does reflect the sense of life and self being diminished/constricted).
