Expressed Forms of My Depression. {photo story}
We as human beings seldom feel complete, even if all of our feelings are perceived to be.
Within each of us lies a small portion of dissatisfaction. Even if we try to be significant, we find something is missing. This feeling of lack of being kind of acts as a strange phenomenon, in which people like us lie submerged.
People’s identity is rooted in their identification, in what they associate themselves with. Identity is not just what you know, but also how you know. This how matures with the progression of one’s age. It is evolving in nature.
Still there are certain clinical problems existing in this era which can create difficulty for a person in taking an appropriate perspective towards other tasks in life, compounding one problem into many.
Depression can be termed as an epidemic negative view of the self, the world, and the future, generated by biases in processing the gathered information. This negative reliance, rooted in a pessimistic self-schema, gives rise to thoughts that a depressed individual experiences every single day.
This not only dismantles your state of confidence, but also attempts to reedit your life story, twisting the meaning of every successful event in your life, with repressed memories from your past projecting the losses and embarrassments. We begin to question our ability.
We have all felt broken, faced the bruises, and have experienced the phase of being heartbroken, disappointed by some decisions we have made in our life. This can manifest as depression. This melancholy feeling of being abandoned is not the end, but it’s the ensuing sadness that changes our condition to perceive the way we see ourselves, our past, present and future.
It changes the core of your identity and takes away all of the key factors of staying happy.
The way this particular illness discredits every single feel-good moment from the pages of your memory is truly heartbreaking. It makes you feel that somehow you simply got lucky on your way. Even the affectionate approach adopted by your friends seems to be challenging and hard to digest. It questions your success at every step that you take.
For me, this started to happen in 2016, when I first left home for a job and had to stay alone for more than a year, away from my family members. I started experiencing sudden nightmares and unnecessary cramps, and was haunted by memories of my past always playing hide and seek with me.
Slowly all happiness faded away as my workload began to increase, and that made me realize how I had no existence of my own.
After being diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder and Depression, I started to worry about everyday life events without any particular reason, and always expected disasters to befall no matter how soothing the situations were. I started talking to myself, and felt a burden of stress along with heart palpitation and chronic nervousness wherever I went.
Yet there was a strange euphoric rush that accompanied the feeling of being left alone, which was becoming hard to control. At that time, I realized that this is not a general feeling, but a condition faced by most of the people nowadays. I decided to document it.
Till now I have always looked for ways to express myself through the photographs that I try to take. I believe this strange condition of mine is a gift through which I am able to send messages in a sort of thought-provoking way, that I am not the only one out there. People like us exist, and this is a common scenario currently faced by a lot of people.
This is a subjective approach of mine towards a project that I have been doing for quite a long time. I am attempting to show the situation of my mind at this moment through the plethora of caliginous feelings. These are all ways in which I see my surroundings and the nature of my mind when I am down with anxiety attacks.
I am searching for the eternal euphoria amidst all these construed illusions of the habitat existing between me and my feelings. I have termed this project as Forms.
Expressing all of these through a series of photographs kind of makes me feel happy, even if it is momentary.
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Ritam Talukdar is a freelance photojournalist and a storyteller who likes to tell stories through the various visual narratives he uses while depicting the daily emotions of various people. After having worked as a product photographer and child photographer, he developed a strong passion to find out the day-to-day happenings of life all around in the forms of story. He left his job and got into this wide creative field to document the daily emotions and expressions that build up a human life and to document the news of lost cultures to the outside world. He has a strong urge to learn about various post-processing techniques involved in the developing of an image, and has been playing with various forms and also regarding its presentation so that it can appeal to the masses. He has been featured in The Edge of Humanity Magazine (UK), Private Photo Review, F-Stop Magazine Gallery Exhibit, and in a lot of Delhi newspapers for news regarding contemporary art residencies.
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