This body is not mine
My story begins with terrible stomachaches. My mother called the nurse in charge and explained her that I ate too much. A few months after I only ate crumbs. My stomach could not take it. The nurse told me to leave the house and go for a walk to let the food digest. Then she referred me to a doctor who specializes in eating disorders. I was treated there for a few years.
That time I was thirteen, and my body was my biggest enemy. I hated myself. I used to injure my body. It took the pain away and gave it a tangible tone. This was much better than the mental pain, the vague that I did not always knew how to explain.
After my condition got worse, I was referred from my psychiatrist to hospitalization, so I ended up in the emergency department in Abarbanel hospital. There was a handcuffed prisoner sitting with leg chains guarded by two policemen. I was scared. I told myself I don’t belong here and I wanted to run. Later a tall woman called me in, with braids and a smile. She was the psychiatrist. I gave her the reference, she wrote her impressions and diagnosis. Among other things she wrote: borderline personality disorder. Then the nurse came to pick me up. Although the woman with the braids calmed me down a little, I was still scared. From that moment I begged to go home and was let after 24 hours.
After a year the depression got worse and I harmed myself more and more. My mother was a key person in my adolescence years. I felt like she did not understand me. It was not easy for us to live together. We were both overwhelmed from the difficulty to cope with each other. We needed a rest from one another.
At fourteen or so I went to my sister’s house. It was decided that I stay there for a while. I had a pleasant room with a bed, a wardrobe and a fine library. I needed some peace. My sister, who raised me as a second mother was the safest refuge.
The day I arrived we went to buy my sister a camera. When we came back, I took the new camera and went to the park next to her house. So much magic was in this place. The children playing there showed me what freedom is. I sat down on one of the facilities and watched a child running with a kite on the grass. He seemed so happy. Like an infatuated I took pictures of him. I was charmed by how his movements appeared on the photos. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.
Every day I got up early in the morning and went to school in the city where I came from. It was autumn. The cuts hidden by my long sleeves have not healed yet. Everyone thought that everything was fine and the timeout was helpful for me. The shock came after four weeks, at the weekly visit at my mother’s house where I tried to commit suicide for the first time.
I met my sister at the hospital. She told me that it was enough from running away and it is time to face the reality I created. When I was released and returned to my mother.
I had no tools to cope. Nothing helped me. It was very hard to be home again. My relationship with my mother has always been complicated. I grew up without a father and I have three older siblings, which are average eleven years older than me. They are from another father, who also did not attend. Even my appearance was very different from them. Because of that I felt even more lonely and unusual.
It seemed like until then I had no time to deal with the absence of a father figure. I did not feel the deprivation since my father has never been there. My mother played both roles. She was, and still is, my greatest love and my biggest disappointment. A reflection I’m afraid to look at. I could still not decipher this woman’s emotions or breaking points. Until this day I cannot predict her reactions towards me. She knows everything about me. I used to tell her everything that happened. Maybe that is why I felt she was not excited of my “drama”.
In tenth grade I switched schools and applied to art class. I got there with short hair and a big shirt covering my scars. I thought that I could have a fresh start in my life. That the commitment to create will distract from what strangled my throat. At the same time I got a Canon film camera from my uncle who was a photographer at the time. With this camera I got to explore photography more deeply. I realized how much power this tool carries, how a single image can be so powerful emotionally while reflecting on reality.
All the hopes seemed to fail. I did not feel like I belong in this school either. In one of the projects which we had to make, I chose the subject of “Shame". Each student in their turn presented their work in front of the whole class. The others were excited, interested and clapped. When it was my turn I showed intimate photographs of myself, my mother, a photo of a boy friend of mine wearing high heels, a painting of a woman, maybe a self-portrait where I’m naked and my face is covered with a blanket. In the margins I wrote: “Shame on the right, shame on the left”. Suddenly there was silence. No one spoke or asked. Everyone was shocked. The feeling that no one understood me got me despaired.
I left school and the hospitalizations continued. This time they were longer and more frequent. The way to the hospital was short: ten-minute-walk down the street, directly from my mother’s house to the hospital. Finally I felt like I found a place where I felt normal. Apparently I was there in the best mental state. I was aware of myself and I was relaxed. The tension was going away. Finally that was the reason for the six hospitalizations since my treatment there was not exhausted. The more difficult conditions were not part of the periods when I was staying there. They would come when I was released, or before I arrived. My psychiatrist in one of her latest hospitalization summaries wrote that it seems that my mental state is unstable or rather: there is stability in my instability.
A few months after my last hospitalization around my seventeenth birthday, I bought a digital SLR camera. The first pictures I took were nude portraits of my mother.
Maybe I needed her to be fully exposed in front of me after all this time of uncertainty. It is not that we were not open with each other before, but something was still missing. I asked her not to pose. It was comfortable for us and we took breaks. I was attentive, she was cooperative.
