For the past five months, I’ve been developing an intimately personal body of work that has challenged me to publicly reveal deeply personal aspects of my battles with anxiety, trauma and self-hate in a drastic attempt to reset myself. I would have never assumed the trajectory of my creative work would have led me here, as my upbringing precluded the possibility of being so openly candid, lest I was merely attempting to garner attention. Counseling took over ten years for me to seek out because internally I felt that needing help was a sign of personal weakness, all the while I was outwardly encouraging those around me who struggled to find help. Similarly, it took me twenty years to seek out medical treatment for my debilitating anxiety and depression, fearful that medicine would erase me and leave me in a constant, bland liminal space.

While counseling validated my self-worth and medicine allowed me to let go of my unsurmountable and inescapable fears, my depression, anxiety and self-hate still hid in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to strike. Having had failed to process decades of pain for fear of bringing it to the surface: after all, hurting those involved, even those who caused it, was one of my top concerns before my own health. I tried addressing my pain directly, whether with those who caused it or those who blocked me from healing and leaving it behind, but those attempts failed. I realized some people in our pasts use the pain they’ve caused us as a method to tie us down, to subjugate us, and to keep us in line.

This last summer, perhaps spurred on by the endless hours I spent contemplating life while traveling 14,000 miles over seven weeks of photographing, I finally had enough. I had carried around decades of religious guilt, physical trauma and self hate for decades, been battling swirling torrents of hypothetical situations that keep me up at night for years, and kept secret the things that made me doubt my actions, my worth, and my inherent goodness. Anxiety had turned me into an insomniac, Guilt made me fearful of vengeful retribution from a higher power, and Self-Hate had made me question my worth at my job, my home, as a husband, and a father. Firmly resolved, I sought to find a way out of all of this, but not at all in the way that those words may suggest – a positive, constructive, creative way of exploring, revealing, and resolving my deepest fears, worries, and faults.

For four years, I had been seeking for a way to creatively utilize my growing Gameboy Camera collection for a personal project, struggling to find firm grounding to establish a concept on. I had been circling around this idea of utilizing its diminutive sensor to suggest derezzed images of our past as they fade in our memories, but I didn’t know what the subject matter should be.  I had been wanting to use the Cyanotype process meaningfully for over a dozen years, but always ran into trouble when trying to process why I was using such a connotatively loaded hue. Both of these came together in The Faults in my Code, a series of rephotographed imagery that defines critical and key moments in my life that I started, somewhat reluctantly, in October of 2024.

This body of work explores the remnants of memories, derezzed and translated into pixel art with the Gameboy Camera and then rendered in a tonally-compressed 2-bit color. So much of my childhood is defined by yearbook photos and polaroid pictures, but the crisp records of time that photographs serve don’t match up with the amount of decay that time causes in the brain – so rephotographing these memories, tonally compressing them and rendering them abstractly, as they are similarly preserved in memory, makes sense to me. The process and its Prussian Blue hue suggests nostalgia, sadness, somber overtones and a deep longing to resolve mistakes, making it a perfect complement for the work. Alternative process encourages creatives to literally push the boundaries of the print, allowing brush strokes and intentional, uneven coating to become part of the intended composition. In this way, I accentuate it further by mimicking the patterning found in Rorschach ink blot tests, because, after all, am I not analyzing these critical moments in my life for hidden meaning, am I not asking the audience what these memories *should* represent for me, or for them? Text serves an important purpose in this series by extending a private memory into the public space, allowing strangers to understand, empathize, and possibly heal a little themselves, too. Finally, the use of thin Thai Unryu paper and its imperfect deckled edges abruptly separate this memory from the rest, the frailty of the paper links it to the transparency of these candid admissions *and* the fragile nature of how we encode memory, but perhaps most important – the fibrous nature of the paper emulates the connections between the neurons that encode and retain these memories, linking them to the interpretations we’ve carried with them, for bad or for good. The paper hints at the complex nature of memory, yet the image shows how shallowly we often record them.

After five months of creating these, what has changed? Well, more than I could have ever imagined, to be perfectly honest. Creating these Faults in my Code, the title of which is a nod to a treasured song by a powerful siren, Halsey’s Gasoline, have allowed me to let go of these regrets, sins, and failings, and to admit my flaws, shortcomings, and struggles. By creating each of these pieces, writing a companion journal piece, and sharing it through my website,  social media, and in-person, I feel as if I’ve written my troubles on a piece of paper and thrown it into the fire. These memories are not lost, but they no longer haunt me because I’ve shared them, honored them through laborious writing, and found kindred spirits, from friends to strangers, that empathize with me. These acts have allowed healing for the first time in over twenty years, and truly allowed me to give myself the grace that every stumbling human being deserves in life.

This last weekend, however, I recognized perhaps the most potent change that creating this series has gifted me with: the ability to sleep without burdens. Since I’ve started to let go of these collective anxieties, I’ve found that insomnia rarely haunts me anymore, that I look forward to bed for rest rather than merely being a crude shelter from exhaustion, and that my body aches less than ever after a night’s sleep.  For the first time in 25 years, I am regularly dreaming and retaining stories forged in those dreams. My wakeful bouts in the morning no longer cause frustration as I beg for more sleep, but now I’m able to listlessly fall back into dreams, or to create new ones, in a matter of minutes. I am comforted by these dreams rather than haunted by them. I can’t express how happy realizing this makes me.

Summing it up in one word, I have found catharsis.

My continued work in this project has given me the freedom from my past that counseling suggested and that medication made me believe in, but now I have finally found it.

So many folks have commented on this project as I’ve developed it over the past four months, many discussing how brave they think I am, doing something they know they need to do but could never imagine themselves being so vulnerable and candid. Turn the clock back six months and I would have thought you insane if you told me I’d be doing this project, saying what needs to be said, and being so candid about it. This all terrifies me, but the outpouring of support and the cathartic release has more than outweighed the relatively minor inconveniences of baring my soul.

Give it a try.