I’m In Here, A Prisoner Of My History

Photo taken by contributor Carrie Hilgert, a photographer and portrait artist in her thirties from Northeast Kansas. After venturing into digital photography, she became interested in documenting her life with self portraits. This became particularly helpful when her life started to fall apart due to depression. All her other creative outlets left her, but she could always process her very dark feelings with self portraits. While she is doing much better now, she maintains compassion for those going through these hard things and hopes that her photography can give an honest insight into something that makes most people feel very isolated and alone.

About this photo: “This is from a series on fear and uncertainty. Fear seems to be a recurring theme in my life, no matter how hard I fight it. Fear of abandonment, of not being noticed, of my mental illness consuming me, of what people will think if they see the real me, of losing my creativity and worst, of getting to the end of my life without having let all of the wonderful things inside me come out. This image is about the battle against fear. I think most of us recognize that internal war with something. Whether it’s fear or not, no matter how long you’ve been fighting it, there are times when the battle is fierce and for me, it’s usually when I am trying to grow. The ego doesn’t like change.”

Find more from Carrie at her blog or flickr.

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