Taking Care of You & Building the Conversation

Do you remember the first time you heard the phrasing “Mental Health”? And not just as a general concept? Do you remember the first time someone encouraged you to take care of your mental health? Do you remember the last time prioritized your mental health, like really prioritized it? If this practice is still new for you, then give yourself grace. In a society that encourages us to work, work, work, we are often told, both subliminally and directly, that putting ourselves needs to come last-after the work is done, after we’ve run errands, after we’ve cooked dinner, after we’ve checked on everyone else. But, what if the most effective way to do all of this is to ensure we are mentally and emotionally healthy first? As the saying goes, “you can’t pour from an empty cup.”

I am going to challenge this saying a little bit and say you “can” pour from an empty cup, but it makes life ten times more challenging. You could run around trying to do everything all at once, but what will you have left for you? I have been asking myself this questions alot lately and as I attempt to uncover the answers I realize how much they relate to my mental health. When I fill my own cup first, whether that’s spending some quiet time reading a book, playing music or my favorite show while I clean my space, journaling at the end of a long day, tackling a personal goal etc., I’ve noticed how much better I function in my relationships with friends & family.

We often tend not to consider all of the aforementioned activities as caring for our mental health, yet we also soon realize how good we feel when we do any one of those things I listed above. Of course, these are external items, and while they can directly affect our mental health, there is also therapy, meditation. In other words, there is more to mental health and more needed to make sure we are mentally healthy.

Take care of you as needed when needed and everything will flourish in its time. The goal of the Resiliency Project is to share new ways of being, healthier coping skills. Simultaneously, the project reveals the necessity for effective mental health education. Mental health is the new, trendy topic of our current social culture. However, we can ensure that it does not become a fading trend. There is a great need for the conversation to continue because mental health care will be something we all need as the world continues to change.

Through the work I aim to do with The Resiliency Project, I want mental health to remain in our cultural conversation and lexicon, so that there is a generation of young people who aren’t hearing about it for the first time. What information can we leave for the next generation? What can we create now for the future?

The Beginning: Mental Health Matters

Where do you begin with a project? What’s your first step? A photography project of this magnitude needs careful planning and consideration. I wrote and posted the announcement for the Resiliency Project in the late spring of 2022. As a way of promoting the project, I found that doing 30-second to 1 minute long interviews with each participant was great way to do so. The following links are the result of the first three photoshoots and the interviews that followed.

Interview 1

Interview 2

The Resiliency Project: Origin Story

The Resiliency Project is a labor of love. The idea came to me in the late Winter/early Spring of 2023. After going through a dark time mentally and emotionally after a particularly tough relationship, I felt I was in a more empowered and healthy place to create a body of work that would spotlight the importance of mental health. What is the best way to highlight the importance of something that still has so much stigma around it? This is one of the first questions I asked myself. As an artist, the best method I could think of was photography. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But, I understood with the topic of mental health, photographs are not going to tell the whole story. Each person’s journey with their mental health is deeply personal. I understood if I am going to do a photography project about mental health I needed to showcase this.

The Resiliency Project was announced in June 2022 and by July of that year my first two participants had completed their photoshoots. The project, as I created it, is a space for each person who chooses to participate, to share their personal story and journey with mental health. A series of 5 open-ended questions allows for sharing one’s struggles, battles, and triumphs with their mental health. The photographs that accompany each story spotlight each person.

The goal with this project is gather 50 participants who are ready to share their mental health story and create a coffee table book of photographs and personalized stories-showcasing that there is more than one face to mental health. The larger goal is to de-stigmatize the conversation around mental health. I believe, by using photography as the medium, the eventual readers of this book will know there is no one face in this daily battle. Photography can cause us to confront what we often try to conceal; it captures emotions, states of being, and humanity in ways that we often avoid.

Hence the importance making mental health the topic of choice and further more for personalizing it through individual stories. The Resiliency Project is way telling one aspect of the human experience.