For awhile now I have felt like I do not belong here at Carleton. I have felt like an outsider. I have felt lost, disconnected, isolated, invisible. And it wasn’t until recently that I was able to put into words, and ultimately attempt to capture in photo, why it is that I feel this way.
This is what my COMPS project is truly about: capturing my experience with depression here at Carleton while simultaneously trying to spark conversation within our Carleton community (and hopefully society at large) to ultimately change the negative perspectives we have towards mental health. I attempt to capture my experience by taking photos of my reflection and editing them to more accurately convey how I feel.
The idea of capturing my reflection in a photo embodies and portrays my experiences and feelings of being an outsider. For me, depression is sort of like an out-of-body experience, in the sense that I feel very disconnected to my body when I am feeling depressed, and I feel that this is most accurately represented in my reflections because that separation is automatically manifested.
