Inside
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Photo Feature Life is Elsewhere
Everything turns problematic, questionable, subject of analysis and doubt: My Life is Elsewhere is a journal of my life, my family, my love, my friends, my travels, my sheer need to experience all that is about to disappear; and so in a way I'm attempting to connect my own life with the world that I see with a hope to find my reality in it. Life is Elsewhere is a book of contradictions and of doubts and understandings and of laughter and forgetting in which I am trying to constantly question myself by simply documenting the broken fragments of my life which might seem completely disconnected to one another on their own. But I hope that in time I am able to piece together this wonderful jigsaw puzzle called life. And this journey will perhaps lead to reconciliation with my own life.
It was in the summer of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with an acute case of paranoid schizophrenia. I was 17 then. The doctors, in retrospect, said that she had already started developing the symptoms many years prior to that. Symptoms that nobody had noticed. But it was the breakup with my father that caused her condition to suddenly come alive and then deteriorate.
Over the years, the walls of our home started to peel off; people had stopped coming to our home because my mother was too scared to let anybody in, and all that remained were the traces of a life that no longer existed. Our initial years were spent hiding from the world. She out of paranoia and I out of embarrassment and anger at who she had become. But after all these years I've realised that my mother had never stopped loving me.
Today as I look back I realise that who I am; what I feel, see and think; is connected to my relationship with my mother in a way stronger than I know. And in this work, I hope I am able to connect the relationship that I've had with my mother with the rest of my life.
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