After this photographs series, when I looked at the photos for the first time I suddenly noticed that we look alike. Something that I was really scared of. Not that I think that she is not beautiful, but when I saw what a burden she carries and how sad she is, her femininity against mine, our adolescence and so on… I realized maybe that is why she can understand me well. It was accompanied by fear and courage to look at these pictures. I did not want to see, but I insisted. I forced myself to look at her and myself, as if the umbilical cord was still connecting us to one another.
Since then I did not stop taking pictures. I photographed myself and my mother a lot. I had to decipher who and what I am. Get to know myself again without the hospitals or any labels. I tested the boundaries of femininity and gender, subjects that has always interested me, but now in front of the camera. Photography for me has become a tool to show the complexity of gender and it’s range. Every time my photos were seen different, I moved between the mid-tones. Something in the borders was changing. This was not because of my development or other identity formation, but it was depending on feelings – which color I was at that exact moment.
Today photography is my home, my peace. I do not photograph myself when someone is around me so it gives me time to concentrate on myself only. This is the most accurate way for me to convey what I feel. It shows the feelings in the widest and most honest mode, and does it a lot better than painting and writing, which I have also did. Photographs were not always in harmony with the present, but they always signed the feelings and the atmosphere that prevailed.
Almost five years have passed since my last hospitalization. I do not have anxiety attacks, I do not take pills and I stopped hurting myself. When I was eighteen and a half, I left home and rented an apartment in Tel-Aviv. I used to meet with my mother at least once a week. We talked every day. The distance from home, from those walls, objects and those hard years in that house makes me want to get closer. Now I’m more curious, want to understand, and dig deeper in the relations between me and my mom, and the rest of the family. Get deeper through conversations between them, and the camera.
There is no doubt about that there is something therapeutic for me in photography. Maybe the documentation process signs the moments, giving me strength to continue and cope with my problems differently.
It is not braveness for me to be exposed like this. This is some kind of a need. Like everyone else, I’m thirsty for understanding, listening, and to have a story to tell. The prominent scars that left on my body do not let me hide my story. I still live in it, every step I take.
I learnt that documentation could lead you to two options: to sign and dispose moments or look within and delve into them. Sometimes when I feel I wasted those years, observing the photographs give me strength to try to establish a new life for myself. It happened, I could pass it, it signed. Now I can continue.
My story begins with terrible stomachaches. My mother called the nurse in charge and explained her that I ate too much. A few months after I only ate crumbs. My stomach could not take it. The nurse told me to leave the house and go for a walk to let the food digest. Then she referred me to a doctor who specializes in eating disorders. I was treated there for a few years.
That time I was thirteen, and my body was my biggest enemy. I hated myself. I used to injure my body. It took the pain away and gave it a tangible tone. This was much better than the mental pain, the vague that I did not always knew how to explain.
After my condition got worse, I was referred from my psychiatrist to hospitalization, so I ended up in the emergency department in Abarbanel hospital. There was a handcuffed prisoner sitting with leg chains guarded by two policemen. I was scared. I told myself I don’t belong here and I wanted to run. Later a tall woman called me in, with braids and a smile. She was the psychiatrist. I gave her the reference, she wrote her impressions and diagnosis. Among other things she wrote: borderline personality disorder. Then the nurse came to pick me up. Although the woman with the braids calmed me down a little, I was still scared. From that moment I begged to go home and was let after 24 hours.
After a year the depression got worse and I harmed myself more and more. My mother was a key person in my adolescence years. I felt like she did not understand me. It was not easy for us to live together. We were both overwhelmed from the difficulty to cope with each other. We needed a rest from one another.
At fourteen or so I went to my sister’s house. It was decided that I stay there for a while. I had a pleasant room with a bed, a wardrobe and a fine library. I needed some peace. My sister, who raised me as a second mother was the safest refuge.
The day I arrived we went to buy my sister a camera. When we came back, I took the new camera and went to the park next to her house. So much magic was in this place. The children playing there showed me what freedom is. I sat down on one of the facilities and watched a child running with a kite on the grass. He seemed so happy. Like an infatuated I took pictures of him. I was charmed by how his movements appeared on the photos. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.
Every day I got up early in the morning and went to school in the city where I came from. It was autumn. The cuts hidden by my long sleeves have not healed yet. Everyone thought that everything was fine and the timeout was helpful for me. The shock came after four weeks, at the weekly visit at my mother’s house where I tried to commit suicide for the first time.
I met my sister at the hospital. She told me that it was enough from running away and it is time to face the reality I created. When I was released and returned to my mother.
