Denial’s Downward Spiral

Photo taken by contributor Jaeda DeWalt, a conceptual self-portrait artist in her forties from Seattle, Washington. Her battles with mental illness hearken back to her earliest memories, at age 4, when she became obsessed with the number four and performed exhaustive rituals in patterns of four. During her teen years, she began noticing extreme mood swings, manic one moment and depressed the next, and in her late 20′s she finally sought treatment and was diagnosed with Bipolar, OCD, PTSD, Anxiety, and ADHD. Her doctors told her they believed the mental illness was brought on by a severe concussion she sustained at age two, along with the trauma of being sexually abused as a child into her young adult years. Her life was filled with self-destructive coping methods until she went full force into creating, in her mid-twenties. The process of creating and putting herself in front of the camera felt cathartic, liberating and healing. The photographic medium opened up a new world to her and ignited a kind of passion within that she didn’t even know she was capable of experiencing. She has been on an ever-evolving, healing journey, ever since.

About this photo: “Denial creates an emotional paralysis. It keeps us from facing our fears, coping with our pain and resolving our issues.

It is a common defense mechanism that doesn’t work. It leads us into a downward spiral, creating a deeper void and greater hurt than what we would experience were we to face the truth, confronting our pain, issues and resolving the root causes of them.

I took this self portrait from an odd angle to distort my facial features a little bit. My fringe of bangs obscuring my vision. And I moved just as the camera went off. I wanted the edges to be a bit hazy. Because denial does exactly that, it distorts the way we see ourselves and the way we experience the world around us.”

Find more from Jaeda at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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