Healing the relationship with myself
Around the time I was 19, I started creating artful self-portraits to help me capture and work through whatever was most present at the time.
When I first started… I couldn’t even look at the photos. 💔
I was so blinded by trauma and self-hate that my first year of self-portraits never saw the light of day (that’s after hours of picking apart every perceived flaw). I distinctly remember once spending nearly 6 hours attempting to photoshop an image of myself into something that wouldn’t leave me feeling disgusted and disappointed. When I looked at the ‘final’ image and couldn’t recognize anything about myself, I knew I needed a profound change to heal my relationship with myself.
I tend to deeply over-complicate things, which means returning to simplicity is my go-to when I know a shift is needed. I put all the distractions, including my camera, away for a few months and I sat.
I sat in silence, each day, in front of a mirror and stared into my own eyes. 👀
And at first…it felt hard as Hell, sometimes even impossible. I would barely last a few minutes before breaking down into tears or feeling overwhelmed by what I saw in my reflection. So many days at the beginning of eye-gazing with myself felt like looking at a stranger. The Monica staring back at me didn’t look like the Monica in my head or the Monica I had been conditioned to think I needed to be.
What began as pain and hardness and anger and picking myself apart inch by inch slowly but surely turned into small moments of surprise. Staying curious, finding beauty and awe in the shape of my eyes or the texture of my skin, or the way a lifetime of laughter can be traced through the delicate lines around my lips.
I learned to breathe more deeply. I learned to hold my own gaze. I learned to really, truly see myself and all of my magick.
And most of all: I learned to deeply love the woman looking back at me. 💛
Looking into my own eyes has changed and healed my greatest relationship in this lifetime: the one I have with myself.