I had no tools to cope. Nothing helped me. It was very hard to be home again. My relationship with my mother has always been complicated. I grew up without a father and I have three older siblings, which are average eleven years older than me. They are from another father, who also did not attend. Even my appearance was very different from them. Because of that I felt even more lonely and unusual.
It seemed like until then I had no time to deal with the absence of a father figure. I did not feel the deprivation since my father has never been there. My mother played both roles. She was, and still is, my greatest love and my biggest disappointment. A reflection I’m afraid to look at. I could still not decipher this woman’s emotions or breaking points. Until this day I cannot predict her reactions towards me. She knows everything about me. I used to tell her everything that happened. Maybe that is why I felt she was not excited of my “drama”.
In tenth grade I switched schools and applied to art class. I got there with short hair and a big shirt covering my scars. I thought that I could have a fresh start in my life. That the commitment to create will distract from what strangled my throat. At the same time I got a Canon film camera from my uncle who was a photographer at the time. With this camera I got to explore photography more deeply. I realized how much power this tool carries, how a single image can be so powerful emotionally while reflecting on reality.
All the hopes seemed to fail. I did not feel like I belong in this school either. In one of the projects which we had to make, I chose the subject of “Shame". Each student in their turn presented their work in front of the whole class. The others were excited, interested and clapped. When it was my turn I showed intimate photographs of myself, my mother, a photo of a boy friend of mine wearing high heels, a painting of a woman, maybe a self-portrait where I’m naked and my face is covered with a blanket. In the margins I wrote: “Shame on the right, shame on the left”. Suddenly there was silence. No one spoke or asked. Everyone was shocked. The feeling that no one understood me got me despaired.
I left school and the hospitalizations continued. This time they were longer and more frequent. The way to the hospital was short: ten-minute-walk down the street, directly from my mother’s house to the hospital. Finally I felt like I found a place where I felt normal. Apparently I was there in the best mental state. I was aware of myself and I was relaxed. The tension was going away. Finally that was the reason for the six hospitalizations since my treatment there was not exhausted. The more difficult conditions were not part of the periods when I was staying there. They would come when I was released, or before I arrived. My psychiatrist in one of her latest hospitalization summaries wrote that it seems that my mental state is unstable or rather: there is stability in my instability.
A few months after my last hospitalization around my seventeenth birthday, I bought a digital SLR camera. The first pictures I took were nude portraits of my mother.
Maybe I needed her to be fully exposed in front of me after all this time of uncertainty. It is not that we were not open with each other before, but something was still missing. I asked her not to pose. It was comfortable for us and we took breaks. I was attentive, she was cooperative.
After this photographs series, when I looked at the photos for the first time I suddenly noticed that we look alike. Something that I was really scared of. Not that I think that she is not beautiful, but when I saw what a burden she carries and how sad she is, her femininity against mine, our adolescence and so on… I realized maybe that is why she can understand me well. It was accompanied by fear and courage to look at these pictures. I did not want to see, but I insisted. I forced myself to look at her and myself, as if the umbilical cord was still connecting us to one another.
Since then I did not stop taking pictures. I photographed myself and my mother a lot. I had to decipher who and what I am. Get to know myself again without the hospitals or any labels. I tested the boundaries of femininity and gender, subjects that has always interested me, but now in front of the camera. Photography for me has become a tool to show the complexity of gender and it’s range. Every time my photos were seen different, I moved between the mid-tones. Something in the borders was changing. This was not because of my development or other identity formation, but it was depending on feelings – which color I was at that exact moment.
Today photography is my home, my peace. I do not photograph myself when someone is around me so it gives me time to concentrate on myself only. This is the most accurate way for me to convey what I feel. It shows the feelings in the widest and most honest mode, and does it a lot better than painting and writing, which I have also did. Photographs were not always in harmony with the present, but they always signed the feelings and the atmosphere that prevailed.
Almost five years have passed since my last hospitalization. I do not have anxiety attacks, I do not take pills and I stopped hurting myself. When I was eighteen and a half, I left home and rented an apartment in Tel-Aviv. I used to meet with my mother at least once a week. We talked every day. The distance from home, from those walls, objects and those hard years in that house makes me want to get closer. Now I’m more curious, want to understand, and dig deeper in the relations between me and my mom, and the rest of the family. Get deeper through conversations between them, and the camera.
There is no doubt about that there is something therapeutic for me in photography. Maybe the documentation process signs the moments, giving me strength to continue and cope with my problems differently.
It is not braveness for me to be exposed like this. This is some kind of a need. Like everyone else, I’m thirsty for understanding, listening, and to have a story to tell. The prominent scars that left on my body do not let me hide my story. I still live in it, every step I take.
I learnt that documentation could lead you to two options: to sign and dispose moments or look within and delve into them. Sometimes when I feel I wasted those years, observing the photographs give me strength to try to establish a new life for myself. It happened, I could pass it, it signed. Now I can continue.