The Universal Struggle

My photographs were born out of my deepest struggles. They are universal struggles. That is what I have been learning in recent times. Through my conversations and connections with others, I have learnt that we are all longing for the same things: love and understanding. So simple, yet so frustratingly complex for many of us.

I see it on the face of my partner when I am reunited with her after a week full of triggers and healing. I see it on the faces of my clients when we are out in Eryri in pursuit of photographs. I used to hear it in the voices of my parents as they would scream and shout at each other across the hallway late at night, and I saw it in my sisters’ actions as she invaded my room and privacy to play on my games, when all I really wanted was to be alone.

We act in ways that are so confusing and often dysfunctional because it is easier than facing our fears and exposing our fragility and vulnerability by saying, ‘I’m hurting. I don’t understand. I need some love.’ Instead, we brush our feelings under the carpet and go on pretending like everything is ok. We smile when all we really want to do is scream and cry and breakdown in front of the world. We so often act as though we don’t need love, building concrete walls around our hearts to keep it safe. All we really want is to be seen by another, naked and exposed, with all of our imperfections, wounds and scars on show.

We are mostly unconscious to the fact that we have spent our entire lives hiding from the world, portraying versions of ourselves that we think we need to be as a means of survival – to stay connected to and accepted by the tribe. We all came out of the darkness and into the light of the world in the same way – naked, screaming, and longing for our mothers’ love. In our first moments on this earth, we are held in the safety of a warm, nurturing and protective embrace. How many of those have you received since those precious, formative moments?

Bravery, I have been learning, is not going it alone. The strongest of us are not those that are independent. True courage is admitting that you need help, you need support, you need love and you need to feel understood by yourself and those around you. It is opening your heart and soul to the world and letting people in to the sanctuary that you have created inside of yourself because of the unsafety that you have felt at times amidst the chaos of the outer world. True love and understanding, I have learnt, must first be created in the safety of this inner sanctuary.

My photographs are the result of my own healing process – a long journey into Nature to create that sanctuary inside of myself, and understand the events that took place in the fires that forged me. If I can understand myself, then I can understand another. With understanding comes acceptance, and with that, comes unconditional love. A love without conditions is what we felt as we were cradled in our mothers’ arms whilst drawing our first breaths on this planet. The universal struggle that is shared by us all, is the desire to return to this place of sanctuary, where there are no walls that prevent love from entering.