Is This Healing?
“Is This Healing?” is a photographic zine born from rupture, displacement, and the uneasy search for restoration. Created in the immediate aftermath of a surgical abortion following rape, these images document a forced pilgrimage — a journey to Kauai, offered as a salve for wounds too fresh, too deep to name.
Before the trip, my body and spirit had been severed. I no longer recognized myself; I moved through life in a disembodied haze, overwhelmed by emotions that refused coherence — sadness, rage, loneliness, fear. The physical act of survival itself became unbearable. In an attempt to restore me, my employer gifted me time away: two weeks on an island synonymous with paradise.
Is This Healing? captures the contradiction of being placed in a breathtaking environment while carrying invisible, unrelenting pain. Through photography, I explored not the postcard-perfect landscapes, but the fractures within them — quiet moments of disconnection, alienation, and longing. The work questions the idea that proximity to beauty can mend the unseen devastations of trauma.
This series resists easy narratives of healing. Healing is not linear, not picturesque, not guaranteed. Sometimes, it feels like walking barefoot across sharp stones, surrounded by lush vistas you cannot feel part of. Sometimes, it is simply enduring the passing of time.
Within my broader artistic practice, Is This Healing? continues my exploration of the body as both witness and archive of lived experience. It challenges cultural narratives that seek to sanitize trauma with quick fixes or picturesque escapes. It gives space to the ambiguity, to the not-yet, to the unanswered questions that healing leaves in its wake.
Ultimately, Is This Healing? is not a declaration.
It is a vulnerable, open-ended inquiry:
How do we come home to a body that feels foreign?
How do we heal when even beauty feels too sharp to touch?
And what if healing, at least for now, simply means surviving?
