OCD runs in my family. Once you notice it, it is unmistakable, and the impact it has on a growing child is long-lasting. My limited emotional vocabulary of polar opposites was deeply etched into me, and the logical structures I have built up around rationalizing the use of those few descriptors made complete sense to me and my family. Clean and dirty, good and bad, useful and useless. While my thinking was encouraged to be fluid and nuanced, my feelings remained binary well past the times I was reading books about heroes and villains fighting for good and evil.
In the past year, I have been trying to break out of that rigid system I locked myself into. Flipping through photos I took in some of the most tumultuous years of my life, feelings wash over me that I cannot put a name to. Details of images, environments, or even colors have sparked deep rooted emotions that struggle to come forward. My fluency in three languages feels like a burden rather than an asset, as if they were all playing an endless game of hide-and-seek with the words I can’t grasp, but I know exist.
Like you’ve found these images in a hidden corner of the house, I invite you to help unlock some of those familiar feelings, and to explore the nuances that rest between the simple titles scratched onto the covers.
