Photography and mental health

Photography and mental health

So lately I’ve been thinking about the intersection and between photography and mental health, but honestly take what I have to say with a grain of salt. We all have our different ideas about this kind of sensitive topic and I just wanted to explain that before I begin because my radical understanding is, physical health is mental health.

Physical health is mental health

Life is physical. We’re flesh, we cut we bleed, we have an inevitable death at the end of our lives, waiting for us. Now, with this in mind, I also remind myself that we are bound by gravity. We have this gravitational force that pushes us down and connects us to the ground, to the Earth, and all of my surroundings. Now, it’s the idea of being pressed out, that I think about, when looking at the word, depression itself.

De – pression

So my thought is, depression arises when you are downwardly pressed. When you’re allowing the force of gravity, to confine yourself to a chair. When you are laying in bed, scrolling on your phone, inside, it’s inevitable that your soul will slowly die. But when you’re moving your physical body, outside, creating something that gives your life purpose, and meaning, you exist outside the passage of time, and thrive.

To thrive, follow your purpose,

And so photography, for me, is it daily ritual. It’s an inevitability that at the end of the day, I will come home with a few frames, and publish them to my website, add some prints to the stack, and move on. It’s become like breathing for me. What’s interesting about photography, is that it’s endless. There is no finish line, there is no end goal, there is just doing. 

And because there is no peak, I entered the stream of becoming, of evolution and change each day. I simply surrender to the media itself, and allow myself to chip away at this obsession, that fuels my life with purpose of meeting, that’s almost happening in voluntarily like breathing.

## Just commit to something

When you commit to something that’s bigger than you, to something that has this endless pursuit, despite the external circumstances of what other people think about what you do, whether or not it’s considered as good or bad or has any monetary outcome at the end, you fulfill yourself on a much deeper level than anything material that the world wants you to be a slave to. And so when you commit to a ritual, to a practice, something that you do each day, it feels you with the sense of purpose, where it’s almost as if depression, will never come your way.

When you walk 30,000 steps a day, how the fuck will you ever feel depression? The thing, though, is you’re not just walking away from your problems. You’re saying yes to life with each click of the shutter, you’re working towards something greater than you, and it’s that act, of physical vitality and movement, propelling you throughout the day to actually commit to doing something, that makes it impossible for depression to find you.

Decision fatigue

The number one culprit, two depression and any feelings of anxiety arises from decision, fatigue. And so I decide to eliminate everything. I eliminated every choice that I can make. One camera, one lens, one workflow. A daily ritual. No decisions. No friction.  What clothes to wear? Either all black, or all colors. I literally never mix a match. Right now I’m wearing a full highlighter color outfit. I love to either wear extremely bright vibrant colors from head to toe, or complete black.

What to eat? OK, I guess meat is all I need. Breakfast and lunch? Skip that, I’m committed to fasting. Shoes?, Just walk barefoot.

What should I shoot? Who gives a fuck, I’m a kid, I’m playing. I’m not confining myself to one way of operating. I’ll shoot pictures of plants as much as i photograph. Vibrant scenes of humanity.

All these endless choices you can make in a day are merely an illusion. The only choice is movement. The only choice is doing. Stop thinking, start living. 

Just treat photography as a way for you to say yes to life. Focus all of your energy on your physical health and vitality. The goal is to wake up with enthusiasm for the day, possessed by God. If you’ve arrived there, then you already know 

Dante